Adoniram Judson (1788-1850)
This two hundred and thirty page book, is the third that I have managed to finish in one sitting. The details are simply too incomprehensible and exhausting to process. It is a different brand of Christianity from what we commonly know today. Not the type that reaches safely from a distance, but charges head on into the fray. At times it seems Adoniram and his wife, Ann, were on their own. The difficulties, sickness, and death, all continue to pile up one after the other in an unending and worsening fashion. The mission wears on long for years, and with every turn, life-threatening danger, or tragedy.
As you read this short summary of the life of Adoniram Judson, you will see that God indeed prevails, and that He is in total control of even the minute of circumstance. It was incredible to read how God saved the translations when Adoniram never imagined to see them again. The fruit of His sacrifice for Burma, testify of God's sovereign hand. The translation of the Bible that Adoniram Judson worked so hard to complete remains to this day the only translation of the Bible into Burmese.*
The kingdom of God is advanced in great strides whenever a man is moved to see beyond the visible into the eternal, and says to himself, "I give thee back the life I owe, and lay in dust life's glory dead." In truth, we find it difficult to let go of anything we assume to be ours. If you wish to know what a man's object of affections are, you need not look further than what he devotes most of his time to, and to that which he gives much of his resources to. Did not our Lord reveal that our heart is held by what is most precious to us (Luke 12:34), and that we can only love one and not two masters (Matthew 6:24)?
What is incomprehensible to the natural man is perfectly natural to the heavenly quickened. We all are born blind. But these, like Bartimaeus, even while Jesus yet called, cast off the only thing they have in this world, their very lives, to run to Christ in obedience.
We think of following Christ today at a distance, not beside him. Of affirming His teachings, not obeying them. We pick and we choose, which command would cost us less, not that which would cause us to depend only on Christ. We love him, and us. That is why it is impossible the weight of bearing fruit for the kingdom's sake, with the cost that comes with it, apart from first, dying to self. Christ bore that weight in leading us down that narrow road. We must bear the weight of following Him in the same.
The first question I should ask myself is the same that accompanies me to the end, "What think ye of Christ?" (Matthew 22:42)
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