CHAPTER ten
CHAPTER ten
What a Life Like This Means: The Full Accounting, the Final Word, and What You Do Next
I want to begin the final chapter where the whole story began: in a roadside inn in New York State, in the autumn of 1808, outside a room where a young man was dying.
I was twenty years old. I had just graduated from Rhode Island College as valedictorian, brilliant and proud and thoroughly convinced that God was a superstition for the intellectually timid and that the future I was building for myself was the only future worth building. I had chosen my companions carefully — men who confirmed my rejection of faith, who celebrated my intellect, who never asked uncomfortable questions about eternity or accountability or what lay beyond the material world.
And then Jacob Eames died in the room next to mine. And I stood outside that door and heard the silence that follows death, and the silence said something to me that all my philosophy had no answer for. It said: this is coming for you. And it said: are you ready? And I discovered, standing in that corridor in the middle of the night, that I was not. That I had built an elaborate intellectual architecture to avoid this exact question, and that the architecture had no foundation, and that the question had found me anyway.
That moment — that ordinary, unglamorous, corridor-in-a-roadside-inn moment — was the hinge of everything. Not the ordination. Not the voyage. Not the first convert. The hinge was there, in the dark, outside a dead man's room, when a proud young man ran out of answers and found that the only honest response to the silence was to fall on his knees before the God he had spent two years trying to convince himself did not exist.
Everything in this book — all nine previous chapters — flows from that moment. The conversion. The seminary. The missionary call. The voyage. The language study. The zayat. The six silent years. The first convert. The prison. The graves. The harvest. The completed Bible. The death at sea. Two million believers in Myanmar today. All of it traces its origin to one young man in a dark corridor who finally stopped running and turned around.
(Luke 15:20 KJV) "And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him." He arose. He came. He was yet a great way off. And the Father ran. That is the whole of grace, compressed into four sentences. The son stopped running in the wrong direction. The Father had been watching the road. And when the turning happened — when the face finally turned homeward — there was no hesitation, no waiting to see if the repentance was genuine enough, no measured response proportionate to the degree of offense. There was running. There was embracing. There was the kiss of a father who had never stopped loving the son who had spent two years pretending he did not exist.
The Arc of a Life: What the Whole Story Shows
Now that we have walked through the whole of this life together — birth in Malden, death in the Indian Ocean, and everything in between — I want to step back and describe the arc of it. Because individual chapters, however powerful, do not always reveal what the whole story means. You need to see the shape of the entire thing before the meaning becomes fully clear.
The arc of Adoniram Judson's life is not, at its core, the arc of a heroic missionary. It is the arc of a prodigal brought home, equipped for a purpose larger than he ever imagined for himself, and sent out to bring the same news — that the Father is watching the road, that grace is real, that the kiss of homecoming is available to every human being who has ever walked away — to people who had never heard it before.
He was the prodigal made apostle. The young man who ran from God became the old man who ran toward Burma. The intelligence that had been devoted to building a wall between himself and his Maker was redirected — by grace, not by effort — into building a bridge between the Burmese language and the eternal Word of God. The pride that had nearly destroyed him was not eliminated but was transformed: shaped by suffering and loss and nineteen months of chains into something that no longer needed to assert itself because it had been replaced by something better. Not humility as a performed virtue, but humility as the natural posture of a man who has seen what he actually is and what God actually is and who has stopped confusing the two.
What the arc shows us is that God wastes nothing. Not the years at Brown, where the intellect was developed that would eventually produce the Burmese Bible. Not the years with Jacob Eames, where the arguments against faith were heard at close range and found to be hollow. Not the two years of proud unbelief, which gave Judson an intimate acquaintance with the inside of skepticism that made him a more effective apologist for the rest of his life. Not the six years of no converts in Rangoon, which built the endurance that would carry him through the prison. Not the prison itself, which built the faith that the grief years needed. Not the grief, which built the depth of pastoral empathy that would serve the Burmese church for the rest of his ministry.
