The Morning Watch

He wakeneth morning by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned. ISAIAH 50:4

Hudson Taylor’s life was full of dramatic answers to prayer. But the steady ground under all of them was an undramatic habit: he met God early each day over an open Bible. His biographers describe him, in his later years of constant travel, lighting a candle in the small hours to read and pray before the day’s journey began. In his own writings it appears as a conviction, stated briefly, as if it hardly needed saying.

Nothing can make up for it

In Union and Communion, in the middle of his meditation on the bride brought into the King’s chambers, he pauses to add a word about what he calls the morning watch. “There is no time so profitably spent as the early hour given to Jesus only.” Do we give it sufficient attention? If possible it should be redeemed; nothing can make up for it. And then a short sentence that has been quoted by Christians ever since: “We must take time to be holy!”

My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O LORD; in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up. PSALM 5:3

He says the same in Blessed Prosperity, his meditations on the first psalm, and with the same realism: “To some it is not at all easy to secure time for the morning watch, but nothing can make up for the loss of it.” He does not pretend that every Christian has leisure. He knew mothers, labourers and missionaries whose days were not their own. He simply insists that the loss is real, and that it cannot be made good by anything else.

Delight, not duty

Taylor’s ground for the habit is not discipline but delight. Blessed Prosperity is built on the words, His delight is in the law of the LORD; and in his law doth he meditate day and night. The unregenerate, Taylor says, may read the Bible as a religious duty and admire much of it. But when they are converted they find that among the “all things” that become new, they have a new Bible. The child of God feeds on it as a newborn baby on milk.

But his delight is in the law of the LORD; and in his law doth he meditate day and night. PSALM 1:2

It is not hard, he adds, to discover what a man delights in: out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. The mother speaks of her baby, the politician of politics, the athlete of his sport. The happy Christian will speak naturally and often of what he finds in the Word.

He also warns against a way of reading that looks only for promises. The phrase the law of the LORD tells us, he says, that the Bible is meant to show us what God would have us be and do, not merely what we can get from Him. Ezra prepared his heart to seek the law of the LORD, and to do it, and to teach it (Ezra 7:10), and the hand of his God was upon him for good.

Reading in regular course

One of the most charming pages in Taylor’s books is the introduction to Separation and Service. He tells how, travelling in Zhejiang, he spent a night in a wicked town where every inn was dreadful and the people seemed hardened against the truth. He woke cast down and spiritually hungry, opened his Bible at his regular place, and found it was Numbers 7, one of the longest and most repetitious chapters in Scripture. He felt he could not face it. But he was not happy to leave his regular portion, so after a little conflict he read it, praying for a blessing he hardly expected.

God, he says, gave him a feast. The chapter that looked like a list of offerings opened to him as a revelation of God’s delight in the gifts of His people, and became the seed of the book. And he begins the story with a sentence worth taking to heart: “I have never ceased to be thankful that I was early led to read the Word of God in regular course.”

All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. 2 TIMOTHY 3:16

If we only read the passages we already love, we will only ever hear what we already know. Reading straight through, including the long chapters, lets God speak on His own agenda rather than ours.

Feeding and feasting

When ill health drove Taylor home in 1860, he spent years helping to revise the New Testament in the Ningbo dialect. At the time he thought of the work only as a help to Chinese Christians. Later, he says in A Retrospect, he saw that without “those months of feeding and feasting on the Word of God,” he would have been quite unprepared to form the China Inland Mission on the basis on which it stood. The principles of the mission, its dependence on prayer, its refusal of debt, its conviction that God would supply, came out of those hours with the text.

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path. PSALM 119:105

In the first psalm Taylor finds a picture of what such a life becomes: a tree planted by the rivers of water. It is stable, not blown about by circumstances; its hidden supplies do not fail in drought. Taylor notes that the evergreen shows its life most clearly in winter, when the trees around it are bare.

And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. PSALM 1:3

A word of balance

Taylor held a very high view of Scripture, which he called plenary and verbal inspiration, and he had little patience with the critical scholarship of his day. In Unfailing Springs he asks why so much time is worse than wasted over criticism of the Bible’s books. Readers today may wish he had engaged those questions more patiently. But his central point stands: the best evidence for the Word of God is found in the Word itself, when it is studied, loved, obeyed and trusted.

Two cautions are worth adding. The morning is not magic; for some, because of work, health or small children, the quiet hour must come at another time, and Taylor would not have made the clock a law. And a habit can harden into a performance to be ticked off. The point of the watch is not the watch. It is the One we meet there.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Decide on a regular time, if possible early, when you will meet God over an open Bible, and guard it this week.

2. Begin a plan of reading Scripture in regular course, including the parts you would normally skip.

3. When you read, ask not only what God promises but what He would have you be and do.

4. After you pray about a question, wait a few minutes in silence before you leave.

5. If your circumstances make the morning impossible, choose another time without guilt, and keep it faithfully.

A PRAYER

Lord, Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path, and I have too often gone out into the day without it.

Give me a delight in Your law that makes the early hour a pleasure rather than a burden. Teach me to take time to be holy.

Feed me from the whole of Your Word, the long chapters as well as the loved ones, and speak to me on Your agenda rather than mine.

Plant me by the rivers of water, so that my leaf does not wither in the drought, and let my fruit come in its season. Amen.