A Life-changing Day

A Life-changing Day

He was late for his own wedding.

JAMES TAYLOR awoke before dawn on his wedding day, a man without God. As he went about his morning work threshing wheat in his barn, deep in thought, his heart was being strangely pulled toward heaven. The words “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” kept running through his mind.

He knelt praying in the straw, unaware of the time as the sun rose higher toward noon. While James prayed, God gave him a glimpse into eternity, and he rose from the straw, a man reborn.

Suddenly he realized he was late for his wedding, and he ran out of the barn as fast as he could, down the long hill to the snowy valley of Croyden, where the pealing church bells sang a loud invitation to the marriage of James Taylor and Betty Johnson.

James Taylor, a young stonemason from Yorkshire in England’s North Country, had heard Jesus’ words all his life. Even before his wedding-day conversion he had served as a bell ringer and a member of the choir at Royston parish. But he had not known God personally until then.

How God began his awakening we don’t know. It may have been the Gospel readings he heard weekly from the lips of the village vicar or the dramatic conversion of his neighbors, Joseph and Elizabeth Shaw, from whose cottage he could often hear hymns rising with the wind that crossed the ridge. The whole neighborhood knew of the strange and narrow-minded “Methodist” notions of the Shaws. They also knew that Elizabeth had once been crippled with rheumatism but was now hale and hearty and fully convinced that God had healed her instantly when she “trusted the Lord.”

It may have been when young Taylor, at the Mapplewell Midsummer Fair, listened intently as the radical Methodist preacher John Wesley boldly warned his lukewarm hearers of “the wrath to come.”

What we do know is that on the morning of February 1, 1776, while lost in contemplation of the eternal state of his soul and late for his own wedding, he said “I do” to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Betty Johnson had never intended to marry a Methodist, but the new bride soon followed her husband into the kingdom of God as part of the glorious revival that was sweeping Great Britain and Ireland. The Spirit of God was doing a mighty work among people at all levels of society.

After a serious accident some years later, James Taylor was forced to give up his career as a stonemason. The couple, now with a young family in tow, moved to a nearby mining town, where Taylor eventually became the Methodist preacher. His faithfulness in ministry in a spiritually resistant corner of the nation laid a strong foundation of Christian commitment for generations of Taylors to come.

On a day in May 1832, with the warm spring sun melting the late winter snows in the Yorkshire valleys, a baby boy was born. Great-grandson to the deceased stonemason and Methodist minister James Taylor, the child was named James Hudson Taylor. Hudson, as the boy was called, eventually became the first Protestant missionary to Inland China. But the story of Hudson Taylor, grand and glorious in the history of the church of Jesus Christ, is for another day.

Reflection

Just as in the Old Testament God chose Abraham as the progenitor of a godly family and drew him to himself, so God chose James Taylor and drew him into a personal relationship with himself to found a godly family that would help change the world. If you are part of a family with a godly heritage, praise God for it. If not, start now, and ask God to begin this heritage with you.

The love of the Lord remains forever with those who fear him. His salvation extends to the children’s children of those who are faithful to his covenant, of those who obey his commandments!

Psalm 103:17-18