(Romans 8:28 KJV) "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose." All things. Not the comfortable things, not the spiritually productive things, not the things that feel like they are going somewhere useful. All things. The inn corridor and the chains and the hopea tree and the ocean that received a body that had given everything — all of it working together, in the hands of a God who does not improvise, toward a good that was determined before the foundation of the world.
The Costs: Looking at Them Fully
I have not minimized the costs in this book. I do not intend to minimize them here. The costs of Adoniram Judson's obedience were real, large, and permanent.
Ann Judson died at thirty-seven under a hopea tree in Amherst. She had given her young adulthood, her linguistic gifts, her relational warmth, her fierce advocacy, and ultimately her life to a mission in a country that was not her own, for a people she had come to genuinely love. She died without seeing the harvest that her suffering helped to purchase. She never knew about the two hundred and seventeen baptisms in 1832. She never knew about the thousand-plus baptisms in 1836. She never knew about the two million. She planted in tears and went to her rest before the reaping.
Roger Williams Judson died at eight months old in Rangoon, and is buried there. Maria Judson died at two years and three months old in Amherst, and is buried beside her mother. An unnamed first child was stillborn on the voyage to India. Three children dead before they reached the age of understanding. Sarah Boardman Judson died at forty-one on St. Helena, and is buried there. Emily Chubbuck Judson died at thirty-six in Hamilton, New York, four years after Adoniram, and is buried there. The mission consumed three wives and three children and the health of the man himself, and delivered him to the Indian Ocean at sixty-one, worn out decades before his natural span was finished.
These are not footnotes. They are the price. The actual, non-metaphorical, permanent, earthly price of thirty-seven years of devoted-for-life missionary service in nineteenth-century Burma. And I want to name that price fully and honestly because I think there is a version of missionary hagiography that dwells so thoroughly on the harvest that it obscures the cost, and that obscuring does a disservice to everyone: to the people who paid the cost, whose sacrifice deserves to be seen clearly, and to the people who might be called to a similar obedience, who deserve to count the cost honestly before they commit.
So I name it. Ann. Roger. The unnamed child. Maria. Sarah. Emily. The nineteen months of chains. The four years of declining health that ended in the Indian Ocean. That is the price. It was paid willingly, by people who understood what they were buying and who considered what they were buying worth the price.
(2 Corinthians 4:17-18 KJV) "For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal." Light and momentary. Paul called his own suffering — shipwrecks, beatings, imprisonments, the constant nearness of death — light and momentary. Not because it was easy. Because it was temporary. The graves in Amherst and St. Helena and Hamilton are temporary. The people in those graves are not. They are somewhere the suffering cannot follow them, in the presence of the Jesus they served, already in possession of the eternal glory that the momentary troubles were achieving.
The Returns: What the Cost Bought
But the accounting has two sides. The cost was real. The return was also real, and it was — it is — staggering.
Seven thousand baptized believers by the time of Judson's death in 1850. Churches at Moulmein, Rangoon, Tavoy, Amherst, and throughout the Karen hills. Burmese and Karen pastors trained, ordained, and leading their own congregations without dependence on Western missionaries. A Burmese New Testament completed in 1823 and a complete Burmese Bible in 1840. A Burmese grammar that equipped generations of missionaries who followed. An English-Burmese dictionary completed posthumously in 1852 that served the church for over a century. A missionary movement in America that grew, in part, from the inspiration of the Burma mission's example, and that sent thousands of devoted-for-life workers to every corner of the earth in the generations that followed.
By the late nineteenth century, the Burma mission had produced a Karen church that was one of the most remarkable Christian communities in Asia — a people who had embraced the gospel with such depth and tenacity that generations of political persecution could not shake them loose from it. By the mid-twentieth century, the Baptist Convention of Myanmar had become the largest Protestant denomination in the country. By the time Matthew Hla Win held a Burmese Bible in 1993 and wept over the name on the title page, the count of believers in Myanmar had passed two million and was still rising.
