TWENTY-FIVE CENTS AND ALL THE PROMISES OF GOD!

Recently I wrote about Hudson Taylor, the pioneer missionary who was one of the first to take the gospel to the interior of China. His commitment to prayer and faith was radical then and it would be considered radical today. Taylor was powerfully used of the Lord to plant the seeds of the gospel in the largest nation in the world. I believe that much of the harvest being reaped today is linked to the pioneering work of Taylor and the missionaries of the China Inland Mission in the late 1800’s.

For those who do not know who Hudson Taylor was, or if you wish to know more about this amazing man of God, let me recommend that you read Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret, written by one of Taylor’s sons and his wife, Dr. and Mrs. Howard Taylor. You can get a used copy of the book through Amazon for just a couple of dollars and it is well worth it.

In the last article, I focused on the prayer and faith of this radical missionary. To be a missionary in China in the 1800’s was not an easy road to take. To be in the interior of the country was to be in a primitive part of the world and it was the inland, unevangelized portions of China that heavily burdened Taylor.

In 1874 a fall seriously injured Taylor. Some months later, back in England, it was discovered that he had suffered a concussion of the spine which eventually left him paralyzed from the waist down. Taylor’s world for the next several years became a narrow bed with posts at the corners. Across the posts at the foot of the bed was a map of China. Taylor eventually got the use of his legs back but spent several years as an invalid.

As I read about all this man went through to take the gospel to China, two things, in addition to prayer and faith, struck me with great force. The first was that Taylor never stopped praising the Lord . . . never! No matter what the circumstances were, he rejoiced in the Lord, giving thanks at all times. The second was that he had found a place of rest and peace in the Lord.

Earlier in Taylor’s life he was a very legalistic believer. By his own words he stated, “I hated myself; I hated my sin; and yet I gained no strength against it. Every day, almost every hour, the consciousness of failure and sin oppressed me.” Taylor knew that the answer to all this lay in Christ and so he intensified his prayer life. He fasted, he made resolutions, he read the Bible more—and yet he was still unsatisfied.

One of Taylor’s missionary friends, John McCarthy, wrote to Taylor the following: “I seem, as if the first glimmer of a glorious day has risen upon me . . . I seem to have sipped only of that which can fully satisfy. To let my loving Savior work His will . . . abiding, not striving or struggling . . . Not a struggling to have faith, or to increase our faith but a looking at the faithful one seems all we need. A resting in the loved one entirely, for time, for eternity. It does not appear to me as anything new, only formerly misunderstood.”

The long, inward struggle in Taylor was resolved in a split second. “As I read I saw it all. If we believe not, yet He abideth faithful (2 Timothy 2:13) and I looked to Jesus and saw (and when I saw, oh, how the joy flowed) that He had said, ‘I will never leave you’ (Hebrews 13:5).” Later Taylor said, “I have striven in vain to abide in Him. I’ll strive no more. For has not He promised to abide in me—never to leave me, never to fail me?”

“I am one with Christ,” Taylor would say. “It was all a mistake to try and get the fullness out of Him. I am part of Him. Each of us is a limb of His body, a branch of the vine. Oh, think what a wonderful thing it is to be really one with a risen Savior.”

Hudson Taylor was a man on a quest to know His Lord. When he understood what it meant to “abide in Him,” he was filled with the joy and peace of the Lord and finished his life as a faith-filled worshiper of Jesus Christ!

The title of this post is “Twenty-five Cents and All the Promises of God.” In a way the title explains where Taylor was spiritually in the latter part of his life. Having had the personal revelation of “abiding in Him,” Taylor shared what he had learned with the staff of CIM. When he told them that the ministry bank balance was just twenty-five cents, one of the staff responded, “Twenty-five cents . . . and all the promises of God!”

Under Taylor’s faith-filled leadership, CIM continued to flourish and eventually sent over 800 missionaries to virtually every part of China. The seeds they planted over one hundred years ago are still bearing fruit. Even though the bank balance was at times disastrously low, the staff at CIM laid hold of the promises of God and refused to let go!

Twenty-five cents and all the promises of God!