Speaker: Dr. Harold J. Sala | Series: Guidelines For Living | Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for that is how their fathers treated the false prophets. Luke 6:26

When the British ship, The Caravan, sailed into Rangoon Harbor on July 13, 1913, a young American couple, Adoniram and Nancy Judson disembarked with great anticipation. They were the first American missionaries to leave the shores of their fledgling company. But the welcome was not what they expected. The weather was warm—hot and muggy—but their reception was cool. Greeted by a minor official, they were told that they were unwanted in Burma, and that the best thing they could do would be to get back on the ship and go somewhere else.

They stayed when they had every right to reconsider and go somewhere else. On the voyage over, Nancy’s first child was stillborn.   But then in the first year of their stay in Rangoon, a little boy was born. Six months later they buried him. Then war broke out between Britain and Burma. It wasn’t Judson’s fight. He was an American, but the Burmese didn’t know the difference. He looked and spoke like the British, and he was arrested and placed in a death prison—a hellhole of disease and filth. In the meanwhile, Nancy, having given birth to another baby, was so ill with fever that she couldn’t nurse the child. Compassionate jailers allowed Judson to leave the prison for a few hours every day so that he could take the tiny infant and beg women to breastfeed the child. But eventually Nancy died, and then the baby died.

No wonder Judson, who by now had been released from prison, broke under the strain and suffered a nervous breakdown.

There’s one more thing that I failed to mention– something important, understanding that Judson had gone there to convert the Buddhists of Burma to Christianity. In the first seven years he lived there, he did not have one single convert—not even a child. What kind of copy do you suppose his problems made when he had to write to his supporters back home? He wasn’t exactly “knocking them dead” with success.

How much does it take for a man, even a stubborn man, to say, “Enough! I’ve had it” and go home? But the word quit wasn’t in Judson’s vocabulary.

On the personal side of today’s commentary, I have to tell you about my first visit to Burma years ago. Generations before, Ting Mang Tung’s grandfather had been one of the workmen who helped build the great Shwedagon Pagoda which was there when Judson came, but now this gentle Burmese brother headed the work of the Far East Broadcasting Company in Rangoon. Ronnie, as he is nicknamed, took me to a little hotel where I settled down about midnight. It was hot. The windows wouldn’t open, and the compressor on the window air conditioner had died a long while before.   Though the fan blew, there was no cool breeze. I lay there and sweat and thought of Judson, and felt like a heel to be bothered by the heat. Then, hours later, I heard the sound of church bells and looked through the dirty window panes to see the spires of several churches on the horizon.

Judson didn’t quit and thus became the father of Christianity in that gentle land. I wonder, I really wonder, what just might happen if we only had the strength to persevere.   When Judson was not well received, in scorn people began calling him “Jesus Christ’s man in Burma,” thus bestowing on him the highest compliment. JC’s man in Burma.   The term Christian was first used in scorn, thus identifying followers of Jesus Christ. How our enemies feel about us may well be the test of our character. No wonder Jesus said, “Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for that is how their fathers treated the false prophets” (Luke 6:26).

The purpose of today’s commentary isn’t to beat you down or make you feel that you just don’t have what it takes to succeed, but to simply remind you that the real test of your character is what it takes to stop you. Think about it.

Resource reading: Galatians 6.