09 - Chapter 09
Chapter 9 - Tuesday Morning, July 13th
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Mr. Hudson Taylor read Isaiah 40:1-31 and continued, ―None of us have been long in this land without finding the need of comfort. There is quite enough in our surroundings to require this, and so we love to hear the Master say, “Comfort ye My people.” There is no comfort like His.
COMFORT OF PREPARING FOR THE LORD’S COMING.
“The voice of one that crieth, Prepare ye in the wilderness the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” We cannot read these words without thinking of the work to which John the Baptist was called. Is not much of our special work in China John the Baptist work? The number we gather into the fold is not perhaps our principal work: certainly it is not our only work. Thank God there are many gathered into the fold, and this cheers us; but I believe that this is the least part of our service, and that we are here to prepare the way of the Lord. Supposing the signs of the coming of the Son of Man had appeared in the heavens twenty years ago, how many in China could have interpreted them? How many portions of Scripture were there then scattered throughout these inland provinces to give the masses any light on the coming of our Lord? Whereas now there are hundreds of thousands of such portions, and every year the number of those instructed that there is a coming King, Who is going to reign in China and all the world over, is increasing. So I believe that our work is largely a preparatory one.
COMFORT OF DIVINE SUFFICIENCY.
If the sufficiency for our work were human, we might perhaps, be able to do spiritually what our engineers can do naturally. They can sometimes build viaducts across valleys, but they do not attempt to fill them up. They can bore a little hole through the Alps and make a tunnel, but one never heard of their undertaking to level the Alps. They can raise a highway through a low, level country, and make a road or railway wind in and out among the hills; but as for making the crooked straight and the rough places plain, engineers never attempt anything of that kind. We might perhaps intelligently expect with some measure of success to accomplish something like this in a spiritual sense—make a crooked way among the hills. But what a glorious promise is here! “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low!” Ah! It is the mighty God who will work thus: it is far beyond all human power! The entire resources of the Church, if they were all concentrated on it, would be utterly insufficient. The work that is to be done by God will manifest His power, “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed.”
FRUITLESSNESS OF FLESHLY INDUCEMENTS. (Isaiah 40:6-8)
What a warning these verses are to be very careful that we are not building with untempered mortar, and heaping together mere wood, hay and stubble! How frequently we have bee tempted to put some temporal inducement before people in the shape of helping them, or to use some worldly argument, or to say something that would be soothing to the flesh, in the vain endeavor to serve the Lord! What loss of time has been the result! Many are finding out that their ten, twenty, forty years of service have been comparatively wasted, and are coming back to Apostolic lines! “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the Word of our God shall stand for ever.” It is the Word of God and the message about God that we should present; it is imperishable seed that we should sow and such alone.
HOW THE COMFORT IS BROUGHT IN. (Isaiah 40:29)
“He giveth power to the faint.” Are those circumstances which are very exhaustive to us and which naturally cause us to faint greatly to be deplored, if they bring us to the end of our strength and bring in His strength? If our power to comfort (2 Corinthians 1:4) those who are in affliction is measured by the comfort which we ourselves have received from God in affliction, shall we be greatly distressed if we find many afflictions in our lot? If God thus put in our way the only facilities and qualifications for doing this work aright, shall we be surprised or upset by them? Shall we not rather, like the Apostle of old, rejoice in the difficulties, trials, perplexities and overwhelming circumstances in which we often find ourselves—so far beyond mere human resources—if they are the necessary inlets for Divine fullness? There is nothing which should encourage us more than to be brought to the end of all hope from ourselves, from the flesh, from every human source whatever, because we are thus cast upon our Sufficiency, and it comes into operation. Paul was greatly distressed, his afflictions weighed him down; but what has he to say: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort.” (2 Corinthians 1:3) Blessed! —his very heart went out, and thanked God for these things. Such proofs of His grace were they, that his whole soul went out in praise. He found not only the affliction, but also the comfort in it. “Who comforteth us in all our affliction, that we may be able to comfort them that are in any affliction, through the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.” It was not the suffering only that abounded, the comfort also abounded. And it was all preparation for service, as well as precious personal experience:―“But whether we be afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation,” (2 Corinthians 6:7) etc. There was such similarity in the experiences of the Apostle to the circumstances of those to whom he ministered, as made the help he found from God the very best help he could render to them.
