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

Judson’s Call to Foreign Missions and His Marriage to Anne

June 28, 1819, he and four others presented themselves to the Congregationalists as foreign missionaries. They had never sent a foreign missionary away from American soil. And he said, we're going to start it.

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. The same day he was ordained to that, he met Anne and fell in love. Now, to show you the fiber of which this tree was made, both the man and the woman listened to this letter of courting sent to her father.

I have now to ask whether you can consent to part with your daughter early next spring 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, 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.

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 brightened with the acclamations of praise which shall redound to her savior from the heathens saved through her means from eternal woe and despair?

The mindset among us in America today is so fragile.

We'll go try this out, this mission thing.

We'll just try this out a little bit, six months or 18 months or a couple of years.

Let's try this out.

Her father said to her in modern English, it's your call, which was amazing. And she wrote to a friend, I feel willing and expect if nothing in Providence prevents to spend my days in this world in heathen lands.

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 shall see fit to place me.

A year and a half later, 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 Rangoon, even though it was dangerous.

And there began a lifelong battle in 180, 108 degree 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, salivation with mercury, things like that.

She bore him three children, as you know. His next wife bore him eight children. His third wife bore him two children. Of the 13 children that he had, seven survived. The first news they got from home was two years and four months later.

Missionary Suffering, Delayed News, and the Power of Sacrificial Love

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, two years before they heard anything from anybody. They died to that. He didn't go home for 33 years.

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 jets and email. Then missionary time was like this. If you get sick enough, you don't take a 10 day antibiotic regimen.

You get on a boat and disappear for six months from your wife. Or your husband in the hopes that salt water might help.

That's what you could do.

That's how time will have a little six month interval here before we pick up again and go on. A 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 and you felt like you needed sex often enough, Anne's departure when she was sick for two years would be a death. If you chased, she went back for two years.

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. 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.

She wrote a book called An Account of the American Baptist Mission to the Berman 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 had not she been on the brink of death and had her husband not died to his needs for two years.

His first convert, Mong Nau, baptized six years after he came. Long sowing, harder reaping, and then 1831 arrives and God honors the dying and the self-hating.

As it were.

Listen to this quote, 1831. He arrived there in 1813. The spirit of inquiry is spreading everywhere through the whole length and breadth of the land. We have distributed nearly 10 ,000 tracts, giving to none but those who ask.

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. We're afraid of it. Do you have a writing to tell us how to escape it?

Others from the frontiers of Cathay, 100 miles north of Ava. Sir, we have seen a writing that tells about the eternal God. Are you the man who gives away such writings? If so, pray, give us one for we know, 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. 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, between 1813 and 1831, the price had been absolutely enormous. In 1823, Anne 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 despotic emperor who could lop your head off in a minute.

And little did they know that when they got there, Britain was going to attack Rangoon, which they did. June, May of that year, 1823. Immediately, everybody 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 bound in his feet and every night a bamboo pole was put through the binding on his feet and all the other prisoners lifted up above the ground so that only his shoulders and his head was on the ground.

And every night he was hung that way. She was almost at wit's end with fear and not knowing how to help. She walked the two miles in 108 degree heat over and over again every day to the palace, pleading for the 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. But the vermin had so infested their hair from the rotting food that they had to be shaved bald. And still they were hung up at night.

Some months later, almost a year, they were suddenly whisked away to another village prison, got hollow eyes, dressed in rags, crippled from the torture, and they laid them, bound.

Them.

And this time their feet 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.

She went with the baby who had been born by this time, following him, because without somebody to help, 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 Adeniram.

Her milk dried up. He pleaded with mercy for mercy to the to the jailer and the jailer let him at night go out if his wife would stay there and take the baby to women, begging them to nurse the baby 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. And six months later, the baby dies. It's now 18, 26. He had said in prison, it is possible my life will be spared. If so, with what ardor I will pursue my work.

If not, his will be done. The door will be opened for others who would do the work better. So God had given him strength, confidence in the sovereignty of God had given him strength through the imprisonment.

Spiritual Desolation, Self-Mortification, and the Death of His Brother

But now the darkness began to fall. And, oh, did it fall. 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 produce psychological effects of devastating proportion.

Self-doubt began to overtake him. He began to doubt that he was a believer, doubt that he had come out for any other reason than the aggrandizement of his own pride. He began to read Catholic mystics like Madame Guillaume and Fenelon and Thomas Akempas, who led him to do solitary ascetic efforts in a kind of self-mortification, trying to lacerate himself and somehow discover God again.

He dropped entirely his Old Testament translation work, which had been the love of his life. He retreated more and more from people, from anything that might conceivably support pride or promote his pleasure.

