In 1865, J. Hudson Taylor founded the China Inland Mission, to raise up workers to take the Gospel to the interior regions of China. In calling for willing men and women to serve God among the Chinese, he wrote China's Spiritual Need and Claims. He did not hide the dangers and difficulties that would surely encounter anyone who undertook this great task, but placed these trials in a larger context: The spiritual needs of the Chinese and the presence and help of God. Here are a few of his powerful words:
"The dangers and difficulties will be neither few nor small, but with Jesus for our leader we may safely follow on. These dangers, difficulties and trials, while leading to a deeper realization of our own weakness, poverty and need, will constrain [compel] us also to lean more constantly, to draw more largely, to rest more implicitly on the strength, the riches, the fullness of Jesus.
"'In the world ye shall have tribulation,' but 'in Me...peace,' will be the experience of those engaged in the work. If it be for God's glory, for the benefit of His cause and the true interest of those concerned, the times of greatest trial and danger will be the times when His delivering power will shine forth most conspicuously; and if otherwise, His sustaining grace will prove sufficient for the weakest servant in the conflict..."
Dr. and Mrs. Howard Taylor, Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission, Volume Two: The Growth of a Work of God, 41-42
To be continued