A Message from Missions to the Modern Ministry 99 cross. The miracle was wrought, and stony hearts were broken. Kayarnak came near and said to Beck with pathetic face and voices “How is that? Tell it to me once more. I, too, want to be saved.” Tears ran down Beck s face to think that after these years there was one inquirer. He told the story again and again. Kayarnak came day after day. Soon twenty came with him. On Easter, 1739,, he, his wife, and two children were baptized. He became a preacher and taught the missionary to depend, not upon logic but upon the story of the cross. In 1747, twenty-five years after Egede had landed, the first church was built for the three hundred members. The workers wrote at the time: “A stream of life is now poured upon this people. As we speak or sing of the sufferings.of Jesus, . . . . tears of love and joy roll down their cheeks” (“New Acts of the Apostles, p. 215). In 1828 in far away Burma Adoniram Judson had been laboring many years with but little success. He hears of the Karens far in the interior. The only Karen man he could find was Kho-Thah-Byu, a slave fifty years of age. As a youth be had been dull, vicious, and brutal. As a man he had mur dered thirty men by his own hand. Judson paid his ransom and took him to his own home. His darkened mind was at last lightened by the story of the cross. He was baptized and went immediately to his people to preach. For twelve years he made itinerating tours of from one week to six months among the six hundred thousand Karens. Whole vil-v lages were converted, and today there are forty thousand native Karen Christians as the result almost wholly of the preaching of Kho-Thah-Byu, a result second only immission annals to the work in the South Sea Islands: And this is one testimony of his preaching: “He sought in every sermon to bring into prominence the vicarious death of Christ. And the result was that a larger number of converts understood justi fication by faith than could be found among an equal number of Christians in a Christian land.”
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker