HERO OF THE CROSS

HERO OF THE CROSS

 Hebrews 11: 2, 32-38

Adoniram Judson is famous for his oft-quoted statement “the  outlook is as bright as the promises of God.”Again he wrote, if they ask ‘What the prospect of ultimate success is there? tell them ‘As much as there is an almighty and faithful; God, who will perform His promises’”

It was that faith that kept him and Ann, his first wife, laboring for seven years before they baptized their first convert, and after twelve years had only eighteen. It was faith that carried them on when their first baby died, faith that kept him plodding till he wrote a Burmese grammar and dictionary and after ten years completed a Burmese New Testament. In spite of repeated attacks of fever and dysentery, Judson believed on.When supporting friends decided that he is not worthy of support because he could show little fruit he believed on. He wrote, “it requires a much longer time than I have been here to make an impact on a heathen people… if we live some twenty or thirty years, they may hear me again.

After eleven years,
the tyrannical Burmese emperor imprisoned him for eleven month in a death house. At times he was manacled with three pairs of leg irons, at times with five pairs. He was driven barefoot over the burning sand at noon for several miles until his feet blistered, cracked open, and he left a blood- stain with each step on the sand. His feet were put in stocks and raised higher than his head. The floor crawled with vermin. When Satan would taunt him about slim prospect that seemed to exist for establishing Christ’s church in Burma, Judson held on the promises of God.

When his wife became ill she could not nurse the baby, Judson was finally able to bribe the jailer to release him each evening so that he could carry his little withering baby from door to door to beg nursing mothers for a little of their milk for his baby.

Yet they still believed God. Then his wife died; then their second baby died. After several years he remained unmarried widow of another missionary who had come out to join them. In time she died. Insurmountable odds, indescribable suffering, impossibility afer impossibility, loneliness; and still Judson believed and pressed on until he died at sea en route home.   To  the endhe believed and stood on the promises of God. During his only furlough back to America, street urchins, seeing God’s presence on his face as he walked down the street the hands of his two surviving children, called him Mr. Glory Face. When he died, he left behind hundreds of graves of believers in Burmese soil, sixty-three churches, seven thousand baptized believers, and one hundred sixty-three missionary and Burmese who name name the name of Jesus as their Lord.