The Exchanged Life

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. GALATIANS 2:20

By the summer of 1869 it was fifteen years since Hudson Taylor had first landed in China. He had founded a mission, led a party across the world, survived a riot, buried a daughter and been denounced in Parliament. Outwardly he was a man of faith. Inwardly he was close to despair. In his address Unfailing Springs he describes that time without disguise: “I was painfully conscious that I was not living all that I was trying to teach the Chinese.” He struggled for victory and was too often defeated. He fasted, prayed, meditated on the Word, and nothing seemed to help. He asked himself whether he ought to give up preaching altogether and leave missionary work.

What happened next became, in the hands of his biographers, the most famous episode of his inner life. They called it the exchanged life, and the phrase has stuck.

Two tellings of one discovery

Taylor’s crisis has come down to us in two forms. In the account most people know, the turning point came in September 1869 at Zhenjiang, through a letter from a younger colleague, John McCarthy, who had himself been seeking holiness and had found rest. The burden of his letter, as Taylor’s biographers record it, was that the way to growth in faith was not striving after faith but resting on the Faithful One. The details of that afternoon come from later accounts, not from Taylor’s own books in the Ochorus library, and they should be held with that in mind.

In his own address Unfailing Springs, Taylor tells it through a different text. Alone in inland China, he came one afternoon in his ordinary reading to the fourth chapter of John. It had always been, he says, ancient history to him. That afternoon, for the first time, it became a present message to his soul.

Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life. JOHN 4:14

The two tellings do not compete. They describe the same discovery from different sides: that Christ Himself is the life of the believer, received freely and continually. The vine speaks of union; the well speaks of supply. Taylor lived on both, and this chapter follows both.

Resting on the Faithful One

Taylor had been trying to make himself a branch, to draw strength out of Christ by effort, as if the vine and the branch were two separate things that had to be joined afresh each day. He came to see that he was already joined. We have no need to strain for a union with Christ that already exists. The branch does not make itself a branch. It is one, by the act of the vinedresser. Its whole business is to remain where it has been placed, and to receive.

Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me. JOHN 15:4

This is the hinge of all his later teaching. The weight of the Christian life does not rest on the strength of our faith, or on the constancy of our feelings, but on the One in whom we have been placed. Faith is only the hand that takes hold. It is the Faithful One who holds.

Shall means shall

What struck him in John 4 was the plainness of the promise. In Separation and Service he recalls the same moment, and describes how he came to see that Christ literally meant what He said: that shall meant shall, and never meant never, and thirst meant thirst. He had sat down thirsty, he says, and sprang up praising the Lord that the thirsting days were past for ever.

In Unfailing Springs he explains what thirst means: any unsatisfied need, any longing left faint and unrefreshed. And he tells how he took the promise: “believing from His own Word that my thirsty days were all passed, not from any present feeling, but because of His promise.”

He did not feel any different at first. That evening he took his usual Bible-reading with the Chinese and spoke freely, but without any special sense of power. The next morning he learned that one of his hearers had been so convicted of sin that he could not sleep. From that time, he says, his ministry was owned of God as it had not been for some while. The promise was taken on the word of Christ, and the evidence followed, not the other way round.

He stops, too, over the tense of the verb. Jesus does not say whosoever has drunk, as if a single draught settled everything. He says whosoever drinketh, and the word describes a habit, a continuing action. The living water is not a deposit made once, but a spring that keeps flowing to the one who keeps drinking.

He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. JOHN 7:38

Fruit, not work

This conviction shapes nearly everything Taylor wrote afterwards. In Blessed Prosperity, his meditations on the first psalm, he draws a distinction that goes to the root of it. God, he says, does not work through us in a mere mechanical way, as a man uses a tool. He makes us branches of the true Vine, “the very organs by which Its fruit is produced.” And there is “a fundamental difference between fruit and work.” Then comes one of the best sentences he ever wrote: “Work is the outcome of effort; fruit, of life.”

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law. GALATIANS 5:22–23

He notices that Paul speaks of the fruit of the Spirit, singular, not fruits, as though we might pick the graces we prefer. It is one rich cluster. And if he were asked to put that fruit in a single word, he says, it would be Christliness. A workman has to find his materials and tools, and set himself to his task with painful perseverance. Fruit is the glad, free outcome of the life within, and it ripens in its season.

