ORDERED BY INFINITE LOVE

 She was 23.  They had three children. All the children died.   The first baby Nameless.  They drop (the baby) in the water between India and Rangoon.   The second, Roger Williams Judson 17 months old dies.   The third, Maria Elizabeth Butterworth Judson outlives her mother by two months or six months and dies.  

 Now Anne who lost two children then died and another child died wrote this after her second child died.   

 “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. Oh

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.”

 

I preach to produce mothers like mothers like that.  There are not many around.  

 Judson inherited a deep belief in the sovereignty of God; and, the great

importance of stressing that here for me is not primarily soteriological, though

it had that function of course for the way he understood people getting saved

in Burma. But it mainly, and my point here is that it stabilized him in the midst

of incredible and never-ending calamities in his life.   

 

Let me read you a beautiful sentence that I hope you all will be able to say.

 

“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.” 

 

There's another reason why I want to build fences around the sovereignty of

God.  I listen to the people in my church.  I listen especially to the suffering

people in my church.   and I don't know what I would tell them, if I could not

tell them,  

 

“This has been ordered by infinite love and mercy, not --- he just

didn't know this was gonna happen.”