Preface to the Revised Edition
PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION
The Road to Reality has been in print now for 23 years with more than 150,000 copies in English, Spanish, French, Korean and Finnish.
Regularly I hear from people who have been impacted as they have been confronted with the message of this book. Just the other day, I received an email from a man who found the book at a garage sale, read the book and has begun his own journey on the narrow road of authentic Christianity.
One of my senior leaders, David Carroll, was a CPA in California back in 1991 when he first read The Road to Reality. His dream was a common one for that day: to make a million dollars and then retire early and live off the interest.
“Little did I know,” he wrote later, “that except for the Bible, this book would change my life more than any book I had ever read.”
After reading The Road to Reality, he and his wife, Debi, were deeply convicted to radically recommit themselves to follow in the footsteps of Christ. Step by step, they began to put the principles of this book into practice. Eventually, they left the accounting practice behind to join the staff of Gospel for Asia as home team missionaries. Instead of a million dollars in the bank, David and Debi have helped bring a million people to heaven.
Many events have transpired since The Road to Reality first came out in 1988. For one thing, back then I was 37, and now I am 61!
In 1988, the Berlin Wall was still standing and the World Wide Web sounded like science fiction. In the two decades that followed, the political map of the world has been radically recast, economies have been shaken, and technology has completely changed the way we learn and are entertained.
What hasn’t changed are these few stark, all-important realities: Nearly 2 billion people in the world still haven’t heard the name of Jesus even once. Most of these still live in Asia, and they are still dying without hope by the tens of thousands every day.
Jesus said to take the Gospel to the uttermost parts of the world, and He has equipped His Church with everything we need to obey His commands. Another generation has passed, and where are we?
It grieves me to write this, but even on the home front, the Church seems to have lost, instead of gained, ground. Today our churches permit people to mix and match their belief systems any way they please, as long as they don’t impose their beliefs on anyone else. Having abandoned the Holy Scriptures as our standard for faith and practice, we find ourselves defenseless against the world, the flesh and the devil.
The divorce rate among couples in the Church today is no better than that of the secular world. I wonder how we compare in other areas, like consumer debt, personal morality, alcohol and drug abuse, depression and suicide.
Not only are Christians increasingly indistinguishable from the world in the way they live, but if you ask them, most would probably say they prefer it that way. They would rather blend into the crowd than to stand up against an increasingly hostile world. Everywhere Christians are in retreat-and-seek-cover mode against the onslaughts of cults, nationalist movements, modern science and postmodern cynics.
What is the way out of the foxhole we have dug ourselves into? It is to repent, to return to Jesus, to surrender to Him and start living as He commands us to. That is the message of The Road to Reality, and the message is more urgently needed today than ever before.
I am grateful to make this revised edition of the book available to those who are seeking for truth and reality in their lives. There are dozens of young people serving with our ministry now who were not even born when I wrote the book. Their energy and zeal for Jesus are an encouragement to me, and I am releasing this new edition of The Road to Reality with them in mind.
The new edition has updated statistics, illustrations and suggestions more relevant for our times. However, the autobiographical parts of the book are largely unchanged, placing me in the United States in the 1980s.
It is my prayer that what I experienced and learned as a young person so many years ago in the United States will still resonate with today’s readers around the world.
For my staff who helped me on this revised edition, I am deeply grateful. Thank you for persevering on this road with me.
K.P. Yohannan
January 2012