Great Christian Biographies with John Piper: Hudson Taylor 1

The focus of this message, and that probably is the right word for it, I do biographies to preach, not out of any mere historical or academic interest alone. The focus of this message on Hudson Taylor is how he experienced union with Christ.

Could focus on many other things in his life, but that's what this message is about. And of course that raises warning flags because many people know that he was deeply influenced by the Keswick movement and in its worst expressions, there are deep flaws in the Keswick understanding of the Christian life and sanctification in particular.

And my conclusion is going to be that Hudson Taylor was not one of those worst examples. But in fact was protected from being one of the bad examples by his allegiance to the Bible, his devotion to the sovereignty of God, and his lifelong experience of suffering.

So that's where we're going. Which means that there are glorious things to be learned from the life of Hudson Taylor. Wonderful lessons about abiding in Christ, about faith, about prayer, about obedience, about sacrifice, about self-denial.

Whatever else Keswick's teaching may have gotten wrong, it was not wrong to say to all Christians everywhere, there is more joy, more peace, more love, more power, more fruit to be enjoyed than you are presently enjoying.

First Thessalonians 4 .1. As you received from us how you ought to walk and to please God just as you are doing, do so more and more. First Thessalonians 4 .10. Concerning brotherly love, we urge you brothers, do this more and more.

Philippians 1 .9. It is my prayer to God that your love may abound more and more. Ephesians 5 .18. Be filled with the Holy Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs and singing and making melody to the Lord from your heart.

Just on a scale of one to ten, how you doing with that one? So full of the Holy Spirit that from your heart you are singing and making melody to one another in your family. There is more. There is more.

Or Ephesians 3 .16 I bow my knee before the Father from whom the whole family in heaven on earth is named that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you. I'm praying this now for you. He may grant you by his Spirit to be strengthened in the inner man with power and that Christ might dwell in your heart through faith and that you being rooted and grounded may have power to comprehend what is the height and depth and length and breadth and to know the love of Christ that passes knowledge and be filled with all the fullness of God.

Keswick did not overstate the goal. Any view of the Christian life that does not promote desire for and pursuit of that inexpressible fullness is as defective as a view that says it always comes through a crisis experience sometime after your conversion.

In fact, I would say more defective. It's less defective to pursue it in a wrong way than not to pursue it. The link between Hudson Taylor's pursuit of this fullness and the legacy of the China Inland Mission is enormously instructive.

It is relevant for everyone who wants to experience peace that passes understanding and who wants your life to bear fruit all out of proportion to your limitations. And that's what I hope will happen as a result of this message.

You will be led by his example and the Holy Spirit in this room into a deeper experience of union with Christ experientially and you will venture more for his glory than you've ever ventured before in your your situation or beyond your situation.

Early Life, Conversion, and First Missionary Labors

Do a little survey here. If you're 29 years old or younger, raise your hand. Okay, so those are 20-somethings and younger. If you're between 30 and 50, raise your hand. That's probably more. And then over 50 like me.

Interesting. That's great. Now the reason I had you do that is because I have the young guys in mind and they're just getting started. They're dreaming their dreams. They're maybe in their first church or ministry.

And then there's the midlife folks who are cresting and some of you in crisis. Happens to a lot of guys, around 41 and a half. And then there's the rest of us who the world talks in terms of sunset years.

I think that's terrible because it's unbiblical. Proverbs 4 verse 18 says, The life of the righteous is like the dawn that grows brighter and brighter until the full day. Stop. No sunset. Noon. Death is in 1159 a .m.

So my point here is that yes, young man. Yes, get beyond that midlife crisis. Yes, you 50, 60, 70 somethings. There is a dream to be dreamed. There is more. There is more in Christ for now. And of course the resurrection.

12 o 'clock is resurrection. Noon. Not midnight. When Hudson Taylor wrote one of his most famous sayings, Depend upon it. God's work done in God's way will never lack God's supplies. He meant every kind of supply.

Money, health, faith, peace, strength, protection. And that's my prayer. That you will see and experience new possibilities of spiritual experience. You've been frustrated a long time. He was. New possibilities for spiritual experience, new victories, more faith, more joy, more peace, more love, and all the money you need to do his will, which may mean none or much.

