The Garment of Praise

“to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them a garland for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they may be called trees of righteousness, the planting of Jehovah, that he may be glorified.”

— Isaiah 61:3, ASV

A Man Not Naturally Happy

The popular image of Praying Hyde is a sorrowful one: a gaunt figure on his face in the dark, sobbing for souls. There is truth in that image, and earlier chapters have not hidden it. But it is only half the truth, and the friends who knew him best were anxious that it should not be taken for the whole.

McCheyne Paterson began his chapter on Hyde’s joy with an admission that he thought would comfort many readers. “Mr. John Hyde was not naturally a bright and happy man. On the contrary he was in himself inclined to be morose, retiring, shy and silent. Yet he became one of the most joyous souls I have ever met.”

That sentence holds a whole gospel. Temperament is real, and Hyde’s was gloomy. Grace did not erase his temperament. He remained shy, and in public he often looked burdened. But grace gave him a joy that his temperament could never have produced. Jones noticed the same thing. People who did not know Hyde well thought him “a morose, melancholy person,” but in the company of those who understood him “how bright and cheerful he was.” Jones said he had what some called “sanctified humour,” kept “under perfect control.”

The Great Exchange

Paterson says Hyde was “very fond” of the verse at the head of this chapter. In Isaiah 61, the anointed servant of the Lord announces good news to the afflicted. Among other things, he comes “to give unto them a garland for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness” (Isaiah 61:3, ASV). Hyde read this as an exchange. We hand over to Christ what we have: ashes, mourning, and a spirit of heaviness. He hands us what he has: his beauty, his oil of joy, his garment of praise. Paterson added a pointed remark about the ashes: “what is our past life but ‘ashes’?”

The joy, in other words, is not produced by the one who receives it. It is Christ’s own joy, given. Jesus said, “These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full” (John 15:11, ASV). Hyde, Paterson wrote, received “our Lord’s Double Gift of Joy … freely from his Master’s Hand, and then would burst out into joyful praise. For no one can be filled with the Divine Joy and not sing His Praise!”

This is why the image of a garment matters. A garment is put on. It does not grow from within. A man with a heavy spirit does not wait until he feels praise before he praises. He accepts the garment Christ offers and puts it on, and the feeling follows.

“Praising God Through Shut Teeth”

Paterson says that no one he ever knew obeyed Paul’s command more faithfully than Hyde: “giving thanks always for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the Father” (Ephesians 5:20, ASV). It was, he said, “one great source of his joy and therefore of his attractive power.”

Hyde would say again and again that if we want to know why trials are sent to us, we should begin by thanking God for them, and we will soon see why. His circle of friends had a private phrase for this: “Praising God through shut teeth.” It meant praising God in the face of the worst troubles and darkest hours, not because the troubles felt good but because God was still Father. “We can never doubt that He is our Father in Heaven,” Paterson wrote, “and so all must be well for us at all times and in all circumstances.”

Hyde had a story he liked to tell about how he learned this. He and his catechists were touring the villages in the hot weather, when preaching had to begin very early. One morning he woke with one of his worst headaches, so painful that he could not lift his head from the pillow. He could not preach. But he could look up to his Father and thank him “for the love that had permitted that headache.” At his insistence, the evangelists carried his bed out to a shady place and went off to preach without him.

In that village, work among the women had been at a standstill. Some of the men had been baptized, but their wives had never come forward. Whenever anyone spoke to them about it, they said they had never talked it over among themselves. Now the women heard that the Padri Sahib was ill, and they came in a body to sympathise with him. As he lay there, he spoke to them of the claims of Christ. Yes, they said, they believed he had died for them. Then why had they not confessed him? They had never discussed it among themselves, they said. There was no time like the present, said Hyde, so why not discuss it now? They agreed, and after some talk among themselves they told him it was plain to them that they ought to be baptized. To the great joy of their husbands and the evangelists, it was done. “And John Hyde saw why the headache had been sent,” Paterson wrote. He always said afterwards that it had taught him to give thanks for all things at all times.

Singing Villages

Two more stories, both from Paterson, show how often praise went before fruit in Hyde’s work.

Once Hyde was travelling in a country cart to a distant village with one of his Punjabi evangelists and two of the evangelist’s small children. The men were talking gloomily about their destination. The gospel had been preached there for a long time, and hardly anyone had shown any interest. The children had no such worries. They were happy, and they sang, psalm after psalm and hymn after hymn. Their singing was infectious. Soon the two men were singing too, and they sang all the way to the village. When they arrived they found the people unexpectedly interested and eager. Before they left, more than a dozen had shown such living faith that Hyde “felt he dared not refuse them baptism then and there.” It was the first gospel breakthrough in that village, and Hyde was convinced it had been “heralded and brought about … by the spirit of praise which the children had evinced.” The psalm says, “Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou established strength” (Psalm 8:2, ASV).

