Introduction

Where there is neither Greek nor Jew …but Christ is all, and in all. COLOSSIANS 3:11

Among the men whose names are attached to the deeper-life movement, A. B. Simpson is the one most likely to be unfamiliar to the reader, and the one whose fingerprints are most widely distributed. He founded a worldwide missionary movement that now numbers in the millions. He established the first Bible institute in North America, and the pattern he invented has been copied on every continent. He wrote around a hundred books and more than a hundred hymns. He shaped, directly or at one remove, the theology of a great deal of twentieth-century evangelical devotion — A. W. Tozer was his spiritual son and wrote his biography. And most Christians who have absorbed his emphases have never heard his name.

A summary in four words

Simpson’s teaching is unusually easy to summarise, because he summarised it himself. He called it the Fourfold Gospel, and he preached it for forty years: Christ our Saviour. Christ our Sanctifier. Christ our Healer. Christ our Coming King. The structure matters less than what it is built to do. Notice that all four begin with the same word. Simpson was not offering four doctrines but one Person in four relations, and this was the whole point. When a prominent healing evangelist once invited him to spend himself on a nationwide healing campaign, Simpson replied that he had four wheels on his chariot and could not neglect three of them to devote himself to one. That instinct — for wholeness, for keeping things in proportion, for refusing to make any single emphasis the whole — is his most valuable characteristic, and it is what makes him worth reading in an age of ministries built on one idea.

Himself, not it

But beneath the four wheels lies something simpler still, and it is the reason Simpson belongs in this series. His most quoted hymn opens by describing a change he had passed through: that once it had been the blessing, and now it was the Lord; once the feeling, and now the Word; once His gifts he wanted, and now the Giver alone. The hymn is called Himself, and the title is the whole of his theology. Simpson had spent years pursuing spiritual experiences — a deeper consecration, a fuller blessing, the power he saw in others — and had found that each arrival was followed by a fresh emptiness. What broke the cycle was the discovery that Christ does not primarily give things. Christ gives Himself, and everything else is contained in Him.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ. EPHESIANS 1:3

That is the thread running through all eighteen chapters of this book, and it is the question to keep asking as you read: am I seeking something from Him, or am I seeking Him?

How this book is arranged

Eighteen short chapters set out his teaching, beginning with that central emphasis, moving through the four wheels of the chariot, then into his teaching on the self life and the Christ life, the Holy Spirit, faith and prayer, and finally to the two things that consumed the last half of his life: the forgotten poor at his door, and the unreached nations beyond the sea. Each chapter ends with application points and a prayer. Simpson would have insisted on it. He had no patience with truth that stopped at the understanding, and he measured every doctrine by whether it produced a changed life and a worker sent out. Read one chapter a day, or one a week. Stop at the application points. Pray the prayer, or better, pray your own.

One more thing must be said at the outset, and it is better said plainly. This is not a book of hero-worship, and there are places where Simpson must be read with care. His teaching on divine healing has been a blessing to many and has done real damage to others. Simpson himself, after his own healing in 1881, set aside medical treatment entirely and taught others to trust Christ alone for the body. Some of those who followed him died of treatable conditions. Some were told, or concluded, that their continued illness proved a deficiency of faith — a cruelty that has crushed sincere believers ever since. Chapter four sets out what he taught, what is genuinely biblical in it, and where it must be qualified. Please read that chapter with its cautions rather than without them. His doctrine of sanctification as a definite second crisis, received by faith after conversion, is held by many godly Christians and rejected by many others who read the same passages differently. This book presents it as he taught it and notes honestly where the disagreement lies. And his expectation that the gospel might be carried to every nation within his own generation, hastening the Lord’s return, proved mistaken — as every such expectation has. The burden was right. The timetable was not. Why read him at all, then? Because on the central matter he was profoundly right, and because he lived what he taught at considerable cost. He walked away from the most comfortable pulpits available to a man of his gifts, twice, to work among people nobody else wanted. He gave away money he needed. He sent out hundreds of missionaries to places from which many did not return, and he buried his own children. So the counsel of this book is the counsel of Scripture: Prove all things; hold fast that which is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Weigh every chapter against the Word of God. Where Simpson is faithful — and on the all-sufficiency of Christ, on the indwelling Spirit, on the missionary obligation of the whole church, he is faithful indeed — receive it gladly and act upon it. Where he presses beyond what is written, mark it, set it aside, and lose nothing.

A final word about the reader this book assumes. Simpson wrote for late nineteenth-century North Americans, in a city filling with immigrants, at a moment when the modern missionary movement was gathering force. He is read now in places he prayed for and never saw. The movement he founded is today far larger outside the country he worked in than within it, which would have delighted him and not surprised him at all. He assumed no particular setting, because his subject was not a culture but a Person. Wherever this book is opened, and into whatever language it is carried, the question it presses will already be waiting.