196 – July 14 – THIS DAY IN BAPTIST HISTORY PAST

196 – July 14 – THIS DAY IN BAPTIST HISTORY PAST

Posted: 13 Jul 2014 07:57 PM PDT

A Person can die and not be afraid”

John Taylor Jones was born at new Ipswich, New Hampshire. When he was about 15 years old, he received Christ as Savior and joined the Congregational Church in Ashby, Mass. During his biblical studies, he had a change of thinking concerning the mode and subjects of baptism and in 1828 he was baptized by Pastor Malcom and joined the Federal Street Baptist Church in Boston.

On July 14, 1830 he married Eliza Grew, and within seven months, they were on their way to Burma as missionaries. After their arrival Jones threw himself into the work with great zeal and soon became proficient in the Burman and Taling languages. He was especially drawn to the Talings, a tribal people, and he departed for Siam (Thailand), where there seemed to be a great opportunity to reach this group.

The Lord had a great work of translation ready for him which he completed in Oct. of 1843. It has been extolled as one of the great Asiatic translations of the New Testament. During his last visit to New York, Jones is quoted as saying, “There is one thing that distinguishes Christianity from every false religion. It is the only religion that can take away the fear of death. I never knew a dying heathen in Siam, or anywhere else, that was not afraid, terribly afraid, of death.”

He went on to say that there was nothing that struck the Siamese people with greater astonishment than when his dying wife said to her Siamese maid shortly before her death, “I am not afraid to die.” For weeks after her death, the Siamese people came to him and asked, “Teacher is it really true that a person had died and was not afraid to die? Can it be possible? And when he assured them that it was, they would say, “Wonderful, wonderful, that a person should die and not be afraid.”

Dr. Greg J. Dixon: From: This Day in Baptist History Vol. I: Cummins/Thompson, pp. 288-89.

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