Conclusion

I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. JOHN 17:4

Fifteen chapters can make it look as though F. B. Meyer taught a great many things. He taught one thing, and the rest is that one thing lived out. Our power and peace lie in being where God would have us be — and we are brought there, and kept there, by a Saviour who has opened the way to God and a Spirit who fills the surrendered.

Follow it through and the whole shape appears. Guidance is God making plain where He would have us be, by His Word, His Spirit and His providence, one step at a time. Waiting under the cloud is refusing to go where He has not led. Consecration is giving Him the last key so that He may lead us at all. Fact, faith and feeling put our standing on His work and not our moods. The indwelling Christ and the fulness of the Spirit are the life by which the surrendered walk. The way into the holiest and the great High Priest are the ground of it all. Rest is ceasing from the burdens He never gave us. The still hour is where the day is set. Sorrow is the refiner’s fire in the Father’s hand. The race is run by laying aside weights and looking to Jesus. The Bible biographies show all of this in the lives of men of like passions. And the prison gate, the slum and the pledge card are where it goes when it leaves the closet. One thread, one Lord, one surrendered life.

The danger of this book

If you have read this far, you are in some danger, and Meyer would have named it first. It is possible to read about surrender, guidance and the fulness of the Spirit and turn them into a new ladder to climb, measuring oneself against a crisis one has not had, a joy one does not feel, a sense of God’s presence one cannot keep. Meyer knew the danger. He warned against those who go from convention to convention with notebooks, hungry for the blessing and forgetting the Giver. He told the anxious to stop examining their faith and look at God’s faithfulness. He told the introspective to stop cleaning their windows. And he insisted that the Spirit’s fulness is not a trophy but a daily dependence.

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 to go back to the chapter that made you least comfortable, not the one you liked best. Take its application points and work them slowly. Then take the next.

Two things to carry

First, give Him the last key. Whatever else you forget, remember the ring of keys and the one held back. If you cannot give it, confess that you are willing to be made willing, and let Him take it. Everything else in Meyer’s teaching waits on that.

For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself. ROMANS 14:7

Second, go to the gaol gate. Meyer would not be satisfied with a reader who finished this book with a richer inner life and the same closed hands. Find your neighbour — the next person who needs your help — and weld yourself to that life. The still hour and the back street belong together, or neither is what it should be.

A last word about the man

We have been honest about his limits. The Keswick language of a second crisis must be read with his own correction, that the filling is sought again and again. His prose can be sentimental, and his illustrations sometimes pile up until the point is lost. His polemic against priests was unkind. His temperance teaching sometimes leaned towards making a wise choice into a rule. And his Bible biographies fill the silences of Scripture more freely than the text allows.

None of this has been said to diminish him. It has been said because he would have wanted it said. A man who taught that consecration must be humble, and that the tone in which some speak of their holiness shows how far they are from it, would not want to be praised beyond the truth.

Not unto us, O LORD, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory, for thy mercy, and for thy truth’s sake. PSALM 115:1

He died in the spring of 1929, in his eighty-second year, having preached and written almost to the end. He is remembered for a last note to a friend that spoke of meeting again in the morning. It is a fitting word from a man who had spent his life telling perplexed and sorrowing people that the cloud would lift, the afterward would come, and the Guide who had led them so far would not fail them at the last.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Return to the decision you wrote down at the start of this book. What have you learned about how God may guide you in it?

2. Ask whether anything in these pages has become a new law to you. If so, bring it to God and receive it again as grace.

3. Name the key you still hold back, and pray about it daily for a month.

4. Keep a still hour, however short, every morning for thirty days.

5. Choose one of Meyer’s own books from the Reader’s Guide that follows, and begin it this week.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, I have read about guidance, surrender, the Spirit and the still hour, and I could make all of it into another burden. Keep me from that.

Take the last key. Lead me where You would have me be, and keep me there.

Fill me each morning, and send me out each day to someone who needs You.

And as You were faithful to Your servant F. B. Meyer to the end, be faithful to me, until we meet in the morning. Amen.