Preparing the Messenger

“And it came to pass in these days, that he went out into the mountain to pray; and he continued all night in prayer to God.”

— Luke 6:12, ASV

The Man Who Never Sleeps

Somewhere in the Punjab, at some point in his middle years, the people began to call John Hyde by a new name. Griswold recorded it in the obituary: “He was mystical in temperament, and used to give himself day and night to prayer. So much so that he was called, by the people, ‘the man who never sleeps.’”

It was not a literal description. Hyde did sleep, though his friends agreed that he slept remarkably little and often in odd places. Jones once watched him, in a crowded prayer room, go aside into a corner and throw himself on the floor to sleep, and then spring up again when the prayer began to flag. But the name captured something the people around him had noticed. At whatever hour of the night they passed his room, there seemed to be a light burning, and a man on his knees or on his face.

How did this begin? The later legend tends to present Hyde as a man of prayer from the start, as though he stepped off the boat already praying through the night. His friends knew otherwise. The whole nights of prayer came later, and they began, as far as we can tell, in the most ordinary way imaginable: with a talk he had not finished preparing.

A Sleepless Night of Preparation

Jones asked Hyde once how the Lord had taught him to spend whole nights in prayer. Hyde told him a story that has a pleasing lack of drama.

Some time before, he said, he was due to give a Bible reading at a Bible school one morning. He had not had enough time to prepare it, so he stayed up the whole night working on it. The message was ready by morning, and the talk went well enough. But afterwards a thought came to him. He had spent a night getting the message ready. Was there not a need to get himself ready too? “Would not a night of prayer and praise be a good preparation for a real blessing the following day?”

Jones was sure it was “the Holy Spirit’s suggestion.” That night Hyde remained in prayer the whole night. He “enjoyed it so much that he repeated it the following night.” Others heard of it and joined him, some for part of the time and some for the whole night. The practice that would make him famous had begun.

Hyde did not stop preparing his talks. Jones insists that he “was always careful in his preparation for his Bible readings, sermons or Convention addresses.” But from then on he often said something that Jones never forgot: “the preparation of the Messenger was quite as important as the preparation of the message.”

Two Kinds of Preparation

That sentence deserves to be written over the desk of every preacher, teacher, and Christian worker. Most of us who speak about God put almost all our effort into the message: its structure, its illustrations, its accuracy, its application. That work matters, and Hyde did not despise it. But the message is only half of what happens when someone speaks for God. The other half is the messenger, the state of the heart that the words come through.

Paul expressed the same double concern when he told Timothy, “Take heed to thyself, and to thy teaching” (1 Timothy 4:16, ASV). And the apostles in Jerusalem, when they were being pulled into administration, protected both halves: “But we will continue stedfastly in prayer, and in the ministry of the word” (Acts 6:4, ASV). Notice the order. Prayer comes first, and then the ministry of the word.

Jesus himself is the supreme example. The verse at the head of this chapter describes the night before he chose the twelve apostles: “he went out into the mountain to pray; and he continued all night in prayer to God” (Luke 6:12, ASV). The next morning he called his disciples and chose the twelve. Mark records another morning, after a crowded day of healing: “in the morning, a great while before day, he rose up and went out, and departed into a desert place, and there prayed” (Mark 1:35, ASV). If the Son of God prepared himself in prayer for the work of the next day, it is hard to see how his servants can do without it.

“Morning by Morning”

Hyde’s nights of prayer attracted attention, and later writers have tended to make them the whole story. But his friends describe something more steady and more imitable: a daily discipline of early rising, Scripture, and prayer.

Griswold, describing Hyde’s last years at Moga, wrote that “the early morning would be given up to prayer and Bible study, and then being armed with the whole armour of God, Mr. Hyde and his fellow workers would go forth to do valiant battle for the Lord.” Jones, who shared a room with him for a week, noticed that Hyde was “on his knees long before I was up in the morning, though I was up with the dawn.” He also saw that Hyde “would also light the lamp several times in the night and feast on some passage of the word and then have a little talk with the Master.” A friend in Calcutta, lying awake with an illness in a room across the passage, watched Hyde’s electric light flash on at twelve, at two, at four, and at five. From five o’clock it stayed on until sunrise.

This was not a technique. It was a relationship with a God who, as Isaiah says, “wakeneth morning by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as they that are taught” (Isaiah 50:4, ASV). The Calcutta friend was so struck by what he saw that he began to ask God to wake him too. At first he woke at two in the morning, and later at four, “with striking regularity.” He had always claimed exemption from night watches because he was too tired. Now he found it a joy.

The Bible Always Open

Jones noticed one more thing about the way Hyde prayed, and it may be the most important of all. “His Bible was always in his hand,” Jones wrote, “even when we had our morning cup of tea, he regaled me with manna from the Word. When he knelt to pray, the dear old Book was always open before him and his hands rested on it. Face to face with the Lord and resting on the promises.”

