“This Sickness Is Not unto Death”

“But when Jesus heard it, he said, This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified thereby.”

— John 11:4, ASV

George

George Studd was the brother closest to Charlie in age and, in many ways, in temperament. He was a fine batsman, a Cambridge captain, and Charlie’s companion on the voyage to Australia in the winter of 1882–83. In November 1883, back in England, he fell desperately ill. The illness is variously described in the family accounts, and its exact nature is not recorded in any source that can now be checked, but for some days the doctors did not expect him to live.

Charlie sat by his brother’s bed. In later life he described what passed through his mind there, and it is the turning point of his story. He found himself asking what all George’s fame was worth now. The runs, the wickets, the praise of the newspapers, the admiration of thousands of people who had watched him play, none of it could do anything for him as he lay between life and death. The only thing that seemed to matter was whether he was ready to meet God. And Charlie, who had been a Christian for five years, found that he was ashamed of the way he had lived. He had been converted, and he had kept his faith to himself. He had given cricket his strength and Christ almost nothing.

George recovered. The family regarded his recovery as an answer to prayer, and so did Charlie. But he never forgot the questions he had asked at the bedside, and he was never again able to go back to the comfortable faith of the previous six years. Jesus said of his friend Lazarus, “This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God.” Studd came to believe that George’s illness had been sent, in part, for his sake.

Moody Again

In the same season Moody and Sankey were back in Britain, in the second of their great campaigns, and in the winter of 1883–84 they were holding meetings in London. Charlie went to hear Moody. It was the preaching that had converted his father, and it now did for the son what it had done for him. He came back, as he later told it, to the joy of his first conversion, and this time he did not keep it to himself.

He began at once to speak to his friends about Christ. Some of them were cricketers, and he invited them to the meetings. He gave away Christian books and spoke of the gospel to people he met, with an enthusiasm that some found attractive and others found alarming. The quiet young man who had kept his religion in a private corner had become, almost overnight, an evangelist. His family noticed the change, and not all of them liked it.

What Should He Do?

The question that followed was the one that faces every young Christian whose faith becomes serious: what was he to do with his life? Studd had a degree, a famous name and a large fortune coming to him. He could have taken holy orders and become a clergyman, like many of his Cambridge contemporaries. He could have done Christian work at home, as Kynaston was doing among young men. He could have gone on playing cricket and spoken of Christ to the people he met. He tried, by his own account, to find out what God wanted, and for some months he did not know.

He seems to have found two things during this time. The first was a deeper understanding of what it meant to give his life completely to God. Like many young evangelicals of the 1880s, he was influenced by the teaching about the surrendered life that was spreading through the holiness meetings of the period, and especially through the Keswick Convention, which began in 1875. That teaching stressed that a Christian could not have both a divided heart and peace with God, and that the way to joy was to hand everything over to Christ. Studd took it literally, as he took everything.

The second thing he found was the mission field. The China Inland Mission, founded by J. Hudson Taylor in 1865, was by then the most talked-about missionary society in Britain. It asked its workers to go inland, far from the treaty ports, to wear Chinese dress and live in Chinese houses, and to trust God for their support without being promised a salary. To some people it looked like folly. To young men like Studd, it looked like the New Testament. He had heard that another Cambridge man, the rowing stroke Stanley Smith, had already offered himself to the Mission. During 1884 he met Hudson Taylor and made his own offer. He would go to China.

The Family Objects

His family was dismayed. According to the family accounts, his mother, a widow for seven years, pleaded with him not to go. Kynaston, himself a committed Christian, argued that Charlie was being carried away by emotion, and that he could serve God just as well at home. Friends told him that it was a waste of his gifts and his position. It is easy to read these objections as worldliness, and Studd’s admirers usually do. But they were the natural fears of a loving family who had already lost a husband and father, and who could see that the climate of inland China killed missionaries with depressing regularity. They were not entirely wrong to fear for him.

Studd later said that he had struggled hard with their opposition, and that he found it one of the most painful parts of the whole decision. He said, too, that he had been settled by turning to the Bible and finding there what he took as God’s own direction. The details of that experience are given by his biographer, and this book does not repeat them. What matters is the result. He decided that he must obey God rather than his family, and he told them so.

Jesus warned that following him could divide families: “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37, ASV). That word has been used, sometimes cruelly, to justify neglect and harshness in the name of a higher calling. Studd would later be accused of exactly that, and not without reason. But there is no sign that he was harsh with his family in 1884. He was sorry to grieve them, and he went anyway. In time, most of them came round. Kynaston would help the seven with their preparations for departure and became one of the most effective advocates of foreign missions among students on both sides of the Atlantic.

First Love

The letters to the seven churches in the book of Revelation include a warning to the church at Ephesus, a church that had worked hard, endured much and refused to tolerate false teachers. “But I have this against thee, that thou didst leave thy first love. Remember therefore whence thou art fallen, and repent and do the first works” (Revelation 2:4-5, ASV).

Charlie Studd’s six cold years were not years of open sin. By the standards of his world he was an admirable young man: sober, honest, hard-working at his sport, loyal to his friends. He had not denied Christ. He had simply let him drift to the edge of his life. The Ephesian church had done the same in a different way, by being so busy with right doctrine and hard work that it forgot what it was all for.

What brought Studd back was a crisis, and that is often how it happens. But it is worth noticing that the crisis did not create anything new in him. It reminded him of what he had already received in 1878, and made him ashamed of what he had done with it. The call of the risen Christ to the Ephesians was not “find something new” but “remember … and do the first works.” In 1883 and 1884 Studd remembered. He went back to the simple faith of his conversion, and from it, this time, he went out.

It is also worth noticing what he did not do. He did not despise his earlier conversion, or say that he had never really been a Christian before. In later years, when he told his story to students, he was careful to say that he had been truly converted at eighteen, and that his trouble had been, not unbelief, but a faith that had never been allowed to cost anything. That is a more common condition than unbelief, and in some ways a more dangerous one, because it feels so safe.

Glory, Not Fame

When John wrote about the sickness of Lazarus, he chose his words with care. The sickness was “for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified thereby.” Glory and fame are not the same thing. Fame is what people give, and it can be taken away. Glory, in the Bible, is the weight and splendour of God himself, made visible. Charlie Studd had had a great deal of fame, and at George’s bedside he had seen what it was worth. From then on he wanted something else: that whatever he did would make Christ visible.

He did not always see clearly how to do that. He would make many mistakes. But from 1884 until his death, the direction of his life did not change. The famous cricketer had decided to stop playing for the corruptible crown, and the newspapers were about to discover it.