Adapted from the session as a book chapter, in John Piper's voice, followed by Chad Vegas's closing words to the conference (which are in the recording but not in the YouTube video). It keeps the argument, stories and wording where possible, but it is an edited retelling, not a transcript. Tap a time in the margin to hear that moment.
Father, I need your help now, and so I ask for it. These folks need your help to listen, to receive and to be changed. I believe you have been calling, and will call, some to go to the hardest places in the world at great cost, and I pray that my message would be used to confirm that call. It's a mystery. I marvel at how you do it; I can't explain it, quantify it or calculate it. You just do it. So do it, Lord. In Jesus' name, amen.
First, a word about the title, “Servant of Joy.” Adoniram Judson and two of his wives (he had three, because two died) gave their lives between 1813 and 1850 to bring joy to the people of Burma. That's what I mean.
When Adoniram and his wife Ann (affectionately called Nancy; I may use both names for the same woman) arrived in India in 1812, William Carey, already there, discouraged them from going to Burma. The British were the colonial power in the region, the Judsons were Americans, and the War of 1812 between Britain and America was in high gear. Why put yourself in harm's way with the British, not to mention the local people? They went anyway. And it was Nancy who put into words why:
“The poor Burmans are entirely destitute of those consolations and joys which constitute our happiness; and why should we be unwilling to part with a few fleeting, inconsiderable comforts, for the sake of making them sharers with us in joys exalted as the heavens and durable as eternity? … I have been accustomed to view this field of labor with dread and terror, but I now feel perfectly willing to make it my home the rest of my life.”
And she did. She died in Burma thirteen years later, at thirty-six.
Joys exalted as the heavens
If people have not heard of Jesus Christ and believed in him, they are destitute of the consolations and joys that constitute our happiness. So for twenty centuries thousands upon thousands of missionaries, of whom the world was not worthy and most of whose names you will never hear this side of eternity, have said, “Shall we not spend and be spent to make lost people sharers with us in joys exalted as the heavens and durable as eternity?” Only those who hear and believe can have those joys.
There is no greater joy, wouldn't you agree, than to have your sins forgiven and all your guilt removed; reconciliation with God; no wrath; escape from hell; adoption into God's family; personal fellowship with the Son of God now and forever; the hope of glory; the everlasting presence of God, in whose presence is fullness of joy and at whose right hand are pleasures forevermore; and in the meantime the most significant life you could ask for. The alternative to that joy is eternal misery, and the only people who escape it are those who hear about Jesus and believe.
The missionary note the Judsons sounded, as missionaries have through the centuries, was sounded three thousand years ago in the Psalms. They didn't make it up. “Let the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you! Let the nations be glad and sing for joy!” (Psalm 67). “Clap your hands, all peoples! Shout to God with loud songs of joy!” (Psalm 47). “Shout for joy to God, all the earth; sing the glory of his name; give to him glorious praise!” (Psalm 66). “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth! Serve the Lord with gladness! Come into his presence with singing! Know that the Lord, he is God!” (Psalm 100).
It is God's invincible purpose that his Son have this happy reward for his sufferings. Why did he die? What did he ransom? “You were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation.” He was slain to have a people from every nation whose happiness is, as Nancy said, exalted as the heavens and durable as eternity. And she was right. He was not slain to fail. He paid the ransom, and he will have the ransomed, from all the nations, and they will be glad. He will have a happy people. That's what he died for.
The gladness of the ransomed in the Redeemer is the great goal of all things: “The ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.” That is the end of all things, the goal of everything that exists: a ransomed, happy people surrounding the Redeemer, delighting in him, and so making much of him by their happiness in him. Nancy said so. Why wouldn't we go?
I still get letters, not just emails, and sometimes people say to me in person, even here, “Pastor John, God used you in my passing from death to life.” That sentence came last week. I tell them, “You could not have said anything more precious or satisfying to me.” I once asked my father, an evangelist and the happiest man I ever knew (I'm a Southerner; I called him Daddy until he died at eighty-six), “Daddy, what's the key to the greatest happiness?” He didn't hesitate: “Johnny, leading someone to Jesus.” There is no happier or more significant way to spend your life than making much of Christ by helping people experience him as their greatest treasure, especially those who have never heard.
Of course, the Calvary road behind Jesus to the nations is a hard, very painful road. He walked it; you will walk it. And it is the happiest road in the world. That's not a contradiction. (I wrote a poem for my wife on our fifty-seventh anniversary last December. It had been a hard and happy year. I'd love to recite it for you, but it was a hard and happy year.) Why is it not a contradiction? Because of 2 Corinthians 7:4: “In all our affliction, I am overflowing with joy.” Not after all our affliction: in it. That's crazy. You lose your child, you get cancer, your wife is so depressed she can't talk, and you're overflowing with joy? It's crazy, unless 2 Corinthians 4:17 is true: “This light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.” (That's in the same letter where Paul lists twenty-six horrible afflictions he lived with.) Faith is the substance of things hoped for. Right now, in affliction, you can taste it. That's what they believed.
