Legacies of Light: Adoniram Judson Part 2)

A young man asks a father for his daughter’s hand with a promise most would never make: expect hardship, insult, and maybe a violent death. That stark beginning sets the course for Adoniram and Ann Judson’s life of conviction, where truth outran comfort and a clear call survived the loss of money, safety, and applause. We follow their voyage where long hours in Scripture reshaped their beliefs, cost them their support, and sent them to Burma to start from nothing—no grammar, no dictionary, no church—only the resolve to build a language bridge strong enough to carry the gospel.

What unfolds is both brutal and beautiful. Years of quiet work yield almost no visible fruit; persecution raises the stakes; the emperor tosses a tract to the floor; a child dies; a prison cell turns nights into torture; and grief carves out a hollow in Adoniram’s soul that swallows even joy. He steps back from honors, digs his own grave, and writes that God is the great unknown. Then a letter about his brother’s last‑minute faith lights a small fire. He returns to the desk, to translation, and to a patience forged by suffering. The tide shifts. Interest grows. A second marriage steadies the home. Among the Karens—keepers of oral traditions about a Creator, a tempter, and a promised deliverer—thousands travel for months to ask for writings that show the way of escape. Twelve years had seen eighteen baptisms; one year will bring more than a thousand.

The legacy stretches far beyond numbers. Adoniram completes the Burmese Bible; grammars and dictionaries rest on his groundwork; and churches multiply where none stood. By his death at sixty‑one, hundreds of congregations gather, and estimates count over two hundred thousand believers across Burma. He returns to America only briefly and whispers the gospel when crowds beg for adventure tales, a quiet refusal that speaks louder than fame. This is a story for anyone weighing cost against calling, wondering if endurance matters when results lag. It says that a buried seed can outlive a lifetime and that conviction, language, and love can reshape a nation.

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Chapters

• 0:57 A Proposal That Counts The Cost
• 5:02 Conviction At Sea And Becoming Baptists
• 7:06 Rangoon: Language, Loss, And First Fruit
• 10:21 Prison, Grief, And Hollow Silence
• 12:57 Descent Into Darkness And A Flicker Of Hope
• 15:32 Translation, Return, And Quiet Fame
• 19:49 The Karens And A Sudden Harvest
• 22:35 Legacy Counted In Lives And Language
• 25:01 Three Lessons From A Buried Life

