III The Empty Table1793 – 1951
Not every witness died for the promise. Some spent a lifetime staking a household, or a whole mission, on a single verse about provision — and kept the receipts.
Enlarge the tent
Serampore, Bengal, 1793–1834 — seven years to the first convert; the press burned in 1812
Expect great things; attempt great things.
William Carey, a village shoemaker, preaching on Isaiah 54 to the Baptist ministers at Nottingham on 30 May 1792 — as the earliest record gives it. The “from God… for God” everyone knows was added by later memory.
He sailed the next year on a Danish ship after the East India Company put him off its own, and baptized his first convert, a carpenter named Krishna Pal, in December 1800. In March 1812 a fire at the mission press destroyed the type for fourteen languages and years of manuscript, including his Sanskrit and Bengali dictionaries; printing resumed within weeks. By his death he and his colleagues had put the whole Bible into six languages and portions into some thirty more. Asked how he should be described, he told his nephew that if a biographer called him a plodder “he will describe me justly… I can plod. I can persevere in any definite pursuit. To this I owe everything.”
The promise“Enlarge the site of your tent, stretch out the curtains of your dwellings, do not hold back. Lengthen your ropes and drive your stakes in deep.” (Isaiah 54:2)
Source & context
“Narrative of the First Establishment of this Society,” Periodical Accounts Relative to the Baptist Missionary Society, vol. I (1800), p. 3. Read the early account (PDF). The William Carey Center compares the later variants; the sermon itself is known through reports.
As the waters cover the sea
Burma, 1813–1850 — six years to the first convert; seventeen months in a death prison
Thanks be to God, I can now say I have attained. I have knelt down before Him, with the last leaf in my hand… I have commended it to His mercy and grace.
Adoniram Judson, in his journal at Maulmain, 31 January 1834 — the day he finished translating the Bible into Burmese, twenty-one years after landing.
He arrived in 1813 and baptized the first Burmese believer in 1819. During the First Anglo-Burmese War he was chained in the death prison at Ava for seventeen months while his wife Ann smuggled in food; his manuscript of the New Testament survived the war sewn into a pillow. Asked years later whether the prospects were bright, he is remembered answering, “As bright as the promises of God.” His Bible is still the one Burmese Christians read, and there are now more than a million Baptists in Myanmar.
The promise“For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.” (Habakkuk 2:14)
Source & context
Adoniram Judson’s journal, 31 January 1834. It is reproduced in Francis Wayland, A Memoir of the Life and Labors of the Rev. Adoniram Judson, vol. II (1853), and later biographies. Read the journal entry in Wayland’s memoir (PDF); search for the date.
All your needs
Bristol, 1836–1898 — 10,024 orphans, and never an appeal for money
…provided with all they need, only by prayer and faith, without any one being asked by me or my fellow-labourers.
George Müller, stating the first object of his orphan houses in his Narrative (1837): that God be shown faithful by the way the children were fed.
He never made an appeal, never took a salary, and recorded every gift in ledgers that ran to thousands of pages — about a million and a half pounds over sixty years. The famous morning when the children sat down to empty plates and gave thanks, and a baker and a milkman knocked within minutes, is not in his own books; a woman who visited as a small child told it in 1920. The Narrative itself records dozens of same-day provisions that read much the same.
The promise“And my God will supply all your needs according to His glorious riches in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:19)
Source & context
George Müller, A Narrative of Some of the Lord’s Dealings with George Müller, part I, on the purpose of the orphan houses. Read the Narrative (PDF); search for “first and primary object.” The quotation is Müller’s own explanation, distinct from the later empty-plates anecdote.
Seek first the kingdom
China, 1854–1905 — a mission with no salaries and no appeals
Depend upon it, God’s work done in God’s way will never lack God’s supplies.
Hudson Taylor — the China Inland Mission’s founding maxim, as his son and daughter-in-law recorded it; no letter of his containing it has been found. He founded the mission in 1865 with ten pounds and a bank account opened in its name.
He wore Chinese dress and a queue when other missionaries thought it disgraceful, and went inland where none had gone. By his death the mission had more than eight hundred missionaries. In 1900 the Boxer Rebellion killed fifty-eight of them and twenty-one of their children; Taylor refused the compensation the Chinese government offered, so that the mission would owe its standing to nothing but the gospel.
The promise“But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.” (Matthew 6:33)
Source & context
Dr. and Mrs. Howard Taylor, Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret (1932). Edition and preview at Google Books. The maxim is transmitted by his son and daughter-in-law; this citation does not establish a surviving letter in Hudson Taylor’s hand.
My grace is sufficient
Dohnavur, South India, 1895–1951 — fifty-five years without going home; the last twenty mostly in bed
Hast thou no scar? No hidden scar on foot, or side, or hand? … Can he have followed far who has no wound nor scar?
Amy Carmichael, from the poem “No Scar,” in Toward Jerusalem (1936) — written for the family of rescued children she called Dohnavur.
She began by buying girls out of temple prostitution — the first, Preena, walked into her house in 1901 — and became “Amma” to hundreds. A fall in 1931 left her largely bedridden; she wrote most of her thirty-five books from that room. The Dohnavur Fellowship is still there. Her grave is marked by a birdbath with one word on it: Amma.
The promise“My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is perfected in weakness.” (2 Corinthians 12:9)
Source & context
Amy Carmichael, “No Scar,” in Toward Jerusalem (1936). CLC’s edition record. The poem, rather than a remark recorded by someone else, is the source; the ellipsis omits its middle lines.
The weak things of the world
Yangcheng to Sian, 1940 — a London parlourmaid the mission board turned down, with a hundred children over the mountains
I wasn’t God’s first choice for what I’ve done for China. There was somebody else… It must have been a man — a wonderful man, a well-educated man… Perhaps he died. Perhaps he wasn’t willing. And God looked down and saw Gladys Aylward.
Gladys Aylward, to a friend — as the historian Ruth Tucker reported it. The line is second-hand; it is also the one she is remembered by.
Rejected by the China Inland Mission in 1930 as too old and too poorly educated to learn Chinese, she spent her savings on a train ticket and left Liverpool Street Station that October, crossing Siberia alone through an undeclared war. At Yangcheng she ran an inn for muleteers, served the mandarin as inspector against foot-binding, and became a Chinese citizen. In the spring of 1940, with the Japanese advancing, she walked about a hundred children over the mountains and across the Yellow River to Sian in some four weeks, and collapsed with typhus when they arrived. She never married; she told Elisabeth Elliot she believed God had called a man to come to her, “but he never came” — and that she still believed God answers prayer. She died in 1970 running an orphanage in Taipei.
The promise“God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” (1 Corinthians 1:27)
Source & context
Ruth A. Tucker, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya: A Biographical History of Christian Missions (Zondervan, 1983), the account of Gladys Aylward. Library edition record. This is a second-hand attribution, not a diary entry or a transcript of Aylward speaking.