I remember the evening vividly.
A frail old man, walking stick in hand and supported by a friend, slowly climbed the steps to the Keswick platform and onwards to the lectern. During his life, he had spoken on every continent of the world, to multiple thousands in baseball stadia, to hundreds in church buildings of every denomination, to congregations gathered under trees and at many student missions.
Holiness
As he stood to give the final address of his long career as a preacher and teacher, this is what John Stott said at Keswick in 2009: ‘I want to share with you where my mind has come to rest as I approach the end of my pilgrimage on earth and it is – God wants his people to become like Christ. Christlikeness is the will of God for the people of God.’
In addressing this most significant purpose of God for every Christian, John Stott was returning to a theme which has been part of the DNA of the Keswick movement worldwide since its earliest days. And it remains a core theme that needs to be proclaimed and modelled today. Holiness is a neglected priority of the modern church, a fading glory in the evangelical world, as Jim Packer has expressed it. Holiness gets a bad press these days, but we know it is a vital and central theme of Scripture.
From the beginning
It was God’s intention from the beginning. ‘For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters’ (Romans 8.29). The mission of the Lord Jesus, conceived in an eternity past, was nothing other than to restore the image – to overturn the disastrous effects of the Fall and to restore within us the original divine image.
Then God has provided the Holy Spirit, by whom we are being transformed into the image of Jesus himself. ‘And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit’ (2 Corinthians 3.18). And, while many aspects of our future home in heaven are not clear, one thing is certain: we will be like Christ. ‘Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is’ (1 John 3:2). We will be with him and like him for all eternity.
So from the perspective of past, present and future, Scripture teaches us that this is God’s purpose for every believer. It is for this reason that today the Keswick movement wants the theme to be centre stage once again. The quest for holiness engaged the attention of many Christians in the period when Keswick began, and has been the sustained heartbeat of the movement ever since. There were various vigorous debates about holiness during its early days – some Christians seemed to get worryingly close to the idea of sinless perfection, while others seemed to suggest that a crisis moment could secure a condition of Christlikeness that almost implied that no personal struggle or effort was needed.
Caricature of Keswick
Both of these ideas have long been rejected by the Keswick movement, of course, and it is disappointing that people sometimes caricature the present Keswick movement as being locked into a particular view of holiness (sometimes called ‘the Keswick view’), when for the past 40 years the position taken on Keswick platforms has been entirely mainstream evangelical teaching with which few believers could disagree. Indeed, even in the early decades of Keswick, preachers like Evan Hopkins were keen to show that the Convention was not portraying ‘the holiness of the Christian as consisting in the eradication of sin from his own heart and life’. For him, the secret of power related to an active trust in Christ’s work and in the empowering presence of the Spirit, themes which later speakers also emphasised.
God’s Word heard
Keswick continues to call for steady and sustained growth in Christlikeness. We know it is a life-long process. But there must always be room for preaching for a decision, when individuals hear God’s Word, sense the Spirit’s leading and commit themselves more wholeheartedly to live for Christ. Such moments of focussed intention are not crises which somehow achieve a higher level of spiritual experience, but are often manifestations of the power of God’s Word and Spirit in provoking renewed repentance and faith, and a realisation of the vital importance of living more fully under the Lordship of Christ. Nothing in life is more important.
