Conclusion

Christ is all, and in all. COLOSSIANS 3:11

Eighteen chapters can make it appear that A. B. Simpson taught a great many things. He taught one thing, and everything else is that one thing applied. The one thing is this: Christ Himself is the supply for every need a human being has, and He supplies it not by sending something but by being Someone within us. Follow it through and the whole structure appears. Christ our Saviour — He does not merely provide salvation, He is it, and He enters. Christ our Sanctifier — holiness is not achieved but received, because it is a Person. Christ our Healer — the same indwelling life reaching the body. Christ our Coming King — the Person we have received is the Person we shall see. The self life goes because the Christ life comes. The Spirit’s whole work is to make this Christ real. Faith is how He is taken; prayer is fellowship with Him; the Scriptures are about Him; an ordinary Tuesday becomes a day of heaven because He is in it. And the reason to cross an ocean is that He is too glorious to remain unknown. Four wheels, one chariot, one Person.

The danger of this book

If you have read this far, you are in some danger, and Simpson would have named it before anyone. The peculiar risk of deeper-life teaching is that it can generate exactly the condition it was written to cure. A person reads about the fullness, the surrender, the land of promise — and sets off in pursuit of an experience. He attends the meeting, makes the consecration, has the feeling, and is empty six weeks later. So he tries again, and the cycle that Simpson escaped becomes the cycle this book has installed. The whole point of his hymn is that the pursuit ends when the object changes. Not the blessing but the Lord. Not the feeling but the Word. Not the gift but the Giver.

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. JAMES 1:22

So the plainest counsel this book can give is the same as in its companion volumes. Go back to the chapter that made you least comfortable — not the one you found most interesting. Take its application points and work them slowly over months. Then take the next.

Two things to carry

First, ask for Himself. Not for more of the Spirit, whom you already have. Not for a blessing you can describe. For Christ — and then go about your work without checking your feelings hourly to see whether it took. Second, hold the four wheels together. Simpson’s great gift to the church was proportion. In every generation, ministries are built on one emphasis, and the one emphasis eventually distorts everything else — healing without holiness, prophecy without evangelism, experience without doctrine, doctrine without compassion. Simpson’s answer to the man who wanted him to specialise still stands: there are four wheels on the chariot, and three of them cannot be neglected for one.

A last word about the man

We have been honest about his failures. His teaching on healing has done real damage where it was taken further than Scripture warrants, and some who followed him died of conditions that could have been treated. His confidence that the world might be evangelised in his own generation was mistaken. His framework of sanctification as a distinct crisis is disputed by serious Christians who read the same texts differently. And the man who taught so many about victory ended his own life in frailty, confusion and a season of spiritual darkness that those who loved him found hard to watch. That last fact should not be tidied away, because it is pastorally important. If a man who taught the deeper life for forty years could finish in darkness, then darkness is not proof that someone has failed. It may simply be the end of a long race run by a body that is wearing out. God did not love him less in 1919 than in 1881. None of this has been raised to diminish him. It has been raised because his own theology requires it. A teaching whose whole point is that we have nothing in ourselves and everything in Christ cannot be commended by pretending its teacher was an exception.

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us. 2 CORINTHIANS 4:7

He died at Nyack in the autumn of 1919, having spent forty years telling people that the King was coming soon. The King did not come in his lifetime. He left no money. He left a training school that has been copied on every continent, a hymnbook, a magazine, a tabernacle full of the sort of people other churches did not want, and several hundred workers in countries he had prayed for by name and never visited. The movement that grew out of it is now far larger in those countries than in his own, and is made up overwhelmingly of people who have never heard of him. He asked for exactly that. He did not see it. It happened anyway, which is the ordinary arrangement, and he would not have minded in the least — provided the credit went where it belonged.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, I have read about Your all-sufficiency, and I am capable of turning even that into one more experience to chase.

Keep me from it. I do not want the blessing; I want You. I do not want a fuller feeling; I want more of me to be Yours.

Be my salvation, my holiness, my strength, and my hope. Hold the four wheels of my life together, so that I do not become a person of one emphasis and no proportion.

And when my own strength fails at the end, as his did, hold me then too. Amen.