God's purpose for you at this conference has been to make the missionary life possible for all of you, and irresistibly attractive for some of you. Both are happening. All of you should feel in your bones as you walk out, “I could do that. I'm willing.” Most of you shouldn't go; you are called to be here. But for some of you it is not just possible, it is unavoidable, and God is making that clear right now. Either way it is costly. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” What could make you happier than a life of much fruit? So die, and be happy. That's Christianity, plain from the Gospels: “Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (John 12:25). Eternal joy, if you're willing to lose your life. And what strikes me as I trace Judson's life is how many times and in how many ways he died, so that he might make the Burmans sharers in joys exalted as the heavens and durable as eternity.
The making of a missionary
He was born August 9, 1788, in Malden, Massachusetts. (Last week Christianity Today reported that Burmese Christians in Boston found the house he was born in, a few miles north of the city, up for sale, bought it for $700,000, and in 2025 turned it into a museum. Someone gave me that article three days ago. How cool is that? The ripple effect of his life goes on in Boston right now.) His father was a pastor in the old Jonathan Edwards tradition. Adoniram graduated from Brown at nineteen, top of his class, and that summer, influenced by skeptics, threw away his Christian faith, breaking his parents' hearts. He took the horse he had inherited from his father and, like the prodigal son, headed for New York to write for the stage.
Mercifully, God did not let him go. Looking at the dissolute life around him, he became, by grace, disgusted. His unbelief didn't last long. He visited his uncle Ephraim, who gently wooed him back toward Jesus with reasonable conversation. And then he met death face to face in the death of Jacob Eames, a young man so witty, so clever, so articulate, so skeptical, and so dead. (There is some controversy about the details, so I'll leave it at that.) Courtney Anderson, in To the Golden Shore, a book you should all get, writes that in his very bones, logic or no logic, Adoniram was suddenly imbued with the feeling that the God of the Bible is real. He was filled with despair and dread, for the Deist logic and evidence said no. He read Thomas Boston's Human Nature in Its Fourfold State (I read it in my first year as a pastor; so important), and he resolved to go to Andover Seminary (Harvard had already become too liberal) to learn what he needed to know. Little by little the dread and doubt subsided, and on December 2, 1808, at twenty, he “made a solemn dedication of himself to God.”
Over the next two years he was riveted by missionary news: Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg and William Carey in India, Robert Morrison in China. He devoured everything he could find about the East. And by February 1810 the miracle was wrought. I referred to it in my opening prayer. You don't understand how it happens; neither do I. But, oh my, it happens. It became perfectly clear to him that he should be a missionary. Here is what he wrote:
“It was during a solitary walk in the woods behind the college, while meditating and praying on the subject, and feeling half inclined to give it up, that the command of Christ, ‘Go into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature,’ was presented to my mind with such clearness and power, that I came to a full decision, and though great difficulties appeared in my way, resolved to obey the command at all events.”
And it was over. The battle was done; the call was complete; he would never turn back. That's a miracle, and it's happening at this conference. You go home at night and say, “Are you serious, God?”
One problem: he was far ahead of the agencies and the churches. There was no American agency, no group of Christians ready to support him and his friends to go ten thousand miles around the world. So, a Congregationalist of the Edwardsean kind, he resolved to go to Britain and sign up with the London Missionary Society. When Samuel Mills, one of his Haystack friends, heard, he wrote: “Is England to support her own missionaries and ours likewise? I do not like this dependence on another nation, especially when they have done so much and we nothing.” That kind of zeal among college students, and Judson's remarkable commitment to go, led to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, a Congregationalist agency of churches willing to send. On June 28, 1810, at twenty-two, Judson and four others presented themselves and appealed to be sent to the East, and they were accepted.
And amazingly, that night there was a young woman there. (This is so good, because God has done this in my own life: that's why I went to Wheaton in the summer of '66.) Her name was Ann Hasseltine. She was twenty-one, he was twenty-two, and he fell madly in love. A month later he declared his intention to court her and wrote her father a letter that some of you know because it's so famous and so crazy. I read it not because it's cute and clever and sweet, but because it shows the kind of people he, she and her father were:
“I have now to ask whether you can consent to part with your daughter early next spring, to see her no more in this world; whether you can consent to her departure, and her subjection to the hardships and sufferings of a missionary life; whether you can consent to her exposure to the dangers of the ocean, to the fatal influence of the southern climate of India; to every kind of want and distress; to degradation, insult, persecution, and perhaps a violent death. Can you consent to all this, for the sake of him who left his heavenly home, and died for her and for you; for the sake of perishing, immortal souls; for the sake of Zion, and the glory of God? Can you consent to all this, in hope of soon meeting your daughter in the world of glory, with the crown of righteousness, brightened with the acclamations of praise which shall redound to her Saviour from heathens saved, through her means, from eternal woe and despair?”
