The Secret Life
Merry Monday by Parris Bailey
My early years at Bible School were spent dreaming of distant lands. Frank and I devoured missionary books and dreamed of spending our lives on foreign soil. It was the life of Hudson Taylor in China that impacted me most.
The plan back in 1978 was that our school would send us down to Nola to close a work that had been struggling. We were to stay a few months and then make our way down to Costa Rica for missions training. It was a good plan but not only did we not close the work but stayed 30 more years. I picked up Hudson’s Taylor’s book a few years ago and begin to read with new eyes and a new heart. Funny, back at Bible School, I never noticed the title of his book, “Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret”. We all can learn a lot from his testimony.
In Chapter 15 he begins to write to his sister about the years of striving and trying to make things happen in China. Then he found himself struck with a passage in a book entitled Christ is All. “All the time I felt assured that there was in Christ all I needed, but the practical question was how to get it out. He was rich truly, but I was poor; He was strong, but I weak. I knew full well that there was in the root, the stem, abundant fatness, but how to get it into my puny little branch was the question. As gradually light dawned, I saw that faith was the only requisite-was the hand to lay hold on His fulness and make it mine. But I had not this faith. I strove for faith, but it would not come; I tried to exercise it, but in vain. Seeing more and more the wondrous supply of grace laid up in Jesus, the fulness of our precious Saviour, my guilt and helplessness seemed to increase. But how do I get faith strengthened? Not by striving after faith, but by resting on the Faithful One.”
He went on to say, “the sweeter part is the rest which full identification with Christ brings.I am no longer anxious about anything, as I realize this; for He, I know, is able to carry out His will, and HIs will is mine. It make no matter where He places me, or how. That is rather for Him to consider than for me; for in the easiest position He must give me His grace, and in the most difficult His grace is sufficient.”
Are you resting today? In your abilities or his? Hudson Taylor called it “the exchanged life”. It is no longer I that lives but Christ lives in me. His perpetual supply, he gives where we all lack. When the rich man encountered Christ, he asked that very question- “what do I lack to gain eternal life?” Christ answered in such a way that even the disciples begin to wonder who could possibly do this? It is Christ in us the hope of glory. I pray you, too, learn the spiritual secret that will bring to you joy unspeakable and full of glory so that you never thirst again!
“Yes, in me, in me He dwelleth, I in Him and He in me! And my empty soul He filleth now and through eternity! ( H. Bonar)