Self-Denial versus Self-Assertion

To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some. 1 CORINTHIANS 9:22

In 1855, a year after he landed in Shanghai, Hudson Taylor did something most of his fellow Europeans found faintly ridiculous. He put on Chinese clothes, shaved the front of his head and wore the long braid of hair then required of Chinese men. A Retrospect describes it in a single matter-of-fact paragraph. The suggestion, he says, came from the veteran missionary Walter Medhurst, as a way to make travel and residence inland easier, and “much benefit was found to result from this change of costume.” He and most of those who worked with him continued to wear it.

The benefit was plain to see. When William Burns travelled with him the following winter, Burns noticed that the younger man had the quiet listeners while he himself was followed by rude boys; that Taylor was invited into homes while he was not, because of the crowd his foreign clothes drew. After some weeks Burns changed too. The China Inland Mission later made native dress its common practice.

More than clothes

It was a clever piece of missionary strategy. But it grew out of something deeper, which Taylor set out in a short address called Self-Denial versus Self-Assertion. Its text is the call of Christ to deny ourselves and take up the cross daily, and its argument goes somewhere most sermons on self-denial never reach.

We usually think of self-denial, Taylor says, as a slight lessening of our self-indulgences. But when Peter denied Christ he utterly disowned Him. In the same way we are to disown self daily. The question can no longer be whether I like this or that: “the only question must daily be, What would Jesus like?”

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant. PHILIPPIANS 2:5–7

Giving up our rights

Then Taylor turns to what he calls another aspect of self-denial, often overlooked: the surrender of our rights. What does Scripture teach about our rights and claims? That our deserts are condemnation. Believers are pardoned criminals, and whatever good is in us is imparted. Can such people consistently be self-asserting?

He points to the parable of the unmerciful servant, forgiven a vast debt, who seized his fellow-servant by the throat over a small one. He points to Christ before Pilate, who did not assert His rights but waited for the Father’s vindication. And then he asks the question that must have made some of his hearers uncomfortable. Shall we, as ambassadors of a King whose kingdom is not of this world, be jealous of our own honour and rights “as men and as citizens of Western countries,” and seek to assert them, when what our Master wants is a reflection of His own forbearing character?

Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight. JOHN 18:36

This was not an abstract question in Taylor’s China. Foreigners there lived under treaties imposed by force, which gave them legal privileges and the protection of their consuls and gunboats. A missionary who was robbed or attacked could often call on that power. Taylor’s address closes with a prayer that God would work in His people “not ease and honour-seeking and right-maintaining, but right-abandoning and cross-taking.”

A thief forgiven

A Retrospect gives an early example. In 1856, on the road to Ningbo, Taylor’s servant disappeared with everything he owned in China. It would not have been hard to have the man punished. But Taylor had prayed for him and taught him the Sermon on the Mount, with its command not to resist evil. Concluding, as he says, that the man’s soul was of more value than the forty pounds’ worth of things he had lost, he wrote to him urging repentance and faith instead. A friend in England, hearing of it, later sent him a cheque for the same amount.

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. MATTHEW 5:39

At the other end of his life, after the Boxer massacres of 1900 had killed fifty-eight of the mission’s workers and twenty-one of their children, the mission declined to claim compensation for its losses, even where it was offered. It was the same principle on a much larger and more painful scale.

Honest complications

Taylor did not always live this perfectly, and it does not answer every question.

After the riot at Yangzhou in 1868, in which his wife and others were injured, the British consul intervened with warships, and the affair became a diplomatic incident. Taylor had not asked for gunboats, but he did seek redress through the authorities, and the mission was widely blamed at home for provoking trouble. The episode shows how hard it was to be a foreigner in China in those years without being entangled in the power of one’s own government. In later years the mission counselled its workers to avoid appealing to consular power wherever they could.

Nor was identification ever complete. Chinese dress removed a barrier, but it did not make a Yorkshireman Chinese, and Taylor never pretended it did. His phrase in Separation and Service is careful: we are not to hesitate to be peculiar when “the privilege of self-denial for the benefit of others calls for it.” Identification was a form of love, not a disguise.

Finally, surrendering our own rights is not the same as ignoring the rights of others. Scripture calls us to defend the poor and the oppressed. Taylor himself spoke against the opium trade that was ruining Chinese lives. What he asked Christians to lay down was their own claim to honour and redress, not their concern for justice for others.

Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction. PROVERBS 31:8

The mind of Christ

What remains is a searching challenge for any Christian, missionary or not. We are quick to defend our dignity, insist on our due, and resent slights. Taylor asks whether our Master did the same. Christ laid aside His glory, took the form of a servant, and did not open His mouth before His accusers. The one who follows Him will find that the cross touches not only his comforts but his rights.

For even hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps. 1 PETER 2:21

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Replace the question What do I like? with Taylor’s question, What would Jesus like? Ask it before each decision one day this week.

2. Name a right, honour or claim you are clinging to. Pray about whether Christ is asking you to lay it down.

3. Think of someone who has wronged you. Ask whether their soul matters more to you than your loss, and act accordingly.

4. Consider what barriers of custom, language or manner stand between you and the people you are trying to reach, and which you could remove.

5. At the same time, identify one person whose rights you could help defend.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You made Yourself of no reputation and took the form of a servant. I have been quick to defend my own reputation and slow to serve.

Teach me to deny myself daily, and to ask not what I like but what You like.

Give me grace to lay down my rights and claims for the sake of others, and to care more for the souls of those who wrong me than for what they have taken.

Yet make me bold to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves, as You did. Amen.