My God will supply all your needs means to do his will. And we die as part of his will. We suffer as part of his will. And we need several millions of dollars to do desiring God and to your church has a budget and you need a salary and you can send your kids to school and we all know these things and this promise is true.

He will not leave you without what you need to do his will. Won't make you rich. God forbid. It's hard for rich people to get into the kingdom. Why would you want that? Why would you want to make it hard?

My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ. Jesus was one of his favorite texts. Because of that new peace, that new confidence, new supply, you then venture everything on your dream.

Your Christ exalting dream that maybe God is birthing in these very days as you're away from home. Sometimes happens like that. Abiding in Christ produced in Hudson Taylor a life of great action, risk, discipline, self-denial.

All of it sustained by great peace, great joy. And that's what my prayer is for us here now. Unlike Robert and Hannah Smith, two of the great founding thinkers, writers of the Keswick movement, unlike them, Hudson never made shipwreck of his faith.

They did. From his conversion age 17 to his death age 73, 1905, he was unwavering in his allegiance to Jesus Christ and Christ's purpose to evangelize the provinces of China. Whatever his views of the Christian life, they stood him well.

They served him well. And the legacy of steadfast faith and obedience and fruitfulness is astonishing. He did not have a flashy second experience and then crash, which thousands have. He did have an experience.

We'll talk about it. And he proved him o 'er and o 'er. Jesus, Jesus, how I trust him, how I've proved him o 'er and o 'er. Yes, he did. And so his life is worth looking at. He was born May 21st, 1832 in Barnsley, England, to a devout Methodist home.

Age 17, he was dramatically converted. He was a good friend of Spurgeon and Spurgeon told the whole story. This is a very well-known story about his conversion. I'm just let you you find it and read it.

It was dramatic because his mother's prayers for him, sort of like Augustine. He entered then immediately a rudimentary medical training with an apprenticeship to Robert Hardy, no formal theological training, no formal medical training.

And at age 21, September 19, 1853, he was on a boat headed for China with the China Evangelistic Society. Landed in Shanghai March 1st, after a five and a half month voyage. He learned the language quickly.

In his first two years, he did 10 upcountry evangelistic trips, risking his life over and over again to just herald the gospel in the streets, where they've never been preached before and there were no churches and no Christians.

Faith Missions, Marriage, and the Cost of Family Sacrifice

After four years, he resigned from the China Evangelistic Society because of a deep conviction that neither a person nor an agency should ever borrow money. Here's what he said. To borrow money implied to my mind a contradiction of scripture, a confession that God had withheld some good thing, which he never does, and a determination to get for ourselves what he had not given.

To satisfy my conscience, I was therefore compelled to resign the connection with the society, which had hitherto supplied my salary. That was the beginning of a approach to missions that was called Faith Missions, and he from then on never went into debt personally and never went into debt as the China Inland Mission, which he would later found.

Nor would he ever ask for money explicitly. He would follow his hero George Mueller, who was alive at the time. January 20th, 1858, he had been in China almost five years. He married Maria Dyer. They were married for 12 years.

Maria died when she was 33. She had given birth to eight children. Two of them died at birth. Two died in childhood, and four lived, and all four of those children became missionaries with the China Inland Mission that their father had founded.

I really did have to pause there and wonder. He sent those children back to England when they were six, and there are really painful descriptions of a little six-year-old boy weeping his way onto the boat as mommy's left behind.

And today we would look at that and say, I'm not sure about that. God saved them all and put them all right back into their father's mission. That's amazing. Be careful. Be careful how you judge people's handling on the mission field of their children.

It's not easy, and frankly, I would be very slow to condemn almost any approach that keeps a person on the field, if they're called. It's worth thinking about. July 1860, Hudson and Maria sailed for England.

He was seriously ill with hepatitis. It was, in his mind, a terrible setback to have to go back to England, and this setback, so-called, would give rise to the most important, or one of the two most important events of his life, namely the founding of the China Inland Mission.

He was home for four years, and during the very period that it took the Americans to fight the Civil War, he was birthing a vision that would transform the largest nation in the world. He knew there needed to be another agency that functioned on different principles.

