Let My People Go by A.W. Tozer (1990)

Posted on 2024-01-25 by thelittleman

Let My People Go: The Life of Robert A. Jaffray by A.W. Tozer (1990)

A dear friend loaned me this biography of Robert A. Jaffray, a Presbyterian missionary leader of The Christian and Missionary Alliance in Indochina. While I’d never heard of Jaffray before, I’d certainly heard of the author, A.W. Tozer, so I enjoyed reading this book and peering into the work of Christ in Asia about a century ago.

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Robert A. Jaffray’s Call and Work

R.A. Jaffray was heir to the Toronto Globe and was a faithful participant in his local church, but he felt a stirring for the lost peoples of the world. Tozer writes:

He immediately became active in his home church, but the vision of a whole world lost would not let him rest content with church work. The call of the masses was upon his heart now, and the urge of the Spirit was within him. He was not sure yet, but vaguely he sensed that the voice of the Lord was saying to him, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people and I have come down to rescue them. So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh, and you shall say to him, ‘Let my people go.'” (15)

This phrase dug deep in heart, and it ultimately became his motto: “Let my people go!” From his Presbyterian background, this phrase may be the doctrine of election at its finest, a view that the lost souls of Southeast Asia were God’s people already, yet still they sat lost in Satan’s bondage and needed a missionary to bring the message that would free them. However one views the doctrine of election, the fact remains that Jaffray was such a missionary willing to take the Gospel to the lost people of China! He didn’t just figure that God’s people would ultimately find their way to Him some way and somehow. Jaffray went, preached, and left the results with God. Calvinist or otherwise, he was an evangelist and disciple-maker through and through.

With his publishing experience, Jaffray maintained a strong and prolific writing career through periodicals like Bible Magazine with Gospel messages and missionary encouragements that he spread throughout Asia, even through difficult times of war. He was essentially an early-day blogger who had to lug printing presses through the jungles to get his daily thoughts out to the masses. Writing was his greatest weapon, because poor health limited his movements.

Jaffray’s Personality and Ministry Style

It was Jaffray’s poor health, in fact, that helped promote his unique ministry style. After reading a number of chapters, I got the sense that he would have been a very difficult man to follow or team up with on the field, noting these character traits in the margins of my book: impatient, demanding, severe, even unforgiving. Tozer speaks to this, though, that certain times require certain personality types, including Jaffray’s which had often been affected by his poor health:

Jaffray was a great missionary, but he was not a foot soldier. Instead, he was a missionary general, a strategist and tactician of undoubted vision. But the actual labor of traveling about and preaching in the villages had to be done by others. He could do little itinerating. His diabetes and his heart condition remained with him—only has driving will enabled him to carry on at all. (31)

These personality flaws didn’t detract from Jaffray’s love for others, of course, for their souls and relationship with God was what sent him to the mission field in the first place—and kept there, despite his ailments. Tozer writes:

R.A. Jaffray was a great lover of people. His was not the detached love of the scientist or the student of ethnology. His love had in it almost no intellectual content. It was a vast sea of pure emotion that he never tried to analyze. He loved people for their own sakes and was drawn to them by an inward attraction bigger than reason. He was happy in the presence of human beings, whatever their race or color. He never had to put up with people—he enjoyed them too much to be bored with them…. Those who came near to him felt that love like the warmth of the sun. (33)

Tozer also coins a term to describe Jaffray’s unique personality on the mission field, the “Extroverted Mystic”:

If I may be permitted to create a term to describe Jaffray’s spiritual type, I would call him an extroverted mystic. He had learned to pray as he moved. He conceived prayer and working as being identical acts. Work was prayer if it was God’s work. I can think of only one man who accomplished this difficult fusion of the two acts—work and prayer—in the degree that Jaffray seems to have done: that was Brother Lawrence, who taught “the practice of the presence of God.” (35)

Jaffray’s Philosophy and Emphasis on Training Nationals

I’ve recently been preaching through a series on purpose and calling in life, and I’ve commented on the flaw in biographies and memoirs. I’ve said: “The problem is that we get to look at a person’s entire life, decades of ministry boiled down into a few hundred pages. We get to see their milestones and turning points, and we get to see how these things became the freeway of their lives. The problem with this is that we expect to be able to do the same with our own lives, but our lives aren’t so succinct, and they’re certainly not over! To look at our own past milestones cannot help us predict where we’re going in the future, because our own biographies are not yet complete.”

