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The shadow of a sixty-year-old man was silhouetted against the canvas of the tent. The flickering candle cast a golden aura inside as he knelt beside a small wood and canvas cot. Rhythmic tropical rain lightly pelted the tent as he prayed beside his bed. The prayer was one he had written out many years before. If you were able to hear that night what God heard it would have sounded much like this:
O Lord since Thou hast died, To give Thyself for me,
No sacrifice would seem to great, For me to make for Thee.
Outside the native porters, guides and cooks who had followed this man for nearly 20 years through the jungle heard the low sound of his voice communing with God as he always had done before bed. Then the candle flickered out and they also retired to sleep through the rainy night.
The next morning the cold and stiff body of David Livingstone was still kneeling beside the cot when his beloved native brothers found him. He was so thin from the countless bouts with malaria, his skin darkened by the years of Equatorial African sun was loosely draped over the bones of his earthly tent now vacant. His spirit had soared immortal, making its flight from the darkness of a disease-ridden, weak, and failing body to the realm of light and life in the presence of Jesus his King to whom he had consecrated his life.
WHO WAS DAVID LIVINGSTONE (1813-1873)?
• David Livingstone was born in the Scottish city of Blantyre in 1813.
• At age ten he began working fourteen-hour days in the cotton mill to help support his impoverished family. There he learned by snatching sentences from a book on his spinning jenny, followed by two hours of night school. These disciplines kept him from being totally uneducated.
• He was converted at twelve, and had a profound spiritual awakening at twenty and resolved to be a medical missionary in China. From that point onward Livingstone studied Greek, theology, and medicine at Glasgow, returning to the mill during vacations to help pay expenses.
• Qualified in medicine, he was sent by the London Missionary Society in 1840 to South Africa, since the Opium War had closed China. Livingstone’s heart had been fired by missionary Robert Moffat’s words about having seen “the smoke of a thousand villages” where no missionary had ever been.
• Livingstone and his wife, Mary, Moffat’s daughter, stayed in three homes in three years, ever moving further up-country. He was an evangelist, doctor, teacher, builder, gardener, shoemaker, and carpenter. But all the time his eyes were on the “unknown north” beyond the fearsome Kalahari Desert.
• In 1852 Livingstone sent his wife and children home before he embarked on a four-year, six-thousand-mile journey that took him to Angola’s Atlantic coast, then east to the Indian Ocean at Mozambique.
• When Livingstone’s wife died in 1861, he threw himself fiercely into his work. He disappeared from sight for ten years; and when found by Henry Morton Stanley of the New York Herald in 1871, Livingstone refused to go home.
• David Livingstone, the renowned and noble missionary to Africa, wrote in his journal, People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Can that be called sacrifice, which is simply paid back as a small part of the great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay?
• At his death in 1873, such was their love for him that his native assistants bore his body fifteen hundred miles to the coast.
With that background listen again through the tent as you can dimly see in the dark jungles of Africa the shadow of a sixty-year-old man silhouetted against the canvas of the tent. The flickering candle cast a golden aura inside as he knelt beside a small wood and canvas cot. Rhythmic tropical rain lightly pelted the tent as he prayed beside his bed. The prayer was one he had written out many years before. If you were able to hear that night what God heard it would have sounded much like this:
O Lord since Thou hast died, To give Thyself for me,
No sacrifice would seem to great, For me to make for Thee.
Lord send me anywhere, Only go with me;
Lay any burden on me, Only sustain me.
Sever any tie, Save the tie that binds me to Thy heart.
Lord Jesus my King, I consecrate my life Lord to Thee!