Adoniram Judson and the Six Years of Empty Pews

In 1813, Adoniram Judson arrived in Burma with a promise burning in his chest — that God had called him to bring the gospel to a people who had never heard it. For six years, not a single Burmese soul converted. Six years of preaching to empty interest, of learning a language so difficult that scholars said no Westerner could master it. His first wife, Ann, buried a child in foreign soil. Friends back in Massachusetts wrote letters urging him to come home.

When someone asked Judson about his prospects for the conversion of Burma, he replied, "The prospects are as bright as the promises of God."

That is the faith of Romans 4. Abraham, Paul tells us, "hoped against hope" — he believed the promise of the Almighty even when his own body was as good as dead and Sarah's womb had long been closed. He did not weaken in faith by considering the impossibility of his circumstances. Instead, he grew strong, giving glory to God, fully convinced that what the Lord had promised, He was able to perform.

Judson died in 1850. By then, over 100 churches and thousands of Burmese believers stood as living proof that the promise had been real all along. He never saw the full harvest. Abraham never counted every descendant. But both men staked everything on the faithfulness of God — and it was credited to them as righteousness.