Victory, Victory, Victory

“but thanks be to God, who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” — 1 Corinthians 15:57 (ASV)

On Good Friday, 14 April 1911, Hyde's ship reached Liverpool, and he went to stay with Pengwern Jones in Llangollen, Wales. They walked the hills and prayed together. There they visited an elderly woman who was very deaf and complained that she couldn't hear anything at church. “You ought to praise God for that,” Hyde told her. He couldn't hear either, he explained, so he would look at the preacher and pray for him, and then look at the people one by one and pray for each. The deafness he had carried for twenty years had become a gift he could pass on. She wrote later that his advice had made a wonderful difference to her life.

Then he heard that the American evangelist J. Wilbur Chapman was struggling with a mission at Shrewsbury, in England. Hardly anyone came, and some local ministers treated it “as some little side-show.” Hyde was a stranger and seriously ill, but he said, “I cannot leave a brother minister to bear this burden alone,” and came back for a week to pray. Chapman later wrote that “instantly the tide turned in our work,” and his biographer records that at least fifty people responded that day. Before Chapman left, he asked Hyde to pray for him, and remembered the prayer like this:

“My Father, here is a minister who sorely needs Thy help, do bless him, I beseech Thee, may his life be precious in Thy sight.”

A more dramatic version of that scene, with a locked door and long silences, comes from an undated letter. The account Chapman published himself is the quieter one. Either way, the week cost Hyde dearly. He “crawled back” to Jones's house, so weak he could hardly speak, and whispered: “The burden was very heavy, but my dear Saviour's burden for me took Him down to the grave.”

That spring someone started singing a hymn in the middle of his talk, and the message was never given. Another time he travelled a long way while ill and was never even invited to speak. He didn't complain. Of unkindness he said, “This is my cross which He wants me to take up and carry for Him.”

In August he sailed for America. Doctors at Clifton Springs, New York, found a malignant tumour and operated. He wrote to his sister: “Am still in bed or wheel chair getting a fine rest and doing a lot of the ministry of intercession, and having not a few opportunities of personal work.” In December he moved to her home in Northampton, Massachusetts. The tumour returned, and his last weeks were “days of unutterable suffering.” Yet in the middle of it he said, “Thank God for pain, thank God for everything!” To his sister he said, “It's just victory, victory, victory.”

John Hyde died at Northampton on 17 February 1912, aged forty-six. (Many books say he died at Clifton Springs, but that is only where he was treated.) His last words were in Punjabi, remembered as “Bol, Yisu Masih, ki jai!”, roughly “Shout the victory of Jesus Christ!” It had become the great war cry of the Punjab church. He was buried at Carthage beside his father, his mother and his brother Edmund.

Nobody learns to say “Thank God for pain” on their deathbed. Hyde had been practising for twenty years, through headaches, slights and slow years. The habits you build now, giving thanks, refusing to hold grudges, carrying other people's burdens, are the ones you'll have when life gets hard. Jesus' question to his sleeping friends, “What, could ye not watch with me one hour?”, is the one Hyde answered with his life. You won't answer it in his form. You can answer it in his spirit.

One thing to do this week: find someone who is carrying something heavy right now. Tell them you'll pray for them, and set a daily reminder to do it all week. End each prayer the way Hyde ended his life: thanking God for the victory of Jesus.