In his New Year’s address Under the Shepherd’s Care, Taylor puts the same truth in a homely picture. A heavy bunch of grapes on a tender shoot would break it. But if the shoot abides in the vine, it grows stronger as the fruit develops. Many earnest Christians load themselves with the fruit they think they ought to bear, and the load breaks them. Taylor had nearly broken under it. The remedy is not less fruit but a different source.

Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ. PHILIPPIANS 1:6

Whatever the size of the vessel

In one of his loveliest illustrations, Taylor imagines a walker on a hot mountain day, parched with thirst, finding a stream falling from an overhanging rock. His cup may be small, but he can fill it again and again. A bucket would take longer to fill, a barrel longer still, but each would overflow in the end, for the overflow “depends not on the size of the vessel but on the unfailing supply of the stream.”

My cup runneth over. PSALM 23:5

The Samaritan woman had no training, no standing and a bad reputation, yet she at once brought a whole town to Jesus, while many an eloquent preacher sends his hearers home unsatisfied. It ceases to be a question, Taylor says, of what we are or what we can do. The question is whether we have brought our vessel to Christ to be filled. We cannot all be great or wise or strong, but Christ is made unto us all that we need.

But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption. 1 CORINTHIANS 1:30

The test of 1870

Taylor’s testimony does not end in the afternoon of discovery, and what follows is hard to read. Some months later, he says, came a time of great trial: the death of a beloved child, the sending home of three others, and the most trying time the mission had ever known. In Tianjin the Sisters of Mercy, French priests and the consul were massacred, and every inland station was in excitement and peril. Then his wife Maria fell ill; a baby was born and lived only a fortnight; and the morning after the baby’s funeral, Maria herself died.

For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes. REVELATION 7:17

Then, he writes, he understood why the Lord had made John 4 so real to him. In the weeks of illness that followed, lonely, missing his wife and the pattering footsteps of children far away in England, he would feel the heart-thirst returning. “Perhaps twenty times in a day,” he writes, he cried to the Lord that He had promised he should never thirst, and each time the Lord came and more than satisfied his sorrowing heart.

The promise did not mean that Taylor stopped grieving. He grieved deeply, and he says so. It meant that in his grief he had somewhere to go, twenty times a day if necessary, and that he was never turned away. The living water did not prevent the heart-thirst from coming back. It answered it every time it came.

Resting and working

Taylor’s discovery did not make him passive. The years after 1869 were the busiest of his life. He travelled, organised, wrote, prayed for seventy and then a hundred new workers, and bore burdens that would have crushed most men. What changed was not the amount of work but its source. He had stopped trying to supply the life himself.

For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. PHILIPPIANS 2:13

The exchanged life is not a technique for feeling better, or a second blessing that removes all struggle. Taylor struggled again, grieved again, and knew seasons of darkness to the end. Nor was the discovery itself new truth. It is plain New Testament teaching, taught by the Puritans and by many others before him. What was new was that Taylor, having taught it, came to live on it.

A reader who hears of a sudden transformation may be tempted to seek the same kind of moment, and miss the point. The discovery was not an experience to be chased but a fact to be believed: that the believer is already in Christ, and Christ in him. Some come to see it in a single afternoon, as Taylor did; others grow into it over years. The branch is joined either way, and the invitation to the spring is not to the spiritually advanced. It is to whosoever. The only qualification for drinking is thirst.

And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely. REVELATION 22:17

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask yourself whether you are living as a branch or as a workman: are you drawing life from Christ, or trying to supply it yourself?

2. Name the fruit you have been straining to produce by effort, and the thirst that nothing else has satisfied. Bring both to Christ in plain words today.

3. Take one promise of Christ this week and believe it on His word, before you feel anything.

4. When the old thirst returns, as it will, go back to Him at once. Keep count, if it helps, and do not be ashamed of the number.

5. If you are exhausted in Christian service, consider whether the problem is the amount of work or its source.

6. Read John 15:1–11 and John 4:1–42 this week, paying attention to what the branch and the thirsty woman do and do not do.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You are the Vine and I am a branch. I have tried to make myself fruitful, and the effort has worn me out.

I stop striving after faith and rest on You, the Faithful One. I am in You, not because I have joined myself to You, but because You have joined me.

You stood and cried, If any man thirst, let him come unto Me, and drink. I am thirsty, and I come. Let shall mean shall, and never mean never.

When the heart-thirst comes back in the lonely hours, let me come back to You as often as I need, and find You more than enough.

Fill my small vessel until it overflows, and let my labour be fruit and not merely work, for the blessing of others who are thirsty too. Amen.