He refused to eat outside the mission compound. He destroyed all his letters that had been sent to him of any commendation. He formally, in a letter to the Baptist magazine, renounced his honorary doctorate from Brown University.

He gave away all of his private wealth, which was $6 ,000 at the time, to the 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. He lived in total isolation, moved in. He dug a grave beside the hut and sat in front of the grave, contemplating his own dissolution in the hope that somehow there would be awakening of spiritual life in his soul.

He ordered all of his letters in New England destroyed, which is why we have so little.

In Whelan's biography, 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 destroyed, which they were. It was a time of absolute spiritual desolation.

He said in a letter, God is to me a great unknown. I believe in him and I find him. And then his brother El Nathan died May 8, 1829.

Now, he's his brother was 35 years old.

And ironically, that proved the turning point. Because when he left El Nathan, he could remember with that little boy, I mean, a 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 left behind an unbelieving brother. And the letter that brought the news of his death told him he died believing. And it totally changed his attitude. And God used the death of his brother in the faith to say, all right, I will move forward.

It's now 1831.

You think that's an accident?

That's design.

The outpouring of 1831 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, lets its children die, lets its wife die, lets its feet be hung in the sky.

It remains alone. But if it does. They will come from China to say, are you the Jesus Christ, man? Are you the one who can tell us how to escape hell?

Speak to us.

Give us some writing. Well, that's the beginning of his sufferings. And I'm not going to spend too much time with the rest. She died eight years later. Another whole story intersects. Some of you read, perhaps, the biography about Sarah Boardman.

What a legacy. Sarah Boardman had come out the same age as Anne. And George Boardman, her husband, dropped dead just like Anne dropped dead. 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 Karen people.

And then he married her. He found out that she was a widow. He knew he was a widower. He looked at this legacy. He wrote her one of those letters. She was the kind of woman, just like Anne was, that said, that's my kind of man.

And they married. And in 11 years, six, eight children later, two of them dead, six children. She is so sick now, Sarah. Her only hope is a voyage. And everybody said it would be absolute brutal not to go with her.

And so he broke his pledge not to go home. Got on the boat with Sarah to head for New England. The three oldest kids they took on the boat. The three youngest kids they left behind. One of whom died before his daddy ever saw him again.

And as they rounded the tip of Africa, Sarah dies. Three children, a husband on the high seas going home. They're just short of St. Helena. The boat docks just long enough to dig a grave. And that's the end of Sarah.

And you sail away. I tell you, when I read that, I cried like a baby.

You can't leave her. Oh, yeah, she's dead, but you just can't go away like that.

And the three kids crying on his neck. And he comes home. Which isn't home, of course, at all. 33 years, nothing was the same. His mother was dead. 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, Emily, 29 years old.

And he is 57. That's how old 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. Which he didn't care a rip about. He had found another one of those wild eyed, wonderful women.

Who was willing to give up everything. And go with this man. And God, in his mercy, 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, 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.

They had one child. And then the old sicknesses attacked Adenarum one last time. He's 61 now. The only hope of voyage.

She's pregnant.

She can't go. One man, Thomas Ranney, 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 unspeakable. There would be these convulsions of terrible pain, ending in vomiting.

Over and over again. That's where I got the title for the message. One of his last sentences were. How few there are who die so hard. 15 minutes after four o 'clock on Friday afternoon, April 12, 1850.

Adenarum Judson died at sea, away from all his family and all of his church. The crew assembled quietly in the evening. The larboard port was opened. 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 Aristide Marie sailed on.

Ten days later, Emily gave birth to a dead baby. Four months later, she went home. And three years later, she died at age 37, broken in health with tuberculosis herself. The Bible was done. The dictionary was done.

Hundreds of converts were leading the church. And today, 3 ,700 congregations in the Burmese Baptist Convention. So, brothers, my closing plea. Life is fleeting. Brothers, in a very short time, you will give an account not only to how you have shepherded your flock, but how you have obeyed the Great Commission.

Many of the peoples of the world are without any indigenous Christian movement today. Christ isn't enthroned there. His grace 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. That's what's left to be done in obedience to the Lord Jesus.

Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. Some of you, they will put to death. You will be hated by all for my namesake, but not a hair of your head will perish. I just ask you, brothers, as we close, are you sure that God wants you to finish your course?

In this church saturated American soil, or might he be calling you to fill up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ and to die like a seed falling into the ground so that it might not remain alone, but bear much fruit or to hate your life in this world so that you may keep it forever.

Forever.

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.

Walk softly, therefore, death is narrowly watching your steps. So the question, brothers, is not whether you will die. The question is whether the death you die will bear much fruit.

Closing Exhortation on the Great Commission and Dying to Bear Fruit

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