He did not know he could lead it. He was very fearful about whether he had the strength, the wisdom, the wherewithal to lead a mission that would penetrate all the provinces of China. The decisive day came in June 25, 1865, Brighton Beach, England, and I'll let him describe it for you.

On Sunday, June 25, 1865, unable to bear the sight of a congregation of a thousand or more Christian people rejoicing in their own security while millions were perishing, for lack of knowledge, I wandered out on the sands alone in great spiritual agony.

And there the Lord conquered my unbelief, and I surrendered myself to God for this service, for this service. I told him that all the responsibility as to issues and consequences must rest with him, that as his servant, it was mine to obey and to follow him, his to direct, to care for, and to guide me and those who might labor with me.

Need I say that peace at once flowed into my burdened heart? There and then I asked him for 24 fellow workers, two for each of the 11 inland provinces which were without a missionary, and two for Mongolia, and writing the petition on the margin in the Bible I had with me, I returned home with a heart enjoying rest such as had been I had been a stranger to for months.

Isn't it beautiful to watch the birth of a world-changing event? He was 33 years old. Some of you were 33. Jesus finished at 33. He was just beginning. The missionaries would have no guaranteed salaries.

These are the stipulations now of how they would run this mission. They would have no guaranteed salaries. They were not to appeal for funds to anyone except God. They were to adopt Chinese dress, which was very controversial at the time, pigtail and all, and press the gospel to the interior.

That was their their goals. May 26, the following year, 1866, Hudson and Maria and their children and the largest group of missionaries ever to sail to China so far, 16 besides themselves, were on a boat sailing for China with Hudson Taylor as the leader who would decide all issues.

I say that because sometimes when we read biography and we have our heroes, we miss the horrific controversies they endured. This was one of them. He was quite a strong leader and the pressures he put on himself spiritually and in terms of evangelism, he'd put on others and this didn't land well with all of them.

One of these 16 accused him of tyranny and had to be dismissed and sent back to England. That was not easy and there were other such things. Three years later, after prolonged frustration with his own temptations and failures in holiness, failures in holiness, a second making event happened, namely the spiritual crisis that caused him to be associated with the Keswick movement and we'll come back to that in a few moments, but what I want you to see now is what he was experiencing leading up to it.

Spiritual Crisis, New Assurance, and the Meaning of Abiding in Christ

It's the quote, The need for your prayer has never been greater than at present. Envied by some, despised by many, hated by others, often blamed for things I never had anything to do with, an innovator on what have become established missionary practices, an opponent of mighty systems of heathen error and superstition, working without precedent in many respects and with few experienced helpers, often sick in body as well as perplexed in mind and embarrassed by circumstances.

Had not the Lord been especially gracious to me, had not my mind been sustained by the conviction that the work is his and that he is with me, I must have fainted or broken down, but the battle is the Lord's and he will conquer.

We may fail, do fail continually, but he never fails. I have continually to mourn that I follow at such a distance and learn so slowly to imitate my precious master. I cannot tell you how I am buffeted sometimes by temptation.

He's writing to his mother. I never knew how bad my heart is. Yet, I do know that I love God and love his work and desire to serve him only and in all things. And I value above all else that precious savior in whom alone I can be accepted.

But often I am tempted to think that one so full of sin cannot be a child of God at all. May God help me to love him more and serve him better. So you can see he's ripe. He's ripe for a critical intervention from God.

September 4, 1869, Sheng Jiang, he enters a new Christian experience. Oh, Mr. Judd, God has made me a new man. God has made me a new man. What happened on that day, September 4, was not ephemeral. He looked back 30 years later and wrote this.

We shall never forget the blessing we received from the words of John 4, 14. Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst. Nearly 30 years ago. As we realized that Christ literally meant what he said, shall meant shall, never meant never, thirst meant thirst, our heart overflowed with joy as we accepted the gift.

Oh, the thirst with which we had sat down and oh the joy with which we sprang out of our seat praising the Lord that the thirsting days were all past. Forever. Now before you respond cynically to that, he's not naive.

He's writing that 30 years later. He's speaking of an experience that didn't leave him crashing and burning after a high at a conference. The thirsting days were all past does not mean in his mouth he never had any desires for Jesus anymore.

