Frank Boreham was a pastor in New Zealand and Australia in the late 1800s and early 1900s. One Sunday evening, he began a series of sermons entitled, “Texts That Made History.” He began that first Sunday with “Martin Luther’s Text,” and continued the series for 125 Sundays!
This article deals with Hudson Taylor’s text. Taylor was a pioneering missionary to inland China and founder of the China Inland Mission in 1865.
The day on which James Hudson Taylor–then a boy in his teens–found himself confronted by that tremendous text was, as he himself testified in old age, “a day that he could never forget.” It is a day that China can never forget; a day that the world can never forget. It was a holiday; everybody was away from home; and the boy found time hanging heavily upon his hands.
In an aimless way he wandered, during the afternoon, into his father’s library, and poked about among the shelves. “I tried,” he says, “to find some book with which to while away the leaden hours. Nothing attracting me, I turned over a basket of pamphlets and selected from among them a tract that looked interesting. I knew that it would have a story at the commencement and a moral at the close; but I promised myself that I would enjoy the story and leave the rest. It would be easy to put away the tract as soon as it should seem prosy.”
He scampers off to the stable loft, throws himself on the hay, and plunges into the book. He is captivated by the narrative, and finds it impossible to drop the book when the story comes to an end. He reads on and on. He is rewarded by one great golden word whose significance he has never before discovered: “The Finished Work of Christ!” The theme entrances him; and at last he only rises from his bed in the soft hay that he may kneel on the hard floor of the loft and surrender his young life to the Savior who had surrendered everything for him. If, he asked himself, as he lay upon the hay, if the whole work was finished, and the whole debt paid upon the Cross, what is there left for me to do? “And then,” he tells us, “there dawned upon me the joyous conviction that there was nothing in the world to be done but to fall upon my knees, accept the Savior and praise Him for evermore.”
“It is finished!” “When Jesus, therefore, had received the vinegar he said, “It is finished!” and He bowed His head and gave up the ghost.”
“Then there dawned upon me the joyous conviction that, since the whole work was finished and the whole debt paid upon the Cross, there was nothing for me to do but to fall upon my knees, accept the Savior and praise Him for evermore!”
“It is finished!” It is really only one word: the greatest word ever uttered; we must examine it for a moment as a lapidary examines under a powerful glass a rare and costly gem.
It was a farmer’s word. When, into his herd, there was born an animal so beautiful and shapely that it seemed absolutely destitute of faults and defects, the farmer gazed upon the creature with proud, delighted eyes. “Tetelestai!” he said, “tetelestai!”
It was an artist’s word. When the painter or the sculptor had put the last finishing touches to the vivid landscape or the marble bust, he would stand back a few feet to admire his masterpiece, and, seeing in it nothing that called for correction or improvement, would murmur fondly, “Tetelestai! tetelestai!”
It was a priestly word. When some devout worshiper, overflowing with gratitude for mercies shown him, brought to the temple a lamb without spot or blemish, the pride of the whole flock, the priest, more accustomed to seeing the blind and defective animals led to the altar, would look admiringly upon the pretty creature. “Tetelestai!” he would say, “tetelestai!” And when, in the fullness of time, the Lamb of God offered Himself on the altar of the ages, he rejoiced with a joy so triumphant that it bore down all His anguish before it. The sacrifice was stainless, perfect, finished! “He cried with a loud voice, ‘Tetelestai!’ and gave up the ghost.”
This divine self-satisfaction appears only twice, once in each Testament. When He completed the work of Creation, He looked upon it and said that it was very good; when He completed the work of redemption, He cried with a loud voice, “Tetelestai!” It means exactly the same thing.
In his own narrative of his conversion, Hudson Taylor quotes James Proctor’s well-known hymn: that hymn that, in one of his essays, Froude criticizes so severely:
Nothing either great or small,
Nothing, sinner, no;
Jesus did it, did it all,
Long, long ago.
“It is Finished!” yes, indeed,
Finished every jot;
Sinner, this is all you need;
Tell me, is it not?
Cast your deadly doing down,
Down at Jesus’ feet;
Stand in Him, in Him alone,
Gloriously complete.
Froude maintains that these verses are immoral. It is only by “doing,” he argues, that the work of the world can ever get done. And if you describe “doing” as “deadly” you set a premium upon indolence and lessen the probabilities of attainment. The best answer to Froude’s plausible contention is The Life of Hudson Taylor. Hudson Taylor became convinced, as a boy, that “the whole work was finished and the whole debt paid.” “There is nothing for me to do,” he says, “but to fall down on my knees and accept the Savior.” The chapter in his biography that tells of this spiritual crisis is entitled “The Finished Work of Christ,” and it is headed by the quotation:
Upon a life I did not live,
Upon a death I did not die,
Another’s life, Another’s death
I stake my whole eternity.
