But Adoniram's faith sustained him, and he threw himself into the tasks to which he believed God had called him. He worked feverishly on his translation of the Bible. The New Testament had now been printed, and he finished the Old Testament in early 1834.
Statistics are unclear, but there were only somewhere between twelve and twenty-five professing Christians in the country when he died, and there were not churches to speak of.
At the 150th anniversary of the translation of the Bible into the Burmese language, Paul Borthwick was addressing a group that was celebrating Judson's work. Just before he got up to speak, he noticed in small print on the first page the words: "Translated by Rev. A. Judson." So Borthwick turned to his interpreter, a Burmese man named Matthew Hia Win, and asked him, "Matthew, what do you know of this man?" Matthew began to weep as he said,
We know him—we know how he loved the Burmese people,
how he suffered for the gospel because of us, out of love for us. He died a
pauper, but left the Bible for us. When he died, there were few believers, but
today there are over 600,000 of us, and every single one of us traces our
spiritual heritage to one man: the Rev. Adoniram Judson.
But Adoniram Judson never saw it! And that will be the case for some of us. We may be called to invest our lives in ministries for which we do not see much immediate fruit, trusting that the God of all grace who oversees our work will ensure that our labour is not in vain.
Adapted from Julia
Cameron, editor, Christ Our Reconciler (InterVarsity Press, 2012), pp. 200-201
No comments:
Post a Comment