F. B. Meyer – A Brief Biography
F. B. Meyer –
A Brief Biography
Frederick Brotherton Meyer (1847-1929) was a Bible teacher, pastor, and evangelist of German descent born in London. He attended Brighton College and graduated from the University of London in 1869. He studied theology at Regent’s Park College, Oxford, and went on to serve the Lord as a Baptist pastor and evangelist in England. He also devoted time to inner-city mission work in England and in America.
Meyer first became a pastor in 1870 at Pembroke Baptist Chapel in Liverpool. By 1872, he had moved on to pastor at Priory Street Baptist Church in York. It was during his tenure there that he met the well-known American evangelist Dwight L. Moody. The two of them became good friends, and the Lord used him to introduce Moody to other churches in England.
From Pembroke, he went on to pastor a number of other churches. When he accepted the pastorate at Christ Church in Lambeth in 1892, he found a meager congregation of only 100 faithful people attending; but over the next two years, God used him to breathe new life into the church and blessed him with more than two thousand people attending on a regular basis. God planted him at Christ Church for the next seventeen years, and then sent him out to preach at conferences and evangelistic services. These evangelistic circuits included trips to South Africa and Asia, and even carried him across the Atlantic a number of times to the United States and Canada.
Meyer was known for his outcry against immorality and other social evils. He was part of the Higher Life Movement, which was devoted to scriptural and practical Christian holiness. As a result, he tirelessly championed for the poor and needy, and his life and message were responsible for closing down more than five hundred saloons and houses of prostitution. He also initiated a prison aid society. Higher Life conferences were held at Broadlands (1874), Oxford (1874), Brighton (1875), and finally at Keswick (1875). Keswick quickly became the center of the movement, which also became known as the Keswick Movement, and for many years, he was closely associated with the Keswick Conventions.
During one of these conventions in 1887, as he sat listening to Hudson Taylor of the China Inland Mission speak, he suddenly realized something was missing in his life. Hudson Taylor possessed something he did not − the baptism of the Holy Spirit. That evening he walked from the Keswick tent and up a nearby a hill. Later he said:
I was too tired to agonize, so I left the prayer meeting and as I walked I said, “My Father, if there is one soul more than another within the circle of these hills that needs the gift of Pentecost, it is I. I want the Holy Spirit, but I do not know how to receive Him and I am too weary to think, or feel, or pray intensively.” Then a Voice said to me, “As you took forgiveness from the hand of the dying Christ, take the Holy Ghost from the hand of the living Christ and reckon that the gift is thine by a faith that is utterly indifferent to the presence or absence of resultant joy. According to thy faith so shall it be unto thee.” So I turned to Christ and said, “Lord, as I breathe in this whiff of warm night air, so breathe into every part of me Thy blessed Spirit.” I felt no hand laid on my head, there was no lambent flame, there was no rushing sound from heaven: but by faith without emotion, without excitement, I took, and took for the first time, and I have kept on taking ever since.
This experience changed his life, and as an evangelical of singular vision, his obituary in The Daily Telegraph described him as “The Archbishop of the Free Churches.” As an author, he sold five million copies of his books during his lifetime. In all, he penned more than forty books, including Christian biographies on the lives of Samuel, David, Paul, Moses, Abraham, and others, as well as devotional Bible commentaries written to help Christians in their daily walk with Christ. Meyer served as president of the Free Church Council (1904), president of the World’s Sunday School Association (1907), and president of the Baptist Union (1907). But with all these accomplishments, Meyer made it clear that all credit went to God. He said, “I am only an ordinary man. I have no special gifts. I am no orator, no scholar, no profound thinker. If I have done anything for Christ and my generation, it is because I have given myself entirely to Christ Jesus, and then tried to do whatever He wanted me to do.”
Meyer influenced giants of the faith like Charles H. Spurgeon, who said, “Meyer preaches as a man who has seen God face to face.” From 1904 to 1905, he served as president of the National Federation of Free Churches, and following that term, he served as an evangelist for that organization.
In his seventies, F. B. Meyer returned to the work of pastoring churches in England but still traveled to the United States and Canada. At the age of eighty, he crossed the Atlantic one last time for his twelfth American preaching campaign for the Lord with a preaching style characterized as simple and direct. This campaign involved traveling more than fifteen thousand miles and speaking at more than three hundred meetings.
He led a long and fruitful life, preaching more than sixteen thousand sermons before he went home to be with the Lord in 1929 at the age of eighty-two.
Robert T. Henry, The Golden Age of Preaching: Men Who Moved the Masses (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2005), 191.