We, Americans, love security. We pray for it, we avoid unnecessary risks, we buy insurance to maintain it, and we store up so that we will be secure for many years. And we believe, “If I’m doing God’s will, He will protect me from all physical harm.” But we forget that it was Jesus who said in John 15:20“20 Remember what I told you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also..” Jesus did God’s will perfectly and God’s will for Him was to suffer. Most, if not all, of the disciples’ lives were cut-short by beheading or crucifixion. When Jesus called Paul, He said about him, “I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.” So the Apostle Paul suffered terribly – he who is the author of 13 books of the Bible. And the Christian history thereafter reminds us that so many who knew the will of God and followed it suffered unimaginably. Today, I want to present such a man to you. I’ve never done this before, but this entire time will be devoted to a biographical sketch of a life that was given to the mission of God.

Adoniram Judson was an American missionary to Burma, or Myanmar it is called now days in the early 1800. He was one of the first foreign missionaries from America. Where we are going this summer – Thailand-, it borders Burma and I’ve been on the river that separates Burma and Thailand and when I saw Burma from the boat, immediately I thought of Adoniram Judson. It is largely because of him there are Christians in Burma. It is because a seed fell to the ground and died, now there are millions of people who are the fruit from that seed. And died ever did that seed!

When Adoniram Judson entered Burma in July, 1813 it was a hostile and utterly unreached place. With anarchic despotism, fierce war with Siam, enemy raids, constant rebellion, no religious toleration. All the previous missionaries had died or left. But Judson went there with his 23-year-old wife of 17 months. He was 24 years old and he worked there for 38 years until his death at age 61, with one trip home to New England after 33 years.

His conversion story is a remarkable story of God’s providence, but we don’t have enough time to get into it. But his story is one of a deep belief in the sovereignty of God. He said, “If I had not felt certain that every additional trial was ordered by infinite love and mercy, I could not have survived my accumulated sufferings.”

And suffer, he did. For example, after Adoniram and Ann married, two weeks later, they were on a boat to India. She bore him three children and all of them died. The first baby, nameless, was born dead just as they sailed from India to Burma. The second child, Roger, lived 17 months and died. The third, Maria, lived to be two, and outlived her mother by six months and then died. When her second child died, Ann Judson 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.'” In other words, what sustained this man and his three wives was a rock-solid confidence that God is sovereign and God is good. And all things come from his hand for the good – the incredibly painful good – of his children.

Judson entered seminary soon after his conversion and made solemn dedication of himself to God. The fire was burning in him for missions. In 1810, Judson and others presented themselves to the Congregationalists for missionary service in the East. He met Ann that same day and fell in love. After knowing Ann for one month he declared his intention to become a suitor, and wrote to her father the following letter:

“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; … to every kind of want and distress; to degradation, insult, persecution, and perhaps a violent death. Can you consent to all this?”

They were married a year and a half later in 1812, and sailed for India 12 days later with several other missionaries. After a time in India they chose to risk Burma and arrived there a year later. There began a life-long battle in the 108-degree heat with cholera, malaria, dysentery, and unknown miseries that would take two of Judson’s wives and seven of his 13 children, and colleague after colleague in death.

Eight years into their mission Ann became ill and had to sail home. She didn’t return for 2 ½ years. And when she arrived he had not heard from her for 10 months – didn’t know whether she recovered or died! Judson labored to learn the language, translate the Bible, and do evangelism on the streets. Six years after they arrived, they baptized their first convert, Maung Nau. The sowing was long and hard. The reaping even harder for years.

Not long after he and Ann got to Burma, he was accused of being a British spy and was put in prison. He suffered horribly. One time, Judson already weak and emaciated was driven in chains across the burning tropical sands, until his back was cut open by the lash and his feet covered with blisters, he fell to the ground and prayed that God would give him death. For almost two years he was locked up in a prison even animals wouldn’t be able to survive. He was bound with three pairs of chains and his feet were tied in stocks which at times were suspended in air, so that only his shoulders touched the ground. The room that he shared with many other prisoners were crowded without a window and felt like a fiery furnace under the scorching heat of the tropical sun. The stench was terrible and rats ran around everywhere. Daily, prisoners were dragged out to execution and Judson many times wondered when he would be next.

Judson would not have survived the prison if it were not for his lovely wife Ann. As often as possible she bribed the jailer and then, when it got dark, she crept to the door of Judson’s den, brought food and whispered words of hope and consolation. Finally, for three long weeks, she didn’t come visit Judson. When she came back to visit Judson, she had in her hands a new born baby which explained her absences. But little Maria, their third child, was smitten with smallpox while Judson was still in prison, and Ann found herself unable to care for the baby. Ann took her baby up and down the streets of the city, pleading for mercy and for milk, “you women who have babies, have mercy on my baby and nurse her!”

