Biography of David Livingstone | David Livingston

In the simplest description of a disciple from the gospel accounts, Jesus said, a disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone, when he is fully trained, will be like his teacher. The consequences of such training, again, the disciple not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master, it is enough for the disciple to be like his teacher and the servant like his master. If they called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those who are of his household? And a further radical cost, demand that Jesus requires, if anyone comes after me and doesn't hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. So therefore, anyone who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple. And two, proofs of authentic discipleship. By this, all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another. By this, my father is glorified that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. Let's pray. Lord, bring life into this room and into my and our hearts together as we consider a disciple of yours from the 19th century. Lord, we don't want so much a spotlight on him and he certainly never would have wanted that, but certainly on his savior and certainly on the tremendous advantage it is to accede to his wishes, to recognize that when he imposes his way, it is for his glory and our everlasting good. So bring, we pray, bring to life what we need for life afresh in our own lives and callings. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. Let's take a look at the man himself in his mature years. This is David Livingston. He was born in 1813 and died 60 years later He died so remotely in Africa that it took his followers 15 months to carry his remains back to the coast and then on to England to be buried at Westminster Abbey. He was a contemporary in history in this country of Abraham Lincoln and in his own country of the Great Britain of Charles Darwin. When he was 10 years old, he began to work in a cotton mill in the town where he was born and in that same year, Victoria became Queen of England for the next 64 years. In 1871, the great news here in America was the Great Chicago Fire. That was the year that Livingston, who had been lost in Africa, was discovered by Henry Morton Stanley. Now let's talk about this little man. He never grew up to be more than five foot tall, five foot eight inches tall. Blantyre, Scotland is near Glasgow, near the big industrial city on the west side of the country of Scotland. He was born into a family of devout parents. He was born and lived in a tenement factory house with 24 other families in a 14 by 10 foot room. They shared that room together with his four brothers and sisters. There was no running water and it was a challenge that would prepare him for the challenges of the life that was ahead of him. As I said, when he was 10 years old, he began to work in a cotton thread making company. He started at 5.30 in the morning and he worked until seven or eight o'clock at night. Like a few other of the ambitious children, he went from there to school from eight o'clock until 10 o'clock at night. And then he went home to dinner and to study, often until midnight. And his mother says that there were times when she had to come into the room and take his books away from him. And he did this for six days a week for 10 years of his life. A 10 year old, and by the way, today is the 10th birthday of my grandson Emmett out in Colorado and I had the opportunity to look at him and tell him that I was gonna talk about somebody his age in a very different circumstance than him. A fourth grader. One of the remarkable things about David was that by the time he was 10 years old, he was already a voracious reader. And a portion of the first paycheck that he received went to buying a Latin grammar, rudiments of Latin. A language that he studied for many years hence. And it helped him, of course, when he went into the profession of becoming a medical doctor. And while he worked, he would take whatever book he was studying and he would set it on the spinning jenny and as he walked, and by the way, these piecers or spinners, they often had to walk 20 miles a day walking around the mill. And working in stiflingly hot temperatures. 80 to 90 degrees. That was considered the best temperature for making thread. And these machines were just roaring and so he'd put a book on the jenny, perched there, and he would read a sentence and then he'd walk around and then come back and read the next sentence. And he said, I could keep up a fairly continuous stream of education. The other piecers didn't appreciate that. They would often throw bobbins at his books trying to knock them off the perch. And of course, his supervisor thought it slowed him down in his works. And if that machine ever broke down, he'd be beaten for his inattention. So he lived a rigorous life for years and years and perhaps because no one appreciated what he was doing, he had no friends in the factory. That's why he was there for 10 long years. Now after he graduated, as it were, he finally graduated to operating the machines themselves and this gave him more opportunity to save money so that he could go to school. He'd been saved as a teenager. He compared it to, in later life he said, becoming a Christian was like being cured of color blindness. All of a sudden, the glow of Christ came through to me. See if I can find the actual description of the way he described himself. The perfect freeness with which the pardon of all our guilt is offered in God's book drew forth feelings of affectionate love to him who bought me with his own blood. In the glow of that love that Christianity inspires, I resolved to devote my life to the alleviation of human misery. So he went from being a worker in the factory to Christ and then from Christ to this desire to alleviate human misery and so he became a medical doctor. At least he began studying to become a medical doctor which in those days was the best the world had to provide but it was still quite primitive. Nevertheless, Livingston was devoted to that study