Hudson Taylor's Spiritual Secret

"Depend upon it, God's work done in God's way will never lack God's supplies." - Hudson Taylor

"Hudson Taylor was ...one of the greatest missionaries of all time, and... one of the four or five most influential foreigners who came to China in the nineteenth century for any purpose..." - Kenneth Scott Latourette (Author, A History of the Expansion of Christianity)

"No other missionary since the Apostle Paul has had a wider vision and has carried out a more systematized plan of evangelizing a broad geographical area than Hudson Taylor." - Ruth Tucker (author of From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya: A Biographical History of Christian Missions.)

A single sentence in 1869 transformed Hudson Taylor's life and consequently the lives of hundreds of people in England and thousands of Chinese converts. After his experience he exclaimed "Oh, Mr Judd, God has made me a new man! God has made me a new man!"

Hudson Taylor's spiritual secret was the realization of what it meant to be in union with Christ: daily, even hourly, resting in his presence provided seemingly inexhaustible joy, peace, and energy. These were obvious to those who observed him in his strenuous life of prodigious missionary work. His colleague Charles Judd recorded,

"He was a joyous man now, a bright happy Christian. He had been a toiling, burdened one before, with latterly not much rest of soul. ... Whenever he spoke in meetings after that, a new power seemed to flow from him, and in the practical things of life, a new peace possessed him. Troubles did not worry him as before. He cast everything on God in a new way... Instead of working late at night, he began to go to bed earlier, rising at 5 A.M. to give time to Bible study and prayer.

H. B. Macartney observes,

"Here was the real thing ... a man almost sixty years of age, bearing tremendous burdens, yet absolutely calm and untroubled."

His phenomenal energy is attested to by the growth of the China Inland Mission, which he founded. At the time of his death, it had 825 missionaries in over 300 mission stations spread over all eighteen provinces of China. Their converts accounted for a quarter of all Christians in China. Hudson Taylor never solicited funds, and he suffered from personal and family ill-health, as well as frequent violence towards Christians in China.

While many other Christians, both famous and unknown, have discovered the secret of a changed life, this book is perhaps the best exposition of a life-changing Christian epiphany, and the resulting transformation. Dr. and Mrs. Howard Taylor, Hudson Taylor's son and daughter-in-law, both of whom lived and worked with Hudson Taylor, have carefully pieced together the story from person...