And, as I have said, the very words that Froude so bitterly condemns are quoted by Hudson Taylor as a reflection of his own experience. And the result? The result is that Hudson Taylor became one of the most prodigious toilers of all time. So far from his trust in “The Finished Work of Christ” inclining him to indolence, he felt that he must toil most terribly to make so perfect a Savior known to the whole wide world. There lies on my desk a Birthday Book which I very highly value. It was given me at the docks by Mr. Thomas Spurgeon as I was leaving England. If you open it at the twenty-first of May you will find these words: “‘Simply to Thy Cross I cling’ is but half of the Gospel. No one is really clinging to the Cross who is not at the same time faithfully following Christ and doing whatsoever He commands;” and against those words of Dr. J. R. Miller’s in my Birthday Book, you may see the autograph of J. Hudson Taylor. He was our guest at the Mosgiel Manse when he set his signature to those striking and significant sentences.
“We Build Like Giants; We Finish Like Jewelers!”–so the old Egyptians wrote over the portals of their palaces and temples. I like to think that the most gigantic task ever attempted on this planet–the work of the world’s redemption–was finished with a precision and a nicety that no jeweler could rival.
“It is finished!” He cried from the cross.
“Tetelestai! Tetelestai!”
When He looked upon His work in Creation and saw that it was good, He placed it beyond the power of man to improve upon it.
To gild refine’d gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.
And, similarly, when He looked upon His work in redemption and cried triumphantly, “Tetelestai!” He placed it beyond the power of any man to add to it. There are times when any addition is a subtraction. Some years ago, White House at Washington–the residence of the American Presidents–was in the hands of the painters and decorators. Two large entrance doors had been painted to represent black walnut. The contractor ordered his men to scrape and clean them in readiness for repainting, and they set to work. But when their knives penetrated to the solid timber, they discovered to their astonishment that it was heavy mahogany of a most exquisite natural grain! The work of that earlier decorator, so far from adding to the beauty of the timber, had only served to conceal its essential and inherent glory. It is easy enough to add to the wonders of creation or of redemption; but you can never add without subtracting. “It is finished!”
Many years ago, Ebenezer Wooton, an earnest but eccentric evangelist, was conducting a series of summer evening services on the village green at Lidford Brook. The last meeting had been held; the crowd was melting slowly away; and the evangelist was engaged in taking down the marquee. All at once a young fellow approached him and asked, casually rather than earnestly, “Mr. Wooton, what must I do to be saved?” The preacher took the measure of his man. “Too late!” he said, in a matter of fact kind of way, glancing up from a somewhat obstinate tentpeg with which he was struggling.
“Too late, my friend, too late!” The young fellow was startled.
“Oh, don’t say that, Mr. Wooton!” he pleaded, a new note coming into his voice. “Surely it isn’t too late just because the meetings are over?” “Yes, my friend,” exclaimed the evangelist, dropping the cord in his hand, straightening himself up, and looking right into the face of his questioner, “it’s too late! You want to know what you must do to be saved, and I tell you that you’re hundreds of years too late! The work of salvation is done, completed, finished! It was finished on the cross; Jesus said so with the last breath that He drew! What more do you want?” And, then and there, it dawned upon the now earnest inquirer on the village green as, at about the same time, it dawned upon young Hudson Taylor in the hay-loft, that “since the whole work was finished and the whole debt paid upon the cross, there was nothing for him to do but to fall upon his knees and accept the Savior.” And there, under the elms, the sentinel stars witnessing the great transaction, he kneeled in glad thanksgiving and rested his soul for time and for eternity on “The Finished Work of Christ.”
“The Finished Work of Christ!”
“Tetelestai! Tetelestai!”
“It is finished!”
It is not a sigh of relief at having reached the end of things. It is the unutterable joy of the artist who, putting the last touches to the picture that has engrossed him for so long, sees in it the realization of all his dreams and can nowhere find room for improvement. Only once in the world’s history did a finishing touch bring a work to absolute perfection; and on that day of days a single flaw would have shattered the hope of the ages.
This article does not contain the complete essay by Frank Boreham. Much has been edited for space. Also, many spellings have been changed to conform to American style. For the original, see a recent reprint by Kregel entitled Life Verses: The Bible’s Impact on Famous Lives, Vol. 2, pp. 102-112
The current formatting and editing is copyrighted by Jim Ehrhard, 1999. You are permitted to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that: (1) you credit the author; (2) any modifications are clearly marked; (3) you do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction; and (4) you do not make more than 100 copies without permission. If you would like to post this material to your web site or make any use other than as defined above, please contact Teaching Resources International
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