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:37

He retreated from anything that might promote any sense of happiness or pleasure. He refused to eat with those outside the mission station. He then built a hut some distance from his mission compound, deep in the jungle, dangerous. He even dug next to the hut an open grave. He would write in his journal, God is to me the great unknown. I believe in him, but I cannot find it. On the same day he presented himself to the Congregationalist Mission Board, he met a young woman named Anne Hasseltine. And over the next few weeks, they quickly fell in love. His letter to Anne's father is revealing. I'm going to read some of it to you. Because it reveals his passion for the lost and it's almost prophetic in detail. The letter reads by the way, dads, imagine some young man wanting to marry your daughter and his proposal sounding like this. 1800s English. I quote I have now to ask you, whether you can consent to part with your daughter early next spring to see her no more in this world. Okay, that's a period for me. Think about it. Listen, whether you can consent to her departure for a heathen land, her subjection to the hardships and sufferings of a missionary's life? Whether you can consent to her exposure to the dangers of the ocean, to the fatal influences 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 heaven and the glory of God? Can you consent to all this and the promise of meeting your daughter in the world of glory with a crown of righteousness brightened by the acclamations of heathen now saved through her means who will there be praising her Savior? How's that for a proposal? Man, imagine, I'd like to take your daughter away from you to a heathen land where she'll probably suffer every deprivation and more than likely a violent death. You could see, can't you, in this young man? No holds barred. This is what I'm gonna do. This is where we're gonna go. This is what matters most. Anne's father said yes. And so did she. In a way, Anne, her father, her mother, really we're all saying the same thing to God, just in different ways. Here am I. Bury me. Two weeks after their wedding, they are on a ship bound for India. The voyage would last four months. And I want to bring up one thing because it creates problems, and again, it shows you a little bit of their character. It's going to create problems with their congregationalist supporters back home and their family. Remember, his dad is a congregational pastor. You see, during this voyage, they spent a lot of time ransacking the book of Acts, the Gospels, studying the word on subjects related to church planting. And they came to the conclusion that salvation should precede baptism. And they also concluded that baptism, correctly understood, literally translated, could only mean immersion. In that voyage, they changed their entire view and their affiliation. So, which means, and by the way, this is no small thing, they departed from America as congregationalists and landed in India as Baptists. Now the problem was there was no American Baptist Missionary Board. He's the first missionary from America. So they effectively declined, walked away from all of their support and their supporters. I bring that issue up because it reveals something about them early on, both of them. Their willingness to confront their religious past, their willingness to potentially upset their families, their willingness to lose all their financial support, all for the sake of biblical conviction, which reveals quite a bit about the metal of their character that'll be put to the test. Adnar and Anne Judson were baptized by immersion soon after landing in Calcutta, India, by the son of William Carey, Felix was his name, with whom they stayed when they arrived. They would trust God and frankly never look back. Now the good news was when news reached America of their changed position, Baptist churches rallied. Evidently, they're a little slower than the congregationalists, and they created the American Baptist Missionary Union and promptly began supporting them. Now there were other changes ahead for them. They expected to settle in an area where they were not allowed when they arrived. They had to move several times. And eventually they settled on an area known as Rangoon, Burma, just north of Thailand. There they would spend the next ten years of their lives attempting to learn the Burmese language. They had to learn it without a teacher, without a grammar, without a dictionary, without any other believers, without a church, without any help. Adenar had to learn and his wife Anne by literally creating his own Burmese grammar. See how God wired him at three to prepare him for what he would be doing at 23. And so he would spend several years creating his own grammar, learning the language. It would take six years of study before he was able to preach his first sermon. Finally, seven years after arriving, Adonairam led the first Burmese individual to faith in Jesus Christ. Now think about it. Seven years before one convert to Christ. I mean, that doesn't really sell all that well to the supporters back home, does it? But they stayed with it. Part of the problem was in Burma, converting from Buddhism was punishable by death. Little wonder it would take Judson twelve years before he had 18 people baptized and in the church. Twelve years. Eighteen people. On one occasion, Adrianaram and another missionary traveled to see the Emperor of Burma to petition for freedom to preach and for people to convert without losing their lives or be or being threatened of the loss of their lives. And he not only disregarded their requests, but he threw the gospel tract that Adon Aram had written to the ground after reading only a few lines. In the meantime, Roger William Judson, their little boy, died at eight months of age. Back in their home region, Anne Judson continued serving along with her husband. She had been able to befriend the wife of the political leader in Rangoon, sort of like the governor in our culture, and begin to make inroads. Before long, a printing