The Sin That Had Not Been Taken Away

“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

Arrival

John Hyde reached India at the end of 1892, at the start of the cool season in the north. From the coast he travelled up-country by rail to the Punjab, the land of five rivers in the north-west of British India, where his church had worked for nearly sixty years. It was a land of wheat fields and canal villages, of mud-walled towns and Sikh temples, mosques and Hindu shrines. Along the roads moved bullock carts, camels, and the occasional missionary on a pony. The languages he would need were Urdu, the common tongue of the towns and of educated conversation, and Punjabi, the language of the villages. He knew neither.

For his first days he stayed, as new missionaries usually did, with an older colleague, a man Hyde later described simply as “a brother of some experience.” Almost at once, “on one of the first few days” in India, something happened that he never forgot. Years afterwards he told Pengwern Jones about it, immediately after telling him about the letter on the ship, as though the two belonged together. They did.

A Question at an Open-Air Meeting

The older missionary took him out to an open-air service in the town. In the Punjab of those days this was a common method. The preacher would take his stand in a bazaar or at a crossroads, perhaps with a helper or two to sing, and speak to whoever would stop and listen. Hyde could not understand a word. But someone told him what the subject was: the missionary was speaking about Jesus Christ as the real Saviour from sin.

When the address was over, a respectable-looking man in the crowd stepped forward. He spoke good English, and he asked the missionary a direct question: had he himself been saved from sin in the way he was describing?

We do not know how the older missionary answered. The story is not about him. It is about the young man standing silently beside him, who suddenly found that the question had gone straight into his own heart. “If the question had been asked me,” Hyde told Jones, “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.”

The thought appalled him. Here he was, newly arrived to proclaim to others that Christ was a perfect Saviour, and he could not honestly say that Christ had delivered him. “I realized,” he said, “what a dishonour it would be on the Name of Christ to have to confess that I was preaching a Christ that had not delivered me from sin, though I would be proclaiming to others that He was a perfect Saviour.”

The Unnamed Sin

Hyde never told Jones what the sin was, and Jones never asked, or if he asked, never recorded the answer. Hyde used the language of the verse that stands at the head of this chapter: it was “the sin that so easily beset me.” It was a single, particular, recurring failure that he knew well, and it had followed him, it seems, all the way to the Punjab.

It is natural to want to know what it was, and wise not to guess. Every Christian who reads this story will probably find their own besetting sin coming to mind, and that is the point. Hyde’s silence on the matter is itself a kind of mercy to his readers. Had he named it, some would have thought, “Well, that is not my problem.” Unnamed, it becomes a mirror.

The writer to the Hebrews assumes that every Christian has such a sin. He does not say “lay aside the sin, if you happen to have one.” He speaks of “the sin which doth so easily beset us” (Hebrews 12:1, ASV), as a runner might speak of a heavy cloak that wraps around the legs and trips him every time he tries to run. The sin that besets us is not the dramatic fall we would never contemplate. It is the familiar one. It knows our weak places and our tired hours, and we have half made our peace with it.

“One of Two Things”

Hyde went back from the meeting to his room, shut himself in, and had it out with God. What he told Jones about that hour is uncompromising.

“I told the Lord that it must be one of two things,” he said. “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.”

It is easy to misread this as a kind of bargaining with God, or an ultimatum. It was not. It was a young man refusing to live a divided life. He had come to India to proclaim a Saviour from sin. If that Saviour could not save him, then he had no business preaching. And if the Saviour could save him, then there was no reason to put up with the besetting sin any longer. Either the gospel was true in his own life or he would go home. He would not do the one thing that hypocrisy would have made easy: carry on preaching while quietly keeping the sin.

Paul warned his young colleague Timothy: “Take heed to thyself, and to thy teaching. Continue in these things; for in doing this thou shalt save both thyself and them that hear thee” (1 Timothy 4:16, ASV). Notice the order: first thyself, then thy teaching. Paul applied the same discipline to himself: “I buffet my body, and bring it into bondage: lest by any means, after that I have preached to others, I myself should be rejected” (1 Corinthians 9:27, ASV). Hyde had not read these verses for the first time that evening, but for the first time they were addressed to him personally, by a stranger’s question in a Punjabi street.

