The Seeds Adoniram Judson Buried in Burma

When Adoniram Judson sailed for Burma in 1812, he carried little more than a grammar book and an unshakable conviction that the gospel would bear fruit in foreign soil. For six grueling years, he preached without a single convert. He buried his first wife, then his second. He spent seventeen months in a Burmese death prison, hung by his feet, wasting with fever, his translation manuscript hidden in a pillow his wife smuggled past the guards.

Yet Judson kept translating. Kept preaching. Kept planting.

By the time he died in 1850, there were one hundred churches and over eight thousand believers across Burma. Today, there are more than three million. The seed he buried in tears became a forest he never lived to see.

Paul writes to the Colossians about a gospel that is "bearing fruit and growing throughout the whole world" — the same gospel that bore fruit in them "from the day you heard it and truly understood God's grace." He prays that they would be "strengthened with all power, according to His glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy."

That is the Judson story in a single verse. God does not ask us to manufacture the harvest. He asks us to remain faithful in the planting — strengthened not by our own resolve, but by His glorious might — and to trust that the fruit will come, even if we never see it ourselves.