Judson’s Dramatic Conversion

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, �But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn�t for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we�re called by the Divine Trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here�s our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

New Intro, Financial Support, and the Judson Topic

Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry, Mike Abendroth here. Soon and very soon, we�re going to see the King. And soon and very soon, we�re going to have a new intro for NOCO, a new outro, new equipment is getting ready to get set up, and we�re going to try to compete with Pat Abendroth and the Pactom for some fun stuff to buy and wear, working on new websites, and because of all that, we really need your financial support.

Some people still do give on Patreon. I think we have eight supporters, so thank you if you�re one of those eight supporters. Even one person, I think, gives a dollar a month. So hey, if you give a dollar a month, you get the Gospel Assurance Book for free.

Anyway, what are we going to talk about today? It wasn�t that long ago where I had a friend in town who happens to be, in my mind, the most adept Adoniram Judson scholar. He has written books about Adoniram, has studied Adoniram.

I think he probably learned Burmese to read some of the original notes. He and I went to Salem to see where Judson was commissioned and then sent off from America to I think he started off going to India, although my friend could correct me and would correct me as a friend would.

I was thinking about Adoniram Judson the other day and just his desire to preach and then what happened in his life and how he became a Christian. You know, father�s a pastor here. New England stuff is interesting to me, you know.

1633 Antinomian controversy is interesting to me and Thomas Shepard, you know, just work really hard if you want assurance and, you know, the revival didn�t happen, whatever. But I�m thinking about Adoniram Judson.

And I thought about that book called To the Golden Shore. A while ago, I did a show called 20 or the 20 or something like that, Ocean�s 20. And somebody at church, a deacon, Chuck said to me, �Mike, what are, you know, your favorite 20 books or something?

What are your top 20 books that every Christian should read And I just started writing them down. And I probably put some on the list that maybe I would switch out for something else. But for the most part, I put in books.

I put in my seven books. That�s kind of funny, I have to admit. And out of my seven books, I only wrote, let�s see, I didn�t write the Romans commentary. I wrote the introduction and then I had to be the redactor.

The Gospel Assurance, I wrote the intro, like 6 ,000 words, and I was a compiler. Things that go bump in the church, I wrote one third of it. The other two authors wrote the rest. So I�ve really only written four and a third books, but I have some stuff on parenting and other things that I�ve written, but it�s not published yet.

So we�re going to go for seven. But on the list of 20, joking aside, I had this book, �To the Golden Shore� by Courtney Anderson, subtitled, �The Life of Adoniram Judson. And I thought, you know what?

I think I need to reread this book because it was gripping. It was amazing to think in 1812, Adoniram and his wife, Anne, get on that boat in Salem and off they go. Well, I was thinking about death a lot lately for several reasons.

We�ve had some funerals in our church. There have been many funerals the last year, either COVID-related or non-COVID-related. I�m preaching through Ecclesiastes, and there�s a theme in Ecclesiastes.

Certainly the theme is fear God, or a theme. Certainly a theme is when you can enjoy simple gifts from the hand of God. There�s a theme that life under the sun, Adam�s sin affected everything, and so we�re realist as we assess the situation.

And there�s a theme, you�re going to die one day, and it�s better to go to a house of mourning. There�s a dead body there, and everybody�s there mourning the body. Could be a funeral home if you�d like, and it�s better to think about death than it is to think about, well, you�re at a party, and what do you think about?

Patriots game or whatever. Certainly you can go to feasts and parties. Certainly Jesus went to a wedding. We are not people that are trying to be hermits and asceticism rules around here. I don�t mean that at all.

Wisdom says it�s better to think about death than not to think about it. A fool ignores death. Therefore, I began to think about Judson and how he became a believer. And I�m going to talk a little bit about that today through the lens of Courtney Anderson, and I�m going to go home and reread this book.

Not all at once. It�s pretty big. 500 pages, and it is published by, I think, E .P. No, it�s published by Judson Press. Wow. Well, there you have it. Judson Press. Seriously? Valley Forge Judson Press, 1987.

1987. Original copyright, 1956. Wow. That is amazing. Judson. I long to reach the golden shore. So here, to the golden shore. Well, Judson was born, and he was not a Christian, obviously. He looked cute, but he was an innocent viper.