(I understand your laughter; it is so weird. But it is deadly serious.) Do you know what her father said? She could make up her own mind. That's amazing. What a man. What a woman. She wrote to a friend: “I feel willing, and expect, if nothing in providence prevents, to spend my days in this world in heathen lands. Yes, Lydia, I have about come to the determination to give up all my comforts and enjoyments here, sacrifice my affection to relatives and friends, and go where God, in his providence, shall see fit to place me.”
They married on February 5, 1812, and sailed for India twelve days later. Quite a honeymoon. They sailed with two other couples and two single men on two ships, so that if one went down, the mission would go on. The voyage took 114 days, and on the way he became a Baptist. (He had a lot of time; he was reading his Bible; that's what happens. Kevin has already gone home, so there are only a few Presbyterian remnants down here. Sometimes it goes the other way; I can see that.) Now he was in real trouble: he arrived in India having just given up his Congregationalist support. William Ward, Carey's Baptist colleague, baptized him and Ann on September 6, 1812. Ann, always the voice we hear (he had many of his letters destroyed, as you'll see), wrote: “We anticipate the loss of reputation, and of the affection and esteem of many of our American friends… But the most trying circumstance attending this change, and that which has caused most pain, is the separation which must take place between us and our dear missionary associates… We feel that we are alone in the world, with no real friend but each other, no one on whom we can depend but God.” (Baptists in Minnesota don't have any reputation either; it's like a sect.)
When American Baptists heard what had happened, they banded together into an association and supported them. Luther Rice, one of the missionaries, came home with a liver ailment and spent the rest of his life mobilizing Baptist support for foreign missions, and the rest is history. Baptists in America have been great supporters of missions ever since.
Burma
In July 1813 Adoniram and Nancy left India and ventured to Rangoon, Burma. That was the beginning of the rest of their lives: 108-degree heat, cholera, malaria, dysentery, no modern medicine or health care. It would cost Judson two wives and seven of his thirteen children. He never saw his mother or father again; neither did she. He never saw his brother again. It was thirty-two years before he visited America once, for a year, during which he married a third wife, Emily, and took her back. (Ann, Sarah, Emily: there is a book called The Three Wives of Adoniram Judson, and all three were heroic women.) He lived three and a half more years and died at sixty-one.
Besides the inspiration of his life, Judson's main lasting achievement was probably translating the whole Bible into Burmese. The New Testament took ten years, from 1813 to 1823, the Old Testament another eleven, to January 1834. His translation was so good that it is still in use today, and it would bear great fruit. But first there would be untold suffering.
In 1824, the year after he finished the New Testament, he was arrested, accused of being a spy, and imprisoned. His feet were put in fetters; a long bamboo pole was lowered from the ceiling, threaded through the prisoners' fetters and hoisted until only their heads and shoulders touched the floor, and they were kept that way all night. The vermin in their hair were so bad that finally they were all shaved bald. Ann, pregnant, walked two miles a day to plead for his life, insisting he was not a spy, and cared for him as best she could. After nearly a year of that torture he was suddenly moved to a village, gaunt, hollow-eyed, in rags, crippled by torture, mosquitoes driving the prisoners mad on their bloody feet. After seventeen months he was released, because the government realized it needed him as a translator.
Ann's health was broken, and eleven months later she died. Six months after that, the baby died. And darkness settled on Adoniram Judson, darkness of soul. Self-doubt overtook him. Had he become a missionary out of ambition, for fame, rather than humility and self-denying love? He destroyed all his letters of commendation, renounced the Doctor of Divinity Brown had given him, and gave all his private wealth to the mission. On the second anniversary of Nancy's death he moved into the jungle in total isolation, with a kind of death wish. He built a hut, dug a grave, sat beside it pondering mortality, and wrote, “God is to me the Great Unknown. I believe in him, but I find him not.” He had just translated the whole New Testament, endured seventeen months in prison, and lost his wife and daughter.
Ironically, what began to bring him out of that deep, suicidal darkness was news of his brother's death. How does that work? When Judson left America his brother was an out-and-out unbeliever. Now the news came that he had died in faith. My brother is in heaven! And it saved him.
Deep darkness often precedes a glorious dawn.