Two million people who know that God is their Father and Jesus is their Savior and the Spirit of God lives inside them. Two million people who have access to the complete Word of God in their own language. Two million people who will spend eternity in the presence of the God who made them, worshiping alongside Ann Judson and Moung Nau and Tha-e and Ko Dwah and the unnamed Karen evangelists and all the others who gave everything to see this day arrive.
Against the cost, set the return. Ann's thirty-seven years against two million eternities. The chains against the freedom they purchased. The hopea tree against the harvest it seeded. (Psalm 126:5-6 KJV) "They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him." Doubtless. The reaping came. The sheaves came. The joy came. Not to Ann on this side of eternity — she did not live to see it. But joy came. Doubtless joy came. God keeps His promises on His schedule, not ours, and His schedule always produces more than we asked for and more than we were able to imagine while we were still weeping.
What the Life of Judson Says to the Life of Faith
Every life of faith asks the same questions in different forms. Is God real? Is He good? Does He see? Does He care? Does the obedience actually accomplish anything, or is it simply the performance of duty in a universe that is indifferent to faithfulness?
Adoniram Judson's life answers those questions. Not abstractly. Not theoretically. In the specific, documented, historically verifiable form of a man who staked thirty-seven years of his one earthly life on the proposition that God is real and good and sees and cares and that obedience to His call accomplishes exactly what He promises it will accomplish.
The evidence is in. God was real — real enough to crack open a proud young man in a dark corridor and redirect his entire life. God was good — good enough to sustain His servant through nineteen months of chains, through four graves, through the grief of the jungle hut, and to bring him out the other side with faith stronger than it had been when it went in. God saw — saw the six years of silence and saw what was being built in those years that could not yet be seen, and brought in the harvest in His own time. God cared — cared enough to send Ann as a guardian angel to the prison, to preserve a New Testament in a pillow, to stop the hand of the Pakan Woon, to break the fever of a dying woman, to bring the first Burmese believer to faith in the sixth year of what looked like failure.
And the obedience accomplished what God promised. The Word went out and did not return void. The seed fell into the ground and produced a harvest that is still being gathered one hundred and seventy years later. The corn of wheat fell into the ground in Amherst and Rangoon and St. Helena and the Indian Ocean, and brought forth much fruit, and the fruit is still multiplying, and it will not stop until Jesus returns and the full accounting is made.
(Isaiah 55:10-11 KJV) "For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it." Not return void. Accomplish what He pleases. Prosper. Those are the promises under which Adoniram Judson labored in Burma, and those are the promises that were kept, and those are the promises that are still being kept in Myanmar today, and those are the promises that are available to every person who takes the Word of God and goes with it wherever God sends them.
The Lessons That Cost the Most to Learn
I have described a life of faith. Now I want to distill from it the lessons that only that kind of life produces — the lessons that cannot be learned in a classroom or a comfortable church service or a well-written book, but only in the living of it.
The first lesson is that God's timing is not our timing, and the difference between the two is not a mistake on His part. Six years of silence in Rangoon. Six years of preaching to people who were interested but not converting. Six years during which any reasonable assessment of the situation would have concluded that the mission was failing. But God was not working on a six-year timeline. He was working on a generational timeline, and the six silent years were the foundation of the harvest years, and the harvest years were only possible because the foundation had been laid with the kind of thoroughness that six years of patient, faithful, result-free labor produces.
If you are in a season that looks like silence — if you are praying and not seeing answers, working and not seeing fruit, trusting and not feeling the confirmation that trust is warranted — do not conclude that God has forgotten you or that the call was a mistake. Conclude that you are in your six years, and that the harvest is coming in the season that God has appointed for it, and that the faithfulness of the silence is as essential to the harvest as the preaching of the plenty.
The second lesson is that suffering is not the enemy of faith. It is the forge in which faith is made useful. The Adoniram Judson who arrived in Rangoon in 1813 was a man of genuine faith — converted, called, committed. But his faith was untested in the specific ways that the Burmese ministry would require. It had not yet been pressed to the point of breaking to discover that it would not break. It had not yet been stripped of every external support to discover that Jesus was sufficient when everything else was removed. The prison, the grief, the silence — these did not threaten the faith. They revealed it. They showed what was real and what was merely assumed, and burned away the assumed until only the real remained.
If you are in suffering — if the fire is currently upon you and you cannot see when or how it will end — do not ask only to be delivered from it. Ask also what it is producing in you. Not because suffering is intrinsically good, but because the God who permits it does not permit it randomly or carelessly. He permits it with purpose, and the purpose is always the same: to produce in His child the kind of faith, the kind of character, the kind of deep-rooted, weather-proof trust in His goodness that can only come from having needed Him absolutely and found Him absolutely sufficient.
The third lesson is that the harvest belongs to God, not to the one who sows. This lesson sounds simple. It is not simple. It is one of the hardest lessons in the Christian life because it cuts directly against the deep human need to see the fruit of our labor — to know that what we are doing is working, that the sacrifice is producing something, that the investment is earning a return we can observe.
Ann Judson never saw the harvest. She died before the river rose past ankle depth. She sowed in tears and went home before the reaping. And this is not an exception to the principle — it is the principle. The farmer who plants an orchard will die before the orchard reaches full maturity. The man who lays a foundation will not always live to see the building that rises on it. The woman who teaches a child the Scriptures may not see the day that child teaches those same Scriptures to her own children's children. We plant for harvests we may never see, and we trust the God of the harvest to bring in the sheaves whether we are there to witness it or not.
(John 4:37-38 KJV) "And herein is that saying true, One soweth, and another reapeth. I sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labour: other men laboured, and ye are entered into their labours." One soweth, and another reapeth. In the economy of God, the sower and the reaper are equally honored, equally necessary, equally credited in the final accounting. Ann is not less honored than the missionaries who came after her and baptized hundreds. The Karen evangelist whose name history has not recorded is not less honored than the church planter whose name appears on every mission report. All of it — every act of faithful sowing in every generation — is known to God and kept by God and will be honored by God on the day when all accounts are settled.
The Particular Providence: How God Moves in One Life
One of the things I most want you to take from this story is a renewed confidence in what the theologians call particular providence — the specific, personal, attentive involvement of God in the details of an individual life.
I have described many moments in Judson's life that could only have been God. The death of Jacob Eames in the room next to his at exactly the moment in Judson's spiritual journey when that death would produce maximum impact. The ship to Mauritius that was available and sailing just when the British East India Company made Calcutta impossible. The pillow with the manuscript that was abandoned in the prison evacuation and recovered by Moung Ing before it was destroyed. The Pakan Woon's embezzlement — discovered at precisely the moment when his execution order against the foreign prisoners was ready to be carried out — ending with the executioner executed before his intended victims. Ann's fever breaking when the Burmese neighbors had already pronounced her dead. The date of October 24, 1840 — the completion of the Burmese Bible — exactly fourteen years to the day after Ann died.
Each of these individually might be explained as coincidence. Together, they are a pattern. And the pattern is the signature of a God who is not governing the universe from a distance, who is not managing general principles while the specific details sort themselves out. The pattern is the signature of a God who knows the number of hairs on every head, who orders the steps of the righteous, who causes all things to work together for good to those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.
Your life has a pattern too. I am not speaking sentimentally. I mean specifically: the events of your life — including the painful ones, including the confusing ones, including the ones that still make no sense to you even from the distance of years — are not random. They are not the product of a universe grinding forward indifferently while you make your way as best you can. They are the specific, intentional handiwork of a God who knows you by name and who is using everything that has happened to you — everything — to shape you for purposes that are larger than your current visibility allows you to see.
