The Finished Work

When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost. JOHN 19:30

Everything Hudson Taylor taught began in an old warehouse in Barnsley on a summer afternoon in 1849. A bored teenager with a free day found a basket of pamphlets and picked out a gospel tract, expecting a story at the beginning and a sermon at the end, which he meant to leave for those who liked it.

He never got as far as leaving it. A single phrase caught him: “The finished work of Christ.” At once the words of Jesus on the cross came to mind: It is finished. What was finished? A full and perfect atonement for sin. The debt had been paid by the Substitute. Then came the question that changed his life. If the whole work was finished and the whole debt paid, what was left for him to do?

Nothing left to do

There was, he writes, “nothing in the world to be done but to fall down on one’s knees, and accepting this Saviour and His salvation, to praise Him for evermore.”

Taylor had grown up in a devout Methodist home, and he had often tried, he says, to make himself a Christian. He had failed, and concluded that for some reason he could not be saved. He had been treating salvation as a task to achieve, and he could not achieve it.

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. EPHESIANS 2:8–9

The tract turned the whole thing round. Salvation was not a work for him to do but a work already done by Another. His part was to receive it. The logic of that discovery runs through everything he wrote. The man who would later be exhausted by his own efforts at holiness, and who found rest only when he saw that Christ was his holiness as well as his pardon, was learning the lesson of the Barnsley warehouse a second time.

The Substitute

Taylor’s gospel had hard edges. In his New Year’s address Under the Shepherd’s Care he insists on the substitutionary character of Christ’s death as the plain teaching of Isaiah 53 and of the whole Bible. The God of the Bible, he says, is a God who punishes sin and cannot pardon without atonement.

But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. ISAIAH 53:5

A finished work is only good news if there was a debt to finish. Taylor’s joy in the tract was the joy of a man who had understood that his sins were real, that they deserved judgement, and that the judgement had fallen on Christ instead of on him. In the address Self-Denial versus Self-Assertion he sums up the believer’s standing with a sentence that leaves no room for pride: “As unbelievers, we were condemned criminals; as believers, we are pardoned criminals.”

Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed. 1 PETER 2:24

It shaped his preaching in China. He could have preached a moral system, and his hearers had several of their own. Instead he preached the finished work. In Ningbo in 1857 one of the first to profess faith under his ministry was an officer of a reformed Buddhist sect who stood up after such a sermon and said he had sought the truth for years in Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism and had found rest in what he heard that night. The message did not ask him to climb. It told him the climbing had been done.

A prayer already answered

Taylor always told his conversion together with his mother’s prayer. She was away from home that day, and rose from the dinner table with such a yearning for her son that she went to her room, turned the key, and resolved not to come out until her prayer was answered. After some hours she could only praise. When she came home a fortnight later and he ran to tell her his news, she said she already knew. His sister, too, had resolved in her diary to pray daily until he was converted.

The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. JAMES 5:16

From the beginning, he says, he was led to feel that the promises were very real, and that “prayer was in sober matter of fact transacting business with God.” He never separated the two: salvation is wholly God’s work, and God is pleased to do His work in answer to the prayers of His people.

Joy, not gloom

One remark in the same chapter tells us much. In his boyhood, he says, conversion was commonly called becoming serious, and judging by the faces of some who professed it, it was a very serious matter indeed. Would it not be well, he asks, if the people of God had tell-tale faces, showing the gladness of salvation so plainly that the unconverted would have to call conversion becoming joyful instead?

Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice. PHILIPPIANS 4:4

A man who has understood that the work is finished has nothing left to prove. He can give himself away without anxiety, because nothing he gives is buying anything. Taylor’s later life had more sorrow in it than most, but underneath lay the settled gladness of a pardoned criminal whose debt was paid.

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. ROMANS 8:1

Where this leaves us

There are two ways of misusing this chapter. One is to treat the finished work as a doctrine for the beginning of the Christian life, and then to move on to the real business of effort and achievement. Taylor tried to live like that for years, and nearly gave up the mission field. The finished work is not the doorway to the Christian life; it is the ground it stands on all the way through.

The other is to make it an excuse for idleness. The very first thing he did after his conversion was to ask God for something to do for Him, as an outlet for love and gratitude. The work that saves is finished. The work that love does in response has only just begun.

For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s. 1 CORINTHIANS 6:20

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask yourself whether, in practice, you are still trying to make yourself a Christian. Name the effort you are relying on, and lay it down.

2. Read John 19:28–30 slowly, and write in a sentence what it means for you that the work is finished.

3. Take one sin that still troubles your conscience and thank God aloud that its debt was paid by the Substitute.

4. If someone is praying for your salvation, or you for theirs, write down that name and pray today with the confidence that prayer is real business with God.

5. Consider whether your face tells the people around you that your faith is a joy or a burden.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You cried It is finished, and it was. I have nothing to add to Your work and no right to try.

Forgive me for the years in which I have lived as if my standing with God depended on my efforts. I am a pardoned criminal, and You paid what I owed.

Let the gladness of that finished work show in my face and in my giving, so that others may see that conversion is becoming joyful.

And make me as eager to serve You out of gratitude as I once was to earn what You had already given. Amen.