The sacrifice element in the Christian life is further illustrated in another kind of palm known as the Cabbage palm. The terminal bud, or "cabbage," is enclosed among many thin, snow-white, brittle flakes. It has the flavor of the almond, but of greater sweetness, and is boiled and eaten with meat. As its removal causes the death of the tree, it is regarded as an extravagant delicacy only rarely to be enjoyed.
Here we find the illustration of the martyr element of the palm tree saint. Paul said, "I am now ready to be offered." Stephen gave himself a living sacrifice to God, and right away lost his life. The martyrs are numbered by thousands. Is not this an extravagant method of spreading the gospel? It may be from a human standpoint, but God in His infinite wisdom can see beyond our shortsightedness, and permits such to be. "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." If there were more persecution today there would doubtless be a better type of Christians. We should possess the martyr spirit. The word "witness" in the original is martyr. And surely many of those early Christians proved it. Every consecrated soul should involve in his consecration the possibility of losing his life for Jesus; then, if he ever faces the issue, he is prepared for it, and if he never has to face such an issue, he might consider it so much clear gain.
III. THE FOREIGN MISSIONARY
The peculiarity of a certain kind of palm, known as the Great Rattan is its wandering or traveling characteristic. The stems of this very peculiar variety are of prodigious length extending for hundreds of feet; it is stated from twelve hundred to eighteen hundred feet, clinging by hooks attached to their leaves to the trunks and boughs of neighboring trees, or trailing on the ground. They are extremely hard externally and usually smooth.
Here we have a beautiful illustration of the missionary spirit. We are living in a day when many of God's dear palm tree saints are flourishing like this Great Rattan. They have the missionary spirit. They have those spiritual hooks attached to their experience which enable them to cling to others with a tenacity which is not human. They are endowed with a spiritual sturdiness which in truth enables them to "endure hardness as good soldiers." They cross mountains, deserts and oceans, and live among the heathen to win them to Christ. What we need in these days of self-ease and luxury is more of this Great Rattan movement. We need more pilgrims to foreign lands. If we are not called ourselves with this peculiar characteristic, then let us help those who are thus called. We can help them with our money and with our prayers.
We all have a call to the foreign field in one sense: "Go ye into all the world." If God has let you off in person, then see to it that you have a part anyway in evangelizing the world. If I can not go, I can send. If I can not reach them by word of mouth, I can by way of the throne. If I can not preach and teach in the foreign land, I can pray and pay in the homeland. Amen!
With the thought of the missionary and also of the living sacrifice before us, we have the perfect combination of the two in the self-sacrificing experience of some of the early pioneers in the foreign lands. We, in the home lands, can scarcely realize the toils and hardships and dangers that some of these heroes of the cross waded through. We think of the dauntless Livingstone, who penetrated Africa's jungles in order to plant the gospel in that benighted region. Lost to home and the world for years, no wonder people considered him worth looking up, and sending a Stanley in search for him. But he was doing a work which would open up nations to hear the Word of life. Though he had to bury his loved one on the bank of the Zambesi, yet "with undaunted courage, he set his face toward new paths." How the natives loved this man—this living sacrifice. He was the means in God's hands of bringing them light for darkness, comfort for sorrow, life for death. He was the foe of the slave stealers, and delivered the poor helpless mortals from their grasp. He toiled on in solitude, and gave his very life to make a way to this dark and heathen world. Finally, far from the shore, and thousands of miles from home, he took sick. He was a man of prayer, and one morning when the native men looked into his abode, they found only the body of this devoted follower of the Lamb; he was dead on his knees. Those dusky, devoted souls determined to do the best they could in memory of their apostle, and knowing that his great, loving heart was centered in Africa, they took out his heart and buried it beneath a tree. They then let the hot sun dry the body and those loyal hands carried the remains many, many miles to the seashore, where, what was left of the faithful missionary was shipped to England. And now, with the heart of David Livingstone in the middle of Africa, his body in Westminster Abbey, his soul in heaven, we have an example of the grace of God in helping a man to give up his life for a lost world.
Let us take a glance at Henry Martyn. Leaving England as a young man in feeble health, for six years he worked against fearful odds in India. There in that disease-ladened land and in Persia he pursued his arduous task of learning three languages utterly adverse, such as Hindustani, Arabic, and Persian. In these three languages he translated the entire New Testament in six years. This is one of the most astonishing of intellectual feats on record. Besides these translations he made others and when we remember that he was burning up with consumptive's fever, and yet kept right on till, in order to perfect his translation in Persian, he made a trip to that country, and crossing burning, sand deserts with his own body literally burning up with fever, he was surely a living sacrifice. His passionate love for the Savior and the souls of lost men, made him suffer on in weakness and sickness, until the short candle of his life consuming at both ends finally flickered out in that faraway foreign land between Persia and the western shore, and where a lone headstone marked the spot where one of God's sainted heroes lay down and died. How small it makes me feel as I write these lines!
Another example is that of David Brainerd, the apostle to the Indians before the colonies became independent. This young man, who died in his thirtieth year in the home of Jonathan Edwards, was one of those early pioneers of gospel work among the wild and pagan Indians. He was another living sacrifice, very feeble in body, dying by inches with consumption, yet toiled on without murmuring, and praying till his body would be bathed in perspiration, he battled almost against hope till finally God gave him marvelous success among those benighted savages. A few lines from the journal of this marvelous man of prayer may stir up more of a spirit of prayer and self-sacrifice in the reader:
"June 14, 1742.