True biblical Christianity provides the clearest understanding, the strongest support, and the greatest assurance to get through this life and to prepare for eternity. We put ourselves at peril in this temporal earthly life and in the eternal life to come if we ignore the Bible’s Christian truths.

We hear a lot these days about professing Christian young people deconstructing their faith. The experiences of Adoniram Judson in turning away from, then coming to the Christian faith speak with relevance to those who are questioning their faith today.

Judson eventually became America’s first foreign missionary, serving for nearly forty years in Burma (modern Myanmar). However, as a young college student he rejected Christianity for a time. Here’s the dramatic true story of how God graciously led him through his unbelief to genuine faith in Christ.

Adoniram’s father was a conservative Christian minister who served a series of three Congregational churches in Massachusetts. Adoniram was an extremely intelligent boy who by age ten gained proficiency in both Greek and Latin. Barely one week after his sixteenth birthday in August 1804, Adoniram entered Rhode Island College in Providence (soon thereafter renamed Brown University).

Adoniram’s scholarship and outward conduct were highly commendable. But he had not yet been spiritually regenerated (born again) and manifested little interest in spiritual matters. In addition, he soon fell under the influence of one Jacob Eames of Belfast, Maine, an upper classman at Brown.

Eames was intelligent, talented, witty, and amiable, but a confirmed Deist. Deism was a popular, rationalistic belief system in that era. It taught that a Supreme Being had originally created the universe, but after that was totally uninvolved with the universe or humankind. Owing to similar tastes and sympathies, Adoniram and Jacob quickly became fast friends, and before long Judson joined Eames in his disbelief of Christianity.

After graduating from Brown, Adoniram taught school for eleven months in Plymouth, where his family was then living. But he wanted to see more of the world and to make much more of his life. He also felt shackled and like a hypocrite living in his parents’ home and attending their church, never having revealed to them the change of religious beliefs he had come to have while in college.

Consequently, on his twentieth birthday, he abruptly left his teaching position and announced his intention to travel for a time. When his father pressed him for an explanation of that sudden change of course, Adoniram was forced to divulge his newly held beliefs.

His father responded with accusations of irresponsibility and ingratitude as well as warnings against rushing to his own destruction. His mother responded with tears and pleading. After enduring a week of domestic anguish, Adoniram mounted a horse and rode westward out of town.

Making his way to New York City, he joined a small traveling theatrical troupe. “We lived a reckless, vagabond life,” Adoniram later confessed, “finding lodgings where we could, and bilking the landlord where we found opportunity – running up a score, and then decamping without paying the reckoning.” He soon grew tired and disillusioned with such a lifestyle and left it without notice one night.

Continuing his journey on horseback, he stopped at a country inn where the proprietor, while showing him to his room, stated apologetically: “I have been obliged to place you next door to a young man who is exceedingly ill, probably in a dying state. I hope that will occasion you no uneasiness.”

Adoniram assured him it would not, but it proved to be a very restless night. What really disturbed him was the landlord’s statement that the young stranger was in a dying state. “Is he prepared?” Adoniram kept wondering. “Is he a strong Christian, calmly anticipating glorious immortality, or an unbeliever shuddering on the brink of a dark, unknown eternity?” Entirely against his will, Adoniram could not help but imagine himself on that deathbed facing eternity.

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