In this biographical sketch, Mike Davenport examines the short life of William Borden (1887–1913) and what it means to live a life devoted to Christ with no reserves, retreats or regrets.

Well, in 1904, William Borden graduated from a Chicago high school. As heir to the Borden family fortune, he was already wealthy. For his high school graduation present, his parents gave 16-year-old Borden a trip around the world. As the young man traveled through Asia, the Middle East, even into Europe, he felt a growing burden for the world's hurting people. While in Rome, he wrote the following in a letter to his mother, Darling mother, I am glad that you have told Father about my desire to be a missionary.

I am thinking about it all the time and looking forward to it with a good deal of anticipation. I know that I am not at all fitted or prepared yet, but in the next four or five years I ought to be able to prepare myself. I don't think I want to go through a seminary, but thorough Bible study is what I do need. As Dr. Torrey says, it's much more important and profitable to know what God has to say on the subject than what men have to say.

As our brother just told us a few minutes ago, if you just had your Bible and take your Bible to the people, that's all you need. Well in July of 1905, while sitting under Torrey's preaching, actually in London, William Borden surrendered his life to service for Christ. In her biography, Mrs. Taylor notes the following, Surrender, in his case, meant not only giving up worldly amusements and indulgences, it meant taking on his master's yoke, living with him, four others, always and everywhere. The following year, 1906, found William, now a freshman at Yale University, in the City of Nashville with some 4, 000 other delegates at the missionary convention of the Student Volunteer Movement.

While at this convention, William was captured by the presentation of one Samuel Zwimmer. With map in hand and armed with facts but also a passion for Jesus Christ and for souls, Mr. Zwimmer challenged the students gathered there in the following manner. When the doors open, we ought to press in, sacrificing our lives if need be for God. If the call voiced by those who have already spoken moved us deeply, coming from Persia, from Turkey, from Egypt, from India.

If that was a call from God, what shall be said of the mute appeal of the 70 millions of the holy, unevangelized Muslim world? Shall we stand by and allow these 70 millions to continue under the curse and in the snare of false religion with no knowledge of the saving love and power of Christ, not because they have proved fanatical and refused to listen, not because they have thrust us back, but because none of us has ever had the courage to go to those lands and win them to Jesus Christ? Of course it will cost life. It is not an expedition of ease nor a picnic excursion to which we are called. It is going to cost many a life.

And not lives only, but prayers and tears and blood. Leadership in this movement has always been a leadership in suffering. There was Raymond Lull, the first missionary to the Muslims, stoned to death in Algiers, Henry Martin pioneering in Persia with the cry, Let me burn out for God. We who are missionaries to Muslims today call upon you to follow with us in their train, to go to these waiting lands and light the beacon of the love of Christ in all the Mohammedan world. Did he not love, pray, suffer for Muslims as well for us?

Shall we do less if the call comes? Say not it is the appeal of the Mohammedan world or of the missionaries. It is the call of the Master. Let us answer with a shout, O heart of Christ, lead on! And we will follow that cry and win the Mohammedan world for him.

Mrs. Taylor records that Borden went back from Nashville committed in heart to that great enterprise should the Lord confirm the call. He did not say much about it, but from that time his most intimate friends knew that he was definitely considering working among Muslims in some unoccupied field. One friend expressed disbelief that William, a millionaire, was throwing himself away as a missionary. In response, Borden wrote two words in the back of his Bible.

No reserves. No reserves. Borden's passion for Christ was not something he was saving with an eye to the mission field. During his freshman year at Yale, he began a small morning prayer group, just he and one other freshman. A prayer group of two.

But this in turn gave birth to a movement that soon spread across the entire campus. By the end of his first year, 150 freshmen were meeting weekly for Bible study and prayer. And by the time William was a senior of Yale's 1, 300 students, some 1, 000 of them were meeting in such groups. One of William's classmates, who himself became a missionary to China, described him in the following way. One conviction that dominated his life was the Bible from first to last, that it is the inspired Word of God.

To him it was the book of books. He was not only an intellectual, he had not only an intellectual grasp of its teaching such as one may get in a theological seminary, but he had the spiritual understanding of it which only comes through prayerful and devotional study and humble dependence on the Spirit of God. And the secret, he said, of William Borden's life, as it seems to him a fellow student, was his belief in the sufficiency and abiding presence of the Lord Jesus Christ. For this was more than a belief. It was for him an experimental reality.

