Griffith John

So to serve Jesus means that we've got to follow Him into that place, dying, bearing fruit, but that then God the Father will honor the one who serves in this way by making their death produce much fruit.

Now, recently I read a book by a relatively unknown missionary from the 19th century, uh, called Griffith John.

He served in China for 55 years with the London Missionary Society, so he was in China even before Hudson Taylor, and he wrote the following: "Jesus could not save Himself because He would save others.

To deliver others, He must surrender Himself." To save others, he must sacrifice himself.

And today, Jesus is the central figure of the human race and the leader of mankind's progress.

All the armies that have ever marched, all the navies that have ever sailed, all the parliaments that have ever sat, all the kings that have ever reigned put together have not affected the life of mankind on earth as powerfully as that one solitary life.

My friends, these verses that we have focused on today are to be believed not simply because they are in the Bible, God's holy word, but because their truth has been proven time and time again, primarily in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ, but also in the lives of countless of his followers, including the two I've mentioned today, Griffith John in China and John Thomas, or Robert Germain Thomas in Korea.

So let us in faith give our lives again to Jesus.

After that, he drifted about the capital in Hongrongon's tattered hand-me-down silk robes, living proof that the brethren were still welcome.

The Welsh missionary, Griffith John, came and went, carrying home an edict from the Heavenly King welcoming home foreign missionaries to live in the Heavenly Kingdom.

With him came the Yale-educated Yung Wing, who met Hongrun Gan on November 19th with a list of seven proposals.

An army organized on scientific principles, military and naval schools, a banking system, graded schools with the Bible as one of the textbooks.

That case had names and faces attached to it by then.

Edkins and Griffith John, up the canal twice in a season.

The Prime Minister of the Heavenly Kingdom taking off his embroidered crown in a room full of old colleagues and then praying with them together as brothers.

It wasn't some abstraction, and the men making it weren't cranks.