10 Years of Beholding God: Andrew Davies

Welcome to the WHOLE Council podcast. I'm John Snyder, and I'm here to commemorate the tenth anniversary coming up for our Behold Your God study, Rethinking God Biblically. So, ten years ago, we were right in the midst of filming and traveling and, you know, and writing and editing and getting all the hundreds of little details together in order to make this study available.

It has been more widely received than we ever expected. I only half-jokingly say that I expected the men who contributed to the study, who pastor churches, I did think that they would probably want to get the study and use it in some small groups, and I thought my mom and dad would buy some, but I thought that would be about the end of it.

And ten years later, we are still getting letters and comments from around the world, from, you know, from Africa and Asia, from Australia, from Canada, South America. It's just been really quite humbling and encouraging at the same time to see the kindness of the Lord to use this material.

Now, whenever you do videos like this with contributors, the interviews are much longer than what we were able to include in the study. We had to leave, by far, the majority of their comments out. And so, Teddy has been working over the last weeks, and he will continue to work to get all these interviews in their entirety available to you.

And we think that, really, that's a great way to celebrate the ten years. And I hope that you will be as benefited by them now as we were ten years ago, listening to these men talk about such important topics.

Now, if you don't want to watch the interviews on the YouTube channel, then there's a link to our podcasts, and you can listen to them on the whole Council podcast over the coming months. You're about to watch an interview with Andrew Davis.

And Andrew was a man that, actually, I met after returning from Wales when my wife and I and our children went to Wales for my studies. I heard a lot about Andrew Davis. I went to a church in Wales where he had just left as the pastor to go to, I believe, Australia.

Andrew has pastored in so many places. Andrew, later, was recommended to me as I was trying to think of British ministers that could come over and preach to Christ Church in New Albany. And so, I asked a friend, I said, can you give me some names?

And he said, well, here's a few names, and one of them was Andrew Davis. I said, well, I've heard of Andrew, but I've never heard him preach. So, with that recommendation, I asked around, and I met a lady who had been in his church when she was very young.

And she said to me this, she said, I still remember his sermons and the spiritual applications he gave 20 years later, as clear as they were when I first heard them. And she said it was because of his life.

Andrew and his wife, Pam, came a few times to Mississippi to preach here, and Pam would speak to the ladies. We'd always line up, you know, special studies for the ladies. And I think, probably, other than the kindness and the sweetness, you know, the graciousness of this couple, I think the thing that sticks out most is what a picture, together, they were of Christ-likeness.

Now, Andrew is a gentle man. When he preaches, I feel like it's the spring rains falling on the seed that's been planted, just gentle rains. And, you know, and what we see is the gospel bearing fruit, conversions occurring, but all in such a sweet and attractive way.

Andrew Davis's father was not a quiet gentleman. I .B. Davis was a bit of a flamethrower of a preacher, kind of a prophetic man. And Andrew Davis, one of the sweet things about having him with us was that we got to ask a lot of questions, because I .B. Davis, when he was a younger man, was in Martin Lloyd-Jones Church in Wales before he went to London.

And Andrew has all these wonderful stories about Lloyd-Jones, and then later, Andrew's father became a powerful minister of the gospel in Wales. And Andrew talks about being, you know, a 12-year-old or so, and seeing I .B. Davis, his father, Martin Lloyd-Jones, and J .I. Packer all in the same room having a theological discussion, and it was getting late.

And Andrew Davis's father saw Andrew peeking around the corner, and so he said, Andrew, come in here. The doctor says this, and Mr. Packer says this, and what do you think? And Andrew Davis would be asked to weigh in on the theological question where there was some disagreement, and sometimes he would be asked to dismiss the group because it had gotten late.

It was time for them to go home. So, Andrew, would you pray for us? And so, just so many wonderful stories of Andrew's early life. One of the things he told us about his father that is my all-time favorite story about I .B. Davis is not the powerful preaching and the way people were gripped, but he said that his father always made time for him and his siblings.

