Great Christian Biographies with John Piper: Adoniram Judson, part 3

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Covenant Reformed Baptist Church Sunday School Great Christian Biographies with John Piper: Adoniram Judson, part 3

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June 28 1819 he and Four others presented themselves to the congregation lists as foreign missionaries
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They had never sent a foreign missionary away from American soil And he said we're gonna start it
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And if you don't we'll go to the London Missionary Society and get them to do it and so they voted to do it
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The same day he was ordained to that he met Anne and fell in love
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Now to show you the fiber of Which this tree was made?
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Both the man and the woman listened to this letter of courting sent to her father
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I Have now to ask whether you can consent to part with your daughter early next spring
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To see her no more in this world Whether you can consent to her departure and her subjection to the hardships and sufferings of missionary life
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Whether you can consent to her exposure to the dangers of the ocean to the fatal influence of southern climate of India to every kind of want and distress to degradation insult persecution and perhaps a violent death
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Can you consent to all this for the sake of him who left his heavenly home and died for her and For you for the sake of perishing immortal souls for the sake of Zion and the glory of God Can you consent to all this in hope of soon meeting your daughter in the world of glory with the crown of righteousness?
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Brightened with the Acclamations of praise which shall read down to her Savior from the heathens saved through her means from eternal woe and despair the mindset
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Among us in America today is so fragile We'll go try this out.
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It's a mission thing. Let's just try this out a little bit Six months or 18 months or a couple years.
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Let's try this out Her father said to her
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In modern English, it's your call Which was amazing and she wrote to a friend.
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I Feel willing and expect if nothing in Providence prevents to spend my days in this world in heathen lands
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Yes, Lydia. I have about come to the determination to give up all my comforts and Enjoyments here sacrifice my affection to relatives and friends and to go where God in his providence
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Shall see fit to place me a year and a half later
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February 5 1812 They sailed for India I might have my dates wrong there you can check it in the manuscript they sailed for India they went to a
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Rangoon even though it was dangerous and there began a lifelong battle in the hundred and eighty hundred and eight degree
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Heat with cholera and malaria and dysentery and no medicines to speak of except some ones that you wouldn't even want to think about Salvation with mercury things like that She bore him
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Three children, you know his next wife bore him eight children
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His third wife bore him two children of the thirteen children that he had seven
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Survived the first news they got from home was two out two years and four months later
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This is one of the deaths I Can imagine a missionary today getting bent out of shape if an email isn't there the first week?
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Two years before they heard anything from anybody they died to that He didn't go home for 33 years
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Missionary time in those days was very different than our time We sort of assume now that all time is the same everywhere in the world because of Jetson email then
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Missionary time was like this if you get sick enough You don't take a 10 -day
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Antibiotic Regimen you get on a boat and disappear for six months
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From your wife or your husband in the hopes that salt water might help
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That's what you could do That's how time. Oh, we'll have a little six -month interval here before we pick up again and go on a
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Boat ride that's supposed to make two weeks up to the northern part winds up taking six months Because of the storm that blew himself if you were married and You loved your wife
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And you felt like you needed sex often enough and his departure when she was sick for two years
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Would be a death If you chased she went back for two years.
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She was so sick. She went to New England One of the joys that sustain you in those days is knowing that God's up to something good
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That particular Example is that she got well She came back and guess what she had done while she was in New England getting well
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She wrote a book Called an account of the American Baptist mission to the
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Burman Empire and it exploded on the American Baptist scene Raising up hundreds of congregations ready to go ready to give ready to pray which would have never happened
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Had not she been on the brink of death and had her husband not died to his needs for two years his first convert
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Monal baptized six years after he came long sowing harder reaping and then 1831 arrives and God honors
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The dying and the self -hating as it were listen to this quote 1831 he arrived there in 1813
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The spirit of inquiry is spreading everywhere through the whole length and breadth of the land
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We have distributed nearly 10 ,000 tracts giving to none But those who ask
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I presume there have been 6 ,000 applications at the house Some come two or three months journey from the borders of Siam and China Sir, we hear that there's an eternal hell.
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We're afraid of it Do you have a writing to tell us how to escape it others from the frontiers of Cathay?
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100 miles north of Ava sir. We have seen a writing that tells about the eternal
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God Are you the man who gives away such writings if so pray give us one for we know
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For we want to know the truth before we die others From the interior of the country where the name of Jesus is little known.
