The Doubter Who Was Sent

Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me. ISAIAH 6:8

A privileged boyhood. Reuben Archer Torrey was born on the twenty-eighth of January, 1856, in Hoboken, New Jersey, into a family of comfortable wealth. He wanted for nothing that money could buy. His mother was a woman of earnest faith who prayed for her son for years, and, by his own later account, hoped that he would one day preach the gospel. He had no intention of doing so. He went up to Yale at fifteen, and there he gave himself to the pleasures open to a rich young man — the theatre, cards, horse-racing and a good deal of drink — and to the pleasure of argument. He read the new criticism of the Bible and enjoyed it. He was clever, and he knew it.

A night at Yale. In his final year at Yale, in 1875, that life came to a sudden end. Torrey later told how, sick of himself and of everything, he resolved one night to take his own life. Instead he found himself on his knees. He remembered his mother’s prayers, and he promised God that if He would deliver him he would do whatever He asked, even if it meant preaching. He rose a changed man, and he never went back on the promise. He made a public profession of faith, graduated from Yale College that year, and entered the Yale divinity school, completing his course in 1878.

The doubter answered. Conversion did not end his questions. He had absorbed, and for a time kept, the critical views of Scripture he had admired as a student, and he was ordained to the Congregational ministry in 1878 still wrestling with them. He took a small church at Garrettsville, Ohio, and in 1879 married Clara Smith, who was his partner for the rest of his life. Then, in 1882, he did something characteristic. Rather than settle his doubts at second hand, he went to Germany, to the universities of Leipzig and Erlangen, and sat under some of the leading scholars of the day. He came home holding a higher view of the Bible than the one he had taken with him. From then on he defended the Scriptures as a man who had looked at the case against them from the inside. He never forgot what it was to doubt, and he spoke to doubters without contempt.

Minneapolis. His next work was in Minneapolis, where he served as a pastor and as superintendent of the city’s Congregational mission work. There, in 1888, he made a decision that shaped the rest of his life. Having read the life of George Müller of Bristol, who had supported his orphanages by prayer alone, Torrey gave up his salary to work among the poor and resolved to look to God alone for the needs of his family. He had a wife and young children. He later said that from then on their food and clothing came as answers to prayer. The lesson he drew was not that God can be manipulated, but that most Christians stop asking too soon. The habit of praying through, as he called it, never left him.

Moody’s man in Chicago. Torrey had come under the influence of D. L. Moody during a campaign in New Haven, and in 1889 Moody called him to Chicago to be the first superintendent of the Chicago Evangelization Society, the school that became the Moody Bible Institute. He was thirty-three. He built its course of study around the English Bible and practical work, and he sent his students out into the streets, hospitals, jails and tenements of the city. In 1894 he also became pastor of the Chicago Avenue Church, now the Moody Church, and he remained there for twelve years. His best-known little books date from these years: How to Bring Men to Christ, Baptism with the Holy Spirit, What the Bible Teaches, and How to Pray.

The Saturday-night room. In 1898 Torrey began a prayer meeting at the Institute on Saturday evenings. It was not a service. It was an hour of asking, and what they asked for, week after week, was a worldwide outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Torrey prayed privately in those years that God would send him round the world to preach, and not long afterwards an invitation came from Australia. He told the story often, not as a technique but as evidence that God answers.

Grief. The public years had private sorrow. In 1898 the Torreys lost a young daughter to illness. It is worth remembering when his writing seems hard. The man who spoke so confidently of God’s faithfulness had stood at his own child’s grave.

Around the world. From 1902 Torrey travelled with the singer Charles M. Alexander on a series of missions that took them to Australia and New Zealand, to Asia, and through the British Isles. The meetings were enormous. In London in 1905 they filled the Royal Albert Hall day after day for two months. Torrey later remarked that the newspapers kept pointing out that the preacher was no orator, and he agreed with them. He put the crowds down to the uplifted Christ preached in the power of the Spirit, and to the prayers of many thousands of people. He reported the numbers of those who professed faith, but he never claimed them as his own.

The long finishing. Torrey returned to America at the end of 1905, left his Chicago pastorate the following year and his post at the Institute in 1908, and gave himself to campaigns across the country. In 1908 he founded a summer Bible conference at Montrose, Pennsylvania. In 1912 he went west to become the first dean of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, and from 1915 he was also pastor of the Church of the Open Door there. The sermons collected as The Fundamental Doctrines of the Christian Faith were preached to that congregation. These were also the years of The Fundamentals, the series of volumes defending historic Christianity against the new theology, which he helped to edit. He resigned his Los Angeles posts in 1924 and went back to travelling and preaching.

The end. Torrey wrote more than forty books. He died at his home in Asheville, North Carolina, on the twenty-sixth of October, 1928, at the age of seventy-two, and was buried at Montrose. Those who knew him best did not remember him chiefly for the crowds. They remembered a man of regular, unhurried prayer and daily Bible study, who kept the habits of a small room while he stood before great audiences. The young sceptic who had meant to end his life had promised to go wherever he was sent. He was sent a very long way.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Torrey’s mother prayed for years for a son who scorned her faith. Name someone you have stopped praying for, and begin again today.

2. Torrey took his doubts to their source rather than living with them unexamined. If you have a question about the faith that you have been avoiding, decide how you will honestly look into it.

3. In Minneapolis he learned to pray through rather than give up. Choose one matter you will pray about daily until God answers.

4. The Saturday-night room asked God for things far beyond its own reach. Add one request to your prayers that only God could grant.

5. Choose one of Torrey’s books or sermons in the Ochorus library and read the first chapter this week.

A PRAYER

Lord God, You heard a mother’s prayers for a proud and unhappy son, and You met him when he was ready to die. I thank You that no one is beyond Your reach.

You answered his doubts, supplied his needs and sent him to the ends of the earth. Teach me to trust You as he learned to trust You.

Where I have given up asking, give me courage to ask again. Where I have kept my questions at a distance, give me honesty to face them in Your light.

And make me willing to go where You send me, and to say, Here am I; send me. Amen.