“He Did Deliver Me”

Hyde stayed in his room “for some time,” he said, “facing the question, and realized how reasonable it was.” And then: “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. I can now stand up without hesitation to testify that He has given me victory, and I love to witness to this and to tell all of the wonderful faithfulness of Christ my Lord, my Saviour.”

Jones never forgot Hyde’s face as he told the story. There was, he said, “that inexpressibly sad look when he spoke of his sin, and that wonderful smile of his when he referred to the faithfulness of Christ.” The two expressions together are a good summary of Christian experience. Sin is never a trivial matter, even when it has been forgiven and overcome, and a Christian who can speak of past sin without any sorrow has perhaps not understood it. But the last word belongs to the faithfulness of Christ, and it is spoken with a smile.

Scripture holds out the same promise that Hyde discovered: “For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under law, but under grace” (Romans 6:14, ASV). It is not a promise that we will never be tempted, or even that we will never stumble. It is a promise about dominion, about who is in charge. The besetting sin need not be master. Paul, crying out “Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?”, answered his own question at once: “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 7:24-25, ASV).

A Caution and a Comfort

Hyde’s testimony, as Jones recorded it, is very strong. He said the Lord was able to deliver him “from all sin,” and that he had not doubted it since. Readers from different Christian traditions will hear such language differently. Some will hear it as an overstatement of what is possible in this life. Others will hear it as a plain statement of what grace can do. Both should also hear the balancing word of the apostle John. John writes, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us”, and then, in the next breath, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:8-9, ASV).

The rest of Hyde’s life suggests that his victory in 1892 was a real beginning, not a finished work. McGaw’s sources describe him at the first Sialkot Convention in 1904, twelve years later, still speaking to the men of the convention about “some of the desperate conflicts that he had had with sin and how God had given him victory.” One close friend went so far as to say that until that convention Hyde, though truly “born of God,” had still been “a babe in Christ.” Paterson, who knew him best, said Hyde would regularly search himself in prayer for what was hindering God’s work, confess what he found, and ask again for grace. None of that contradicts the story of the open-air meeting. It simply shows that deliverance from a besetting sin is the start of a road, not the end of one.

There is a comfort in that. Many Christians have had some decisive moment of surrender or deliverance, and then have been bewildered to discover that the struggle with sin was not over. They wonder whether the first experience was real. Hyde’s life suggests that it can be entirely real and still only a beginning. The writer to the Hebrews, having told us to lay aside the sin that besets us, immediately adds, “and let us run with patience the race that is set before us.” Laying aside the weight is not the end of the race. It is what makes running possible.

Preacher and Practice

One more thread in this story is worth drawing out. The man who asked the question at the open-air meeting was not hostile. He was, Hyde says, “respectable-looking,” educated, and apparently in earnest. He had heard the missionary claim that Christ saves from sin, and he wanted to know whether the claim was true of the man making it. It was a fair question. Indian listeners in the Punjab of the 1890s asked it of missionaries often, sometimes sharply. They saw very clearly the gap between the Christianity preached in the bazaar and the Christianity practised in some European bungalows, clubs, and cantonments.

Hyde spent the next twenty years answering that man’s question with his life. Much of what made him influential in India was the plain evidence that he believed what he preached, and lived it. He shared the food and houses of his Indian fellow workers. He gave away his clothes. He prayed through the night. He refused to defend himself against unkind treatment. In his later years an Indian enquirer, who had secretly been sent to watch him and find his faults, went back to the men who sent him and reported that Hyde had none. That story is told later in this book, and like many such stories it probably grew in the telling. But the reputation behind it was earned. And it began here, with a young missionary who could not bear to preach a Saviour he had not yet fully trusted.

For Reflection

There are two ways to deal with a besetting sin in the life of a Christian worker. One is to keep working, keep preaching, and keep the sin, managing the tension as best one can. The other is Hyde’s way: to bring the matter to God as a question of integrity, and to refuse to go on until it is dealt with. The first way is common, and it is quietly destructive. The second is costly, and it is the only way to preach with a clear conscience.

Not everyone who reads this is a preacher. But every Christian is a witness, and every witness will one day meet, in some form, the question the stranger asked in the Punjab: Has this Saviour you speak of saved you? Hyde’s answer, after a hard hour on his knees, was yes. It can be ours.