Missionaries Come from People Like You

How God Caught Adoniram Judson for Burma

God is closing in on some of you. He is like the “Hound of Heaven” who means to make you far happier in some dangerous and dirty work. Missionaries and ministers of mercy don’t come from nowhere. They come from people like you, stunned by the glory of God and stopped in your tracks. Sometimes it happens when you are going in exactly the opposite direction.

That’s the way it was with Adoniram Judson, the first overseas missionary from America, who sailed with his wife at age twentythree on February 17, 1812. They had been married twelve days. He spent the rest of his life, until 1850, “suffering yet always rejoicing” to bring Burma under the sway of Christ and make the people glad in God forever. But first God had to turn him around, and he did it in a way that so stunned Judson, he never forgot the providence of God in his conversion.¹