of medicine his whole life even when he got to Africa. There was no such thing as chloroform. There was no cures for malaria but one of the things that he did was pay attention to the witch doctors and to the herbs and the other potions that the witch doctors said would be of use and he experimented on them himself and he stayed alive for 30 years of his life which was a remarkable thing. As you might know about that era of missions history, a lot of the missionaries who went packed their belongings in a coffin knowing that they were never going to return. Livingston returned three times. The year 1832 was for him the year he was promoted to be a spinner, an operator of the machines. In that same year, the British Parliament made history as well. It was the first, in the first place they passed the reform bill stipulating social and educational reforms to better the conditions of people like himself but secondly, it was in the following year, 1833 that Parliament passed the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. Missionary societies now considered the freeing of slaves to be the first step towards spiritual freedom and there was an optimism that stirred right into the young spinner as he started off to university studies. The year 1839 would affect Livingston's career as much as world affairs. He had initially, as he came near to his graduation from medical school as well as his appointment with the London Missionary Society, hoped that he could go to China. However, China was involved with England in an inglorious opium war. Now if you've heard of the opium war between China and England, you would assume it was the Chinese who wanted the opium trade and the British were trying to stop it. It's exactly the opposite way around. It was fought from 1839 to 1842 between the ruling dynasty and the British East India Company. The issue was Chinese refusal to allow the British to continue importing opium from their colony in India. China was humiliated militarily and her interior was pried open for the sake of trade and missionary activity. Resentment against Westerners was the long-term result. A matter of months before Livingston left, instead of going then to China, his attention was redirected to Africa. On a chance meeting while as a student in a missionary living quarters, he happened to meet a man named Robert Moffat. Moffat was something of a hero already because he had established a mission in the interior of Africa and he sought to persuade the young man to come there. He sought it by telling him about the, quote, vast plains north of my mission where, quote, sometimes can be seen by the light of the morning sun, the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary has ever been. And so off he went. Took him three months to get there. That's how long the sailing ships took to get from London to the Cape, Cape Town, South Africa. He was 27 years old when he arrived there. Now remember, here's a young man who had no childhood, no real adolescence. He had little or no play or recreation. To achieve what he had acquired, qualities were needed that left little room for anything but serious considerations. Though his heart was tempered by this love for Christ and this desire to serve humanity, his own endurance and overcoming spirit inclined him to judge others by the same standards that he applied to himself. And he had little patience with those whose views differed from his own. Therefore, when he arrived in Cape Town, first of all, he saw that the huge slave trade was the one deeply entrenched economy of the continent. The inland Africans themselves were willing to capture, transport to the coast, and sell their neighbors. So there was no need for anyone to, for the slavers to risk going into the interior. Nevertheless, Livingston was bluntly stated in his determination to emancipate coastal slaves and to eradicate the practice among the inland tribes. So he made his way after a month, just a month in the Cape Colony, after alienating virtually everybody there. And therefore, to no one's sadness, making his way 900 miles, first up the coast and then inland to meet up with Robert Moffat. Now here's a young man who always loved the outdoors, but didn't get much opportunity in growing up to enjoy it. Africa, Africa was glorious to him. He said it was like going from, one day to the next was like going from one picnic to another. It was just, the sky was blue, the landscape was filled with animals and plants. And he had this great desire, this scientific desire to make observations and to make journals. I tell you, if you wanna be remembered in history, one of the things you need to do is write down your thoughts. He had mountains of journals over the course of his life. And of course he got better and better at it. In fact, he wrote two books, and I'll point those out to you later, that are still in print. Anyway, as he makes his way up into the coast, he falls in love both with the African landscape and with the people himself. If he could be short and inconsiderate of European people, it was exactly the opposite with the Africans. He cared for them. He recognized they were lost souls. They would never have heard about Jesus Christ, and his heart went out to them. One of the things we'll say about him is what is Livingston's place in the mind of the African people, by and large, even today? When he got to Curuman, he began to make exploratory visits. He recognized, in fact, he was disappointed when he got to Curuman, because he saw that there were only 350 Africans there, and of course, Moffat had been there for a long time, and they were settled in. He thought these missionaries had become too comfortable and too luxury-seeking, and so he began making these exploratory trips. He made three of them, up to and across the Kalahari Desert, which people said, well, nobody can cross that. Well, he and one of his companions made those explorations as well. I have no ordinary pleasure in telling, he would say, murderers about the precious blood that cleanses from all sin. I bless God that he has conferred on me one so worthless the distinguishing