press arrived, and materials that Ad and Aram had translated into Burmese were now being printed by the thousands, still no real fruit, but they were now coalescing into printed materials that they could distribute, and they were being distributed. It included a full and complete translation of the Gospel of Matthew. Eventually, Adam and Aram would complete the entire New Testament into Burmese. About the time he finishes this translation work, war breaks out between England and Burma. And all of the English missionaries are immediately suspected of being spies for the British government. There was trouble in the air. Five years after baptizing their first convert, on June 8th, 1824, Burmese officials suddenly broke into their home, threw Adenarim to the ground, tied him up, and dragged them away to prison. He was placed in a prison building with a hundred other inmates, male and female. They were all lying on the floor, their feet in stalks and iron chains weighing 14 pounds. In fact, Adenar would wear the scars of those chains for the rest of his life. At night, he records, a bamboo pole was passed between the prisoners' shackled feet and then hoisted up by pulleys so that the prisoners literally hung upside down at a height which allowed their shoulders to rest on the ground while their feet were pulled above their heads all night long. After some time, Ad and Iron was moved to a cage that once housed a lion, not high enough to stand, not broad enough to lie down. During this time, Anne delivered their daughter Maria. She would walk to that jail every day, bringing Ad and Iron food that she would beg the jailer to pass along to him because the prison supplied no food. Inmates simply starved to death. Soon she became ill and unable to nurse her baby. And finally, if you can imagine this, the jailer had mercy on them and actually let Adonim take the baby each evening into the village and beg for some nursing mother to give their baby milk. Finally, suddenly, Adonairam was released from prison, almost two years in there. He was evidently needed to translate between the English and the Burmese. They found a use for him. And by the time he returned home, Anne was dead. A few months later, their little Maria died. A few months after that, he received news that his father had also only recently died as well, and he was crushed by it all. It just all bore down on him. He entered a deep depression. It would last nearly three years. He dropped his translation work. He retreated from anything that might promote any sense of happiness or pleasure. He refused to eat with those outside the mission station. He renounced his honorary doctorate that he had been given from Brown University. He gave all of his savings away to the Baptist mission board and asked that his salary be reduced. He then built a hut some distance from his mission compound, deep in the jungle, dangerous, and alone where he moved in. He even dug next to the hut an open grave where he expected to be buried, and he would sit in that grave for hours contemplating the decaying of his own flesh. He would write in his journal, though, and on one occasion during this time he wrote these words of utter spiritual desolation. He said, and I quote, God is to me the great unknown. I believe in him, but I cannot find him. He subsisted on a little rice each day, and he actually spent his days reflecting, and he would even pray for some sign that God had forgiven him for all sorts of imagined failures, for not living up to his calling, for not being a more humble missionary, for getting caught up with the pride of his commitment for accepting the accolades that he had received from others, and on and on. The turning point came, and it was surprising. It was actually a letter informing him that his brother El Nathan had died at the age of 35. But ironically, this became the first step out of depression because Adam and Aaron had been praying, had prayed for 17 years specifically for his brother's salvation, but to no avail. However, the letter informed him that not only had El Nathan died, but El Nathan, before dying, had trusted Jesus Christ for salvation. And that was sort of this puff of wind in his sails that moved him back to the mission compound. He picked back up his translation work, and the next year, 1831, was the beginning of an incredible outpouring of spiritual interest that he had never seen before. Is it possible? God in his timing waited until this seed had truly died. And now the refreshing work of God's Spirit was enabling him, breathing new life back into him. And ironically, a great harvest is about to begin. It starts out slowly at first, but it's already seen as different. Part of what God did for him eight years after Anne's death was bring to him another bride. Ad and I married a widow of a longtime missionary partner in Burma. Instead of going back to the states, she decided to stay there. They married, had several children. The family grew, and as it grew, the church grew. On September 1835, he completed the Old Testament translation of the Bible into Burmese. And he also baptized the 100th member of the Burmese Baptist Church. Now, these, when he had started out, had been his goal. He wanted to translate the Bible into Burmese, and he wanted to baptize 100 converts who trusted in Jesus Christ, and they were now accomplished. And he was rejoicing, he was thrilled. Then his wife Sarah's health began to decline, and they decided to go home to America to recover for her and to raise awareness of a mission that God was indeed establishing. It was taking root. There were now a hundred believers. Sadly, she would die en route to America and be buried on an island while Adeniram and their three oldest children continued on. When they arrived in Boston, Adeniram, much to his surprise, was greeted as a celebrity. Newspapers covered his arrival and every move. Everybody wanted to meet the first American missionary to now return some 20 years later with stories of distant lands and great danger and disease and difficulty and prison shackles and, you know, all that