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Are you the Jesus Christ man? Give us a writing that tells us about Jesus Christ That's an excerpt from Judson's own writing however
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Between 1813 in 1831 the price had been absolutely enormous in 1823 and and Adoniram moved from the coastal town of Rangoon up about 300 miles in to Ava the capital in the hopes that there might be more influence with the
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Despotic Emperor who could lop your head off in a minute And little did they know that when they got there
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Britain was going to attack Rangoon, which they did
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June May of that year 1823 immediately everybody
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Western was suspect and thrown into prison and Judson Was put in prison dragged away from his home and his crying wife who was pregnant at the time he was
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Bound in his feet and every night a bamboo pole was put through the binding on his feet and all the other prisoners
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Lifted up above the ground so that only his shoulders and his head was on the ground and every night
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He was hung that way. She was almost at Wits end with Fear and not knowing how to help
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She walked the two miles in the hundred and eight degree heat over and over again every day to the palace pleading for the
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Westerners that they're not spies and could they please have some mercy and She got some mercy and they were allowed to go out into the court during the daytime
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But the vermin had so infested their hair from the rotting food that they had to be shaved
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Bald and still they were hung up at night Some months later almost a year
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They were suddenly whisked away to another village prison gaunt hollow eyes dressed in rags
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Crippled from the torture and they laid them bound them and this time their feet
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Open with wounds were tortured by the mosquitoes that would come in at night off the off the rice patties and just drive them to Distraction with screams because it hurt so bad
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She went with the baby who had been born by this time following him because without somebody to help
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Nobody would take care of you in prison providing food while she's trying to nurse this baby She became as gaunt and thin as I didn't admire him her milk dried up He pleaded with mercy for mercy to the to the jailer and the jailer let him at night
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Go out if his wife would stay there and take the baby to women begging them to nurse the baby
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So that the baby would live as he walked through the village and then suddenly 17 months into the imprisonment he is released because they need him as a translator to broker the negotiations with Britain And now he's freed and 11 months later and dies
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Six months later the baby dies It's now 1826 he had said in prison
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It is possible. My life will be spared if so With what ardor
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I will pursue my work if not His will be done
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The door will be opened for others who would do the work better So God had given him strength
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Confidence in the sovereignty of God had given him strength through the imprisonment But now the darkness began to fall and oh did it fall
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He heard in July Three months after the death of his little girl that his father had died eight months earlier and all these losses produced psychological effects of Devastating Proportion self -doubt began to overtake him
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He began to doubt that he was a believer doubt that he had come out for any other reason than the aggrandizement aggrandizement of his own pride
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He began to read Catholic mystics like Madame Guillaume and Fenelon and Thomas a campus who led him to do solitary ascetic efforts in a kind of Self -mortification trying to lacerate himself and somehow discover
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God again He dropped entirely his Old Testament translation work, which had been the love of his life
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He retreated more and more from people from anything that might conceivably support pride or promote his pleasure
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He refused to eat outside the mission compound He destroyed all his letters that had been sent to him of any commendation
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He formally in a letter to the Baptist magazine renounced his his honorary doctorate from Brown University He gave away all of his private wealth, which was $6 ,000 at the time to the
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Baptist board He took a cut in his salary He built a little hut out in the jungle and moved out there to live all by himself near Mulmaine and on October 24 1828 the second anniversary of Anne's death
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He lived in total isolation Moved in he dug a grave beside the hut and sat in front of the grave contemplating his own
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Dissolution in the hope that somehow there would be a waking awakening of spiritual life in his soul
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He ordered all of his letters in New England destroyed, which is why we have so little in Wayland's biography
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It's almost all oral and He kept a legal document sent by his sister refusing to sign it until she provided legal evidence that all of his letters had been
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Destroyed which they were It was a time of absolute spiritual
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Desolation he said in a letter God is to me a great unknown.