I still believe this to be the case, but for a man like Jaffray, long since passed, we can take an objective look at his ministry and impact and see some things float to the surface. Tozer particularly points out his philosophy and his focus on training the nationals for service. About his philosophy, Tozer writes:

The Jaffray philosophy of Christian missions…consisted chiefly of four things to do: contact, evangelize, organize and instruct. But in the doing of these essentials, a person might toil a lifetime. Nevertheless his or her toil would be fruitful because these were things Christ had sent his servants to do. (60)

About training the nationals, particularly training the Chinese believers to become missionaries to the Chinese in Indochina, he writes:

The best in swiftest work would always be done by Christian nationals operating among their own people. But these must first be taught, established in the truth and trained for the most effective service. The Bible school could do this—no other agent could. (63)

Due to his wise policy of training national workers and encouraging the church to depend upon its own efforts, the work could go on without much help from the foreigners. (87-88)

This type of focus worked best when Jaffray had his own priorities straight. I love this line Tozer writes about Jaffray’s purpose for going to the mission field in the first place:

Jaffray early came to the conclusion that he was sent to China not to make Westerners, but to make disciples. (38)

Jaffray’s Legacy

R.A. Jaffray ultimately died as a Martyr in a WWII Japanese prison camp. He left volumes of missions-focused and theological writings to posterity, but more importantly, he also left a host of disciples and converts in his wake in Indochina. Taking Jaffray’s example to heart, Tozer writes this beautiful passage about the devoted life:

The lives of consecrated people are never their own. To sit back in selfish composure and plan the future is never an option to those who have made the great commitment. They are at the call of Another, and at any time they may receive orders to pick up and move on. This is one of the penalties they must pay for the high privilege of serving God, and if seen from a low point it looks like a hard and unsatisfactory way to live. But the truest appraisal of a way of life is always made at the end of it. Who that have placed themselves at the disposal of God and humanity have ever been sorry at the end of life that they did so? Not one, and that is the best argument for the excellence of the devoted life. (94-95)

Tozer’s Writing

I’d be remiss not to focus briefly on the author of this book, a historian who tries to give only the facts but also can’t help himself to make some genuinely insightful comments along the way. Even he, though, recognizes the dangers of taking such liberties when he writes: “When an historian turns philosopher, he or she often goes astray.” (116)

One of my favorite passages came when Tozer questioned why Western Christians seem to doubt the miraculous events that some of the Alliance missionaries witnessed in the Far East and reported to their supporters back home. To highlight the Western Church’s skepticism, he relates one such account from Siam, not in the vernacular of late 20th Century English, but in Elizibethan English reminiscent of what one might find in the King James Bible:

And it came to pass that as they journeyed a young man met them having an unclean spirit: and he threw himself on the ground, gnashing his teeth and foaming. And they essayed to talk with him, but they could not, for he was dumb. And it was so that the multitudes ran. Together the disciples commanded the unclean spirit and said: “Thou deaf and dumb spirit, we charge thee, come out of him.” And straightway the spirit leaveth him and he fell to the ground and became as one dead. And as the people wondered he arose and stood upon his feet and went unto his own house, and they marveled greatly. And so much the more they published it abroad what had been done unto him that had an unclean spirit. (71)

Conclusion

I’m glad my friend shared this biography with me. Since I don’t generally swim in the same circles as Presbyterians or The Christian and Missionary Alliance, I’d otherwise need to have waited until glory ever to hear about R.A. Jaffray and the work he did in Asia. Once again, a missionary biography leaves me inspired. I encourage you to read some yourself: if not this then something, like Daring Dependence or Mountain Rain! Your heart will never hurt after a stirring from books like these.

©2024 E.T.

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