(After Prayer.) Mr. Hudson Taylor resumed,―Our subject today is―
CHRIST OUR ALL-SUFFICIENCY FOR ALL THE EXIGENCIES OF OUR SERVICE, AND FOR FULL EQUIPMENT FOR IT. As we were saying, yesterday, this truth also is not new. We come together to mediate upon it, so that the truth may get a stronger hold on us, and that we may live in the strength of it. We want to realize that Christ Himself is indeed our sufficiency for all our service. His own Word assures us of it. If we had no more than the one word, “GO,” it would settle the whole question, because He always says “Come” to those who are not sufficiently satisfied and qualified. He never says “Go” to a hungry, weary, empty one: He has only one word for such, “Come.” “Come unto Me all ye that are heavy laden.” (Matthew 11:28) “Ho! Every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters.” (Isaiah 55:1) To the hungry He says, “Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” The sick ones were invited to come. But when the demons were cast out, and the man was clothed and in his right mind, Jesus said, Go: “GO and tell what great things the Lord hath done for you.” (Mark 5:19) When, empty-handed, the Disciples were saying, “Send the people away, to buy for themselves,” He did not use them to feed the multitude till He had first filled their hands with the loaves. If, as I say, we had only the one word, “Go,” it would be sufficient to show us, as intelligent believers, that we have in Christ all qualifications and resources. But the Lord Jesus does not leave us to infer His will. He says, “All authority is given unto Me, in heaven and in earth.” (Matthew 28:18) There is no authority in China, civil or military, there is no power, intellectual, physical, natural, that has not been committed to Him. “Go ye, therefore.” There is, then a sufficiency in which we may go to our service, and that sufficiency is in Him, and not in ourselves.
“Go and try; do the best you can”—that is not what He says. Men often say, “We must try our best”—God never says nothing of the kind. He says, “Go and make disciples of all the nations” -not “go and try to make them.” Not “go and hope that peradventure one out of a thousand will pay some little attention to you: “but, “Go and disciple all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; teaching them”—not simply “telling them, and hoping they will receive something or other”—“teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I commanded you: and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” (Matthew 28:19-20) This passage not only proves the great fact that there is sufficiency, but that this sufficient One is with us. Again, read 2 Corinthians 12:1-10. What was the word of the Lord Jesus to His tried servant? “My grace is sufficient for thee; for My power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Corinthians 12:9) What is the response? “Most gladly, therefore, will I rather glory in my weaknesses, that the strength of Christ may rest upon me.” Alas! There has been too much losing sight of this practically. SHALL WE WAIT FOR GOD’S PROVIDENCE?
Many of us have oftentimes waited for human facilities for preaching the Gospel, calling them God’s providences. Long did the Church wait till human authorities made it safe to bring the Gospel to China. But if we had come a century ago, when there were no authorities to protect us, what witnesses might we not have been! What necessities, what persecutions, might not have been the result? When I began twenty years ago to urge inland work, I was met by this, “We must not go before God’s providence” —in other words, “We must not go till we have gunboats and passports and treaties.” It was so difficult to get people to realize that it was our duty to go forward, notwithstanding there were no treaties—nay, rejoicing in the fact that the power of Christ would have to be the more manifested. It was this sort of teaching that led the papers to put in articles saying that the members of the Inland Mission and their leader would have been safer in the Asylum for Incurable Idiots than in China. They do not say so now! Why? Because those words have been fulfilled, “Lo, I am with you alway.” (Matthew 28:20)
You and I are in this inland city today with our passports, and with our safety confirmed by the Chefoo Convention. But there was no Chefoo Convention when the Lord took me to England twelve years ago. When we appealed to the Church for prayer for eighteen men to go as witnesses into the inland provinces of this Empire, there was no Chefoo Convention. When Cameron, Nicoll and George Clarke, when Turner and others came out, there was no Chefoo Convention. Yet God answered prayer, and gave eighteen men prepared to go into the nine provinces that had no missionaries. They spend a few months in the study of the language, and in their own estimation, and in that of others they were very imperfectly equipped for their work. But it was felt better that they should go forward; so we gave ourselves to prayer that God would now set before each of the eighteen brethren an open door. Affairs did not seem auspicious: it seemed as if we were on the very eve of war. I came out about that time. The last intelligence before we sailed was that Sir T. Wade had hauled down his flag, and had gone to the coast to put matters into the hands of the Admiral. When we reached Hong Kong, we asked, “What about the danger of war?” “It is all passed; there has been a Convention at Chefoo, and the right to travel is to be proclaimed in every inland province!” So our eighteen brethren set out to the various provinces, the first foreign travelers to avail themselves of that Convention and visit these provinces. God opened the door in the very nick of time. Was it not the same when He let Peter (Acts 12:10) out of prison? Peter left his chamber in the prison with the angel, and when he came to the great iron gates they opened of themselves. There are no closed gates before faith, for the Lord Jesus is He who (Revelation 3:7-8) holds the Key of David, who opens and no man shuts. The Key will open hearts as well as doors; we have in our Master full sufficiency for all our work. We need no more! And very frequently the absence of those things that men are apt to look on as needful, is essential to let all the glory be manifestly His to whom it belongs.