stuff. Since Adam and Aram was actually suffering at the time with a lung problem, he could only talk in a whisper through an assistant. In addition, he hadn't spoken English for nearly 20 years. And he had a hard time, he said, putting three sentences together properly. In fact, he had written to his board before his arrival, and he said to them, and I quote, do not expect me to make public addresses, for in order to become an acceptable and eloquent preacher in a foreign language, I had deliberately abandoned my own. He had literally stopped speaking English. Congregations and gatherings, you know, in the eastern part of America were somewhat disappointed that instead of talking about his adventures, he most often simply wanted to whisper the gospel and talk about Christ. He had truly died to self. While in America, he met a woman with a rather well-known literary career underway, and they fell in love. She agreed to be his wife and leave her career at the comforts of home for 108-degree weather, disease, difficulty. She too became one more seed to say, Here I am, Lord, bury me. They arrived back in Burma, and that's when the work literally exploded. Adon began a ministry with a group of people called the Karens, a people group, a large ethnic group there in the country that was still following traces of Old Testament truth. It's really interesting to study some of this amazing preservation of truth through oral traditions. In fact, they had handed these down for centuries. They called them the traditions of the elders. Adam Aram Judson, by the way, had no idea, no idea. It's as if God had reserved his encounter with the first Karen, a people group member, until now. But their traditions included, for instance, listen to these, the story of a creator God who created man and then a woman from that man's rib. They also believed in a devil who tempted them into sinning. They believed in a Messiah who would come one day to their rescue. They were actually living with the expectation of a messenger who would come to deliver news of the Messiah and deliver to them news from a sacred parchment roll. And here comes Adonarium Judson. Just perfectly timed by the Lord. While he had once spent years sitting in a public hut he had built praying that someone would accept his invitation to come in and inquire about the gospel. Now, in one winter alone, when they returned, 6,000 people came to their home to inquire and ask for material. Some would travel three months from the borders of China and arrive saying, and I'm reading what he was writing, quote, Sir, we hear that there is an eternal hell, we're afraid of it. Do give us a writing that will tell us how to escape it. Others came from the north saying, we've seen writings that tell of an eternal God. If you are the author, referring to his tracks that by now had been distributed that far. If you are the author, please give us more so that we can know the truth before we die. If you can imagine this, beloved, in one year alone, Adon Aramjutsen and his team baptized more than 1,000 converts. Twelve years to reach 18 people. In one year, over a thousand. That buried seed is now bearing a harvest of fruit. Truly amazing. After several years of fruitful ministry, his health began to fail, and he was now 61 years of age. He had been through so much. When he had arrived in his early 20s, he had hoped and prayed for a hundred believers. Soon after his death, at the age of 61, there were more than 200,000 Christians and hundreds. Of churches. In fact, one out of every 58 Burmese citizens had accepted Jesus Christ. For the last 150 years, by the way, since his death, every dictionary and every grammar written in Burma is based on the work of Adnar Judson. His Bible is still the most popular premier translation for the Burmese people. All of that he did alone, buried. On the day he baptized his first convert, he had waited seven years to see it happen. He had written in his journal these rather audacious words. I love this. He says, and I quote, Oh, may this baptism prove to be the beginning of a series of baptisms in the Burman Empire, which shall continue in uninterrupted success to the end of the age. And guess what? It's still taking place. There are now nearly 4,000 evangelical Baptist congregations, which include 1.9 million people in that country, and counting. And they all trace their spiritual lineage to the legacy of Adonirin Judson. On April 3, 1850, he boarded a ship for a voyage he hoped would help him recover his strength, instead, he became terribly ill, and eight days into the voyage he passed away. Listen to this simple conclusion. The crew gathered in silence as they wrapped his body for burial at sea. No family or friends on board. And after a few words by a captain who didn't believe the gospel, his body was lowered into the Indian Ocean without even a prayer. I don't think that would have mattered to Adam Arbajson. He had died long ago. And his welcome into the presence of his eternal Savior would have been wonderful to see. A seed, a kernel of wheat, surrendered, sacrificed, buried, but even to this day bearing fruit. We can observe a lot of truths from this man's life, but I'm going to give you three statements very quickly. Number one, serving Christ does not eliminate potential suffering. Serving Christ does not eliminate potential suffering. Secondly, willingness to suffer is often the key to spiritual fruit. Willingness to suffer is often key to spiritual fruit. Number three, what matters most is a life surrendered, which effectively says no matter where you are, no matter where I am, what matters most is that we are saying, Lord, here am I. There's a marble slab outside a Baptist church in the town where he was born, Malden, Massachusetts. Placed there in memoriam that says all that I believe Adam Arm Judson would care to have said. And I close with what that slab declares. Reverend Adam Iron Judson, born August 9, 1788, died April 12th, 1850. Malden, his birthplace, the ocean, his grave, converted Burmans, and the Burmese Bible, his monument, his record is on high.