More viper than innocent. That�s another show. Should we even call babies innocent vipers? Unbaptized ones? Maybe. Gotcha there. It says in the book, and these are all quotes from the book, trying to get you to see the hand of God in the life of Judson, so you�ll see the hand of God in your life, and then if you�ve got loved ones, that you�ll have hope in the hand of God as well.

He knew that to his mother and father, New York was the most sinful of American cities, and the theater the ultimate in depravity. In a way, he was too much a product of their teaching to disagree with them.

But to a 20-year-old philosophical deist like himself, the immorality of the people of the stage had to be balanced against the morality and grandeur of great tragedies. So what he�s going to do is he leaves home, he leaves New England, and he goes to New York because he wants to learn how to write, and he actually was writing.

He wrote The Young Lady�s Arithmetic, and he�s going to go to New York. So you can just imagine young people go to New York for lots of reasons, or you go to the city, you get away from home, and his family wasn�t happy.

I was reading something else. �The God of the third church of Plymouth was not Adoniram�s God. He could not believe that the Bible was anything but the work of men, any more than were the Koran or even sacred writings of Buddha, great as its principles might be.

Even Jesus, he was certainly the Son of Man, but almost certainly not the Son of God, except in the sense that all men are. His father, Reverend Judson, was outraged. What had gotten into the boy? He had felt sure that at Brown, of all places, no harm would be done to his son�s soul.

Certainly these pernicious vaporizings�that�s a good band name�did not come from any of the faculty. They must have been picked up from some fellow student infected with some noisome Jacobianism blowing over from France these years.

Anyway, he was not very happy. Of course, then you get the mom involved, right? Interesting. He knows what he is believing is going to affect his mother, and of course, like a good son, she had an influence.

When finally she saw that Adoniram withstood her, as they were talking, she turned to prayers. Whenever he turned, he saw her head bowed in prayer and her heart lifting her voice brokenly, sobbing, pleading with God to change the heart of her wayward son and save him from damnation.

For Adoniram it was a little hell. He endured it for six days until on the 15th of August, mounted on a horse his father gave him as part of his inheritance. Isn�t that interesting? That�s Luke 15 all the way.

I�ll take my inheritance now. �He rode westward down a steep grade on Pleasant Street, crossed Town Brook, and slowly jogged on toward Boston, Worcester, Sheffield. Coming to Worcester. Welcome to No Compromise Radio Worcester, Mass.

He passes over the Connecticut River in Springfield and found himself in the mountains. All right. Well, what does he do? He heads to New York. He sees the upper end of Manhattan Island. He sees the Harlem River.

He wants to do all that he wants to do there in New York and it�s going to be fun, right? �For some time the life might have been fascinating. For Adoniram it was the opposite of his anticipations. If there was better theater somewhere, more like his dreams, capable of opening a road to fulfillment of his ambitions, he did not know where it was or how to find it.

Disgusted and heartsick, he left without notice one night and nursing his disappointment, made his way back to his uncle�s home in Sheffield. And, of course, he had met a man there, Ames, and I think his first name was Jacob Ames.

And Jacob Ames had confirmed all that he knew about deism. Or who knows, maybe if my memory is not serving me well and I need my friend here to tell me, maybe Ames was his friend in Brown and told him about that.

Well, we fast forward a little bit. He�s riding on and he�s headed to his uncle�s house. �As night drew on, he found himself passing through a small village. Finding the local inn, he stabled his horse and asked the innkeeper for a room.

The house was nearly full, said the landlord apologetically, but he had one next to a young man who was critically ill, perhaps dying. He might be disturbed, but, no, said Adoniram, still wrapped in his own thoughts, he would not let a few noises next door deny him a night�s rest.

After giving him something to eat, the landlord lighted Adoniram to his room and left him. Without further ado, Adoniram got into bed and waited for sleep to come. But though the night was still, he could not sleep.

In the room beyond the partition, he could hear sounds, not very loud, footsteps coming and going, a board creaking, low voices, a groan or gasp. Why can�t I read today? �These did not disturb him unduly, not even the realization that a man might be dying.

