My practice over the summer months has been to throw myself into good Christian biography. For the past couple of summers, I’ve invited others to join me on this journey and share in the rich blessing. Together we’ve sought to kindle a kind of ‘soul friendship’ with saints from every age and to gleam lessons from their example of faith, piety, and mission. This practice began over a decade ago when I stumbled upon A.T. Pierson’s biography of George Muller and continues this summer with a lengthy, two volume biography of one of Mueller’s contemporaries and acquaintances, Hudson Taylor.
Both George Mueller and Hudson Taylor were extraordinary men who accomplished great things for God through lives of faith and full consecration to their calling. Mueller was a penniless man who through faith and prayer carried on an extensive work of caring for thousands of England’s fatherless children and supporting missionaries all over the world. And he did all of this without sophisticated fundraising appeals or the guarantee of regular personal income. Mueller left a ‘profound impression’ on Hudson Taylor who followed his example and left everything behind for China. “Think of it,” Taylor wrote in a letter to his sister, “Three hundred and sixty million souls, without God or hope in the world! Think of more than twelve millions of our fellow-creatures dying every year without any of the Consolations of the Gospel.” That’s why I read biography; for inspiring statements like that.
Anyway, in my reading on Hudson Taylor this morning I stumbled upon a Scripture text that unites these two great men and might hold something of a secret to their consecrated lives. The text was Psalm 84:11, “For the Lord God is a sun and shield; the Lord bestows favor and honor. No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly.” Both men feasted upon this simple verse as they contemplated very difficult things. As his first wife, Mary, lay suffering of rheumatic fever, George Mueller turned to this verse, later recalling at her funeral:
The last portion of scripture which I read to my precious wife was this: “The Lord God is a sun and shield, the Lord will give grace and glory, no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly.” Now, if we have believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, we have received grace, we are partakers of grace, and to all such he will give glory also. I said to myself, with regard to the latter part, “no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly”—I am in myself a poor worthless sinner, but I have been saved by the blood of Christ; and I do not live in sin, I walk uprightly before God. Therefore, if it is really good for me, my darling wife will be raised up again; sick as she is. God will restore her again. But if she is not restored again, then it would not be a good thing for me. And so my heart was at rest. I was satisfied with God. And all this springs, as I have often said before, from taking God at his word, believing what he says.
It was quite different circumstances that brought Hudson Taylor to this same verse. In the winter of 1849, Hudson Taylor was in love. “She was a Christian, a Methodist, and so bright and gifted that he could not imagine her to be lacking in missionary devotion.” As it turns out, “something was lacking, and she would gladly have held him back.” But the pressing concern for Taylor at the time, was not her level of ‘missionary devotion’ but the realization that he would be self-supporting on the field with little means to provide for two, let alone one. In his mind the decision was clear, marry and stay home or remain unmarried and move to China. We might wonder whether or not there was a third option for Taylor, but then we have to recall that he was a principled man living by 19th century British norms for courtship and marriage. He would later write in a letter to his sister:
It is not reasonable to suppose that Miss V. (the girl) would be willing to go and starve in a foreign land. I am sure I love her too well to wish her to do so…You will know I have nothing, and nothing (financially) to hope for. Consequently I can enter into no engagement under present circumstances. I cannot deny that these things make me very sad. But my Father knows what is best. “No good thing will He withhold.” I must live by faith, hang on by faith, simple faith, and He will do all things well.
In two separate letters, the one above from November 1850 and an earlier one from September the same year, we find Hudson Taylor meditating very deeply on the words of Psalm 84:11 in light of this relationship and the complexities of his calling. In September he wrote:
I feel that I can trust Him with all my concerns. I can and do ‘praise Him for all that is past, and trust Him for all that’s to come.’ He has promised to withhold ‘no good thing’ from those that walk uprightly. I do love Him, and am determined to devote myself, body, soul and spirit, to His work.
Surely his desire to be married was a ‘good thing’, but the inward call of God to be a missionary was also a ‘good thing’ and too compelling to deny. The only way to resolve this tension was to take God at his word and believe that he “withholds no good thing from those who walk uprightly.” Seven years later Hudson Taylor married a missionary co-worker from the field, Maria, and together they founded the China Inland Mission to reach millions of lost souls in China. Psalm 84:11 remained with him through the death of 5 of their 9 children, 11 voyages to China, two horrifying typhoons in the South China Sea, a Chinese civil war, the Boxer Rebellion, Maria’s death, and the still births of twins born to his second wife Jenny.
The secret behind both men’s lives was in the way they read the Bible daily not for mere information but for transformation. Mueller put it best saying:
Now I saw, that the most important thing I had to do was to give myself to the reading of the Word of God and to meditation on it, that thus my heart may be comforted, encouraged, warned, reproved, instructed; and that thus, whilst meditating, my heart might be brought into experimental communion with the Lord.