When his father would be studying in his study at the house, they would kind of rudely push in. They wanted to see their dad, and the mom would come to bring them out, and his father would always say, no, let them come, and he would make time for them.

The gentleness of the tender, fatherly love in a man that was renowned as quite a prophetic, strong preacher who would often call people down and rebuke them in the church service. I hope you benefit from the things that Andrew says.

Yes, I think Toews was right to say that, that what a man thinks about God tells us a lot about the man himself. I might also add something that Dr. Jim Packer said, that if you want to know what people are like, ask what they're talking about.

And it would be an interesting question, as to what we are talking about today as Christian people, if we are Christian people. What are Christians talking about? Are they talking about God? Are they talking about the person of Christ?

Are they talking about the ministry of the Holy Spirit? Are they talking about godliness and spiritual awakening and personal religion and the return of Christ and the second coming and the glory of heaven and the reality of hell?

Is that what Christians are talking about? Because if Dr. Packer is right, and I think he is, that tells us a lot about them. I came to realize myself that to be a Christian is to be brought personally to God and to know him personally as my heavenly father, not just as the God of creation, though that is what he is wonderfully, not just as the provider of everything good and the controller of history, though he is, but as the one who has intervened in history, in Christ, in time and space, and who also intervened in my life, bringing me, as the Bible says, out of darkness into his marvelous light.

And becoming a Christian is about coming into marvelous light, not just even light, but marvelous light. There is something quite extraordinary about the Christian. Paul put it in a wonderful way when he said that God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.

For me, that is what happened when I became a Christian. I was made aware of God in a way that I had never been aware of him before, though I was brought up in a Christian home and knew many fine Christians and admired them and saw something of the reality of God in their lives, including my parents' lives.

I thought that that was enough, that for me to believe what they believed because I ought to believe it was enough. And so it was very humbling in the extreme to realize that like Ananias and Sapphira in the story in Acts 5, I was acting the part, playing the hypocrite.

And though I was sincerely doing that, believing the gospel in my head, I had no real knowledge of a personal holy, righteous, just, gracious, merciful God for myself. And through the preaching of the Word of God, which humbled me and broke me, convincing me of my sin and also of my need of Christ as my Savior, through the offer of the gospel and of salvation and peace with God through Christ who came to bring us to God, and through the ministry of the Holy Spirit in my heart, I gave in to God and yielded to him and trusted him as my Lord and Savior.

I can still remember the occasion when I did it on a Saturday evening in my own bedroom, knelt by my bed and asked the Lord to receive me. I called on his name. I didn't make a decision for Jesus. I called on the name of the Lord, which is what it is to become a Christian, and he saved me.

Of course, I did decide to, I decided to follow Jesus. But it wasn't a kind of glib, easy decision. It was God coming to me and in the fulfillment of his promises, receiving me as a sinner into his family.

And that's the beginning of it. It's an extraordinary beginning, and it can happen in different ways to different people. Sometimes it's rather like a hurricane blasting you into the kingdom. Sometimes it's like a gale, the wind comes and blows and you come slowly into the kingdom.

Sometimes it's like a breeze, slowly and gradually you're brought to Christ. But the big thing that happens is that you're made aware that you're a great sinner, and Christ is a great Savior, and he came to bring you to God as your Father.

And it's the beginning of a glorious life of adventure, of challenge, of learning, and of progress in the knowledge of God. As Peter puts it in his letter, this is the true grace of God. And there is a false grace, but this is the true grace of God found in Christ, atoning for our sins, rising to justify us, receiving us so that we may know God as the holy and righteous Father that he is.

Yes, yes, you're talking about church growth, but there are different dimensions to church growth. Just this morning, for instance, in my own Bible reading, I read the story of David numbering the children of Israel and how wrong that was.

He wanted to know how many people he had under his authority and reign, and that boosted his own pride and ego, and it was sinful, as we're told in the story. That doesn't mean that there isn't good numerical church growth and we shouldn't look for numerical growth.

