In the twenty years since I first wrote this book, enormous changes have taken place across the board all over the world and throughout the church. I find myself being told constantly and from almost every direction that I am in danger of becoming irrelevant if I don’t stay current with the latest developments in computers and appliances and transportation and the media. And so as I sat down to revise A Long Obedience in the Same Direction for this twentieth-anniversary edition, I was prepared to do a lot of changing.

I have done hardly any. It turns out that there are some things that don’t change. God doesn’t change: he seeks and he saves. And our response to God as he reveals himself in Jesus doesn’t change: we listen and we follow. Or we don’t. When we are dealing with the basics—God and our need for God—we are at bedrock. We start each day at the beginning with no frills.

So the book comes out in this new edition substantially as I first wrote it. I added an epilogue to reaffirm the ways in which Scripture and prayer fuse to provide energy and direction to those of us who set out to follow Jesus. A few celebrity names have been replaced by new ones (celebrities change pretty rapidly!), and I have changed a few references to current affairs. But that’s about it. It is reassuring to realize once again that we don’t have to anxiously study the world around us in order to keep up with God and his ways with us.

The most conspicuous change has been the use of a fresh translation of the Holy Scriptures, The Message, that I have been working on continuously since the publication of A Long Obedience. In fact, the fifteen Songs of Ascents (Psalms 120—134) that provide the text here for developing “discipleship in an instant society” provided the impetus for embarking on the new translation. All I had in mind at first was translating the Psalms into the idiomatic North American language that I heard people using on the streets and in the shopping malls and at football games. I knew that following Jesus could never develop into a “long obedience” without a deepening life of prayer and that the Psalms had always been the primary means by which Christians learned to pray everything they lived, and live everything they prayed over the long haul.

But the people I was around didn’t pray the Psalms. That puzzled me; Christians have always prayed the Psalms; why didn’t my friends and neighbors? Then I realized that it was because the language, cadenced and beautiful and harmonious, seemed remote from their jerky and messy and discordant everyday lives. But when these Psalms were first prayed and written by our Hebrew ancestors, they were every bit as jerky and messy and discordant as anything we experience today. I wanted to translate them from their Hebrew original and convey the raw, rough and robust energy that is so characteristic of these prayers. I wanted people to start praying them again, not just admiring them from a distance, and thereby learn to pray everything they experienced and felt and thought as they followed Jesus, not just what they thought was proper to pray in church.

And so it happened that the unintended consequence of the writing of A Long Obedience in the Same Direction was this new translation of the Songs of Ascents, and then all the Psalms and the New Testament (and eventually the whole Bible). The inclusion of that translation in this new edition completes the book in a way I could not have anticipated twenty years ago.