(Psalm 139:16 KJV) "Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them." In thy book all my members were written. Before there was a Adoniram Judson, God had written his story. Before there was a Burma, God had written the story of the Burmese church. Before there is a you — fully formed, fully known, your entire life still ahead — God has written your story. Not determining it in the sense that removes your responsibility and your freedom. But knowing it, holding it, working within it and through it and sometimes despite it, toward the good that He has purposed for you from before the foundation of the world.
What Ann Means: The Theology of the Hopea Tree
I want to say something about Ann that I have been building toward throughout this entire book. Something about what her life and death mean — not just for the Burma mission, not just for the history of American missions, but theologically. For the theology of how God uses human lives.
Ann Judson was thirty-seven years old when she died. She had given sixteen years of her adult life to Burma — from the 1812 voyage to her death in 1826. In those sixteen years she had mastered Burmese and Siamese, written a Burmese catechism, run a school for Burmese women and girls, served as the sole financial and logistical manager of the mission during the imprisonment, negotiated daily with corrupt officials for the survival of her husband, survived cerebral meningitis against all medical expectation, and established herself as one of the most effective missionaries in the history of the American church. All before the age of forty.
And then she died. Before the harvest. Before the hundreds and the thousands. Before she could see what her sixteen years of labor and her thirty-seven years of life had been building toward.
The theology of the hopea tree is this: God does not measure the significance of a life by its length. He measures it by its faithfulness. Ann's sixteen years of mission service accomplished more, in the economy of God, than sixty years of comfortable Christian living ever could. Not because suffering is the measure of value. But because the depth of surrender — the degree to which a life is given over to God's purposes rather than one's own — is the measure that matters. Ann gave everything. That everything, poured into Burma, became the root system of a church that is still drawing from it today.
(John 15:13 KJV) "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." Ann laid down her life. Not in a single dramatic act of martyrdom, though martyrdom would have been no surprise in the Burma of 1826. She laid it down day by day, choice by choice, bribe by bribe, petition by petition, bowl of rice by bowl of rice carried to a prison compound in a city at war. She laid it down in the accumulated choices of sixteen years that could each have been unmade, that together made up the irreversible commitment of a life fully given. And the friends for whom she laid it down are worshiping Jesus in Myanmar today, two million strong.
The Unfinished Story: What Is Still Being Written
I want to say something that the title page of the Burmese Bible says better than I can: the story is not finished.
'Translated by the Reverend A. Judson' — those words were printed on every edition of the Burmese Bible for over a century after Judson's death. They are still there. The translation is still being used. The churches planted in the nineteenth century are still growing in the twenty-first. The Karen church that began with Ko Tha-Byu's preaching in the 1820s has survived genocidal violence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and is still standing, still worshiping, still bearing witness to the Jesus who sustained it through everything.
And the story extends beyond Myanmar. The Burma mission inspired a generation of missionary sending that spread the gospel to every inhabited continent on the face of the earth. The American Baptist Foreign Mission Society that Luther Rice built on the foundation of Judson's call sent missionaries to China, to India, to Africa, to South America, to the islands of the Pacific. The example of Ann Judson — the first American woman to serve as a foreign missionary — inspired hundreds of women in subsequent generations to answer the same call. The methods Judson developed for language learning, for translation work, for indigenous church planting — these became models that shaped the theory and practice of Protestant missions for a century.
The stone dropped in the pond in 1812 is still producing ripples. They are reaching shores that Adoniram Judson never saw and could not have imagined. Every ripple traces its origin back to a twenty-three-year-old man and his twenty-year-old wife standing on the deck of the Caravan watching New England disappear behind them, trusting a God who had sent them somewhere neither of them had been before.
(Daniel 12:3 KJV) "And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever." Stars. For ever and ever. Ann Judson shines. Moung Nau shines. Ko Tha-Byu shines. Tha-e shines. Ko Dwah shines. Every unnamed Karen evangelist who carried the gospel into an unreached village shines. The brightness of their faithfulness is permanent, established in eternity, not subject to the dimming of time or the forgetting of history. God has not forgotten a single one of them. He will not forget a single one of you.
Your Lion's Den: The Question That Cannot Be Avoided
We have come, at last, to the question that this whole book has been building toward. Not as a rhetorical device. As a genuine, direct, personal question addressed to you, specifically, with the full weight of everything you have just read behind it.
What is your lion's den?
I do not mean: are you going to Burma? I mean something more fundamental than that. I mean: What is the place that Jesus is asking you to enter that frightens you? What is the surrender He is asking you to make that you have been postponing? What is the obedience you know is required of you that you have been avoiding by keeping yourself busy with lesser things?
Every genuine follower of Jesus Christ has a lion's den. Not necessarily a physical prison in a foreign country. But a place of surrender that feels dangerous. A giving-up of something held tightly. A step of trust taken in the direction that God is pointing when the feelings are arguing for the opposite direction. A commitment made in the knowledge that it will cost more than you can currently calculate and will produce fruit you may not live to see.
For some of you, the lion's den is a missionary call that you have been circling for years without answering. You know it. You feel the burden. You have done the reading. The communal confirmation is available if you seek it. The step of faith is the only thing remaining, and you have been standing at the edge of it for longer than you can honestly justify.
For others, the lion's den has nothing to do with geography. It is the conversation you have been avoiding with someone who needs to hear the gospel. The relationship you have been unwilling to invest in because it will cost you time and comfort you would rather spend elsewhere. The financial commitment to missions or to the poor that you know you should make but that you have been putting off until the finances feel more settled (which they never quite do). The leadership role you have been declining because stepping into it would expose you to criticism and failure in ways that staying comfortable does not.
For still others — and I want to name this with particular tenderness — the lion's den is suffering you are already in, not suffering you are choosing. It is the cancer diagnosis that arrived without warning. The marriage that collapsed without your consent. The child who walked away from the faith you raised them in. The calling that has gone silent for longer than you knew faith could survive silence. For you, the lion's den is not a choice to enter. You are already in it. The question is not whether to go in but how to trust God while you are there.
To all of you — to the one on the edge of the foreign call and the one avoiding the difficult conversation and the one already in the suffering that was not chosen — I want to say the same thing, because the same thing is true in all of your situations:
Jesus goes in first.
He always goes in first. He went into the death prison of Ava before Adoniram Judson arrived there in chains. He was already in the jungle hut when the grieving missionary arrived to build it. He was present in the fever that was killing Ann before Ann's husband even knew Ann was sick. He was in the empty lion's cage before it was offered as a room to a chained prisoner who needed somewhere to be alone. He does not send His people into dark places and then wait to see how they do. He goes before. He prepares the way. He is already there when you arrive, and His presence does not depend on your ability to feel it.
(Deuteronomy 31:8 KJV) "And the LORD, he it is that doth go before thee; he will be with thee, he will not fail thee, neither forsake thee: fear not, neither be dismayed." Go before. With thee. Not fail. Not forsake. Those are not the words of a God who observes at a distance. They are the words of the God who is in the room before you get there, who does not leave when the door closes, who sustains in the darkness what He began in the light. That God is in your lion's den. He was there before you arrived. He will be there when you leave. And He will use what happens in that den — even the most painful, most confusing, most apparently wasted parts of it — for a purpose that will be fully visible only in eternity but that is absolutely real right now.
The Final Word: What Judson Himself Would Say to You
I want to close this book by imagining — as carefully and as faithfully as I can from the evidence of his life, his letters, his diaries, and his preaching — what Adoniram Judson himself would say to you if he could speak directly into your life at this moment.
I think he would begin by telling you that he was not a hero. Not in the way the word is usually used. He was a man who was frightened and in pain and uncertain and sometimes deeply mistaken, who chose — day by day, choice by choice, for thirty-seven years — to trust Jesus Christ with the consequences of obeying His call. That is all. That is the whole of it. There is no secret technique. There is no special grade of spirituality. There is only the daily choice to trust, repeated until it becomes the habit of a life, and the God who honors that trust beyond anything the truster could ask or imagine.
I think he would tell you that the suffering is real but it is not the point. The point is Jesus. The point is the mission of God in the world. The point is the people in Myanmar — and in the thousand other places like Myanmar where the gospel is still arriving for the first time, where the river is still rising, where the chain from sending to preaching to hearing to believing is still being extended link by link by the faithful obedience of ordinary people who said here am I and meant it.
I think he would tell you that you will not regret it. Not the sacrifice. Not the risk. Not the cost. You will not stand before Jesus Christ on the last day and wish you had given less. You will not look back at a life of radical obedience and conclude that you paid too much. Every man or woman who has gone where God sent them and given what God asked for has come to the end of it saying — whatever the specific form of the suffering, whatever the specific shape of the loss — it was worth it. He is worth it. The gospel is worth it. The people it reaches are worth it.
And I think he would close by pointing you to the same Jesus he pointed every inquiring Burmese visitor to in the zayat in Rangoon. Not to himself. Not to his example. Not to the biography. To Jesus.
(Hebrews 12:2 KJV) "Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God." Author and finisher. He began the faith in you, and He will complete it. He endured the cross for the joy set before Him — the joy of bringing many sons and daughters to glory, of presenting to His Father a redeemed humanity drawn from every tribe and tongue and people and nation, the harvest of His suffering gathered at last in full. You are part of that joy. The mission you are called to — whatever form it takes, however ordinary or extraordinary the lion's den you are asked to enter — is part of the joy that was set before Him. And He will not stop until all of it is accomplished.
The River That Will Not Stop Rising
I want to end where Ezekiel's vision ends — not at ankle depth, not at waist depth, but at the place where the river is too deep to cross and must be swum. (Ezekiel 47:9 KJV) "And it shall come to pass, that every thing that liveth, which moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live." Shall live. Everything the river touches shall live. That is the promise of the gospel going to every nation — not that some will be reached, not that many will respond, not that a good percentage of the world's population will eventually have access to the message of Jesus Christ. Everything the river touches shall live.
The river touched Burma in 1813 when a young American missionary stepped onto the dock at Rangoon with a manuscript and a calling and a faith that had already survived more than most people's faith survives in a lifetime. The river touched the Karen people in the 1820s when Ko Tha-Byu carried the news from village to village that the Creator God had sent His Son and the lost book had been found. The river has been rising ever since, and it is still rising, and nothing in heaven or earth will stop it until it has reached every shore and touched every life and fulfilled every promise that the God of all creation made when He sent His Son into the world He loved.
Adoniram Judson's life was one current in that river. A strong current, shaped by suffering and sustained by grace, that ran from a Massachusetts inn corridor in 1808 to an Indian Ocean burial in 1850 and produced, in those forty-two years, two million reasons why the river was worth entering.
Your life is another current. Shaped differently, sustained by the same grace, called to different specific obediences in different specific places — but part of the same river, flowing from the same Source, toward the same sea.
Enter it. Trust it. Swim when you must and walk when you can and wade when the going is uncertain, but stay in the river. Because the river is where Jesus is, and Jesus is where life is, and life — real life, the kind that not even death can touch — is the whole point of everything.
(John 10:10 KJV) "The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." I am come. Present tense. Not came, not will come — am come. Jesus is always arriving. He is arriving right now, in your life, in your circumstances, in your lion's den, in the specific moment you are inhabiting as you read these words. He is come that you might have life. Abundantly. Not cautiously, not minimally, not just enough to get by. Abundantly — overflowing, more than sufficient, inexhaustible, the kind of life that can be poured out completely and given away entirely and still be full, because its source is not the pourer but the God who pours.
Ann Judson knew that life. Adoniram Judson knew it. Moung Nau knew it. Ko Tha-Byu knew it. Two million believers in Myanmar know it. And it is available to you, in exactly the form you need, in exactly the moment you need it, from exactly the God who has always been reaching toward you — who was watching the road long before you thought to turn around, who has been running toward you since the moment you first took a step in His direction.