A large number of people becoming Christians is, after all, what we long for and pray for. But the growth has to be down as well as up and out. So growth has to be into the truth of God, into the love of God, into the holiness of Christ, and up into the worship of God and out into the witness to God through the Holy Spirit to other people.

That kind of spiritual growth in the three dimensions that I've mentioned, I think by and large is not happening in the way that we want it to happen. It's certainly not happening in the United Kingdom, which is a pretty secular and hedonistic society, not as religious, in inverted commas, as America is by any manner of means.

There will be less than 1 of the population of Wales in church tomorrow. It's a very hard environment in which we live in the United Kingdom for the Christian church. In one way, that's an advantage because we now know where we are.

We haven't got a lot of dead wood in our churches, people who profess to be Christians but may not be true Christians at all, and that can be very misleading indeed. For many years, I taught at the London Theological Seminary, and in 1977, Dr. Lloyd-Jones gave the inaugural address at the opening of that seminary.

He said that he would rather be a minister in 1977 than in 1877. In 1877, he said, in Britain, the churches were packed, absolutely packed with people, most of whom would not have been true Christians, but who would have thought they were.

In 1977, we were down to basic skeleton Christians, so to speak. Forgive the expression, not the right way to put it, but we were down to the brass tacks. I hope you understand that expression, one of our UK expressions.

There were very few Christians left, numerically speaking. He felt that was a good thing because you knew where you were, and if people were really sincere about knowing God and seeking his blessing in revival and living for him, then they could do a great deal for God rather than just filling pews.

So what we really need, I think, in the United Kingdom is a breath of heaven, a breath of divine work and divine spirit in the lives of people because, as Aristotle used to say, in order to communicate effectively, you need three things.

You need logos, word. Well, we have the word. You need pathos. You need feeling and passion. I think many Christians today have that, particularly in leadership. But you also need ethos. You need the atmosphere to change.

Nothing but heaven-sent revival is going to change the ethos, the secular, hedonistic, anti-God, pluralistic ethos in which we live, which is why in Wales we still have a deep concern for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit, a visitation of God, which will cause the kind of church growth that has these three dimensions that I just mentioned.

For that to happen, we need to be prepared for it. We need to be ready for it. There are things we can do, I think, to pave the way for it, but we also need to call on God for rather than think that we can produce that ourselves.

Finney thought that we could produce it, and he tried to produce it, but by the end of his ministry, he came to see that that failed. And we can produce that, even though there are many things we can do and ought to do.

But for that radical change of the whole atmosphere to occur, we need something heaven-sent and divine. My father was the minister of the church in Neath, south Wales, where Seth Joshua had been the minister.

If you're familiar at all with the 1904–05 revival in Wales, you will know that Seth Joshua was the man whom God used as an instrument in that revival. He was a very godly man and a great preacher, and God used him in the 1904–05 revival.

Interestingly, his son, Peter Joshua, was the man under whom Carl Henry, one of America's greatest 20th century theologians, was converted. That's just a little piece of history. But I was brought up in that church, and the people in that church had been in the 1904–05 revival.

They knew God in a way that I did not know God, and they knew God in a way that many Christians did not know God. They had been in revival, and there was something about them. It's almost indefinable.

There was something about them that reminded you of the greatness of God's love and the wonder of God's person and presence. They knew God, and I knew they knew God. In our church prayer meetings—this is going back a long way now, in the 1950s when I was a teenager—we had six months of extraordinary outpourings of God's grace.

I wouldn't call it revival. I would call it reviving. When we lost consciousness of time in the prayer meetings, very often we would be leaving the little room where we met for prayer at 11 o 'clock in the night, having begun at 7 o 'clock, without any awareness that four hours had elapsed.

Those prayer meetings were full of the presence of God, full of love for Christ, and full of awe. Numbers of men who were converted at the time—rugby players, big men, strong men, converted men, wonderfully converted—would be afraid because they often came late.

They would be afraid to come into the room. Such was the sense of God's presence. People's praying was transformed. They prayed in a way that was not normal to them. It was being lifted out of themselves into another dimension.

