The Faithful One

It is of the LORD’S mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. LAMENTATIONS 3:22–23

Late one Sunday night in Hull, Hudson Taylor was walking home after preaching in the lodging-houses when a poor Irishman asked him to come and pray with his wife, who was dying. The priest would not come without eighteenpence, and the family had nothing. Taylor had one coin in the world, a half-crown, and his supper and breakfast were waiting at home, but nothing for the next day’s dinner. He went. In a wretched upstairs room he found four or five children with the sunken cheeks of slow starvation and a mother lying exhausted beside a baby a day and a half old.

Trusting God plus one-and-sixpence

A Retrospect tells what followed with painful candour. Taylor wished he had two shillings and a sixpence instead of a single half-crown; then he would gladly have given them a shilling. He began to tell the family that there was a kind and loving Father in heaven, and something within him said, You hypocrite. He knelt to pray, and got as far as Our Father before his conscience asked whether he dared call God Father with that half-crown in his pocket. He rose in great distress.

Then the father of the family said, If you can help us, for God’s sake do. The words Give to him that asketh of thee flashed into Taylor’s mind. He handed over the half-crown, and told the man that in giving it he was giving his all, and that God really was a Father and might be trusted. The joy came back in a flood. He sang hymns all the way home through the empty streets.

Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. MATTHEW 5:42

The next morning the post brought a packet in an unknown hand, containing nothing but a pair of kid gloves, from which half a sovereign fell to the floor. Four hundred per cent, he said, for twelve hours’ investment.

What gives the story its power is not the return but Taylor’s diagnosis of himself. The truth, he writes, was that “I could trust in God plus one-and-sixpence, but was not yet prepared to trust Him only.” Most of us trust God. What we find hard is trusting God only, without the reserve in our pocket that we privately rely on.

Failing faith, unfailing God

It would be easy to turn this into an exhortation to have more faith. But Taylor himself kept moving the emphasis away from faith and onto God. In the same book, describing his first years in Ningbo after he had resigned from his society and was depending on God alone, he confesses: “My faith was not untried; it often, often failed.” He was ashamed of the failures. But he adds at once what he was learning through them. God became, he says, so near, so real, so intimate.

Then he sets down the truth that was to become the hinge of his whole inner life. It is good to know that those who trust God wholly find Him wholly true. But it is better still to know that “when we fail to trust fully He still remains unchangingly faithful. He is wholly true whether we trust or not.”

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

He tells us that he had not learned this when he first went to China. As a young man, the serious question in his mind was not whether God was faithful but whether he had strong enough faith to warrant the enterprise. That is a crushing question, because no one can ever be sure the answer is yes. The discovery that set him free, first in principle in these Ningbo years and then fully in 1869, was that the weight does not rest on the strength of our faith. It rests on the One we trust. Faith is only the hand that takes hold. It is the Faithful One who holds.

Small faith in a great God

Taylor is sometimes remembered as a giant of faith, but his own picture of faith was much humbler. In A Full Reward, an address on the book of Ruth, he says that every true Christian worker, at home or abroad, is a faith-worker, and that it is precisely in weakness that God comes near. Those who have gone out without a human guarantee of support, not knowing when the next help will come, find what he calls an additional link with the loving heart of the Father.

And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. 2 CORINTHIANS 12:9

For Taylor weakness was not an embarrassment to be hidden from God but the very place where God’s faithfulness is displayed. When we are weak in ourselves, our friends and our circumstances, then we are strongest in Him. Our faith may be feeble; His arm is not.

In his short address All Sufficiency, on the text The LORD God is a sun and shield, he adds a further point. Sweet as the promises are, he says, “the Promiser is greater and better.” No promise, however richly claimed, can exhaust what God is able to do. Faith looks past the promise to the One who made it.

For all the promises of God in him are yea, and in him Amen, unto the glory of God by us. 2 CORINTHIANS 1:20

A bank that could not break

After the gloves and the half-sovereign, the young Taylor made a resolution that his later life bore out. A bank that could not break, he decided, should have his savings or earnings. He never regretted it.

This was not recklessness; Taylor kept careful accounts. But he was convinced that the safest place for anything we value is God’s hands, and that we lose nothing by giving it to Him, though we may have to wait for the return.

He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the LORD; and that which he hath given will he pay him again. PROVERBS 19:17

A caution belongs here. The half-crown story is not a promise that every gift will be repaid fourfold by the next post. Taylor never said so. What the story teaches is what Taylor learned in that room: that he had been relying on a coin, that God was asking him to rely on God, and that when he did, the joy he had lost came back. God’s faithfulness may be shown in a returned half-sovereign or in grace to go without. Either way He is faithful.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask yourself what your one-and-sixpence is: the reserve you privately rely on while saying that you trust God.

2. If there is a need in front of you that you could meet at some cost to yourself, pray about it honestly today, and do what you are given to do.

3. When your faith feels weak this week, stop examining it and turn your attention to the faithfulness of God. Read Lamentations 3:21–26 aloud.

4. Write down one occasion when God was faithful to you although you had not trusted Him fully.

5. Consider whether you have been treating any story of answered prayer as a formula. Replace it with trust in the Person.

A PRAYER

Faithful Father, I have trusted You plus a reserve of my own, and called it faith. Forgive me.

Teach me to trust You only. When my faith fails, as it often does, let me rest on the truth that You remain faithful, for You cannot deny Yourself.

Make me generous to those in need, not because I expect a return, but because You are my Father and may be trusted.

And when I am weak, be my strength, that the glory may be Yours and not mine. Amen.