The Greatest Sacrifice

David Livingstone (1813-1873), Scottish missionary and explorer of Africa, visited Cambridge on December 4, 1857. To the student body he said: “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 a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay? Is that a sacrifice which brings…bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter? Away with the word! It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger…with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause, and cause the spirit to waver, and the soul to sink, but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall hereafter be revealed in 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.”

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