Those six months of those extraordinary times of prayer have left an indelible impression on me. It means that in one way I've been, whilst satisfied in Christ, also dissatisfied with not knowing something of the reality that we knew then subsequently.

There have been times subsequently when we've also experienced the drawing near of God to us, the sense of God's presence with us in a very felt way, and they've been very special. God-given, we can't control them, we can't contrive them, God-given, but very special.

I think they leave their mark upon you, and it means that you really want to know more and more of that sense of God's presence that you knew in those days. There have been times when one has known it perhaps in preaching or in services around the Lord's table, when we've been having celebrations of the Lord's death in the Holy Communion, and I've known something of that.

That's a reviving, a little miniature of revival, but very precious. Yes, there is a distinction in Luke Acts in particular between being filled with the Spirit as an ongoing life of communion with God, of fellowship with God, and fillings of the Spirit, where the Spirit comes upon Zacharias or Mary, for example, in Luke 1, and in the book of Acts, of course, where the Holy Spirit comes down upon an assembly or upon a meeting.

So there's a distinction, I think, between the two, and the Holy Spirit has been given to the church. Pentecost was the giving of the Spirit to the church. He's with us today, and we are to live in the Spirit and walk in the Spirit and go on being filled with the Spirit, which is living a life of fellowship with Christ through the Word under the Holy Spirit's guidance and ministry, seeking to live a holy and a godly and a Christ-like life.

That is our ongoing privilege, as well as our ongoing responsibility as believers. So that is the daily life of consecration and obedience, and it's a privileged life. In the collective or the communal meeting together of God's people, we do that together, and to do it together is important, not just individually, but in communion with other believers.

After all, the New Testament is full of a doctrine of the church, and believers are part of a body and are the bride of Christ. So we do that together as well as individually in our personal lives. We do it in the family, we do it in the home, living the Christian life, in other words.

And I think in the various references to being filled with the Spirit in Ephesians and Colossians and so on, that is what Paul means. He's talking really about sanctification. But in addition to that, there are the special visitations of the Holy Spirit, where he comes down.

We mustn't, I think, imagine that because there are these special visitations of the Spirit, the Spirit isn't with us all the time. He is. But at the same time, we need to keep the two in balance, and it may be sometimes we don't do that, so we either look for constant coming down of the Spirit, if you like, and fail to take seriously his ongoing work in sanctification, or vice versa.

We need to keep the two in perspective and in balance. For me, that is what the Spirit-filled life is about. But the dimension of the coming down of the Spirit upon us, and if you like, what John Wesley's father said to him before he died, the witness of the Spirit, John, the witness of the Spirit, that is the final proof of Christianity.

That element, I think, is something extremely important. That's a very big question. We are talking really about the renewing of church life and the renewing of individual Christian life. You could approach that sociologically by suggesting that we should implement certain methods and practices and try to achieve certain results.

You might even approach it historically by looking at times, both in the Bible and in church history, when there has been a revitalizing of church life, and that's a valuable way of approaching it. But I think we ought to approach it in a biblical way and in a spiritual way.

The renewing of vital Christian experience and vital Christian witness, I think, ultimately, is about seeking God for himself and pursuing God for himself and wanting to know God for himself, rather than simply for the blessings that he conveys upon us.

Do you remember how in Luke chapter 10, for example, our Lord tells the 70 disciples who return from a preaching mission flushed with success, do not rejoice that the spirits are subject to you, but rather rejoice that your names are written in heaven.

Then we are told that Jesus rejoiced greatly in God his Father. You have three types of joy there. You have the joy of success, which is real in its own way. For the spirits to be subject to them was a real source of joy.

But the greater joy was the joy of salvation, knowing that their names were written in heaven. But even that joy pales into insignificance compared with our Lord's joy in God himself, in his Father. That interpersonal relationship of joy within the Trinity is to me what we are meant also to have a share in, so that knowing something of God's joy in himself and God's pleasure in himself is, I think, what revitalized, renewed Christian experience is all about.

