Prove Me Now

“Bring ye the whole tithe into the store-house, that there may be food in my house, and prove me now herewith, saith Jehovah of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.”

— Malachi 3:10, ASV

Three Books

Some time around 1895, Ramabai read three books that changed the way she thought about money. One was the story of the China Inland Mission, founded by Hudson Taylor, who had gone into the interior of China without guaranteed support, trusting God to provide. One was The Lord’s Dealings with George Müller, the journal of the Bristol pastor who had fed and housed thousands of orphans for decades without ever asking anyone but God for money. The third was the life of John G. Paton, missionary to the New Hebrides in the South Pacific.

I was greatly impressed with the experiences of these three great men. … I wondered, after reading their lives, if it were not possible to trust the Lord in India as in other countries. I wished very much that there were some missions founded in this country which would be a testimony to the Lord’s faithfulness to His people and the truthfulness of what the Bible says in a practical way.

Why, she asked herself, did no missionary come forward to start such a “faith mission” in India? The answer, she said, came from God himself.

Then the Lord said to me, “Why don’t you begin to do this yourself, instead of wishing for others to do it? How easy it is for any one to wish that some one else would do a difficult thing instead of doing it himself.” I was greatly rebuked by the “still, small voice” which spoke to me.

It is one of the most practical rebukes in Christian autobiography, and one of the most widely applicable. She took it to heart. “At the end of 1896, when the great famine came on this country, I was led by the Lord to step forward and start new work, trusting Him for both temporal and spiritual blessings.”

Mukti

The new work was the farm at Kedgaon. The school had bought about a hundred acres there in 1894 or 1895, as a fruit farm to help support the Sharada Sadan. In the spring of 1897, driven out of Poona by the plague regulations, Ramabai took her famine girls there, to live in sheds fenced with thorns. It was meant to be a temporary refuge. It became her life’s work.

That autumn help arrived. Minnie Abrams, an American Methodist missionary who had been working as a village evangelist, woke one morning with a strong sense that she was called to Kedgaon. When she told Soonderbai Powar, Soonderbai said that she and Ramabai had been praying for months for such a helper. On 15 October Abrams moved to Kedgaon. Abrams became one of her closest co-workers.

Many of the famine girls now asked to be baptised. On 6 November 1897 seventeen bullock carts full of them went six miles to the Bhima river, the girls singing all the way, and were baptised in the stream. One who was there remembered each girl clasping her hands as she was presented, and joining in the words of the baptismal formula “with beaming face.” At Christmas, Ramabai gathered all the girls and told them how God had led her in finding them. The following Sunday she and Abrams and the missionary W. W. Bruere organised a church at Kedgaon, “taking the Bible only as our creed.”

In December 1897 Ramabai held a camp meeting of her own at Kedgaon, with missionaries and Indian Christians camping in grass huts and meeting in the barn. There, according to Dyer, she dedicated the new settlement to God and gave it a name. (The finished buildings were dedicated on 24 September 1898.) She called it Mukti. In Hindu thought, mukti is the word for liberation, the release from the endless cycle of births and deaths that she had been taught a woman could never attain. To her, now, it meant salvation. She took the name from Isaiah’s prophecy of the restored city of God: “thou shalt call thy walls Salvation, and thy gates Praise” (Isaiah 60:18, ASV).

It was the perfect name. The liberation that the Shastras had denied to women was here offered freely to thousands of them.

No Bank Account

Mukti was run on Müller’s principles. It had no endowment, no guaranteed income, and no support from any missionary society. The American Association continued to support the Sharada Sadan, but the funds for Mukti came, as Ramabai believed, directly from God, through the gifts of people who heard of the work and gave without being asked for money. Increasingly, she made no appeals for money at all. She prayed, told the story of what God had done, and waited.

“It is quite true that my resources are very limited,” she wrote around 1900; “not only that, but I am literally penniless, with no income of any kind. I own nothing on earth except a few clothes and my Bible.” And in a letter of 1899: “One would not like to exchange this life of faith, after tasting it, for all the riches in the world.”

Her fullest statement of it came in A Testimony in 1907.

I am spared all trouble and care, casting my burden upon the Lord. There are over 1500 people living here; we are not rich, nor great, but we are happy, getting our daily bread directly from the loving hands of our Heavenly Father, having not a pice over and above our daily necessities, having no banking account anywhere, no endowment or income from any earthly source, but depending altogether on our Father God; we have nothing to fear from anybody, nothing to lose, and nothing to regret. The Lord is our inexhaustible treasure.

It should be said honestly that faith finance was not always easy, and that it had its costs. There were months when money ran short. At one point, in a financial crisis, she withdrew the guaranteed salaries of her workers and asked them to trust God as she did, and some of the best of them left. The American supporters of the Sharada Sadan worried constantly about her debts and her health. Faith missions can become a burden on those who work in them, and Mukti was not free of that. But for twenty-five years, through famine, plague, and war, the work went on, and the people at Mukti were fed.

Prove Me Now

The verse at the head of this chapter is God’s challenge to his people through the prophet Malachi. They had been robbing God, the prophet said, by withholding their tithes. If they would bring them in, God promised to open the windows of heaven. “Prove me now herewith, saith Jehovah of hosts.”

It is one of the few places in the Bible where God invites people to test him. According to Helen Dyer, this was one of three verses Ramabai received in the storm of 1893. She took it literally. Her whole approach to religion, from childhood, had been to test it by experience. “God has given me a practical turn of mind,” she wrote. “I want to find out the truth about everything, including religion, by experiment.” She had tested the religion of her fathers and found that the stone images never answered. Now she tested the God of the Bible.

I have responded to the Lord’s challenge, “Prove Me now” (Mal. 3. 10), and have found Him faithful and true. I know He is a prayer-hearing and prayer-answering God. … I entreat you, my readers, to prove the Lord as I have proved Him.

Another verse became her motto. “Faithful is he that calleth you, who will also do it” (1 Thessalonians 5:24, ASV). “This golden text,” she wrote, “has been written with the life-blood of Christ on my heart.” And she summed up everything in one sentence: “I have come to believe the Word of God implicitly, and I have found out by experience that it is true.”