Death was commonplace in Adoniram�s New England. It might come to anyone at any age. What disturbed him was the thought that the man in the next room might not be prepared for death. Was he himself? A confusing coil of speculation unwound itself as he lay half-dreaming, half-waking, while the autumn chills stole down from the mountains and crept in through every crack and cranny of the house.

He wondered how he himself would face death. His father would welcome it as a door opening outward to immortal glory. So much as Crete had done for him. But to Adoniram, the son, the freethinker, the deist, the infidel, lying huddled under the covers, death was an exit, not entrance.

It was a door to an empty pit, to darkness darker than night, at best to extinction, at worst to what? On this matter, his philosophy was silent. It had no answer, but who knows? He had always been neat and well-groomed.

His mother had taught him to be fastidious. He cared for his own person, but he must die, and the grave was cold, dark place. His flesh crawled. Was the wet, earthly mold in the motionless body, the slow dissolution of muscle and tendon, the slower crumbling of bone, the immense weight of the soil, was this all through the endless centuries?

What part of Adoniram Judson he thought of as I? Did it go out like a flame of a candle, or did it to stay in the ground with the flesh? There was terror in these fantastically unwinding ideas, but as they presented themselves, another part of himself jeered, midnight fancies.

What a skin-deep thing this freethinking philosophy of Adoniram Judson, valedictorian, scholar, teacher, ambitious man, must be. What would the classmates at Brown say to these terrors of the night who thought of him as bold in thought?

Above all, what would Ames say? Ames, the clear-headed, skeptical, witty, talented. He imagined Ames' laughter and felt shame. When Adoniram awoke, the sun was streaming in the window. His apprehensions had vanished with darkness.

He could hardly believe he had given in to such weakness. He dressed quickly and ran downstairs looking for the innkeeper. It was past time to have breakfast, pay his reckoning, saddle his horse, and be on his way.

He found his host, asked for the bill, and, perhaps noticing the man's somber face, asked casually whether the young man in the next room was better. He is dead, was the answer. Dead? Adoniram was taken aback.

There was a heavy finality to the word. For an instant, some of his fear of the night made itself felt once more. Adoniram stammered out a few conventional phrases, common to humanity when death takes someone nearby, and asked the inevitable question, do you know who he was?

Oh, yes, a young man from a college in Providence. Name was Ames, Jacob Ames. And probably many of you know the story. Later, when he thought about this, and he contemplated what was going on, the one word that kept repeating itself in his head was lost, lost, lost.

Lost in death. Jacob Ames was lost, utterly irrevocably lost, lost to his friends, lost to the world, lost to future, lost as a puff of smoke, as lost in the infinity of air. If Ames' own views were true, neither his life nor his death had meant anything.

The coincidence of him dying on the other side of a partition from Adoniram in a remote country was simply a meaningless incident in a plan too huge and impersonal to take account of individuals. But suppose Ames had been mistaken.

Suppose the scriptures were literally true and a personal God is real. Then Jacob Ames was almost lost in a most desperate sense. For already, this moment, Ames knew his error, too late for repentance.

Knowing his mistake, regretting it with bitterness which no human could ever possibly imagine, he was experiencing already the unimaginable torments of the flames of hell. Any chance of remedy, of going back or correcting?

Lost. Eternally lost. The pattern Adoniram's shocked mind was this. It was the night thoughts back again but in a more dreadful form. The road was an ordinary country road, barely more than a trail, dusty and warm in the September sun.

The horse ambled quietly, almost unguided. The saddle leather squeaking as always. But there was an indefinable menace everywhere. Even the flaming reds against the thick evergreens on the hillside suggested hungry tongues of hell's flame licking through the forest's cover from under the granite beneath.

For that hell should open in that country in and snatch Jacob Ames, his dearest friend and guide, from the next bed. This could not, simply could not be pure coincidence. Adoniram knew his father's God very well.

He was omniscient. He knew everything. He was omnipotent. He had all power. He could foresee where Adoniram would be that night, could foresee his leaving New York, when and why he did. He could foresee that James, Jacob Ames would be where he was, fall sick, die and be damned.

More. Being all powerful, this he must have done with a purpose. For he, God, could have arranged matters otherwise. This God of the Bible, Adoniram had been taught, was an angry God, a vindictive God.