That comes about when our Lord Jesus Christ is glorified, when he is central. I think of those verses in John chapter 15 where our Lord speaks to the apostles or the disciples about their ongoing ministry.

He says that before a hostile world, God the Father is bearing witness to God the Son through God the Holy Spirit and through the church, through the church's words and through the church's deeds. That kind of Trinitarian experience of entering into God's witness to his own Son through the Holy Spirit is, I think, what the church most needs.

Not able men, though we need able men, not more efficient business techniques, though we are certainly not meant to be slipshod and haphazard and casual in the things of God. We need to do our very best for God.

But ultimately, the answer is not found in those. The answer is found in God himself and in a real knowledge of God that is, how shall I put it, humbling because it makes us aware of our own sinfulness, Christ exalting because we now love him in a way that we perhaps didn't love him before in the way that we should have, God honoring because God becomes the supreme person in the life of the church.

As a result, the corporate witness and worship of the church and its mission to the world is revitalized. That's a spiritual thing. I think there are things we can do to prepare the way for that. There are obstacles in the way to that.

One obstacle is what I might call clericalism, the idea that it's the ministers or the leaders of the church who do all the work. You can have clericalism in ministers. They want to do all the work. You can also have it in people.

They want the ministers to do all the work. As a result, the priesthood of all believers, the involvement of all believers in worship and witness is marginalized. I think we've got to get rid of that.

That is fatal to church life. The whole church needs to be mobilized, in other words, for its worship and witness. I think we can also get rid of complacency, the idea that we've got it all, we've arrived, our church is functioning very smoothly, and the wheels are oiled and everything's ticking over nicely.

We've got to get rid of that as well. I think we've also got to get rid of professionalism. We can do that, and we can really begin to put into practice what a New Testament pattern of church life and witness is all about.

I think we should do that. In the end, it comes down to spiritual renewal, my reviving, my renewal, my spiritual life, my walk with God, my prayer life. It's an individual as well as a corporate thing, and each Christian, I think, needs to be awakened to the need for a deeper walk with God and a closer relationship with Christ.

Well, I'll say something about my father and the way in which God used him generally and his influence in my own life. He was born in 1904, the year of the Welsh revival. His mother had a beautiful singing voice and would sing with Evan Roberts in many of the revival meetings.

He came out of a good Christian home, but wasn't a Christian. During the depression of the 1926 -27 era, he and my mother went to live in Somerset because there was no work in Wales, where through the influence of a loving brethren couple, they were both converted.

Eventually, they came back to South Wales and for 12 years sat under the ministry of Martin Lloyd-Jones in Sandfields Port Talbot, where my father felt a call to the ministry, but he'd had no education.

He'd gone into a coal mine at the age of 13 and as a result needed obviously to be educated. He spoke to Dr. Lloyd-Jones about his feeling that God might be calling him to the ministry, and Dr. Lloyd-Jones told him to go away and study Greek for a year, which he did.

And a year later, after a prayer meeting, coming out of the meeting, Dr. Lloyd-Jones spotted a book in my father's pocket and said, Mr. Davis, what's that book? And he said, well, it's a Greek grammar.

Doctor, you told me to study Greek a year ago and I've been studying it. Oh, he said, you'd better come and see me. And from then on, he encouraged him. He went to Trevecca, the college set up by Howell Harris, of course, but by then a kind of preliminary college for people who hadn't any education.

He got some qualifications and went on to Aberystwyth, where he studied theology and then became a minister in Pontypridd, in the Rhondda Valley, eventually in Cardiff, in the Docks area of Cardiff, a rough red light area of Cardiff, and ultimately in Neath, South Wales.

And in each of those places, God used him as an evangelist. He was, I think, an evangelist, and his preaching was very direct, very personal, but many, many people were converted under his direct evangelistic preaching, including myself, I have to say.

When I was a young man, I was very keen on athletics, and I remember competing in the Welsh athletics championship one Saturday night, as a result of which I couldn't be at the Saturday night church prayer meeting.

