Building from the Top

“The people that sat in darkness Saw a great light, And to them that sat in the region and shadow of death, To them did light spring up.” — Matthew 4:16 (ASV)

While all this went on in public, a quieter story was happening in private. Ramabai later said it was the most important thing that happened to her in those years.

She had been a Christian for about six years. She had been baptised, argued theology, lectured on Christian love and founded a school. But for years, she said, she had studied “other books about the Bible,” not the Bible itself. Back in India she put the other books aside and read Scripture. It made her miserable. “Following this course for about two years I became very unhappy in my mind. I was dissatisfied with my spiritual condition.”

Then, at a mission press in Bombay, she picked up a book by an English clergyman, William Haslam. He had had a good parish and been busy with every kind of church activity, until a woman told him he was “trying to build from the top.” She meant he had never been converted. He had the religion without the life.

That hit Ramabai hard. “There were so many things I did not understand intellectually. One thing I knew by this time, that I needed Christ, and not merely His religion.” Looking honestly at herself, she saw that “sin had dominion over me.” She became restless, almost ill, and spent many sleepless nights. Then:

I had at last come to an end of myself, and unconditionally surrendered myself to the Saviour, and asked Him to be merciful to me and to become my Righteousness and Redemption, and to take away all my sin.

She dated it to 1891, eight years after her baptism, and would not describe the moment. What mattered was the result. “I came to know, after eight years from the time of my baptism, that I had found the Christian religion, which was good enough for me; but I had not found Christ, who is the Life of the religion.” She compared herself to the blind man in John 9 whose eyes were opened: she had been “sitting in darkness,” and “saw great light.”

What amazed her most was that salvation was free, and that it was for women. All her life she had been taught that everything had to be earned, by pilgrimages, fasting, gifts to priests, serving a husband as a god, and that liberation was not open to women at all. Even her early Christian faith, she realised, had been mixed with the idea that she must earn forgiveness. Now she read: “But God commendeth his own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

How good, how indescribably good! What good news — for me, a woman; a woman born in India among Brahmins, who hold out no hope for me and the like of me.

“No caste, no sex, no work, and no man was to be depended upon to get salvation, this everlasting life; but God gave it freely to any one and every one who believed on His Son.”

Everything she did afterwards flowed from this. The famine children, the widows, the women rescued from the streets would not have to earn anything. Neither had she.

You can grow up in church, know the songs, believe the right things, even serve, and still be “building from the top.” Ramabai was not a fake; she really believed. But believing Christianity is true is not the same as trusting Christ himself. And this is not a test you fail by being honest. Her turning point came when she stopped pretending she was fine.

One thing to do this week: ask yourself Ramabai's question: have I found Christ, or only the Christian religion? Write your honest answer down. If you're not sure, tell God that in plain words, and talk to someone you trust about it.