But he was a just God. He could be a loving God and he gave ample warning. If this was the real God, it was no mere coincidence that Adoniram had fallen in among rogues and left disgusted. It was no coincidence that the pious young man had been at his uncle Ephraim's house to converse with him.

It was no coincidence that Adoniram had spent this particular night at this particular inn thinking these particular thoughts. He had been warned, amply warned. Was this the real God? If so, he had a purpose for Adoniram, which Adoniram must learn to read.

In his very bones, all at once, logic or no logic, Adoniram was imbued with the feeling that the God of the Bible was the real God. Adoniram was filled with despair and dread, for Deus' logic and evidence said no.

Suddenly he reined in his horse. Without realizing it, he had been continuing the tour he planned originally. He straightened in the saddle for a moment of decision. Yes, he must find out about this once and for all.

He turned the horse in the road, spurted to a faster pace, and headed back in the direction for which he had come, homeward toward Plymouth. And that's the end of chapter five. Wow. What do you think?

It makes me want to read the rest of the book. It makes me think, oh, how great the Lord is to do that. Help him to see how there's no coincidences, how there's no chance. And before you know it, Adoniram's in seminary.

He's saved. He's in seminary. And off he goes. Hardly had he begun his new duties when he came across an old theological work, The Fourfold State by Thomas Boston. The Merrow Man, Thomas Boston. Well, then you can read more about how he went overseas and all the problems that he had, of the issues of the Golden Shore, but then also how God blessed his ministry.

Gospel Proclamation, Faith Alone, and the Value of Biographies

My name's Mike Ebendroth. If I were to write your biography, dear Christian, it might not sound exactly the same, but the object of your faith would be the exact same. One of the things I want you to remember is when you read a biography like this, or John Bunyan, or something like that, sometimes people go through all kinds of agony before they get saved.

And they're wondering, and they're thinking, and they're praying, and they're reading the Bible. And sometimes people just present it with the gospel, and they just believe right then and there. It's not a long slog of agony and thinking about self and sin.

You present them the claims that they need the gospel because they're sinners and they're going to go to hell if they die. You proclaim to them the gospel, who's the savior of sinners, the Lord Jesus, and what he's come to do and what he has done.

Then you proclaim to them the way they receive the benefits of the gospel, faith and faith alone. And of course, you could talk about the fruit and evidence of the gospel in the life of a person, because there are new creatures in Christ Jesus, and they'll have new affections and loves and obedience, etc.

But I had thought about that the other day and just had a mini recollection of what happened. And I thought, I need to find that book again that I have by Courtney Anderson, To the Golden Shore, because it's one of the 20.

And I love reading biographies, as you know, dear listeners, for lots of reasons. One, it makes me think these people were sold out for the Lord. I'd like to be more sold out. And two, more importantly, God saves sinners and these people are weak and sinful and they struggle and their wives struggle and they struggle.

And yet God doesn't struggle. God is building his church and nothing's going to stop it. And that's one of the reasons why I love biographies, because I think, look, God could use that person and the Lord could use me here in Worcester, Massachusetts, of all places.

And I don't know what the fruit of the ministry here will show in eternity. It'll all be to God's glory anyway. But I'm certain, preaching the Bible here for the last 25 years, some people have gotten saved.

God's Word has been used to convict and to conform and to confront and to encourage and to rebuke and to reprove and to educate about who Jesus is. All through somebody like me, me, just a kid from Nebraska, a sinful kid from Nebraska, who moves to Los Angeles like Judson to find more sin to do, to find more punk rock concerts and surfing, not that surfing's in and of itself wrong, and drugs, etc., etc.

I went looking for that, and while I didn't wake up wondering who in the next room died, certainly the death of my father had a dramatic effect on my life as I began to think about my own life and my own death and what is going to go on if I keep believing what I'm believing.

And so I can just see his life and mine is much more dramatic, but isn't every person that's saved, isn't that dramatic? And of course it is because God saves sinners. Has he saved you? Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved.

My name is Mike Abendroth. This is No Compromise Radio Ministry.

No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life-transforming power of God's Word through verse-by-verse exposition of the sacred text.

Our service times are Sunday morning at 10 .15 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbcchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.