“Living for Jesus, wherever I am,
Doing each duty in His holy Name;
Willing to suffer affliction and loss,
Deeming each trial a part of my cross.”
Doing each duty in His holy Name;
Willing to suffer affliction and loss,
Deeming each trial a part of my cross.”
During my stay in Plymouth, MA, I visited the grave of the American Baptist missionary, Adoniram Judson. What an amazing man this was! Oh that God would give us more men who are willing to sacrifice everything for the gospel of Christ – Oh that I would be such a man!
John Piper writes,
“The story of Adoniram Judson’s losses is almost overwhelming. Just when you think the last one was the worst, and he could endure no more, another comes. In fact, it would be overwhelming if we could not see it all from God’s long historical view. The seed that died a thousand times has given life in Myanmar (Burma) to an extraordinary movement to Christ.”
John Piper, Filling up the Afflictions of Christ: The Cost of Bringing the Gospel to the Nations in the Lives of William Tyndale, Adoniram Judson, and John Paton, p. 85
After describing the terrible environment of Burma, Piper writes,
“But Judson went there with his twenty-three-year-old wife of seventeen months. He was twenty-four years old, and he worked there for thirty-eight years until his death at age sixty-one, with one trip home to New England after thirty-three years. The price he paid was immense. He was a seed that fell into the ground and died again and again…May God use the life of Adoniram Judson to stir many of us to give our lives to this great cause.”
John Piper, Filling up the Afflictions of Christ: The Cost of Bringing the Gospel to the Nations in the Lives of William Tyndale, Adoniram Judson, and John Paton, p. 85-87
What a man this was! But consider his first wife Ann as well.
When their second child Roger died (their first was stillborn), Ann wrote:
“Our hearts were bound up with this child; we felt he was our earthly all, our only source of innocent recreation in this heathen land. But God saw it was necessary to remind us of our error, and to strip us of our only little all. O, may it not be vain that he has done it. May we so improve it that he will stay his hand and say ‘It is enough.’”
Anderson, To the Golden Shore, p. 193
Maybe even more remarkable is the fact that she married Judson, who wrote the following to her father asking for her hand in marriage after only knowing her for one month:
“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 the 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 heathens saved, through her means, from eternal woe and despair?”
Ibid. p. 83
Ann later wrote,
“I feel willing, and expect, if nothing in Providence prevents, to spend my days in this world in heathen lands. Yes, Lydia, I have come to the determination to give up all my comforts and enjoyments here, sacrifice my affection to relatives and friends, and go where God, in his Providence, shall see fit to place me.”
Ibid. p. 84.
May God give us such Daughters of Zion as this today!
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