They don't mean that he didn't walk through horrific days of pressure and a sense of desolation at times. What they did mean we'll get to shortly. But be careful lest when you read those kinds of things you just write them off as Keswick overstatements of flashy spiritual experiences that peter out in the end and leave Christians worse off than than before.

His most thorough biographer, six volumes, Broomhall said his life was revolutionized by this day and just in time because the next year, 1870, was the worst year of his life. God knows what he's doing.

His son Samuel died in January of 1870. And then in July, Maria gave birth to a son, Noel, and the boy died two weeks later because she was so weak she couldn't nurse him. And then Maria at age 33 died.

Two sons and a wife of 12 years in a stretch of months, in one year. They had four living children remaining, small children, and Hudson Taylor at 38. A year later Taylor sailed for England and recovered and married again, 1871, to Jenny.

They lived together for 33 years. She almost lived to the end with him. She died in 1904, he died in 1905. They had a son and a daughter, so now there's six children living. She stayed in England at one stretch.

I mention this just to show the kinds of things they had to live with in those days. She stayed in England from 1881 to 1890 while he made two trips to China, and I calculate they were apart for six years total.

Pilgrim Faith, the Boxer Rebellion, and the Legacy of the China Inland Mission

In his lifetime, Hudson Taylor made 10 voyages to China, which means, as I reckon the sum, he spent between five and six years on the water, just in case you have a two-hour delay at the airport today.

This is a life about not murmuring, about the peace of God that passes all understanding. He was the general director from 1865, when he founded it, right in Beach, to 1902, three years before he died, when he handed it off to Dixon Hosta.

And all those trips, all those long voyages, four, five, six months at a time, one way and the other way, so ten times you do the math like I did, all that travel is just a beautiful example of, here's the pilgrim here.

We're a pilgrim. You get stuck in an airport, just think, tent, it's a tent, you know. I shouldn't have a home anyway. I don't even live here. I'm just traveling through. Quite a symbol. He lived to see the horrible boxer rebellion in 1900.

And I mention it because he was the director when this happened. The boxer rebellion was an uprising where all foreigners, especially Christians, were targeted with great rage. And China Inland Mission lost more missionaries than any other mission under his watch.

58 adults were slaughtered, 21 children were killed in 1900. And the next year, when the Allied Nations moved in and demanded recompense for the losses of property and people, Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission did not demand any payment because he wanted to win them and not just get justice from them.

February 1905, Hudson Taylor sailed for China for the last time. He did a little tour with his son and daughter-in-law through the various mission stations and then he died in Hunan at age 73 and was buried beside his first wife and four children.

Jenny had died the year before in Switzerland. So he's buried in Switzerland. He's buried in China. Another pilgrim reality. Where are you going to want to be buried? You know, it doesn't really matter.

The Cultural Revolution destroyed the cemetery. Today, there are industrial buildings on top of it. At the time of his death, the China Inland Mission was an international body of 825 missionaries, 18 provinces of China, 300 mission stations, 500 local Chinese helpers, 25 ,000 converts.

Luminaries that came up in the China Inland Mission were people like the Cambridge Seven, William Borden, James Frazer, John and Betty Stam. Today, there are 1 ,600 missionaries with OMF International, which is the new name, led in Singapore by a Chinese.

Isn't that? Wouldn't you love for whatever little efforts you made here to see in 150 years, it's still going. It's still going. The mission statement of the OMF International is to glorify God by the urgent evangelization of East Asia millions.

Their vision statement is, through God's grace, we aim to see an indigenous biblical church movement in each people group of East Asia, evangelizing their own people and reaching out in mission to other peoples.

That's an absolutely audacious mission statement. And he would be so pleased. He would be so pleased. Next year, 2015, will mark the 150th anniversary of the mission that Hudson Taylor founded. In 1900, there were 100 ,000 Christians in China.

Today, 150 ,000, maybe. I mean million. 150 million. Picking the middle number and you can go to the footnote that I have here when you read this online to see how that's calculated. This is God's work.

One plants and other waters. God gives the growth. Nevertheless, it's the fruit of faithful labor. It's the fruit of faithful labor. People get saved without hearing the gospel. And he worked longer and harder than most.

And he was sustained by union with Christ. Abiding in Christ. So that's where we turn now.