PREACH GRACE AND LVIE IT.
Notice two things in these words: “My grace is sufficient for thee, for My power is made perfect in weakness.” What are the two things we need, to go in and out among this people? We have a gospel of Grace to teach them, but sometimes in the South, when I have preached a mighty God and yet a Saviour, people have said, “Wild talk”. The idea that anybody has power to revenge himself, and yet will treat offenders with grace, is not a natural thing to the mind of man. But if there is sufficiency of grace in us, if we can live lives of grace before them—if when we are ill-treated we can show what grace is, if the less we are loved the more we love, the more we are tried the more grace we can manifest, we have an opportunity of giving an object lesson to these people. Is not this the reason that our calling is what it is? What (1 Peter 2:20-21) is our calling? It is a three-fold one, To do Good. To suffer for it. To take it patiently.
“For hereunto were ye called.” Now we do not give this people the object-lesson unless we are living out our calling; and to be put in circumstances in which we are compelled to do so, should not be cause for regret, but for intelligent satisfaction. God is never driven into a corner, and obliged to leave His people in unfavorable circumstances. Poor parents are sometimes driven into great straits—they would fain feed and clothe their children, and instruct them; but they have neither food nor clothing. But God never puts one of his children into an emergency without having the means to get him out of it. He puts us into these circumstances, because they are the best adapted for growth in grace, and for success in labor. The needed grace to be patient, and to deal wisely with these people is ensured to us: “My grace is sufficient.”
GRACE SUFFICIENT.
You may know Spurgeon’s remark on this pages. He was going home after some exhausting service, and leaning back in his carriage depressed, and feeling as if an overwhelming burden were oppressing him, when suddenly this passage occurred to his mind. He says that as he thought of it he burst into a laugh, and the more he thought of it the more he laughed! The words came to him accented on the first and last words. “My grace is sufficient for thee;” and he said, “I thought of myself as a little fish in the Thames. Old Father Thames raised his hoary head above the waters, and I said to him, “O Father Thames, I am so thirsty; but I am afraid to drink, lest I should drink all the water up.” Then Father Thames replied, “Drink away, drink away, little fish; there is plenty of water for thee!’” Who are we, that we are going to swallow up the resources of Divine grace? Not only do we ourselves want grace to endure and to manifest Christ, but we want power to transform these hearts so hard, so materialized and earth-sunken. How is that power to be obtained? “My power is made perfect in weakness.” Does not that really take away all excuse for being dissatisfied with our own weaknesses? Shall we not share the Apostle’s words, “Most gladly, therefore, will I rather glory in my weaknesses that the strength of Christ may rest upon me?” Shall we not feel with him that in weakness, in persecution, we can take pleasure; that we can glory in our very infirmities? “For when I am weak then am I strong.”
RELY ON CHRIST ALONE.
What conclusion shall we draw if Christ is really our sufficiency for all the exigencies of our missionary work? Let us learn to rely on Him alone. Every false system of Christianity, as every false religion, builds in part on some superhuman aid, but it counts in some measure on the Divine as supplementing the human. It is important that we do not try, as the Chinese proverb says, to stand with “a leg in two boats.” Let us learn where all our sufficiency lies, and lean on Him alone. If our sufficiency is really Christ, shall we not learn to put all those things that we consider as auxiliaries in their proper place? We can do with them, or without them. Better do without them, than put them in a false position. Let us feel that everything that is human, everything outside the sufficiency of Christ, is merely helpful in the measure in which it enables us to bring Christ forward. For instance, Medical missions. I am sure Dr. Edwards will agree with me that if we are going to put medical skill in the place of Divine power for changing the heart, we shall be disappointed. If our medical missions bring people nearer to us, and we can present to them the Christ of God, medical missions are a blessing; but to substitute medicine for the preaching of the Gospel would be a profound mistake. If we put schools or education in the place of spiritual power to change the heart, it will be a profound mistake. If we get the idea that people are going to be converted by some educational process, instead of by a regenerative re-creation, it will be a profound mistake. If we put our trust in money, or learning, or eloquence—or anything but the living God—it will be a profound mistake. Let all our auxiliaries be auxiliaries—means of bringing Christ and the soul into contact—then we may be truly thankful for them all. But we can do without any of them, if the Lord does not see fit to give them. He gave few of these to the first propagators of the Gospel. The College of Apostles had among them no men who had graduated in the Universities—they graduated in the fishing boats. And those who carried the Gospel to Greece and Corinth—who were they? Hated and despised Jews. Let us exalt the glorious Gospel in our hearts, and believe that it is the power of God to salvation. Let everything else sit at its feet, and then all our auxiliaries will indeed be auxiliaries. We shall never be discouraged if we realize that our sufficiency is in Christ.
