Joseph Binney was born again at the age of twenty. He joined a Congregational church in Boston, and began to prepare himself to take the gospel to the heathen in the Orient. In one of his courses at Yale College he was to debate another student on the subject of baptism. For the first time in his life he was forced to study the subject as found in the Word of God, and in the process he became convinced of believer’s baptism by immersion. In 1830 he united with a Baptist church and then enrolled at Newton Theological Seminary to finish his education, but before he finished his course, the effects of an earlier bout of whooping cough struck him down, and it became obvious that he could not fulfil his heart’s desire to serve the Lord in Burma. Instead, he became the successful pastor of a small Baptist church in New England, and that is where he married Miss Juliette Pattison. As his health continued to deteriorated under the cold Northeastern winters, he accepted the call of a church in Savannah, Georgia, where the climate was more conducive to a man in his condition. There his health improved considerably, encouraging him to once again follow his dream. The Binneys left the United States in 1843. First in Maulmain among the Karens and then in Rangoon, Brother Binney and his wife were blessed to preach and teach the Word of God. After his third restorative furlough, on this day in 1877, the Binneys boarded a ship once again bound for Burma, but later that autumn the Lord took His servant home. He was buried in the Indian Ocean on November 26 of that year.