Another time Hyde and a party of evangelists were camped in a village where the mission had worked for thirty years. The farm labourers there had for years been putting off a decision for Christ. Their excuse never changed: “Not now during the harvest, but afterwards when it is over.” But every year ended the same way, and Paterson could not help quoting Jeremiah: “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved” (Jeremiah 8:20, ASV). The mission party was so discouraged that they decided to leave the next morning. That night someone suggested they go into the village and sing the gospel. They did, and they were so carried away that they sang on until after midnight.

Next morning, as they were packing up, a young man came running from the village. He begged them not to go. The panchayat, the village council, had been called and was meeting at that moment. No one had gone to work. They were considering whether to decide for Christ at once. The missionaries waited. Soon the young man came running back: they had all decided to serve Christ. Hyde found some fifteen men, mostly heads of families, ready for baptism, and baptized them before everyone. Afterwards the young man, himself a new convert, said to Hyde, “This is the result of your singing last night.” He reminded them of one of the songs: “Lift up your heads, O ye gates … And the King of glory will come in” (Psalm 24:7, ASV). “Has he not entered in this morning?”

No one in the missionary party had noticed the connection until the new convert pointed it out.

Praise Before the Answer

The Bible is full of this pattern. When King Jehoshaphat faced an invading army, he “appointed them that should sing unto Jehovah, and give praise in holy array, as they went out before the army.” And “when they began to sing and to praise, Jehovah set liers-in-wait” against the enemy (2 Chronicles 20:21-22, ASV). Paul and Silas, beaten and chained in the prison at Philippi, did not wait for release before they praised God. “But about midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns unto God, and the prisoners were listening to them” (Acts 16:25, ASV). The earthquake came after the singing.

Paterson believed this was one of the deepest secrets of Hyde’s work. He remembered Hyde telling him that on the days when fewer souls were brought in than he had asked for, he would ask the Lord to show him what obstacle in himself was hindering the blessing. “He invariably found that it was the want of praise in his life.” Then he would confess it as sin, accept forgiveness, and ask for the spirit of praise “as for any other gift of God.” He would exchange “his ashes for Christ’s garland, his mourning for Christ’s oil of joy, his spirit of heaviness for Christ’s garment of praise,” praising God “beforehand for what he was going to do.” And, Paterson says, “as he praised God souls would come to him.”

Paterson offered a simple explanation. “No fisher can possibly throw his line lightly when he is dull and sad. It is only the bright and joyous soul that can win souls to Christ.” He noted how Paul, in the chapter of Philippians where he speaks of his fellow workers, immediately adds, “Rejoice in the Lord always: again I will say, Rejoice” (Philippians 4:4, ASV).

Holy Laughter

One more memory of Hyde’s joy comes from a friend who spent a holiday with him in the hills in the summer of 1907. There had been “seasons of great conflict” in prayer, and at times the friend feared Hyde would break down completely. But after whole nights of prayer and praise he would appear “fresh and smiling in the morning.”

The friend credited much of this joy to a poor Punjabi Christian of low-caste origin, whom he calls only “G—.” This brother, he said, had “been used of God to teach us all how to make such times of prayer a very heaven upon earth.” After most awful crying in prayer, G— would seem to break through into the presence of the Father. “You could see the smile of God reflected in his face. Then he would laugh aloud in the midst of his prayer. It was the joy of a son revelling in the delight of his Father’s smile.”

It is fitting that the lesson came from him. The missionaries had come to teach the villagers of the Punjab, and here a villager whose name we do not even know taught the missionaries how to laugh before God. The friend connected it with a verse from Proverbs about divine Wisdom at the creation: “I was daily his delight, Rejoicing always before him” (Proverbs 8:30, ASV). God, he said, had been teaching Hyde and him that he is “the God of Isaac,” a name that means laughter. Such laughter, he thought, “seemed to relieve the tension and give heaven’s own refreshment to wrestling spirits.”

The same friend quoted Nehemiah’s words to the weeping people of Jerusalem: “neither be ye grieved; for the joy of Jehovah is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10, ASV). He also recorded a claim that Hyde himself seems to have believed at the time: that since he had learned to draw on God’s strength, he had scarcely ever felt tired, though he had had little sleep for weeks. “No man need ever break down,” the friend added, “through overstrain in this ministry of intercession.” Hyde’s later history would not bear that confident claim out. We will come back to it honestly in a later chapter. But the joy was real, and it was the true secret of how he kept going as long as he did.

For Reflection

In his last weeks, in his sister’s home in Massachusetts in the winter of 1912, Hyde did not lament. A colleague later reported that after his worst spasms of pain he would say, “Praise the Lord,” or quote Paul’s words, “In every thing give thanks” (1 Thessalonians 5:18, in the older wording he knew). He had been learning that lesson for twenty years, from headaches in village huts, from singing children in a cart, and from a low-caste brother laughing in prayer. At the end it had become his native language.

Many of us, like Hyde, are not naturally joyful. The garment of praise is still offered. We do not have to feel like praising before we put it on. We can hand over our ashes and our heaviness, thank God through shut teeth if we must, and begin to sing. And we may find, as Hyde did, that the King of glory comes in.