Introduction

If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself. 2 TIMOTHY 2:13

Hudson Taylor was a slightly built Yorkshireman, the son of a Barnsley chemist, who never held an important pulpit and never wrote a book of theology. He went to China at twenty-one with a half-finished medical training and no money of his own. When he died at Changsha in 1905, the mission he had founded forty years earlier had placed hundreds of men and women across the empire, and the churches it helped to plant would outlast the empire itself.

But the reason his name still means something to Christians who will never go near China is not his achievement. It is the way he lived. More than almost anyone of his century, he took the promises of God at their plain meaning and acted on them, in money, in danger and in grief, and left a record of what happened.

One conviction beneath all the others

Read Taylor for any length of time and one conviction comes up underneath everything he says: God is faithful, and can be trusted absolutely. He learned it as a boy, when a tract about the finished work of Christ taught him that there was nothing left for him to do but receive. He tested it as a medical student, when he gave away his last coin and found it returned fourfold by the next morning’s post. He staked a mission on it on the sands at Brighton in 1865. And he came to rest in it in 1869, when he saw that he was not to lean on the strength of his own faith but on the faithfulness of Christ.

Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:24

Everything else he taught flows from that spring. Prayer, for Taylor, was business transacted with a God who keeps His word. Finance without debt or appeal was that trust written into a ledger. Abiding in Christ was resting on the Faithful One instead of straining after feelings. His meditations on the Song of Solomon are about a Bridegroom who never withdraws and a bride who drifts and is received back. And his burden for inland China was what that faithfulness looks like when it faces a million people a month dying without having heard.

That is the thread of this book. Do you trust your faith, or do you trust the Faithful One?

Why he still matters

Taylor is worth reading, first, because he is honest. A Retrospect, his best-known book, is full of his own failures: his clutching at a half-crown, his reluctance to leave a friend, his fear of taking responsibility for other lives. He tells these stories against himself so that the credit goes to God.

He is worth reading, second, because he joined the inner life and the outer life without a seam. The man who wrote Union and Communion, a tender meditation on the love of Christ for His people, also ran a large mission, balanced its accounts and travelled tens of thousands of miles for it.

Not slothful in business; fervent in spirit; serving the Lord. ROMANS 12:11

He is worth reading, third, because he brings the Great Commission down out of theory. For Taylor, Go ye into all the world was a command given by a Master who meant it, and the only question was how to obey.

How this book is arranged

After a chapter on his life, seventeen short chapters set out his teaching. The first five follow the lessons he learned before he sailed: the finished work, consecration, prayer, the faithfulness of God, and money. The next five come from his great inner discovery and from Union and Communion: the exchanged life and the living water, the unsatisfied life, communion broken and restored, what we are before what we do, and the morning watch. Three come from Separation and Service and A Ribband of Blue. The last four take up his outward calling: self-denial, the burden for China’s millions, guidance, and suffering.

Each chapter ends with application points and a prayer. Taylor’s own addresses often end with a searching question put to the hearer; he did not think a truth understood until it was obeyed. Read a chapter a day, or one a week. Stop at the application points. Pray the prayer, or better, pray your own.

Where he must be read with care

This is not a book of hero-worship, and it is better to say plainly where Taylor must be weighed rather than copied.

First, his early intensity was costly. As a student he lived for long stretches on brown bread and apples, and in China he drove himself until his health broke more than once. Not every young reader should copy the diet along with the dedication.

Second, his calling laid heavy costs on others. His wife Maria and several of their children died in China; other children grew up in England far from their parents; colleagues bore hardships they had not always foreseen. Taylor felt these losses deeply, and they should not be tidied away.

Third, he worked in an age of unequal treaties forced on China by Western guns, and of an opium trade that Britain protected by force. Taylor opposed that trade and grieved over it. But the treaties opened the interior to missionaries as well as merchants, and the mission he founded could not wholly escape the shadow they cast.

Fourth, his reading of the Song of Solomon is allegorical throughout, and in places he builds more on details of the poem than they will bear. His warm doctrine of union with Christ does not depend on those details, and chapters nine to eleven try to keep the one while holding the other loosely.

Fifth, his principle of never appealing for money has blessed many and burdened some. It can harden into a test of spirituality that condemns faithful people who work differently, or into a quiet boast. Chapter seven takes this up.

The counsel of this book is the counsel of Scripture: Prove all things; hold fast that which is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Where Taylor is faithful — on the sufficiency of Christ, on prayer, on obedience, on the lostness of the unreached — receive it gladly and act on it. Where he presses further than Scripture goes, set it aside and lose nothing.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask yourself honestly whether you rely more on the strength of your own faith or on the faithfulness of God.

2. Choose a pace for this book — a chapter a day or a chapter a week — and decide now when you will read it.

3. Write down one promise of God you believe in theory but have never yet acted on.

4. Resolve to test everything in these pages against Scripture, keeping what is true and setting aside what is not.

5. Ask God to use this book to send you not to Hudson Taylor but to Hudson Taylor’s Master.

A PRAYER

Faithful God, You have never failed one of Your children, though we have failed You more often than we can count.

Teach me what Your servant Hudson Taylor learned: that the work is Yours, the supply is Yours, and the keeping of my soul is Yours.

Keep me from admiring a missionary and ignoring his Master. Where he is faithful to Your Word, let me receive it; where he is not, give me discernment.

And if You have anything for me to do for the millions who have never heard of You, make me willing to hear it and to obey. Amen.