Introduction

Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore. PSALM 16:11

Frederick Brotherton Meyer was one of the best-loved preachers in the English-speaking world for the better part of fifty years, and almost nobody now remembers why. He wrote more than most men read. He preached, by the reckoning of his friends, many thousands of sermons, crossed the Atlantic again and again, spoke at the Keswick Convention for decades, and led two large London congregations. He was also, and this is the part that is easy to forget, a Baptist minister who met discharged prisoners at the gaol gate, campaigned against the drink trade and the brothels of South London, and was mocked for it.

He matters because he joined things that are usually kept apart. He was a man of the inner life who could not leave the slum alone. He was a teacher of surrender and the fulness of the Spirit who insisted on plain Bible study and sanctified common sense. He was a devotional writer, sometimes a sentimental one, who could also give a hard and searching account of why a Christian’s joy had dried up. And he wrote above all for the anxious, the slow and the ordinary, for people who were sure that God led everyone except them.

The one thread

If Meyer’s teaching can be put in a sentence, he put it himself on the first page of The Secret of Guidance: “so much of our power and peace consists in knowing where God would have us be, and in being just there.” Almost everything he wrote is an unfolding of that line. To be where God would have us be, the will must be surrendered. To know where that is, we must learn how God guides — by His Word, by the prompting of His Spirit, and by the slow unfolding of His providence. To stay there, we need the fulness of the Spirit, a daily walk with Christ, and a quiet heart. And being there will never mean staying comfortable. For Meyer, the God who led the soul into the secret place also led the hand into the back streets.

In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths. PROVERBS 3:6

Under that thread lies a foundation, and Meyer never let his readers forget it. We do not find our own way to God. The Lord Jesus, our great High Priest, has entered the holiest by His own blood and opened a new and living way for us to follow. Meyer’s exposition of Hebrews, The Way Into the Holiest, is the ground on which all his counsel about guidance and surrender stands. The surrendered life is not a ladder we climb; it is a door that has been opened, and we go in.

So the question to carry through these pages is simple. Not, how may I become a better Christian? but, am I where God would have me be, and have I given Him the last key?

How this book is arranged

After a chapter on his life, fifteen short chapters set out his teaching. The first group follows The Secret of Guidance: the three witnesses by which God leads, the waiting under the cloud, the surrendered will, the order of fact, faith and feeling, the indwelling Christ, and the fulness of the Spirit. The second group follows The Way Into the Holiest: the open way into God’s presence, the great High Priest, the gospel of rest, and the call to strip for the race. Among them come chapters on the still hour of the daily walk and on how to bear sorrow. The last group turns outward: to the Bible biographies for which he was best known, to his service among the poor and the prisoner, and to the temperance cause he pressed for most of his life. A conclusion and a reader’s guide close the book.

Each chapter ends with application points and a prayer. He would have wanted that. Nearly every reading in Our Daily Walk closes with a prayer, and he had no patience with religion that stayed in the notebook. Read a chapter at a time. Stop at the application points. Pray the prayer, or better, pray your own.

Where he must be read with care

This is not a book of hero-worship, and there are places where Meyer must be read with care. It is kinder to say so at the start.

First, Meyer belonged to the Keswick movement, and he sometimes spoke of the Christian life in two stages: a first coming to Christ for pardon, and a later, decisive handing over of the whole self, followed by a definite receiving of the Spirit’s fulness. Many sincere Christians have found that language freeing. Others, reading the same Scriptures, believe it divides believers into classes the New Testament does not recognise, and that it can leave the conscientious forever wondering whether they have had the experience. Meyer himself taught that the filling must be sought again and again, and he confessed that there was more in the doctrine than he understood. Chapters five and eight weigh this plainly.

Second, he was a Victorian devotional writer, and his style shows it. He piles picture on picture — harbours and steamships, crucibles and gardens — and some of his prose is more sentimental than a modern reader can bear. The substance underneath is usually sound and often searching.

Third, he was a Protestant controversialist of his day, and in The Way Into the Holiest he writes of Roman and Anglican priests in language that is sharp and, in places, uncharitable. His argument from Hebrews deserves a hearing. His tone does not need copying.

Fourth, he pressed total abstinence from alcohol as a Christian cause. His compassion for the victims of drink was real and costly, and he was right about the ruin it wrought in his generation. But Scripture does not forbid wine, and a rule wisely chosen for love’s sake must not be turned into a law binding every conscience. Chapter seventeen tries to honour his cause without making that mistake.

So the counsel of this book is the counsel of Scripture:

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:21

Where he is faithful — on the finished work of Christ, on the surrendered will, on the sure guidance of a Father who stoops to the slowest child, on the need of the still hour, on the love that goes to the gaol gate — receive it gladly and put it into practice. Where he presses beyond what is written, mark it and set it aside. You will lose nothing. He would not have asked you to swallow him whole, and he would have been the first to send you from his pages back to the Bible.

A last word. Meyer was not a great theologian and never claimed to be. He was a pastor who wrote for people in counting-houses and sick-rooms. If this companion does anything, it should send you back to his own pages, and through them to the Lord he trusted to guide the perplexed.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Write down, honestly, the decision about which you most need God’s guidance at present. Keep the page; you will come back to it.

2. Ask yourself whether there is any part of your life — a habit, a relationship, an ambition — that you have not yet handed over to Christ.

3. Decide now how you will read: one chapter a day or a week, with a Bible open beside it.

4. Get hold of one of Meyer’s own books, in the Ochorus library or elsewhere, and read it alongside this one.

5. Name one person in need near you whom you have been avoiding. Pray for them by name as you begin.

A PRAYER

Lord, I want to be where You would have me be, and I confess I do not always want it enough to go there.

Show me the path of life. Take whatever I have kept back, and teach me to trust You with it.

Keep me from swallowing any teacher whole, and keep me from refusing any truth that comes from You.

And as I read, send me out to someone who needs me, for Your name’s sake. Amen.