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

June 28 1819 he and Four others presented themselves to the congregation lists as foreign missionaries

They had never sent a foreign missionary away from American soil And he said we're gonna 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 read down 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.

It's a mission thing. Let's just try this out a little bit Six months or 18 months or a couple 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 a

Rangoon even though it was dangerous and there began a lifelong battle in the hundred and eighty hundred and eight 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 Salvation with mercury things like that She bore him

Three children, you know his next wife bore him eight children

His third wife bore him two children of the thirteen children that he had seven

Survived the first news they got from home was two out two years and four months later

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 Jetson 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. Oh, we'll 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 and his 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

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

Had not she been on the brink of death and had her husband not died to his needs for two years his first convert

Monal 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 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

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 Wits end with Fear and not knowing how to help

She walked the two miles in the hundred and eight 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 gaunt 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 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

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

Six months later the baby dies It's now 1826 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 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 produced 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 aggrandizement of his own pride

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

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 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 a waking 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 Wayland'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

L Nathan died May 8th 1829 now He's his brother was 35 years old and ironically

That proved the turning point Because when he left

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

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 18 31

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

Let's it children die. Let's its wife die. Let's its feet be hung in the sky

It remains lone but if it dies 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 Ann And George Boardman her husband dropped dead just like Ann 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 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

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 you sail away.

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

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 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

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

I don't add an arm one last time He's 61 now the only hope of voyage

She's pregnant She can't go one man

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

Unspeakable there would be these convulsions of terrible pain ending and 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 died so hard? 15 minutes after 4 o 'clock on Friday afternoon

April 12 1850 and Naram 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

It 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

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 Thank you for listening to this resource from DesiringGod .org

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