But earlier in the week in the Young People's Meeting, because I'd been to a Church of England, Anglican school, I knew the Apostles' Creed earlier in the week. My father had asked us in the Young People's Meeting whether any of us knew the Apostles' Creed, and I did, and I recited it.

So there I was in the Young People's Meeting reciting the Apostles' Creed on the Saturday competing in the athletics championship, missing the prayer meeting, Sunday night. My father preached on Ananias and Sapphira.

He spoke about these people who know the Apostles' Creed, very interested in sport, but that comes first, but they don't know God. I knew who he was talking about. I remember going out in a rage, very angry, but I knew he was right.

Although he was very direct and personal, I knew he was right, and God used that in my own conversion. So that kind of direct, confrontational preaching, God used. Not that we should necessarily preach like that.

I mean, he was not in a mold. He was rare, he was unusual, and often evangelists are a bit rugged, if you think about them. With a few exceptions, but often they're pretty rugged people, and he was like that in the pulpit.

But everywhere else, as gentle as a lamb, in the home, a natural Christian who loved sport, loved the outdoor life, loved fishing, loved gardening, loved us as sons, two sons, both ministers. He was just like a lamb, loved us so much that we felt accepted, always accepted, my mother also the same.

Often, as a young boy, I break into his study, he'd be in prayer, preparing for the following Sunday's ministry, often on his knees with tears flowing down his face, praying for the people. He never said he was too busy to see me, never turned me out, always welcomed me, and I saw the reality of God in his life.

It was a privilege to have known him. He eventually went to New Zealand and had two ministries there, again, people converted, he was that kind of a preacher, and came back and then had a stroke and was unable for the last six years of his life to speak or move.

But we saw something new in his life, we saw something sweet, gracious, extra qualities of the Holy Spirit in accepting God's will for him that we hadn't seen to the same degree before. So although they were hard years, those last six years, we saw God preparing him for heaven and just honing and toning his character, as it were, so that when the time came, he was ready to go home.

I was with him when he died, and I've never forgotten it. He breathed more and more slowly, and the breaths became more intermittent, and eventually he took his last breath. There was a sudden transformation of him, and my mother and I who were there, I remember distinctly the words of a hymn coming to both of us, so when my latest breath shall rend the veil in twain, by death I shall escape from death, and life eternal gain.

There was a veil between us and him, he had gone beyond it, we couldn't communicate with him and he couldn't communicate with us, but he'd gone home. And incidentally, I do think that our chiefest task as Christian pastors and leaders nowadays, as always, is to prepare people for eternity.

That's what the ministry is about, to prepare people for eternity, for the life to come. And we forget that in the hurly-burly of the busyness of life, in our world-centered materialistic age, where the acquisition of property and money and success is everything, we forget that we're going to leave it all behind.

And ultimately, we should stand before God. How can I do that without a Savior? But with a Savior, we shall be accepted. One of my great heroes is Daniel Rowland. He said four things which have been an immense help to me throughout my Christian life.

We should repent without despairing, we should believe without presuming, we should rejoice without levity, we should be angry without sinning. Those were four lessons he had tried to learn and therefore lessons that I have tried to learn as well.

He also said that what he called works righteousness, the idea that we can earn our way to heaven by our good works, is like a man's vest. It's the last thing he takes off and the first thing he puts on.

Works righteousness will not get us to heaven, only the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ. For me, the Christian life is all about Christ. It's all about his beauty, his loveliness, his glory, the wonder of such a person.

I've just been reading John chapter 2, the marriage in Cana of Galilee, often used at weddings as a basis for an address. What really struck me about that lovely story is not so much that the Lord turned the water into wine, though he did, but that it was the first exhibition of his glory.

This was the first time the disciples really saw his glory. We can miss that sometimes when we look at it for other reasons, that passage. Christ, preeminent. If he's not preeminent, problems will be, personalities will be.

But if he is preeminent, then we shall be pleasing the Father and the Holy Spirit loves to exalt Christ. So for me, to live is Christ and to die is gain, because we then can see him and are like him and we'll praise him as we should.