Stepping Stones

Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths. PROVERBS 3:5–6

Stepping Stones is Evans’s own story, but it is also a book of teaching. He wrote it, he explains at the outset, not simply to recount a life but to introduce readers to a God who leads His children, one step at a time, into an intimate walk with Himself. Looking back over his life he sees a series of stations, each one a place where God intervened in his plans, each leading to the next. From that long view he draws a theology of guidance that is warm, practical and, for many anxious believers, deeply freeing.

No hidden blueprint

The heart of it is simple. Evans does not believe that God keeps His will for our lives in a secret plan filed away in heaven, which we must decode by hours of anxious prayer for fear of missing it and forfeiting His favour. A loving Father, he insists, does not torment His children by hiding what He wants of them. He expects us to walk in the will He has already revealed in Scripture, and He leads us in His particular will for our lives through circumstances and the doors He opens and closes before us.

The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD: and he delighteth in his way. PSALM 37:23

Our part, then, is not to search out a hidden path but to keep hold of His hand and walk in obedience to what we already know. Evans sums up his own attitude in a prayer he has prayed, he says, for most of his adult life: asking to be kept in God’s will to the end of the journey, admitting that he will sometimes wander from it, and inviting God to bring him back whenever he does. He asks not for a map of the road, only to be kept on it.

Disappointments and appointments

The most characteristic feature of the book is the way Evans reads his disappointments. Again and again a door he expected to open closed in his face. A teaching post in Canada was offered and then withdrawn at the last moment, leaving him embarrassed in front of friends to whom he had spoken freely of God’s goodness. A plan to move to California fell apart when a government policy changed. A request for leave to study for a master’s degree was refused.

Only years later could he see what God had been doing. The withdrawn post led to Hong Kong and to friendships that shaped his future; the collapse of later plans led, step by step, to a Jewish school in Toronto where he was given unusual freedom to speak of Christ, and from there to the pastorate. Chance meetings in wrong buildings, a single letter arriving on a particular morning, a stranger stopping his car at a roadside in India: Evans has a great many such stories, and he refuses to call them coincidences. The setbacks that grieved him most turned out, time after time, to be God’s own arrangements.

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. ROMANS 8:28

He is honest that this is a view from hindsight. In the moment, he questioned God, felt foolish, and needed time to yield. It took him ten years, in one case, to see why a door had been shut. The lesson is not that believers should feel no disappointment, but that they can trust the Father’s hand when they cannot see His purpose.

Led through others

Evans notices that God often leads His children through the decisions of other people, even people who do not know Him. Abraham, he points out in He Holds My Tomorrows, first set out from Ur of the Chaldees because his father Terah moved the family; it was only later that God spoke to him directly. In his own life, school governors, officials and an education officer who had once blocked his path all became, unknowingly, instruments of God’s leading. The Father’s hand is not shortened by the choices of employers, officials or even enemies.

But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive. GENESIS 50:20

Testing, not temptation

Evans distinguishes carefully between testing and temptation. God never tempts us to sin; that is the work of Satan using our own desires. But God does test His children, not so that He may learn something, for He knows the outcome already, but so that He may purify us. He uses the picture of ore in the furnace, heated until the dross is skimmed away and the pure metal reflects the refiner’s face.

That the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ. 1 PETER 1:7

He names several kinds of test. There is the test of offence, which chapter thirteen will consider. There is the test of the closed door. And there is the test of what we are asked to lay down: a gift, a relationship, a possession, even a calling. Like Abraham on Mount Moriah, we may be asked to give up what is most precious. God does this, Evans insists, not to hurt us but to free us from trusting in anything other than Him. And often, having laid something down, we are invited to take it up again, now as His. Moses threw down his shepherd’s staff and picked it up again as the rod of God.

Valleys before mountains

Perhaps the phrase most associated with Evans’s teaching on guidance is his conviction that every mountain top with God is reached through a valley. He has walked several: the long sleeplessness that ended his first pastorate in Victoria, two years of weakness after surgery, serious illness at home. Each time, as he tells it, the low ground gave way to high ground, and the darker the valley had been, the wider the view from the heights beyond it. The Mercy Ship years came straight after the first of those valleys.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. PSALM 23:4

He is careful not to turn this into a formula. There is no promise that every sorrow will be explained in this life, and Hebrews 11 itself ends with many who died without receiving what was promised. But the believer can walk through the valley knowing that the Father walks with him, and that nothing is wasted. Moses’ forty years tending sheep in Midian, which might have looked like a wasted life for a man trained in Pharaoh’s court, were God’s preparation for forty years of leading a nation through the wilderness.

A word of balance

Some readers, especially those who have known long and unexplained suffering, may find Evans’s many stories of providential timing hard to hear. Not every believer’s life contains such striking turns, and it would be a misreading of his books to measure our walk with God by the number of remarkable coincidences in it. Evans himself says that experience does not establish doctrine, though Scripture will be borne out in experience. The doctrine is plain enough: God orders the steps of His people, often unseen, and He is faithful in the dark as well as the light.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. List two or three closed doors in your life. For each, write what you can now see of God’s purpose, or, if you cannot yet see it, write a sentence entrusting it to Him.

2. Stop searching for a hidden blueprint. Instead, write down three things God has plainly revealed in Scripture that you should be doing now, and do them.

3. Ask whether God is asking you to lay something down. If so, lay it before Him in prayer this week.

4. If you are in a valley, tell one trusted believer about it, and ask them to walk with you in prayer.

5. Consider praying, in your own words, a prayer asking God to keep you in His will and to bring you back when you stray.

A PRAYER

Father, You have ordered my steps when I thought I was ordering them myself. Thank You for every door You opened and every door You shut.

Forgive me for sulking at closed doors, and for fearing that Your will is hidden from me. Teach me to walk in what You have shown me, and trust You for the rest.

When You ask me to lay something down, give me grace to do it, and to take it up again only as Yours.

Lead me through the valleys to the mountains You have prepared, and keep my hand in Yours all the way. Amen.