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I Believe in him and I find him and then his brother
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L Nathan died May 8th 1829 now He's his brother was 35 years old and ironically
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That proved the turning point Because when he left
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L Nathan he could remember with that little boy. I mean this teenage boy walking with him toward the boat pleading with his brother to believe in Jesus and he wouldn't do it and So he'd left behind up an unbelieving brother and the letter that brought the news of the death told him he died
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Believing and it totally changed his attitude and God used the death of his brother in the faith to say
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All right, I will move forward It's now 18 31
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You think that's an accident? That's design the outpouring of 1831
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Corresponds with the end of the darkness the end of the loss Endured in faith unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies
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Let's it children die. Let's its wife die. Let's its feet be hung in the sky
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It remains lone but if it dies They will come from China to say are you the
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Jesus Christ man? Are you the one who can tell us how to escape hell
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Speak to us give us some writing well, that's
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The beginning of his sufferings And I'm not going to spend too much time with the rest she died eight years later
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Another whole story intersects some of you read perhaps the biography about Sarah Boardman What a legacy
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Sarah Boardman had come out the same age as Ann And George Boardman her husband dropped dead just like Ann dropped dead
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Sarah Boardman didn't go home She took her little baby on her back and walked into the tiger infested jungles and preached among the
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Karen people And then he married her
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He found out that she was a widow he knew he was a widower he looked at this legacy
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He wrote her one of those letters She was the kind of woman just like Ann was it said that's my kind of man and they married and in 11 years six eight children later two of them dead
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Six children. She is so sick now Sarah. Her only hope is a voyage
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And everybody said it would be absolute brutal not to go with her and So he broke his pledge not to go home
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Got on the boat with Sarah to head for New England The three oldest kids they took on the boat the three youngest kids
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They left behind one of whom died before his daddy ever saw him again And as they rounded the tip of Africa Sarah dies
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Three children a husband on the high seas going home
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They're just short of st. Helena the boat docks
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Just long enough to dig a grave And that's the end of Sarah And you you sail away.
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I'll tell you when I read that I like a baby Can't leave her. Oh, yeah, she's dead, but you just can't go away like that the three kids crying on his neck and He comes home
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Which isn't home, of course at all 33 years nothing was the same. His mother was dead.
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His daddy was dead his sister had not changed one thing in his room for 33 years and she didn't until the day she died and then as he was packing to go back all he dreamed about was finishing his course in Burma and So as he was getting ready to go he met by arrangement
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Emily 29 years old and He is 57
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That's all I am And they fall in love she's a writer a very famous writer of children's books and novels and it was an absolute scandal
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Which he didn't care a rip about he had found another one of those wild -eyed wonderful women
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Who was willing to give up everything? And go with this man and God in his mercy
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Gave them four of the happiest years of their lives She wrote on her first anniversary from Burma it has been far the happiest year of my life and What is in my eyes still more important?
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My husband says it has been among the happiest of his. I Never met with any man who could talk so well day after day on every subject religious literary scientific political and nice baby talk
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They had one child and then the old sicknesses attacked
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I don't add an arm one last time He's 61 now the only hope of voyage
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She's pregnant She can't go one man
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Thomas Rani is put on the boat with him and they head for the Isle of France the healthiest place in the east the suffering is absolutely
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Unspeakable there would be these convulsions of terrible pain ending and vomiting
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Over and over again, that's where I got the title for the message one of his last sentences were how few there are
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Who died so hard? 15 minutes after 4 o 'clock on Friday afternoon
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April 12 1850 and Naram Judson died at sea away from all his family and all of his church
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The crew assembled quietly in the evening the larboard port was opened
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There were no prayers It was a totally pagan crew The captain gave the order the coffin slid through the port into the night location latitude 13 degrees north longitude 93 degrees east a few hundred miles west of Burma and the
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Aristide Marie sailed on ten days later
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Emily gave birth to a dead baby four months later.
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She went home and Three years later. She died at age 37 broken in health with tuberculosis herself
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The Bible was done The dictionary was done Hundreds of converts were leading the church and today 3 ,700 congregations in the
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Burmese Baptist Convention So brothers my closing plea life is fleeting brothers
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It in a very short time You will give an account not only to how you have shepherded your flock
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But how you have obeyed the Great Commission Many of the peoples of the world are without any indigenous
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Christian movement today Christ isn't enthroned there his grace
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Is not known there The people are perishing there and Most of them don't want you to come at least they think they don't they're hostile to Christian missions and Today that's the final frontier.
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That's what's left to be done in obedience to the Lord Jesus behold,
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I Send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves
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Some of you they will put to death You will be hated by all for my namesake
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But not a hair of your head will perish I Just ask you brothers as we close
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Are you sure? That God wants you to finish your course in this church saturated
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American soil or Might he be calling you to fill up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ and to die
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Like a seed falling into the ground so that it might not remain alone
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But bear much fruit or to hate your life in this world so that you may keep it forever
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Listen to this closing word from Judson writing a letter to missionary candidates Remember a large portion of those who come out on the mission to the east die within five years after leaving their native land
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Walk softly therefore death is narrowly watching your steps
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So the question brothers is Not whether you will die.
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The question is whether the death you die Will bear much fruit Thank you for listening to this resource from DesiringGod .org
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