The Sadhu Who Silenced the Oxford Dons

In 1920, Sadhu Sundar Singh — a former Sikh from Punjab who had converted to Christianity after a vision of Christ at age fifteen — arrived in England wearing nothing but a simple saffron robe and bare sandals. Oxford University invited him to speak, expecting perhaps a curiosity, a novelty from the mission field.

The lecture hall was packed with theologians who had spent decades parsing Greek verb tenses and debating the finer points of Pauline rhetoric. Sundar Singh stood before them without notes, without academic credentials, without a single published paper to his name. He simply spoke of walking with Jesus through the Himalayan passes, of the prayers he whispered while nearly freezing to death on a Tibetan mountain trail, of the peace that flooded him in a dark well where persecutors had thrown him among rotting corpses.

When he finished, the room sat in stunned silence. One professor later admitted, "He knows Christ in a way our libraries cannot teach us."

The dons had spent lifetimes accumulating knowledge about God. Sundar Singh had something they could not acquire through study alone — he had knowledge from God, breathed into him by the Holy Spirit in suffering, solitude, and surrender.

Paul told the Corinthians that God's deepest truths are not discerned by the sharpest intellect but revealed by the Spirit to those humble enough to receive them. The natural mind examines. The Spirit illuminates. And sometimes a barefoot sadhu sees further than an entire faculty of scholars.