Thousands have learned this lesson, and if you've lived long enough, you have too. Life and ministry in Burma had been indescribably hard for nineteen years. The first convert was baptized six years after they arrived. Sowing had been long and hard; reaping, harder. But in 1831, the year after his recovery, the heavens opened. There was a new spirit in the land. He wrote, and this is almost too good to be true against the backdrop of what he had suffered:
“The spirit of inquiry is spreading everywhere, through the whole length and breadth of the land… We have distributed nearly ten thousand tracts, giving to none but those who ask. I presume there have been six thousand applications at the house. Some come two or three months' journey, from the borders of Siam and China: ‘Sir, we hear that there is an eternal hell. We are afraid of it. Do give us a writing that will tell us how to escape it.’ Others come from the frontiers of Cathay, a hundred miles north of Ava: ‘Sir, we have seen a writing that tells about an eternal God. Are you the man that gives away such writings? If so, pray give us one, for we want to know the truth before we die.’ Others come from the interior of the country, where the name of Jesus Christ is a little known: ‘Are you Jesus Christ's man? Give us a writing that tells about Jesus Christ.’”
Today the Chin people of Myanmar are about 85 percent Christian and the Kachin about 90 percent, and Baptists are the country's largest Protestant denomination. No one doubts the fruitfulness of Judson's life. But the price in suffering was enormous. How did he endure?
How did he endure?
That's the key question, and it's what I look for in every biography (we were talking about biographies this afternoon). How did you live this life? I want to live like that. I want my life to count like that. How did you do it? Judson answered: “If I had not felt certain that every additional trial was ordered by infinite love and mercy, I could not have survived my accumulated sufferings.” His precious, heroic wives were sustained by the same confidence in the absolute sovereignty of God. Nancy lost three children. When the second died, she wrote: “Our hearts were bound up with this child; we felt he was our earthly all, our only source of innocent recreation in this heathen land. But God saw it was necessary to remind us of our error, and to strip us of our only little all. O may it not be in vain that he has done it. May we so improve it that he will stay his hand and say, ‘It is enough.’”
What sustained this man and his wives was a rock-solid confidence that God is absolutely sovereign, infinitely wise and good all the time. If they had known the song, they would have sung, “All my life you have been faithful; all my life you have been so, so good; with every breath that I am able, I will sing of the goodness of God.” I love that song. And they believed that if a seed falls into the ground, or into the ocean, and dies, it bears much fruit: the fruit the Burmans now have, joys exalted as the heavens and durable as eternity, for centuries to come.
On April 6, 1850, very sick, Judson boarded a ship with two friends and headed into the Bay of Bengal, because sea air was thought to heal. Six days later he died on board. The ship hove to. The crew assembled quietly. The larboard port was opened. There were no prayers. The captain gave the order, and the coffin slipped into the sea. It was eight o'clock at night, latitude 13 degrees north, longitude 93 degrees east. You can find his grave on Google Earth. It's just blue, a vast, empty blue: a seed sown in the depths of the sea. What an inglorious end. And what a glorious harvest. Don't you want to live a life like that? Surely you do.
Father, you are so good. You did not spare your own Son but gave him up for us all; will you not with him graciously give us all things? All we need to obey you, to glorify you, to go: you will sustain us. Everything we need you have purchased. It is done, it is secure, it cannot fail. “My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.” We will never be bereft of his help. So, God, come, and grant the assurance of this care. We need to obey; we need to bear fruit; we need to glorify you. In these last minutes of this conference, as we sing and say farewell, do your final, decisive, confirming, calling work, I pray. In Jesus' name, amen.
Closing the conference · Chad Vegas
Chad VegasThank you to the pastors who brought people from your churches; we are deeply thankful for your trust. And thank you to our volunteers from Greenville, Missionary and Radius, and the hundred-plus others who came to serve.
Chad VegasI had asked for a list of all the churches here so that I could pray through it as much as I could. There are a lot of names. As I prayed, I was taken back to 1998, when I was a twenty-five-year-old man sitting in a conference much like this one and heard Sinclair Ferguson speak about the Trinitarian love of God and the love of God in Christ toward me, and my life was radically changed. I walked out of that conference wanting nothing more than to know Christ in his word and teach it to others.
Chad VegasThe next year, 1999, Brad Buser came back from Papua New Guinea, having led the Yembiyembi to Christ and planted a church there, and I saw the Lord's heart for the nations. That changed me again: now I wanted not only to know Christ in his word and teach it, but to see others go to every tribe, tongue and nation and name Christ where he had never been named. So as I prayed through the list, I prayed: “Lord, whether the people at this conference go or send, may one thing happen in as many hearts as possible by the work of your Spirit: that they would be about one thing, naming Jesus Christ here and in every tribe and tongue and nation on this earth.”
Chad VegasWe hope you'll join us again: at our Go conference for eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds in Matthews, North Carolina, on June 4 and 5; in Oxford next September; or in 2028, when we hold this conference again. But whatever you do between now and then, I pray that all of us would desire one thing, the fulfillment of the vision John saw in Revelation 7: “After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’ … And they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, saying, ‘Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.’” Let's sing the Doxology together.