Hudson Taylor’s Conversion
A Christian mother had prayed for her son over all the seventeen years of his life. She and her husband had raised him and the rest of the family in a Christian home but he had drifted far from any real relationship with God.
The lad’s fourteen year old sister had come to faith and though she looked up to her brother, recognised he was far from God. She decided to do something about it and wrote in her diary that three times every day she would pray for him. She was true to her resolve and began praying.
A month later the boy’s mother decided to pray for a full afternoon for his clear conversion. She was visiting her sister 60kms away.
Back home, the boy was bored. He knew he had to look busy so his little sister wouldn’t bother him and his father wouldn’t give him a job. He went to where his father’s books were, found nothing of interest until he saw a little booklet he’d not seen before.
Keeping out of sight he snuck through the house to a little hide-a-way and began reading. He’d picked up a gospel booklet. Disappointed at first, he decided to read it anyway. He knew the first part of the booklet would have the story of someone’s conversion and the second part would have the Bible verses explaining salvation. He decided to only read the first half.
His mother kept praying that afternoon until she felt a breakthrough. Deep inside she knew God had heard and answered.
The teenager read the first part but then wanted to read just a little more. He soon found he’d read it all. The booklet talked over and over about “the finished work of Christ.” He began to think about these words until it dawned on him that becoming a Christian was a matter of faith in Jesus and not just trying to live a good life. The more he thought about it, the more sense it made. Finally he prayed, telling God that from that moment on he was going to believe the message that Christ had died for him. He left his hide-a-way gloriously born again.
The resolve of a fourteen year old to pray for her brother three times a day, and the resolve of a mother to continue to press into God until something happened brought the seventeen year old Hudson Taylor to Christ.
In time he would go as a missionary to China where he would spend 51 years, begin the China Inland Mission (now OMF), probably the single most powerful missionary organisation in China.
Today there are conservatively around 75 million evangelical Christians in China with almost 250,000 new believers added every year. God used Hudson Taylor to build an extraordinary foundation for this present day growth.
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