Conclusion

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

Seventeen chapters can make it seem that Hudson Taylor taught a great many things. He taught one thing, and lived it in a great many places. The one thing is that God is faithful and can be trusted absolutely. Follow it through and the whole shape of his life appears. The finished work: God has done what we could not. Consecration: we are not our own, and are safe in His hands. Prayer: business with a God who keeps His word. Money: He is not poor, and will supply what He wants done. The exchanged life: we rest on the Faithful One, not on our faith. The living water: He satisfies every time we come. Union and communion: the Bridegroom never withdraws, and receives the wanderer back without reproach. Separation and service: His blessing is sure, and His delight in our gifts is real. Self-denial: we can lay down our rights because He will vindicate us. The unreached millions: He has commanded us to go, and He goes with us. Guidance and suffering: He is the One Great Circumstance, and nothing reaches us except through His hands.

The danger of this book

If you have read this far, you face a danger. It is possible to admire a man of faith and never exercise any. His stories are so vivid that they can become a kind of spiritual entertainment. Taylor told them for the opposite reason. He wanted his readers to put God to the test, as he had, in the small things of their own lives.

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. JAMES 1:22

There is a second danger, the reverse of the first. It is to try to copy Taylor’s outward life instead of trusting Taylor’s God. Not every Christian is called to live on brown bread, to wear the dress of another nation, to refuse all appeals for money, or to leave children in another continent. Those were his callings. What every Christian is called to is the thing underneath them all: to take God at His word and act on it.

So the plainest counsel of this book is the same as that of its companion volumes. Go back to the chapter that made you least comfortable, not the one you enjoyed most. Take its application points and work at them slowly over months. Then take the next.

Two things to carry

First, trust the Faithful One, not your faith. This was Taylor’s great discovery, and it is the most liberating thing he has to give. Many earnest believers exhaust themselves examining their faith and measuring their surrender. Taylor did that for years and nearly gave up. His release came when he stopped looking at his own grip and looked at the hand that held him. Your faith will often fail, as his did. God will not.

Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you. 1 PETER 5:7

Second, do not separate the inner life from the outer task. Taylor wrote Union and Communion and ran the China Inland Mission, and he saw no contradiction between them. Communion with Christ was the spring of his service, and the needs of the world were what communion with Christ sent him out to meet. A Christianity all inward grows selfish; one all outward grows dry.

A last word about the man

This book has tried to be honest about Taylor’s weaknesses. He drove himself too hard and sometimes asked too much of others. His family paid a high price for his calling. He worked in China under the protection of treaties imposed by force, and his mission could not wholly escape the shadow of that power, even as he opposed the opium trade and taught his workers to lay down their rights. His reading of the Song of Solomon sometimes outruns the text, and his principles about money, wise for his mission, were not a law for the whole Church. Some of his eschatology, in the appendix to Union and Communion and elsewhere, is speculative, and few readers now follow him in it.

None of this is said to diminish him. His whole message requires it. A man whose one theme was the faithfulness of God cannot be commended by pretending that he himself never failed. His failures are part of the evidence. God used a nervous, over-earnest, often ill and frequently grieving Yorkshireman to open the interior of the largest nation on earth to the gospel, and He did it because the man learned to rely on God rather than on himself.

But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. 1 CORINTHIANS 1:27

He died at Changsha in June 1905 and was buried at Zhenjiang beside Maria. The churches in China that trace part of their story to the work he began have since grown beyond anything he asked on the sands at Brighton, through suffering he could not have imagined, and mostly without foreign missionaries at all. He would have wanted it so. The work was never his. It was God’s own work through man, and God has been faithful to it.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Name one promise of God you will act on this month, in a practical matter, as Taylor did.

2. Stop examining your faith for a week. Whenever you catch yourself doing so, turn instead to a statement of God’s faithfulness in Scripture.

3. Look at your life and ask whether the inner and the outer are both present, and in the right order.

4. Decide which of Taylor’s callings are not yours, and let go of any guilt about them. Then ask what yours is.

5. Choose one of Taylor’s own writings and begin reading it this week.

A PRAYER

Faithful God, You have never failed one of Your children. I have read of Your faithfulness to Your servant, and I want to trust You as he did.

Keep me from admiring faith without exercising it, and from copying another’s calling instead of obeying my own.

When my faith fails, let me rest on Your faithfulness. When my strength fails, be my strength. When I grieve, be near.

And let my life, like his, be a small piece of evidence that You can be trusted absolutely. Amen.