privilege and honor of being the first messenger of mercy to ever trod these regions. Well, the Moffats had been away for a time, and before they returned, these exploratory ventures prompted him. He just wanted to get out and further north, and so he went up and started a mission station with one other more experienced missionary before the Moffats came back. When they did, he came back down to Curuman, and for the first time, he met and was immediately smitten by a single neatly dressed woman who was Moffat's daughter, Mary. She had been away completing her education in London, and David remained at Curuman over that Christmas and developed a friendship with Mary. Then he went back to that mission station that I spoke about called Mobatza, and among the things that he did that was a life changer for him was to help when the case of marauding lions came into the community, and so he was asked to come and help, and so he took his gun and went out, and there were several lions around, and when he emptied his gun into one of the larger males and told everybody, wait a minute, wait a minute until I can reload, as he was reloading, the lion charged him and clamped onto his left shoulder, and he said, he shook me like a terrier shakes a rat. He crushed his shoulder, and two other of his supporters came and tried to spear the lion and distracted the lion and ran off and tried to kill them and then dropped dead of the initial shots that Livingston had fired. Well, it took him a long time to recover. In fact, when his shoulder was finally set, he was building a house and he lifted something and rebroke the shoulder, and then it was awkwardly set, so the clavicle here was set in a incorrect kind of way. When his body was taken back to England, one of the ways to identify it was that irregularly shaped left shoulder, but because he was so badly wounded, he was taken back to Curamon to recover, and there Mary began to give him not only attention, but affection. And long story short, the two of them were married within a few months, January 2nd, 1845. Mackenzie, one of their biographers said, they shared ideals and partook the cup of their calling in Christ with equal commitment. Mary, in her marriage to David, was to prove herself to be a sensible spouse as worthy as her husband of the reward to be received on the day of judgment. Their marriage was not to be one of idyllic domestic felicity, to say the least, but affected by the stern demands of a vocation unique in the annals of modern Christendom. They didn't get along, these two missionaries that established Mobazzo, and in fact, as I said, this was the kind of guy that he was, very intolerant of someone who he disagreed with. And so, having taken Mary to Mobazzo, they moved to another place called Chuani, 40 miles north. And he won the chief of that village and that location to Christ. But a continuing drought, as well as then the lapsing of this chief temporarily back into polygamy, led him to move once again, move further north to his last mission station effort. So in the course of five years, he built three mission stations. Likewise, in the course of the first seven years of their marriage together, Mary gave birth to four children. Mary and the children would often stay at home while David trekked, and sometimes they traveled with him. The death of their fourth child, Elizabeth Prynne Livingston, two weeks after her birth in 1850, as well as a mysterious paralyzing disease that captured Mary's face for at least a while, prompted a stinging letter from the more sedentary mother-in-law, Mrs. Moffat. So as they talked things over and went back to Kuroman, it just seemed like he should settle down. But always there was this drive in him to get into the interior, to blaze a pathway or to perish. Here's what he said. Fever may cut us all off. I feel much when I think of the children dying. But who will go if we don't? No one. I would venture everything for Christ. Pity I have so little to give. But he will accept us, for he is a good master. Never one like him. He can sympathize. May he forgive and purify and bless us. We have an intense, immense region before us. Thousands live and die without God and without hope. Though the command went forth of old, go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. It is a venture to take wife and children into a country where fever, African fever prevails. But who that believes in Jesus would refuse to make a venture of such a captain? A heart's parent alone can feel as I do when I look at my little ones and ask, shall I return with this or that one alive? However, we're his and wish to have no interest apart from those of his kingdom and glory. May he bless us and make us blessings even unto death. Finally, in 1852, he couldn't stand the criticism of his in-laws or the pressure that he was putting on Mary and the children, so he sent them back to England. He was 45 years old now and alone, and he was about to enter onto the first of three expeditions in Africa. This would be his most successful one. We could call it the coast-to-coast trip that he made. He started by going almost straight up into the middle of the interior of Africa and then going all the way to the west coast of Africa and then not realizing what a tremendous burden it was for Mary to be alone with the children in England because he didn't get any messages back from her. He turned back to where he had started in the center and then went all the way to the east coast. Well, there you can see the map of the places where he explored. So there he is, first step all the way to the left. This is the expedition that makes him famous. When he gets back to England, news of his having tramped, and over the course of his life, he traveled 30,000 miles, most of them on foot, and most of them where there were no roads. When he got back to England, he was a national hero. It was a convenient time in British history for him to be a hero because there was a war in Crimea and it was not going well. There were troubles in India as well. And here was a commoner who had overcome a lot of obstacles and barriers and so he was