Here am I. Send me.
Say it. Mean it. Let it be the beginning of the next chapter — the one that has your name on it, that only you can write, that the God of Adoniram Judson and Ann Judson and two million Burmese believers is waiting with extraordinary eagerness to help you fill.
* * *
Soli Deo Gloria
To God alone be the glory
How to Live in the Miraculous!
This is a quick explanation of how to live and move in the realm of the miraculous. Seeing divine interventions of God is not something that just spontaneously happens because you have been born-again. There are certain biblical principles and truths that must be evident in your life. This is a very basic list of some of these truths and laws:
1.You must give Jesus Christ your whole heart. You cannot be lackadaisical in this endeavour. Being lukewarm in your walk with God is repulsive to the Lord. He wants 100% commitment. Jesus gave His all, now it is our turn to give our all. He loved us 100%. Now we must love Him 100%.
My son, give me thine heart, and let thine eyes observe my ways (Proverbs 23:26).
So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth (Revelation 3:16).
2.There must be a complete agreement with God’s Word. We must be in harmony with the Lord in our attitude, actions, thoughts, and deeds. Whatever the Word of God declares in the New Testament is what we wholeheartedly agree with.
Can two walk together, except they be agreed? (Amos 3:3).
For the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to shew himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him (2 Chronicles 16:9).
3.Obey and do the Word from the heart, from the simplest to the most complicated request or command. No matter what the Word says to do, do it! Here are some simple examples: Lift your hands in praise, in everything give thanks, forgive instantly, gather together with the saints, and give offerings to the Lord, and so on.
I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my judgment is just; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me (John 5:30).
4.Make Jesus the highest priority of your life. Everything you do, do not do it as unto men, but do it as unto God.
If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth (Colossians 3:1-2).
5.Die to self! The old man says, “My will be done!” The new man says, “God’s will be done!”
I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me (Galatians 2:20).
Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him (Romans 6:8).
6.Repent the minute you get out of God’s will—no matter how minor, or small the sin may seem.
(Revelation 3:19).
As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent.
7. Take one step at a time. God will test you (not to do evil) to see if you will obey him. Whatever He tells you to do: by His Word, by His Spirit, or within your conscience, do it. He will never tell you to do something contrary to His nature or His Word!
For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother (Matthew 12:50).
Then went he down, and dipped himself seven times in Jordan, according to the saying of the man of God: and his flesh came again like unto the flesh of a little child, and he was clean (2 Kings 5:14).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Michael and Kathleen Yeager have served as pastors/apostles, missionaries, evangelists, broadcasters, and authors for over five decades. Doc Yeager has authored over 570 books. Helping to establish over 27 Churches. They flow in the gifts of the Holy Spirit, teaching the Word of God with wonderful signs and miracles following in confirmation of God's Word. In 1982, they began Jesus is Lord Ministries International, in Biglerville, where they still pastor as of the writing of this book.
Some of the Books Written by Doc Yeager:
“Living in the Realm of the Miraculous #1to 5
“I need God Cause I’m Stupid”
"The Miracles of Smith Wigglesworth"
“How Faith Comes 28 WAYS”
“Horrors of Hell, Splendors of Heaven”
“The Coming Great Awakening”
"Sinners In The Hands of an Angry GOD”, (modernized)
"Brain Parasite Epidemic"
"My JOURNEY To HELL" - illustrated for teenagers
"Divine Revelation Of Jesus Christ"
"My Daily Meditations"
"Holy Bible of JESUS CHRIST"
"War In The Heavenlies - (Chronicles of Micah)"
"My Legal Rights To Witness"
“Why We (MUST) Gather! - 30 Biblical Reasons”
“My Incredible, Supernatural, Divine Experiences”
PLUS, MORE THEN 550 MORE TITLES