March 10. William Chalmers Burns. As a youngster, Burns had two goals: to have lots of money and to live in a grand house. So he headed to Edinburgh to study law.
But at university, when Burns was seventeen, he met Jesus, and his life changed. His new goal became to glorify God in all the earth. For fifteen years, he preached revival in Scotland. Then he served another twenty years as a missionary to inland China.
Whether at home in Scotland or abroad in China, he was determined to “take care of God’s cause.” To that end, on this date in 1853, he translated the first half of The Pilgrim’s Progress into the Mandarin language. This is his story.
An obstacle can be an enemy or an adventure.
In the winter of 1847, after weathering a fierce storm, Burns arrived on a hostile shore of South China—a war-torn area cloaked in spiritual darkness. No Christian friend greeted him, no European welcomed him. He was armed only with his Bible.
The people resisted foreign religion, and the Western world considered the place an impossible mission field. The language required years of painstaking study to learn, and Burns had only broken Chinese.
None of this deterred Burns. He was a man intent on Chinese people being saved by Jesus Christ. And when Burns got his first opportunity to reach into the darkness and pull the lost from the fires of hell, he was ready.
Dr. Morrison, a fellow missionary, asked Burns to visit “three Chinese criminals under sentence of death for murder.” The men had heard snippets of the Gospel, and now facing their deaths, were desperate for someone to tell them about the Lord Jesus and His salvation.
Burns didn’t hesitate. A man of great compassion, he took great pleasure in caring “for those for whom few else cared, to be as a brother born to the sorrowful, the outcast, the forsaken.”
God had sent Burns to China for men just like these, and he visited them every day. In his broken Chinese, he desperately tried to convey the Gospel. And the criminals—starved in their spiritual hunger—strove to understand everything Burns said. But Burns had been learning the Canton dialect, and they didn’t speak Canton.
So Burns took another approach. He and the three men read Chinese scriptures together. Their dialect. He read slowly and learned alongside them. Burns picked up a few words in their dialect. They received the truth and devoured it.
The long days in that stench-ridden prison were taxing, but little by little, the prisoners began to change. God’s Word took root in their hearts. They began to pray together. The convicts prayed in their own tongue, while Burns joined them, using whatever words he could. Burns wrote in his journal: “I felt encouraged and enjoyed something of the power of grace in praying with and for them.”
And in answer to those prayers, God worked a miracle for one of the prisoners: the governor decided not to execute him.
Nobody had expected Burns to be able to share anything in Chinese until at least a year after his arrival. But God used Burns’ primitive Chinese to lead three needy men to the feet of Jesus, changing their destinies forever.
“Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up” (Galatians 6:9 NIV).
In which area of your life is God calling you to persevere? An obstacle can be an enemy or an adventure.
“William Chalmers Burns.” The Wicket Gate Magazine: A Continuing Witness. Internet edition number 92. Published September, 2011. http://www.wicketgate.co.uk/issue92/e92_4.html.
Burns, Islay. Memoir of the Rev. Wm. C. Burns. New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1870.
The Complete Works of William Chalmers Burns. Parisis, Peter-John (Ed.) Flint, Michigan: 2011.
Story read by Peter R Warren, https://www.peterwarrenministries.com/