“David Livingstone is truly one of the remarkable missionaries of all time. Not only did he seek to bring Christ to the continent of Africa; he also succeeded at great personal cost in making maps and blazing the trail into the little known heart of what was then called the dark continent. But for all of his remarkable work in education and exploration, his heart remained captive to Jesus. So much so that when he died, at his own wish, his heart was buried in Africa.
“For my own part, I have never ceased to rejoice that God has appointed me to such an office. People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of the great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay? Is that a sacrifice which brings its own blest reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind, and a bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter? Away with the word in such a view, and with such a thought! It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege.
Anxiety, sickness, suffering or danger, now and then, may make us pause, and cause the spirit to waver, and the soul to sink; but let this be only for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall hereafter be revealed in, and for, us. I never made a sacrifice. Of this we ought not to talk, when we remember the great sacrifice which He made who left His Father’s throne on high to give Himself for us; “who being the brightness of the Father’s glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high.”
David Livingstone in The Book of Jesus: Treasury of the Greatest Stories and Writings about Christ ed. Calvin Miller (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005) 489.