The Calvary Road
Published by CLC Publications
U.S.A.
P.O. Box 1449, Fort Washington, PA 19034
UNITED KINGDOM
CLC International (UK)
Unit 5, Glendale Avenue, Sandycroft, Flintshire, CH5 2QP
1950 Roy Hession
First published by CLC London
First American edition 1955
New material (Epilogue) 1990 CLC Publications
All rights reserved
This edition 2016
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61958-226-2
ISBN (e-book): 978-1-61958-227-9
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the Holy Bible, King James Version, 1611.
Italics in Scripture quotations are the emphasis of the author.
Contents
I count it a privilege and honor to write the foreword for The Calvary Road a famous book that God has chosen to use in phenomenal ways, in my own life and in the lives of people around the world. It had such an impact on me that it was required reading for many years at Operation Mobilisation, a ministry that I founded in 1957. It also helped me form a lifelong link with CLC Publications, the ministry that still publishes Hessions books in the United States and internationally to this day.
This book first came into my hands as a young Christian student and it proved to be helpful later on in my life as well. In the early days of our marriage, my wife, Drena, and I lived on the floor in the back of a bookshop in Mexico City. We were already having some difficulties in our relationship. God used this book to break me and show me my sin, especially the sins of impatience and irritability. If you have any difficulty in those areas, then this is the book for you.
As I read The Calvary Road during our days in that bookshop, I never would have dreamed that I would spend most of my life ministering and living in the United Kingdom, or that Roy Hession would become a close friend and associate.
Only heaven will tell the full story of Roy Hession and the lives he influenced, both during his life and after his promotion to glory. For years, I watched him live out the message of his book and inspire others to do so as well. He sparked a movement of revival and grace that had roots in the famous East African revival so many decades ago, but is still flourishing today.
For over sixty years, God has used The Calvary Road , and Hessions other books, in over eighty languages with over a million copies soldand I suspect that He will use it for many years to come.
I pray that you will allow the message of this book to become part of your life. I pray also that you will be proactive in distributing the book to others.
George Verwer, DD
Founder, Operation Mobilisation
2016
T his little book was first published in 1950. With the passage of years, I am now even more sure that the truths expressed in these pages lie at the heart of all those movements of revival by which God restored His church to new life in the hours of her dryness and need. Such movements of revival are not only glorious memories of the past, but are taking place right now in various parts of the world.
The outward forms of such revivals do differ considerably, of course. But, the inward and permanent content of them all is always the same: a new experience of conviction of sin among the saints; a new vision of the cross of Jesus and of redemption; a new willingness on our part for brokenness, repentance, confession and restitution; a joyful experience of the power of the blood of Jesus to cleanse fully from sin and restore and heal all that our sin has lost and broken; a new entering into the fullness of the Holy Spirit and of His power to do His own work through His people; and a new gathering in of the lost ones to Jesus.
Inasmuch as this is just what is happening now in various parts of the world, these pages have a special relevance for the reader today. I trust they may, by the blessing of God, be the means of helping many others come to the cross and present themselves as candidates for revival, by the confession of their emptiness and failure.
For revival is not a green valley getting greener, but a valley full of dry bones being made to live again and stand up an exceedingly great army (see Ezek. 37:1-14). It is not good Christians becoming better Christiansbecause as God sees us there are not any good Christians.
But rather, revival is Christians honestly confessing that their Christian life is a valley of dry bones and by that very confession, qualifying for the grace that flows from the cross and makes all things new.
This little book expresses the truths that lie at the heart of revival simply because it is itself the product of revival. As long ago as 1930, God began to work in a new way in the infant church in Rwanda, East Africa. Infant that it was, it carried the seeds of decay within it; but it was a decay that God began to change into glorious fruit when revival came.
In the years that followed, the blessing of revival spread to the churches in the neighboring countries of Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. A great multitude of Africans, and the missionaries among them, not only came to know Christ as their personal Savior, but also began to live a quality of life rarely experienced in even the most evangelical churches of the West.
That movement of revival has continued in East Africa to the present day, if not in one part then in another, with all the vicissitudes and battles that one would naturally expect of a movement of life.
In 1947, I had been doing full-time evangelistic work in Great Britain for a number of years, but had come into a state of great spiritual need. I had somehow lost the power of the Holy Spirit, which I once had known in the work of the Lord. Yet, I still had to continue to conduct evangelistic campaigns without His powera terrible experience!
I was rather like that son of the prophets in Elishas school who lost his axe head while chopping down a tree (see 2 Kings 6:1-7), but who perhaps, for a few strokes at least, continued to chop with just the handle and wondered why he was making no progress with his work!
Ignorant of what had really happened, I redoubled my efforts and became increasingly tense and forceful. This is all a poor substitute for the Spirits gentle penetrating power. It is, of course, only in looking back that I can describe my situation in this way. At the time, I was all too ignorant of my need.
In April 1947, I invited several missionaries from East Africa to come as speakers to an Easter Conference that I was organizing. I had heard that they had been experiencing in their field for a number of years. As an evangelist, I was interested in revival.
What they had to say was very different from much of what I had associated with the word revival . It was very simple and very quiet. As they unfolded their message and gave their testimonies, I discovered that I was the neediest person in the conference and was far more in need of revival than I had ever realized.
That discovery, however, came slowly to me. Being myself one of the speakers, I suppose I was more concerned about others needs than my own.
As my wife and others humbled themselves before God and experienced the cleansing of the blood of Jesus, I found myself left somewhat high and dry. I was humbled by the simplicity of the message, or rather the simplicity of what I had to do to be revived and filled with the Spirit. When at the end of the conference others testified as to how Jesus had broken them at His cross and filled their hearts to overflowing with His Spirit, I had no such testimony.
