The Word That Carried Him Out the Door
James 1:22 "But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves."
Sunday morning, June 25, 1865. Brighton, England. Hudson Taylor, thirty-three years old, was sitting in a pew in a church full of prosperous English Christians who had just finished singing hymns about the lost. He had already served seven years as a missionary in China and returned to England for medical treatment and recovery. He had already seen the Taiping Rebellion kill millions. He had buried friends. He had shaved his head and worn Chinese dress in Shanghai when other missionaries had laughed at him for it.
And he could not sit still in that pew. The thought of millions of Chinese souls dying without Christ while the comfortable British church sang on was more than he could hold.
He walked out of the service and down to the beach alone. He carried his Bible with him. Somewhere on the sand, pacing in front of the English Channel, he scribbled a sentence in the margin of his Bible that would change world missions: prayed for twenty-four willing, skilful labourers at Brighton, June 25, 1865. By the end of that year he had founded the China Inland Mission. By 1910, five years after his death, CIM had over 800 missionaries working in every province of China. By the time Mao closed the country to missionaries, untold numbers of Chinese believers traced their faith to men and women Taylor had led to Christ.
Taylor said, again and again throughout his life, that he had not chosen China. The Word had carried him there.
This is exactly the note James wants us to hear in 1:22. "Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves." Most of us read that verse and hear it as a command to try harder. Stop hearing. Start doing. Muster the obedience. But James is saying something different and much better. He’s describing what actually happens when the implanted Word of verse 21 has actually been received: it moves, it walks, and it carries its hearer somewhere.
Remember the word we sat with last week. Phero. The sailing word Peter used in 2 Peter 1:21 for authors being "carried along" by the Holy Spirit. The same Spirit who carried the Word onto the page carries the Word off the page. He doesn’t drop the Scripture at our doorstep and leave us to figure out the transportation. The wind that filled the apostle's sail is the wind in yours this morning. Remember: obedience isn’t the engine of the Christian life; it’s the evidence that the Spirit has already moved.
This is where so many of us get stuck. We read a verse that presses on something in our lives. An apology we owe. A sin we need to name out loud to a friend. A generosity we’ve been dodging. A conversation we’ve been avoiding. A step of obedience we keep promising ourselves we’ll get to when we feel more ready.
James has news for us. We won’t feel more ready next week. The feeling we’re waiting for isn’t coming. The readiness we keep expecting is a mirage we’ve been chasing for months, maybe years. And meanwhile the Word is right there, pressing, gentle, persistent, sent from a Father who has already filled the sail.
The man or woman who mistakes hearing for doing is, James says, "deceiving" themselves. That’s a strong word. Self-deception. We feel the weight of the Word, we even feel a quiet stirring of conviction in our chests, and then we mistake the feeling of being moved for the fact of moving. We assume the warmth of the sermon is the warmth of obedience. It isn’t. The sermon can warm a heart that never takes a step. The gospel underneath James' warning is that Jesus felt every word of His Father's will and then walked every syllable of it to a cross. We’re not saved by our doing, but by His. And precisely because He has done everything for us, the Spirit is now free to carry us into the obedience we could never muster on our own.
Hudson Taylor didn’t muster China. He was carried there. And you aren’t mustering what the Word is pressing on you this week either.
Today: Do the one thing the Word has been pressing on you this month. Make the call. Write the check. Confess the sin to the person who needs to hear it. Apologize without qualifications. Forgive the one you’ve been keeping on the hook. The Spirit who breathed this Book has been waiting for you to say yes.
Prayer: "Father, thank You that the Spirit who carried Peter's pen is carrying me this morning. Move me from the pew to the street today, into the one step of obedience I have been postponing. In Jesus' name and in His empowerment, Amen."
-PK