PSALM 90:12 - So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom
James Hudson Taylor was taught of God how to number the days he was given here on earth and he really glorified God by a life of total surrender to serve God in missionary work in China under harsh and difficult conditions and situations. He walked with God in his day and finished the work given him victoriously and now resting with the Father.
He was born on 21 May 1832, the son of a chemist (pharmacist) and Methodist lay preacher. As a young man he ran away from the Christian beliefs of his Parents, but at seventeen he got converted after reading an evangelistic tract entitled ''Poor Richard''.
In December 1849, same year he professed faith in Christ, he committed himself to going to China as a missionary.
There were tutors and guardians that God provided him with who taught him the way of the Lord.
There were tutors and guardians that God provided him with who taught him the way of the Lord.
He learned mission faith principles, especially depending on the Lord for one’s everyday needs. He moved to a poor neighbourhood to be a medical assistant with Robert Hardy, distributing tracts, preaching, etc.
His was a total conversion to Christ, he took Christ the way he saw Him:
- Christ the truth, he embraced it
- Christ the life, he lived it.
- He had no other ambitions, goals or gains, he sought Christ only and His kingdom.
- He borrowed a copy of China’s history- it's state and prospects, devoured it and began studying languages of Mandarin, Greek, Hebrew and Latin.
- As preparation for working in China, he enrolled for medicine in 1852 at Royal London hospital in Whitechapel, London.
- He left England before completing his medical studies, arriving in Shanghai, China on 1 March 1854. Five months of a nearly disastrous voyage, he landed in China with the civil war raging on.
- In 1855, as the war ceased, Taylor made 18 preaching tours, made a decision to adopt the traditional Chinese clothes, had his forehead shaven bald as is the Chinese custom with pony tail at the back, here he was just a man of 22yrs old.
- He distributed thousands of Chinese gospel tracts and portions of scriptures in and around Shanghai, adopted Chinese children. At the age of 26 (1858), he married Maria Jane Dyer, a pioneer missionary to the Chinese in Penang, Malaysia.
- He had eight children which all died in missions and away from mission.
- Their last surviving daughter died at the age of thirty on mission field leaving behind 4 children.
- In June 1865, at Brighton, Taylor dedicated himself to God to the founding of a new society to undertake the evangelisation of the unreached in the Mainland China.
- China Inland Mission was formed under a deep sense of China's pressing need: with an earnest desire, constrained by the love of Christ, and the hope of His coming, to obey His command to preach the gospel to every creature, It's aim is to bring the Chinese people to the saving knowledge of the love God in Christ
METHODS
- Duly qualified candidates for missionary labour should be accepted without restriction as to denomination, provided there was soundness in faith in all fundamental truths,
- That all missionaries should go out in dependence upon God in temporal supplies.
- James Hudson Taylor spent 51 years in China, the society that he began was responsible for bringing over 800 missionaries to the country who began 125 schools which resulted in 18.000 Christian conversions, as well as the establishment of more than 300 stations of work with more than 500 local helpers in all 18 provinces.
- Taylor preached in several varieties of Chinese dialects.
- He helped prepare a colloquial edition of the New Testament.
- Historian Ruth Tucker summarises the theme of his life: No other missionary in the nineteen centuries since the apostle Paul has had a wider vision and has carried out a more systematised plan of evangelising a broad geographical area than Hudson Taylor.
- Taylor said, ''oh, for eloquence to plead the cause of China, for a pencil dipped in fire to paint the condition of this people'' He wrote to his sister Amelia Hudson, ''if I had a thousand pounds, China should have it, if I had a thousand lives, China should have them. NO! not China, but Christ. Can we do too much for Him? Can we do enough for such a precious saviour?”
- He travelled as far America to bring even 14 missionaries from there.
- James Hudson Taylor was completely sold out to God in the matter of Chinese people’s need of salvation and also their physical needs.
- He travelled to and fro between China and England amid sicknesses, violent attacks and loss of lives of those close to him, mishaps, etc, seeking out missionaries and working relentlessly, each time the journey taking 5 months.
- God had mercy on Hudson in 1869 as he was influenced by a passage on personal holiness from a book called ‘Christ is all' by Henry Law, which says, ''The Lord Jesus received is holiness begun, the Lord Jesus cherished is holiness advancing,; the Lord Jesus counted upon as never absent would be holiness complete.”
- This new understanding of continually abiding in Christ endured for the rest of his life. He said to his friend, 'Oh! Mr Jude, God has made me a new man!''
- Hudson died suddenly on his eleventh trip while reading at his home in Changsha, China and was buried beside his first wife.
Acts 17:11-12 11 These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.12 Therefore many of them believed; also of honourable women which were Greeks, and of men, not a few.
- We can see that our brother received the word with much readiness of heart, he opened his heart to the word of God and it made a permanent change in his life.
- How is your heart? How is your life now? Did you receive the word of God and ran to sell all you have but on the way, the things and cares of the world clogged up your heart?
- Have you decided to throw in your all for Jesus?
- What will you say on that day to one that at 21 years old he left mother ,father ,friends ,home, relations country to make a perilous five months journey by sea unto a country he never knew, and never ran back home because of a civil war but set his heart to preach Jesus?
- Can we repent and plead with God to help our hearts again to surrender to him?
- Please let us remember that from day one of Taylor's conversion, God provided tutors and guardians, mentors (labourers in God's kingdom) that taught him, gave him direction and focus.
- So your being here today as a disciple or for prayers is not by chance. Can we commit our lives into God's hands today and ask the Lord to have full control.
- Raise me up Lord like you did Taylor and put me in the hands of those that will raise me up for you.
Luke 12:49-50 49 “I came to send fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! 50 But I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how distressed I am till it is accomplished!
- Lord, let me catch the same fire Taylor caught that never waned with time but grew until it consumed him to claim a whole Nation for you.
45 Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls:46 Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.
- Lord, open my eyes to see the field where I must sell all that I have and buy, just like James Hudson Taylor sold all that he had and bought the field of China. Cause that same fervency that burned in him from an early age to burn in me, that which made him to take the whole China for you.
2 Cor.5: 14, Col. 1:26-27, Phil.2:13, Heb.4 :16.
- Thank you Lord, for a life you upheld by your mercies and faithfulness, for having worked in him to will and to do of your good pleasure, thank you for revealing Christ in him the hope of glory.
- We thank you for the comforter that was with him in difficult times.
- Thank you Lord, for teaching him to live by faith and thus all the (missionaries) who lived and worked in China.
- Father, that I may receive such grace that you poured out upon Hudson Tailor’s life and ministry. AMEN.
He bought the whole field for sheer joy
A man found a treasure it was hidden in the field
He bought the whole field for joy
Hudson Tailor was British by birth
He left his land to inherit China
He sowed God’s Words and the seeds gave yield
In the hearts of a few he bought the whole field
He bought the whole field…
