The Last Key

I delight to do thy will, O my God: yea, thy law is within my heart. PSALM 40:8

A London boyhood. Frederick Brotherton Meyer was born in Clapham, then on the edge of London, on the eighth of April, 1847. His father was a prosperous City merchant of German descent, and the home was comfortable, cultured and devout. The family worshipped at Bloomsbury Chapel under the Baptist preacher William Brock, whose warm evangelical ministry and care for the poor of central London left a lasting mark on the boy. There was no dramatic conversion to tell of later, no rescue from the gutter. There was a steady early faith, baptism as a youth, and by his middle teens a settled sense that he was meant for the ministry. He went to school at Brighton College and then entered Regent’s Park College to train as a Baptist minister, taking his degree at the University of London.

A careful young minister. In 1870 he went to Liverpool as assistant to C. M. Birrell at Pembroke Chapel, one of the leading Baptist pulpits of the north, and there he learned the craft of a pastor from a gentle and cultivated master. In 1871 he married Jane Eliza Jones, who shared his life and work, and in 1872 he took his first charge of his own, at Priory Street Chapel in York. By his own later account he was at that stage correct, earnest and rather stiff: a good preacher of the orthodox kind, anxious about his reputation, and more at home with a manuscript than with a crowd.

Moody in York. In 1873 an unknown American evangelist arrived in York with a singer called Ira Sankey and very little in the way of introductions. Dwight L. Moody was a former shoe salesman with no theological training and not much grammar, and most of the ministers of the city kept their distance. Meyer did not. He opened his chapel to him, and in the weeks that followed he watched a man who spoke to God as to a friend and to sinners as to people he expected to see saved. It shook him. The two became friends for life, and Meyer always counted Moody among the great influences on his ministry: the man who taught him that preaching and practical work belong together, and that a minister’s business is not to be admired but to win people for Christ.

Leicester and the prison gate. In 1874 Meyer moved to Victoria Road Church in Leicester. It was a respectable congregation, and it did not care for the free methods and plain evangelism he had begun to learn. After some years of friction he resigned, and a new congregation gathered round him that became Melbourne Hall, a large and busy mission church in a working district of the town. There he began the practical work that marked the rest of his life. He is remembered for meeting men released from the Leicester gaol on the morning of their discharge, giving them breakfast, and helping them to find honest work — among other schemes, a small business chopping and selling firewood that gave them wages and a character to show an employer. Drunkards, the unemployed and the fallen found in Melbourne Hall a minister who expected them to be changed and who did not mind getting his hands dirty to help.

The surrender. It was in Leicester that the hour came which he spoke of for the rest of his life. In the mid-1880s a group of young Cambridge men, among them the cricketer C. T. Studd, were travelling the country before sailing for China, and some of them came to Leicester. Meyer was struck by something in them that he knew he lacked — an unhurried joy and an obvious ease with God. He asked them their secret, and the answer came back that they had given themselves to Christ entirely, holding nothing back. He went home and, as he told it many times afterwards, knelt and handed over his life to Christ as a man hands over a ring of keys, except for one small key he could not yet bring himself to give. The words he later taught others to pray were the words he prayed then. “If you are not willing, confess that you are willing to be made willing.” He found that Christ took him at his word. His preaching changed. His strained concern for himself eased. He began to speak of a Christ who lived within, and a Spirit who could be received by faith, and people who had heard him for years noticed the difference.

Keswick. From the late 1880s Meyer was a regular speaker at the Keswick Convention in the Lake District, the annual gathering for the deepening of the spiritual life that had grown out of the holiness meetings of the 1870s. He became one of its best-known voices, and he carried its message across the world. What he said there he said in his books: the surrendered will, the fulness of the Spirit, the life of faith rather than struggle, and the plain duty of obedience in the next small thing.

London. In 1888 he moved to Regent’s Park Chapel in London, and in 1892 to Christ Church, Westminster Bridge Road, in Lambeth, a great Congregational church south of the river founded by Newman Hall. There, in one of the poorest and roughest parts of London, he preached to large congregations on Sundays and on weekday afternoons, and led a sustained campaign against the public houses and brothels of the district. Opponents mocked him as a meddler; he went on. He returned to Regent’s Park for some years before the war and then to Christ Church once more, finally retiring from a pastorate of his own in his seventies. He served as President of the National Free Church Council and, in 1906, of the Baptist Union, and he did more than most men of his generation to make the Free Churches work together.

The pen and the road. Alongside the pulpit ran the pen. His Bible biographies — Abraham, Israel, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, Elijah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, Peter and Paul — sold in great numbers and are still read. His expositions of Hebrews, of the Shepherd Psalm and of the Gospel of John, his little books on the inner life, and his daily readings went all over the English-speaking world. He travelled as widely as he wrote. He crossed to America many times, preached in South Africa and far beyond, and took every invitation he could as long as his strength held. During the First World War he spoke up for conscientious objectors in prison when it was not a popular thing to do.

The end. He preached and wrote almost to the last. Early in 1929, in his eighty-second year, he was told that he had only days to live, and he is remembered for a note to a friend saying, in effect, that before it arrived he might have entered the palace, and that they would meet in the morning. He died on the twenty-eighth of March, 1929. He left no system and no denomination of his own. He left a shelf of books, a good many prisoners and drunkards who had found their feet, and a simple testimony that the man who gives Christ the last key does not lose his life but finds it.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Meyer was changed by an unknown evangelist whom most ministers kept at arm’s length. Whom are you holding at arm’s length who may have something to teach you?

2. He saw in a few young men a joy he did not have, and he asked them why. Is there someone whose walk with God you quietly envy? Ask them their secret.

3. Is there one key you are still keeping back from Christ? Name it to Him, even if you can only say that you are willing to be made willing.

4. Consider the prison gate. Is there a person leaving some kind of prison — addiction, disgrace, loneliness — whom you could meet with practical help this month?

5. Read the first chapter of The Secret of Guidance, in the Ochorus library, and notice how much of this life it explains.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You took a careful, anxious young minister and made him free. Do the same with me.

Here are the keys of my life. I cannot yet give You every one of them, but I am willing to be made willing.

Open the locked rooms, and fill them with Yourself.

And send me, as You sent Your servant, to the gaol gate and the back street, to those whom others pass by. Amen.