When we look back on what the masters of the spiritual life have written and said, it's hard to escape the conclusion that we have been the victim of a confidence trick in our century. Over the past few decades, the evangelical church has been gripped by a series of issues and concerns that have primarily been marginal, or at best of secondary importance.

Conferences, seminars, and books on a whole series of "vital concerns" have dominated center stage and determined the agenda in many churches and for many individual Christians. "But strikingly absent has been concentration on God Himself." Indeed, on the rare occasions when this absence has not been the case, we have sat up to take notice as though something out of the ordinary were being said!