After sixteen years in the African wild, David Livingstone (1813–1873) returned to London as a hero in late 1856. The Scottish physician and pioneer missionary had spent the prime of his life encountering physical difficulties and spiritual darkness. Soon he would go back for more.
While on furlough, Livingstone explained to students at Cambridge why he left the comforts of England to serve as a missionary. It had not been easy, and he acknowledged the costs: anxiety, sickness, suffering, frequent danger. He spoke of “foregoing the common conveniences and charities of this life.” But he insisted that this was no sacrifice, but a privilege: “I never made a sacrifice.”
In years to come, other missionaries, like Hudson Taylor (1832–1905), would echo this testimony. Men and women who manifestly made great sacrifices for the sake of the gospel would claim that, in the end, it was no sacrifice. The gain of godly sacrifice so outweighed the pain of obedience that, in hindsight, it did not feel sacrificial. The sacrifices were real, but the privilege far greater.
What might today’s missionaries — and husbands, fathers, mothers, pastors, and friends — learn from such a hedonist approach to our painful sacrifices, big and small?
Sacrificial Lambs
The biblical concept of sacrifice begins with the unconsenting lamb. None, of course, volunteered for the cultic ritual or willingly gave its neck to the knife. The lamb found no joy or sense of privilege in its slaughter. It was grabbed against its will, and its throat was slit. Its life was offered by its owner, not by the lamb itself.
This is the striking backdrop against which the incarnate Son of God offered himself as the sacrificial Lamb. No one grabbed Jesus without his consent (John 10:18). He was not coerced, tricked, or forced to the altar. Rather, he offered himself willingly, by his own eternal Spirit (Hebrews 9:14). He chose the cross with its nails and shame, not easily but genuinely. He embraced the ultimate sacrifice, and did so, as Livingstone would one day, with gain in view: “For the joy that was set before him [Jesus] endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2).
In doing so, Jesus lived out the same spiritual calculus he had taught, not only about self-denial and self-sacrifice, but specifically about the cross. At first it may not sound hedonistic: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). But then he explains the gain that makes self-denial and loss worthwhile:
For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself? (Luke 9:24–25)
Sacrificial Joys
So too, Paul, as Jesus’s inspired spokesman, indwelt with Jesus’s own Spirit, expresses surprising joy in his own painful self-sacrifice for the good of his converts:
Even if I am to be poured out as a drink offering upon the sacrificial offering of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with you all. (Philippians 2:17)
Two sacrifices are in view here. First, Paul identifies the Philippians’ obedience as “the sacrificial offering of your faith.” God’s people no longer offer slaughtered animals as sacrifices, as they did under the first covenant, but offer themselves, all they are, their whole lives, as “living sacrifices” (Romans 12:1).
The second sacrifice is Paul’s own. He sits in a Roman prison for his gospel-advancing labors and says, “Even if I die here, I rejoice.” His pursuit of joy in the joy of others landed him in prison, and final joy will be his if he never makes it out of prison because he looks forward to the reward of being with Christ himself (Philippians 1:21–23).
So, Paul, like his Lord, embraces sacrifice for the good of others by looking through the cost of the painful sacrifice to its reward. Beyond the immediate pain of loss, he sees, and begins to enjoy, the eternal gain. He endures for the joy set before him.
And even though we don’t sit in a Roman prison or stare down a Roman cross, we husbands and fathers and mothers and pastors and Christians learn to look to the gain that makes many sacrifices feel like no sacrifice at all — and makes even the most painful of sacrifices worthwhile.
Looking for Reward
A key to real joy, even in the midst of painful sacrifice, is having a heart that is bigger than the moment, a spirit larger than the sacrifice. We could call it faith. Faith sees the unseen that came before the moment and is beyond the immediate circumstances, and faith feels and acts in light of that larger unseen reality.
Faith looks to the reward. The sacrifice in and of itself is costly, uncomfortable, painful. On its own, the act of sacrifice is not desirable. It is not pleasurable but horrific to go to the cross. It’s not pleasurable but painful to sit chained in a Roman prison. But the eyes of faith, in the Spirit-indwelt heart, look through and beyond the present affliction to the reward that will come from the hand and face of God himself.
In such faith, the sacrifice itself does not become less painful, but the promise of joy swells to make the endurance of pain possible and even desirable. Holy-Spirit-buoyed faith looks to the coming reward and tastes even now in the moment of sacrifice some of the fullness of joy that is coming. One might even go so far, as Paul did, to say that the affliction, without itself becoming less painful, is “light” and “momentary” in comparison to the “eternal weight of glory” that is coming (2 Corinthians 4:17–18).
Joy Now and More to Come
What we find in our Lord and in his apostles and in his missionaries is a two-pronged joy that sustains us in painful sacrifice. It’s the same double joy that David Livingstone bore witness to.
The reason he could say, “I never made a sacrifice,” is that he had two joys in view — or one joy in two precious manifestations. He looked both to the final, full, undiluted joy that is to come in the end and to the present, real, sustaining joy he had begun to taste by faith even now. Already he testified to enjoying “blest reward, healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind” — and, what’s more, he had “bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter.” And with such joy now and joy to come, he insisted, “I never made a sacrifice.”
And so we too face the pains of sacrifice as such Christlike hedonists.
Desiring God