Hudson Taylor

I have been reading a book called “Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret,” which has been quite interesting, encouraging, and also challenging. In case some of you don’t know, Hudson Taylor was a missionary to China in the late 1800’s and founder of the China Inland Mission. The “secret” to which the title refers is really no secret. Hudson Taylor came to realize only years after being a missionary that the key to holiness and joy is resting in Jesus–in his work, his words, and his presence (this last part was not mentioned explicitly in the book).

Hudson Taylor eagerly desired holiness, but the more he strove for it, the more he failed, and he became weighed down by sin even to the point of despair; but then he received an encouraging letter from his friend John McCarthy, to whom Hudson had confided his anxieties. Hudson later writes to his sister about how he was transformed. I will show a few excerpts from this letter to his sister.

“Each day brought its register of sin and failure, of lack of power. To will was indeed ‘present within me,’ but how to perform I found not. Then came the question, is there no rescue? Must it be thus to the end–constant conflict, and too often defeat? How could I preach with sincerity that, those who receive Jesus, ‘to them gave he power to become the sons of God’ (i.e., Godlike) when it was not so in my own experience?”

“….I felt I was a child of God. His Spirit in my heart would cry, in spite of all, ‘Abba, Father.’ But to rise to my privileges as a child, I was utterly powerless….When my agony of soul was at its height, a sentence in a letter from dear McCarthy was used to remove the scales from my eyes, and the Spirit of God revealed to me the truth of our oneness with Jesus as I had never known it before. McCarthy, who had been much exercised by the same sense of failure but saw the light before I did, wrote (I quote from memory):

‘But how to get faith strengthened? Not by striving after faith, but by resting on the Faithful One.’

“As I read I saw it all! ‘If we believe not, he abideth faithful.’ I looked to Jesus and saw (and when I saw, oh, how the joy flowed!) that He had said, ‘I will never leave thee.'”

“….The sweetest part, if one may speak of one part being sweeter than another, is the rest which full identification with Christ brings. I am no longer anxious about anything, as I realize this; for He, I know, is able to carry out His will, and His will is mine. It makes no matter where He places me, or how.”

His letter to his sister was encouraging to me, too, so I wanted to share at least parts of it with you. Another part of Hudson Taylor’s life that impresses me is his faith in financial matters. He never asked anybody except God for money for the China Inland Mission; and God always provided, often by stirring the hearts of others to give. In the appendix, the authors write,

“The income while Mr. Taylor was directing the work and sustaining it with his prayers ran into millions of dollars, unasked save of God–no less than four million dollars. The total income since 1900 [the book was written in 1932] has been almost twenty million dollars, unasked save of God. And there has been and is no debt.”