Finallly, after two years Judson was released from prison. When he got home, the first thing he saw was a Burman woman squatting in the ashes beside a pan of coals and holding on her knees an emaciated baby, so skinny and sick that he didn’t recognize it as his own. Across from the woman and his baby was a human object that was no more recognizable than the baby. The face was ghastly pale and the body shrunken to the last degree of emaciation. There lay the faithful and devoted wife who had followed him from prison to prison trying  everything she can to encourage him. Judson buried Ann not too long after that, and Maria, their third daughter also died six months later at age 2.

The psychological effects of theses losses were devastating. Self-doubt overtook his mind, and he wondered if he had become a missionary for ambition and fame, not humility and self-denying love. He dropped his Old Testament translation work, the love of his life, and retreated more and more from people and from “anything that might conceivably support pride or promote his pleasure.”

He refused to eat outside the mission. It had been 15 years now that he had been in Burma, and on the second anniversary of Ann’s death, he lived in total isolation. He wrote in one letter home to Ann’s relatives: “My tears flow at the same time over the forsaken grave of my dear love and over the loathsome sepulcher of my own heart.” He had a grave dug beside the hut and sat beside it contemplating the stages of the body’s dissolution. He retreated for forty days alone further into the Tiger-infested jungle, and wrote in one letter that he felt utter spiritual desolation. “God is to me the Great Unknown. I believe in him, but I find him not.”

His brother, Elnathan, died in 1829 at the age of 35. Ironically, this proved the turning point of Judson’s recovery, because he had been an unbeliever and Judson had been praying for his salvation. And he heard the news that he gave his life to Christ before he died and this brought hope into Judson’s heart again.

Judson remarried 8 years after Ann died. Sarah Boardman, a missionary widow. They had eight children. Five survived childhood. She was a gifted partner and knew the language better than any but himself.

But 11 years later she was so sick that they both set sail for America with the three oldest children. They left the three youngest behind, one of whom died before Judson returned. Judson had not been to America now for 33 years and was only returning for the sake of his wife. As they rounded the tip of Africa, Sarah died. The ship dropped anchor at St. Helena Island long enough to dig a grave and bury a wife and mother and then sail on.

This time Adoniram does not descend into the depths as before. He has his children. But even more, his sufferings have disengaged him from hoping for too much in this world. He was learning how to hate his life in this world without bitterness or depression. He had one passion: to return and give his life for Burma. So his stay in the states was long enough to get his children settled and find a ship back.

To everyone’s amazement, Judson fell in love a third time, this time with Emily Chubbuck and married her. She was 29; he was 57. She was a famous writer and left her fame and writing career to go with Judson to Burma. They had one child, but then the old sicknesses attacked Adoniram one last time. The only hope was to send the desperately ill Judson on a voyage. On April 3, 1850, when Judson was 61, they carried Adoniram onto a ship bound for the Isle of France with one friend to care for him. In his misery he would be roused from time to time by terrible pain ending in vomiting. One of his last sentences was: “How few there are who . . . who die so hard!” A few days later, Judson died at sea, away from all his family and Burmese church.

“The crew assembled quietly. The larboard port was opened. There were no prayers. . . . The captain gave the order. The coffin slid through the port into the night. The location was latitude 13 degrees North, longitude 93 degrees East, almost in the eastward shadow of the Andaman Islands, and only a few hundred miles west of the mountains of Burma. The ship sailed on toward the Isle of France.”

Ten days later Emily gave birth to their second child who died at birth. She learned four months later that her husband was dead. She returned to New England that next January and died of tuberculosis three years later at the age of 37.

The Bible was done. The dictionary was done. Hundreds of converts were leading the church. And today there are close to about 3,700 congregations of Baptists in Myanmar who trace their origin to this man’s labors of love. 1.9 million Christians are there because of Adoniram Judson. … Was it worth it? Not to anyone who does not believe in the life after death. But to those who believe, his life resembled so closely the life His master who was a man of sorrows and stricken with grief. And just as Christ gave his life as a seed only to bear abundant fruit, Judson followed His master and gave his life as a seed so that others could benefit from his sacrifice.

John 12:24-25, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. 25Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Christian life is to be a seed – to die to the self so that others could live.  Judson demonstrated this well. Let us learn from him.