Well Borden's outreach ministry was not confined to the Yale campus in a manner that James one would classify as genuine Christianity. He showed care and concern about widows and orphans and the disabled. He often rescued the drunks from the streets of New Haven, and to try to rehabilitate them he founded the Yale Hope Mission. Such was the heart of this young man for the work of Christ that after his death, his mother discovered by means of going through his check stubs that this young man in his three years at Yale gave $70, 000 to Christian work. Although he was a millionaire by reason of his family, he seemed to realize always that he must be about his father's business and not wasting time in the pursuit of amusement.

Upon graduation from Yale, Many high-paying job offers rolled in, and he turned them all down. Christ had captured his heart, and he was unwilling to give it up for any other thing. In his Bible, he wrote two more words, No retreats. So now he had written there in his Bible, no reserves, no retreats. Well, as time pressed on, Borden's missionary call narrowed to the Muslim Kanzu people in China.

At that time, there were more Muslims there in China than there were in Persia, more Muslims than in all of Egypt, more Muslims there in China than in Arabia, the very home of Islam. And there was not a single person known that was seeking to evangelize this group in China. Graduating from Yale In 1909, William Borden went on to graduate work at Princeton Seminary in New Jersey. And on December 17, 1912, William, having finished his studies at Princeton, set sail for China. Because he was hoping to work with the Muslims, he was studying language there in Egypt.

But while there studying in Cairo, he contracted spinal meningitis. And within a month, on April 9, 1913, less than four months after arriving in Cairo, 25-year-old William Borden was dead. Prior to his death, Borden had written two more words in his Bible. Underneath the words, No Reserves and No Retreats, he had written No Regrets. Well, what can we learn from the brief life of William Borden?

Well, several things stand out in my mind? First, do you draw back from doing hard things? Do you draw back from doing hard things? The life of the Christian is about doing hard things. Jesus said that in order to follow him, one must die to self and take up his cross.

Second, are you serving God where you are? Are you serving God where you are? Don't think of missions as something done on foreign soil. The mission that Christ called his disciples to began right there in their Jerusalem. William Borden served God in his youth.

He served him in his home, in his school, and in his community. Are you putting off serving God to another day? Third, are you willing to accept God's appointment and sphere for your service? Are you willing to accept God's appointment and sphere for your service? We could talk about men like John Payton, William Carey, Adoniram Judson, Hudson Taylor, David Livingston, and they motivate us as we see how God used them.

But what about the life of a man like William Borden? To die never having served God in the capacity that he desired, never having reached those goals, Would it be said of you that you served Christ along the way? Would you be content to serve God as He sees fit, to give the Word, to die, and to maybe even just be forgotten? Fourth and finally, are you willing to depart this world knowing you had served Christ even if you did so without much visible fruit? Would you be willing to depart this world knowing that you had served Christ with all of your heart, even if you did so without much visible fruit?

Are you serving Christ for the fruit that you might receive in the process, or are you serving him because he is worthy? The things that you do, is it out of love for Christ? Is it the love of Christ that compels you, that constrains you? Well my friend and Brother Pastor William Hughes stated the following in one of his sermons, None of you know, none of you know what your influence will be for Christ in your own family, in your place of work, in your local church. The law of the spiritual harvest is this, except the kernel of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abides alone.

But if it die, it will bring forth much fruit. And you may be being called to bury your life like a kernel of wheat in some small remote local church. And you may wonder, what's happening in this church? Why are we continuing to go on in this church? And God is burying your life in that work.

You are saying no to other things, no to other opportunities. God wants for you to bury your life in the work that He has called you to do. It is not glamorous. At times it can be painful and it can be very, very hard. But there is no suffering in your life.

There is no trial, no suffering that is not productive of fruit. If it dies, it will bring forth fruit. Not necessarily in the lives of other people, but it will bring forth fruit in your life. It will do something to you. Well, may God make us a people committed to the kingdom and to the lordship of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and to whatever his sovereign will might lead us to do and with whatever time he may give us to do it, a people who will serve him with no reserves, no retreats, and no regrets.

Let's pray. Our Father we thank you for your goodness to us. Lord we pray that we would be such a people. Father that we would count the cost of following you and that you would make us willing to give everything that we have to have that pearl of great price, the community of the church and her Lord Jesus Christ. Make it to be so, we pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.