A Question in the Street

“Therefore let us also, seeing we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us” — Hebrews 12:1 (ASV)

Hyde reached the Punjab at the end of 1892. It was a land of wheat fields, canal villages and mud-walled towns, now divided between Pakistan and north-west India. He spoke neither of the languages he would need, Urdu and Punjabi. In his first few days an older missionary took him to an open-air meeting in the town. Hyde couldn't understand a word, but someone told him the subject: Jesus Christ, the real Saviour from sin.

When it was over, a respectable-looking man in the crowd who spoke good English stepped forward with a question for the preacher. Had he himself been saved from sin in the way he was describing?

We don't know how the older missionary answered. The story isn't about him. It's about the young man standing silently beside him, because the question went straight into Hyde's own heart. “If the question had been asked me,” he said later, “I would have had to confess that Christ had not fully saved me, because I knew that there was a sin in my life which had not been taken away.”

He never said what the sin was, and it's wise not to guess. He used the words of Hebrews, “the sin that so easily beset me.” It was one familiar failure that had followed him all the way from America. Leaving it unnamed is a kind of mercy, because it turns the story into a mirror. Almost everyone who reads it thinks of their own.

Hyde went back to his room, shut the door, and had it out with God:

“I told the Lord that it must be one of two things. Either He must give me victory over all my sins, and especially over the sin that so easily beset me, or I must return to America and seek there for some other work. I said that I could not stand up to preach the Gospel until I could testify of its power in my own life.”

That wasn't bargaining. It was a refusal to live a double life, preaching a Saviour from sin while quietly keeping the sin. He stayed in his room “for some time.” Then, he said, “The Lord assured me that He was able and willing to deliver me from all sin, that He had planned work for me in India. He did deliver me and I have not had a doubt of this since.” The friend who heard him tell it never forgot “that inexpressibly sad look when he spoke of his sin, and that wonderful smile of his when he referred to the faithfulness of Christ.”

It was a real beginning, not the end of the fight. Twelve years later Hyde was still telling other men about “some of the desperate conflicts that he had had with sin and how God had given him victory.” Freedom from a sin's rule is the start of a road.

Maybe there's one thing in your life you've half made peace with. It knows your tired hours and your weak places. Hyde's way is costly but simple: bring it to God as a question of honesty, and refuse to go on living divided. “Sin shall not have dominion over you” is not a promise that you'll never be tempted. It's a promise about who is in charge. And God's help often comes through people, so don't try to fight it completely alone.

One thing to do this week: name your own “besetting sin” to God this week, in plain words, when you're alone. Then tell one trusted, mature Christian about it (a parent, a pastor, a youth leader) and ask them to pray for you.