Before throwing the meeting open, I put this question to myself, and let each put it to himself: Is the Lord Jesus really all this to me personally? Is the Lord Jesus all the sufficiency that I need for my service? Am I so apprehending Christ? Is my heart overwhelmed, and overflowing with the fullness I have in Him, so that like the Bride in the Song I cannot but say, “This is my Beloved, this is my Lord, the Chiefest among ten thousand?”
MR. STANLEY P. SMITH told a story of the work of the Moravian missionaries among the Esquimaux. They worked for some years among them trying to educate their consciences, lay down rules, etc., and thus prepare them for the Gospel. There was absolutely no success.
One day, one of the missionaries, translating the Gospel of Matthew, was writing out the account of the Lord’s crucifixion. Just at that time a man, who till then had been a ringleader in opposition, came in, and asked him what he was writing, requesting him to read it. On doing so the man burst into tears, adding, “Why did you not tell us this before?” A powerful revival followed, being the first-fruits of the mission. It is exceedingly important to believe that the Gospel is the power of God unto salvation, and to preach fully and constantly “Christ crucified.” You have doubtless all of you seen a simple tract by Mr. Baller of the C.I.M., entitled, “A plan for the forgiveness of sins.” When some of us were going up to Sih-chau last January, we stopped one night at a little place on the way, and going out, we distributed these tracts, saying a few simple words in explanation. About two months ago there was a literary examination in P’ing-yang Fu for B.A.’s and M.A.’s. One B.A., who had heard that preaching, came up from this place on the road to Sih-chau, and stayed with us during the time of examination. He went back to establish Christian worship in his town. Let us believe in the power of the blood.
Mr. ARCHIBALD ORR EWING. The prophet Isaiah, in Chapter 40, uses a wonderful illustration in connection with being “weary in well doing.” Sometimes if we cannot see fruit, we are apt to be weary. He says: “Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall; but they that wait on the Lord shall renew their strength.” Youth is a time of energy and strength—there is nothing grander in the world than a young man—Jesus Christ was a young man, and He has given us the picture of one that is complete—yet “the young men shall utterly fall.” But there is One that will not fail, and “they that wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles.” Yes, we will get up into the heavenly places with Christ Jesus. May God give us grace more and more to wait on the Lord. “My soul wait thou only upon God.” May we be in the attitude of “waiters” in our service, and we shall go from strength to strength, from life to life more abundant.
MR. MONTAGU BEACHUAMP.
I had a helpful thought given me a day or two ago in connection with the verse, “My grace is sufficient for thee.” God grants us sufficient grace for every trial we meet with, but He does not promise us sufficient grace to meet the anticipation. It is the anticipation of trial that causes us anxiety. Since seeing that, I have thought, what are you uneasy about just now—is it something you are looking forward to? And it is so almost invariably. We must rest in the grace of God as sufficient for the present, and leave the future with Him.
PRAISE IS COMELY.
“Every day will I bless Thee;
“And I will praise Thy name for ever and ever.”
“My Savior’s praises I will sing, “And all His love express;
“Whose mercies each returning day, “Proclaim His faithfulness.
“Redeemed by His Almighty power, “My Saviour and my King;
“My confidence in Him I place, “To Him my soul would cling.
“On Thee alone, my Savior, God, “My steadfast hopes depend;
“And to Thy holy will my soul “Submissively would bend.
“Oh grant Thy Holy Spirit’s grace, “And aid my feeble powers;
“That gladly I may follow Thee “Through all my future hours.’