received with great acclaim. He wrote about his experiences and here's where his journaling and just the capacity that he had to describe something that was brand new came to the fore. This was a national bestseller overnight, The Missionary Travels in South Africa, including a sketch of 16 years residence in the interior of Africa by David Livingston. He used the proceeds from this book to basically provide for a second expedition. He was gonna take Mary back with him, leave the children in Africa, I mean in England. One of the great burdens of his life that just haunted him his whole life was that he didn't spend enough time with his wife and his children. The Scottish word for the little ones is, why didn't I spend more time with my bairns, my little ones? Now they've all grown up and forgotten me. I don't have them anymore. So it haunted him. But nevertheless, this desire to go back and again to find that arterial river highway into Africa where commerce, where marketing could happen and the African people be persuaded not to trade on each other, but to open up the markets for other goods. The second great expedition that he went on, in fact, because the Missionary Society, the London Missionary Society refused to send other missionaries in. That was just too dangerous to do that. And so he quit the London Missionary Society and appealed to the government, to the British government, that he might become a consul of the government for the east coast of Africa. And he was given that opportunity, again on the hope that he would open up commerce and that would be good for the British economy. And so he went back now as a representative of the British government. As he came back a hero after the first of his expeditions, he came back a failure at the second. One of the things that doomed him was because he was assigned to be a leader of other men. And as I've already commented, he had no training to do that and he had no disposition to do it as well. He took along one of his younger brothers and his younger brother, Charles, was a troublemonger from the very beginning, stirring up all kinds of conflict and difficulty. And all of this besides the fact that Africa itself just overcame the desire that they had. He was trying to go up the Zambezi River and discovered that there was no way for that to happen because it was a series of waterfalls and rapids. There's the greatest of those rapids or waterfalls. This is actually something he discovered after five years of being on a first hearing about the water or the, what's the African name for it? Something that thunders, the water that thunders. He finally saw Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River. So his dreams of using the Zambezi as the way to get into Africa were shattered. But what it did for him on the second expedition was it turned him north, turned him into the very region where he could discover and see firsthand the terrible plague, the poison, as he called it, the poison on the continent of the African and Swahili slave trade. He came into those areas and he was, again, searching for a waterway, trying to solve the mystery of the inland water system of Africa. But more than that, he was seeking to preach along the way, always as a missionary first and an explorer second. When he came back on this second expedition, so we would call this the Zambezi Expedition, he took Mary with him and on the way discovered that they were pregnant for the sixth time. And so she went to Kuroman and he headed off on his own trying to fulfill his vision. As I said, on this expedition he was in charge of a large contingent of men. Because he demanded of every man the same stamina and tenacity he himself had, he became incredibly impatient except with the natives. Perhaps because of their cultural differences, he had little time for Europeans unlike himself. Again, it was in December of that year, 1858, that his dream of using the Zambezi was foiled. On February 21st, 1862, Mary and David were reunited after she had given birth to their youngest son, Oswell. Mary had caught malaria a number of times and had always recovered. But on the 21st of April, she took ill and did not respond to treatment. She died on the 27th and the man who had faced so many deaths and braved so many dangers was now utterly broken and wept like a child. In his diary, he poured out his heart. It's the first heavy blow I have suffered and quite takes away my strength. I wept over her who well deserved many tears. I loved her when I married her and the longer I lived with her, I loved her the more. God pity the poor children who were all tenderly attached to her. Now his manner of life softened after this for a time, but his previous inflexible determination now hardened even more into an obsession to push himself to the limits of his endurance. Well, because the expedition was extended and was a failure from the standpoint of finding that waterway, it was called off. And he came back to England now a second time and he failed again, even though he had explored some additional rivers in the interior of Africa. Now a third opportunity comes to him, however. Again, it's this time to find the source of the Nile. So the first time, the first expedition coast to coast, the second to Zambezi, which is a failure. Now here's a riddle. Where is the source of the Nile in the interior of Africa? Once on African soil, he decided to his own benefit to travel alone, in large measure because he didn't have a lot of funds to do it, but also because he wouldn't be any threat to suspicious tribespeople that he was a slaver or that he carried a lot of goods and therefore might be a good source to raid and so forth. He set on now at the age of 53. He advanced through the horrors of the trades and saw it firsthand. And in fact, the most crippling event of his life, besides the loss of his wife and alienation from his children was that he happened to be in a market among a cannibalistic people, a marketplace, and Arab slave traders came in with guns and began shooting in the crowd. They shot them not only in the center of this market, but as they tried to