Hyde’s prayer was not a flight into vague spiritual feeling. It was anchored in Scripture. He prayed God’s promises back to God, as the psalmists and prophets did. When he prayed at the conventions he would take a single phrase of Scripture and repeat it slowly, with long pauses, until those around him felt that God had heard. The long nights were full of Bible reading. The lamp he lit several times a night was lit to read by.

Here Hyde was in line with every great intercessor of Scripture. Daniel, before his great prayer of confession, had been reading Jeremiah: “I, Daniel, understood by the books the number of the years … for the accomplishing of the desolations of Jerusalem” (Daniel 9:2, ASV). Then he “set my face unto the Lord God, to seek by prayer and supplications” (Daniel 9:3, ASV). The Word showed him what to pray for. Prayer that is fed by Scripture has somewhere to stand.

A Voice from 1896

We are fortunate to have a few paragraphs from a talk Hyde gave in these middle years, and it lets us hear how he spoke to others about the life he was learning. In 1896 the Student Volunteer Movement held a series of conferences for students in India, at Jaffna, Bombay, Lahore, Lucknow, Calcutta, and Madras. The American missions leader John R. Mott was present at Lahore, and Hyde gave an address there titled “The Life on Wings.” It was printed that year in Madras in a small volume of conference addresses. More than twenty-five years later an Indian Christian found a stained copy in a Calcutta second-hand bookshop. The bookseller would not take payment for it because it was spoiled, and part of the address was reprinted in the memoirs of 1923.

The surviving extract is about discouragement. There are times in Christian work, Hyde told the students, when “Satan seems to have struck a hard blow at the work, and one is fighting against discouragement.” At such times he found strength in a passage from the story of King Asa, which he quoted in the older wording, “The Lord is with you while ye be with him”, and which the ASV renders, “Jehovah is with you, while ye are with him” (2 Chronicles 15:2, ASV). The worker who knows he has not forsaken the Lord knows that the Lord has not forsaken him, and “with this promise he can say to Satan: ‘Wait and see who will have the victory.’” Hyde then quoted Asa’s prayer before battle, which the ASV renders: “Jehovah, there is none besides thee to help, between the mighty and him that hath no strength: help us, O Jehovah our God; for we rely on thee, and in thy name are we come against this multitude” (2 Chronicles 14:11, ASV).

Out of such prayer, Hyde went on, “when strength comes and one rests in the word ‘Father,’ there comes to one an experience in which he feels as it were on wings.” He took his title from Isaiah: “but they that wait for Jehovah shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles” (Isaiah 40:31, ASV). And then he asked the students a direct question: “My friend, can you say that word ‘Father’?”

He ended with the problem of fruitlessness, a problem he knew from the inside after four years of slow work. He told an old sermon story about a Scottish minister whose elders complained that only one person had joined the church in a whole year, and that one a boy. The boy, the story goes, became the great missionary Robert Moffat. It is the kind of anecdote whose details no one has ever been able to trace, and Hyde probably told it as he had heard it. The lesson he drew from it was his own. “The harvest of faithful work is sure. It may be, however, we have wanted results instead of wishing that needy souls might have life, and that Christ might see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied. Have we ever wept for souls? Have you? Have I?”

That last question, Have I?, is the voice of a man who was still learning what he taught. Within a decade he would be weeping for souls in a way that his friends found almost frightening. In 1896 he was only beginning to ask.

Not a Method but a Master

It would be easy to turn this chapter into a programme: rise early, read your Bible with your hands on it, pray through the night before important days. Hyde’s friends were anxious to prevent exactly that. Jones remembered how often Hyde told him “that he was afraid of following the example of men, and he dreaded lest any one should try to follow his example.” Jones begged his own readers to follow Hyde’s prayer life and prayer spirit, “but not necessarily in the ‘form’ that he manifested it.” Many Christians, he pointed out, could not physically do what Hyde did. But every Christian can make prayer “their very breath.”

That warning will matter more and more as this book goes on, because Hyde’s body paid a heavy price for his way of praying. For now it is enough to notice where it began. It did not begin with a heroic resolution to pray all night. It began with a man who noticed that he had spent a whole night preparing a message and none preparing himself, and who decided that this was the wrong way round.

For Reflection

Most of us are more comfortable preparing messages than preparing ourselves. Messages can be finished, and they can be checked and improved. Preparing the messenger is slower and less visible. It means time before God, with the Word open and the heart exposed.

John Hyde did not stop preparing his talks. He simply refused to believe that a well-prepared talk was enough. “The preparation of the Messenger is quite as important as the preparation of the message.” Whatever work God has given us, whether preaching, teaching, parenting, nursing, managing, or writing, the principle holds. The one who does the work needs preparing too, and only God can do it.