Conclusion

Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ. PHILIPPIANS 1:6

Fourteen chapters may make it look as though Gareth Evans teaches a great many things. In truth he teaches one thing, and applies it everywhere. God moves first, and the believer’s part is to take His hand and walk with Him.

Follow that thread back through the book and the shape appears. Faith is God’s own work in the heart, answered by obedience, and all its forms have their source in Him. The walk of faith is a child keeping hold of a Father’s hand, and hope is the settled expectation of all that Father has promised. God speaks quietly to those still enough to listen, and guides His children step by step, through closed doors and valleys. The believer who is in Christ is called to abide in Him and to feast on the riches that are his there, and to be filled with the Spirit whom the Father delights to give. God’s people are bound together by the covenant of the Upper Room: to serve, to love and to obey. When offence and old wounds break that fellowship, the key to healing is forgiveness, which God enables and which frees both the wounded and the one who wounded. Every believer has a burden, a gift and a ministry, and should be released to fly. And the church’s deepest need is not better methods but the manifest presence of God.

The danger of this book

If you have read this far, you are in some danger, and Evans would say so first. A teacher of stories and pictures is easily enjoyed and easily forgotten. It would be possible to finish these chapters having admired the apple tree, the eagle and the child holding its father’s hand, and to be exactly the same person as before.

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 enjoyed most. Take its application points and work them slowly over the coming months. If it was the chapter on offence, begin there. If it was the chapter on forgiveness, begin there, and take your time.

Two things to carry

Carry away, first, a settled rest. The Christian life is not an anxious search for a hidden plan, a strained effort to produce fruit, or a struggle to work up enough faith. It is a walk with a Father who has already acted, who holds your hand and who holds your future. You are asked to keep hold, to listen, to obey the next thing He shows you, and to trust Him for the rest.

Nevertheless I am continually with thee: thou hast holden me by my right hand. PSALM 73:23

Carry away, second, a holy hunger. Evans has never been content with a quiet, comfortable Christianity. He wants believers to fly, churches to be places where God is known to be present, and the Lamb to receive the worship He deserves. Rest and hunger are not opposites. The one who rests in God is the one who can hunger for more of Him without anxiety.

A last word about the man

We have been honest in these pages about the places where Evans’s teaching should be weighed. His distinctions between faith, hope and belief are sharper than the New Testament’s vocabulary; some of his word studies and Old Testament pictures read more into the text than it requires; his understanding of the baptism in the Spirit and of binding and loosing is one view among several held by faithful Christians; and his many stories of remarkable providence are testimonies, not templates for every life. None of this has been said to diminish him. He himself warns against building doctrine on experience and against taking one verse and building a following on it, and he would want his readers to test him by the same rule.

What remains is a life that has matched its teaching. A physics teacher who left a large salary because he believed God had called him; a pastor who shared the credit for his churches’ growth with the people he released; a chaplain who taught pastors in West Africa; a husband who gives his wife the praise others have given him; an old man who has taken to the streets of his city because he believes that only Jesus is the answer to what he finds there. He has walked, as far as any of us can tell, with the One he taught others to walk with.

The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage. PSALM 16:6

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Return to the chapter of this book that made you least comfortable. Choose one application point and work on it for a month.

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

3. Name one way you will keep hold of the Father’s hand each day, whether a morning prayer, a walk alone with God or a pause before work.

4. Choose one person to forgive, one person to encourage and one person to help release into their calling.

5. Begin one of Evans’s own books from the Reader’s Guide that follows.

A PRAYER

Father, I have read about faith and hope, about abiding and forgiving, about gifts and glory, and I am capable of leaving it all on the page. Do not let me.

Hold my hand today. Let me hear Your voice, obey the next thing You show me, and trust You with the rest.

Heal what is wounded in me, loose me from bitterness, and release me into the work You have prepared.

And as You have been faithful to Your servant through a long life, be faithful to me, until the walk is ended and I see You face to face. Amen.