flee to the river, others of these Arabs were there to gun them down. Hundreds of Africans were killed. As usual, David, with the courage that was unusual, began to wave a British consulate flag. Come to me, come to me, they won't kill you if you come under the protection of the British flag. And so he was able to save a few and to minister to others. He was horrified and stricken by this massacre, so much so that it almost gave him a nervous breakdown, but he wrote it down. And when he was discovered by Livingston, or I mean by Stanley, he gave that report to Stanley to take back to England. And it was the horror of that massacre that Stanley was able to carry back to England that aroused the British people and the parliament and sent a consul to Zanzibar on the East Coast and to the sultan there. And finally, it put an end to the slave practice in East Africa. This happened, however, a year after, or I should say a month after Livingston died. He was again on his third and last journey. I've just described it. He compiled the account to the British government, a report he would never see the effect of, but it so enraged the British public that it was one of the leading pieces of evidence for ending the slave trade. Well, his life was broken and his health was as well. And he'd been gone so long that people wondered whether he was alive. And the scoop of the century happened when Henry Morton Stanley, an American newspaperman, found him. And after searching for him for two years in the interior of Africa and uttered those famously understated greeting, Dr. Livingston, I presume, even though Livingston was the only white man within 1,000 square miles, and Stanley was the only other white man in that area, Stanley proved himself to be a wonderful godsend. And Livingston didn't mind, I should have mentioned, he wrote a second book after the second expedition called The Zambezi Expedition, something about his exploration, but mostly about the African slave trade and trying to see it ended. He didn't mind that Stanley was gonna make money as a newspaperman because he knew the story would get back. And in fact, as a little boy, I can remember seeing this book on my parents' bookshelf, Stanley, How I Found Livingston. He was quite different from Livingston in many ways. And yet at the same time, he felt a deep attraction to Livingston as well. And when he returned to England, he turned the tide of opinion in Livingston's favor. And search parties were actually sent out afterwards to try to bring him back. By then he had already passed away. And his supporters, his servants, made the amazing decision that they would carry his body the 1,500 miles back to the coast. They disemboweled him and buried his heart in Africa, but then they mummified him and concealed his identity so that superstitious tribes wouldn't stop them from carrying a dead person back with them. When he got to England, he received what's called a full state funeral. In fact, I think we've got a picture of his gravesite. It's in the very center of Westminster Abbey. And you know, these old churches are built in the shape of a cross. And Livingston's grave is right where the two edges of the cross meet. It's in the very center of that great church. The darkest moments of his life worked the greatest victories. Though he was classified a failed evangelist because he didn't win very many souls for Christ, he encouraged entire missionary societies, and many of his porters and servants went into Christian work as well. He lacked the grace to suffer fools gladly, unless they happened to be weak, ignorant, and or unsophisticated. Then his patience and benevolence were limitless. He always regretted not spending more time with his wife and his children. Again, the only commoner to be buried in Westminster Abbey in full state honors. The epitaph is that closing line that he wrote to the New York Herald. All I can say in my solitude is may heaven's rich blessing come down on everyone, American, English, Turk, who will help to heal this open sore of the world. And on the other side, other sheep I have, which are not of this fold, them also I must bring. They will hear my voice. Among the last things that he wrote, well, maybe I can just end with this. I see that our time has expired. As this poem, it was one of many recorded in the funeral procession and burial. Droop half-masked colors, bow bareheaded crowds, as this plain coffin o'er the side is slung to pass by woods of mass and ratline shrouds as erst of Africa's trunk Leanna hung. Tis the last mile of many thousands trod with failing strength but never failing will. By the worn frame now at its rest with God that never rested from its fight with ill. Or if the ache of travel and of toil would sometimes ring a short, sharp cry of pain from agony of fever, blane, and boil t'was but to crush it down and on again. He knew not the trumpet he had blown out of the darkness of that dismal land had reached and roused an army of its own to strike the chains from the slave's fettered hand. Now we believe he knows, sees all is well. Now God has stayed his will and shaped his way to bring the light to those in Darkling dwell with gains that life's devotion well repay. Open the abbey doors and bear him in to sleep with king and statesman, chief and sage. The missionary come of weaver's kin but great by work that brooks no lower wage. He needs no epitaph to guard a name which men shall prize while worthy work is known. He lived and died for good, that be his fame. Let marble crumble, this is living stone. Let's pray. Father, too little time to talk about so many things in his life. As a scientist, as a doctor, as a lover, as a explorer, and most of all as a humble servant of yours, thank you that he used his life up to the last breath. Thank you, Lord, for the memory of it. Lord, would you grant that we would run all the way to the finish line even as he had to be carried across it by those he loved. Thank you now for this chapel experience. Thank you for this topic of discipleship. Oh God, please do it again. Do it in this age. Do it among us. We pray it in Jesus' name, amen.