Romans 12:1-2, I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.
“Doctor Livingston I presume?” Were the words of Journalist Henry Morton Stanley upon finding the famous missionary pioneer, Dr. David Livingston. By the time David Livingston died in prayer in Africa kneeling by his cot, he was an international hero. For his funeral, England gave him a twenty-one-gun salute and a hero’s funeral among the saints in Westminster Abbey. “Brought by faithful hands over land and sea,” his heart buried in Africa but his body in England, his tombstone reads, “David Livingstone: missionary, traveler, philanthropist. For thirty years his life was spent in an unwearied effort to evangelize the native races, to explore the undiscovered secrets, and to abolish the slave trade.”
“…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 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 nowand then 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 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. “
(Livingstone’s Private Journal: 1851-53, ed. I. Schapera) (London: Chatto & Windus, 19600, pp. 108, 132)