Abiding...Not Striving (James Hudson Taylor)

Last week, I was reading a book about Hudson Taylor and his wife Maria and a chapter in the book struck me as something so true...and so liberating.


From Chapter 20 of the book "Hudson and Maria, Pioneers of China" by John Pollock.

He (J.H. Taylor) opened and skimmed through letter after letter from the stations, from home, from Shanghai.

He came upon one from John McCarthy, written a day or two after Hudson had left. It was a long letter. He read on and on, attention riveted. "I seem," McCarthy wrote, "as if the first glimmer of the dawn of a glorious day has risen upon me... I seem to have sipped only of that which can fully satisfy." McCarthy had found the secret they sought. Hudson looked at the letter again. "To let my loving Saviour work in me His will...Abiding, not striving or struggling..."

Hudson came to the last paragraph. "Not a striving to have faith, or to increase our faith but a looking at the beautiful 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."

Hudson was amazed at his own blindness. His eyes opened wide. As in Barnsley twenty years before, as at Brighton four years before, a long inward struggle resolved in a split second. "As I read it, I saw it all. If we believeth not, He abideth faithful. And I looked to Jesus and saw (and when I saw, oh, how joy flowed) that He had said, "I will never leave you." In shorter time than it took to describe afterwards, Hudson grasped that e must not struggle to have the strengthand peach of Christ. "I have striven in vain to abide in Him. I'll strive no more. For has not he promised to abide with me - never to leave me, never to fail me? The effort to 'get it out' was a mistake.

"I am one with Christ," he cried as he explained the glorious discovery to the whole Chinkiang household, hastily gathering them together and reading McCarthy's letter. "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 Saviour." And in some such words as he wrote a few weeks later to his sister Amelia in England, he expounded the truth he had missed so long: "Think what it involves! Can Christ be rich and I poor? Can your right hand be rich and your left poor? or you head well fed while your body starves?"

Wow! It's just so amazing to know that God is always there ready to guide us, ready to help us. We just have to abide in Him. He promised never to leave us nor forsake us. It just gets so tiring when we struggle to abide in Him thinking that He abandons us when we are unfaithful, but then we don't have to struggle 'cause He is always there... He will never leave our side. :-) Life in Him is always bountiful 'cause everything that is His is ours too. We have everything that we need to fulfill our destiny, we just need to abide in Him.