Sacrifice...it’s a beautiful thing!
by Marilyn Williams

Talk about doing what you can, the men and women I met on our three-and-a-half week ministry trip amazed me! Let me start with the missionaries we met in Nairobi Kenya. Our base station was the Nairobi Literacy and Translation Center. It was started by a handful of missionaries from around the world who came to Nairobi with a vision of a central hub for Bible Translation throughout Kenya and into Eastern Africa. These missionaries worked hard to build relationships with the Kenyan government as well as the Christians already living throughout Kenya. They built buildings and developed programs and training courses for the advancement of literacy and Bible Translation into every language group, no matter how small. The result was humbling. The nationals have now taken it over. I would dare to say they hardly need us anymore. At best, they need us to share the resources God has generously blessed us with in the west. They need our help to keep up with what God is doing through them! Every corner I turned, I met yet another Kenyan Christian Missionary, Bible Translator, and Literacy Specialist. I was more than impressed with the professionalism and devotion. Beginning with prayer and worship in the morning, the center was filled with administrators, public relations communications directors, volunteer coordinators, construction supervisors, Bible scholars, translation consultants, skilled workers, and volunteers from around the world. They are also reaching out to their own people to help support this vital and eternal work. While we were there, we helped with the building of more facilities to meet the demand of their growing organization. It is clear God has taken this center under His wings, and they are flying high in God’s purposes and glory.

Then it was off to Juba, Sudan. Wow, can you say sacrifice? Sacrifice is the best word I can come up with to describe the beauty and devotion of the missionaries and the Bible Translators we met. Let’s start with the missionaries. After seeing the Nairobi center up and running by the nationals, I understood more fully the vision these missionaries were building towards. From the ground up, digging through the hard soil and under the intense heat of the Sahara desert, these missionaries have given up basic comforts you and I did not know we could ever live without. They are fortunate to receive electricity a few times a week. After being there a few years now, they have just received the luxury of running cold water. Pay no mind to the absence of warm water; with average and sustainable temperatures of 100% Fahrenheit and 100% humidity night and day, you don’t want it anyways. The Literacy and Translation Center of Juba Sudan is actually quite blessed compared to the rest of Juba. Most of the people who live in Juba live in tookels- a very pleasant word for very primitive huts. There is no running water or sewage system in Juba and life is difficult and often dangerously unstable. Southern Sudan is an area which has really only been standing on its own two feet in the last three years. As a result, modern conveniences have been replaced with high crime, desperate poverty and a harsh environment. But you wouldn’t know it by the smiles of the missionaries’ faces as they awake each morning to attend to their duties. They have come from various modernized countries and yet they have given up their daily luxuries to help bring God’s Word to the people of Southern Sudan. The content and joyful smiles of my precious Christian brothers and sisters serving the people of Sudan through literary development and Bible Translation Consultation will retain quite an impressionable memory for me.

And then there were the Bible Translators we met in Juba. They were nationals of eastern Africa, coming from different people groups located around southern Sudan. They are gracious and intelligent men who have sacrificed much to live in Juba for the call of Bible Translation. Juba is too rural and harsh to move their children there. Each of them have families they have had to leave behind. The roads between them and their families are too long, dangerous, and expensive (due to the corrupt bribes demanded along the way) to travel on. As a result, they are fortunate to see their families once or twice a year. They rely on skype and modern technology they can get a few times a week at the center to keep in touch. They stay with relatives living in Juba while they work at the center where the Bible Translation training and modern technological equipment is accessible for them. Each day, under intense heat and dusty roads, they walk many miles to work on their language projects. But they smile at the joy of serving the Lord in such a way and for “such a time as this.” While this may seem odd to our western minds who have been spoiled by availability of daily commutes to work and home, for most of the world this concept of having to travel far to find any work at all is quite normal. I also think of the great heroes of our faith who also gave up much personal time at home with their families to surrender themselves to the call of God’s intense work and witness: D.L. Moody, Oswald Chambers, William Cameron Townsend and Billy Graham just to name a few. For them as well as for their families, the call was much bigger and greater than the sacrifice. But still, it is a sacrifice!

Their sacrifice reminds me of one of the many lessons we learn from Mark 14, 1-9. Jesus used Mary of Bethany’s sacrificial and extravagant offering to identify with His upcoming and most costly gift of His life for ours. Mary’s sacrifrice of what was most probably her dowry ( woman’s only hope of a comfortable life) became a reflection of an even mo willingly lay down His life and subject Himself to human sin and even the rampage of the evil one. Perhaps that was the lesson He was trying to teach His disciples during Mary’s extravagant and sacrificial offering. When the disciples accused Mary of wasting her resources, Jesus identifies her sacrificial offering with His coming sacrifice. He tells them she has anointed His body for His coming burial. Whether she understood this or not is irrelevant. The Sunday school lesson for His disciples, as well as for us, is the correlation of sacrifice with eternal life. If we want to live forever with our creator, we must enter into Jesus’ sacrificial death through confession of our sin and submission of our will. This is costly. Eternal life will cost us our own deluded mastery of our lives and demand from us we die to ourselves and now live under His authority and for His glory alone. But the reward of eternal life far outweighs the sacrifice you and I could ever make.

The missionaries and Bible Translators I met model this principal for me. They see this life and all of the comforts and conveniences they have given up as nothing in comparison to the glory of God’s truth and love. They know their sacrifice is little, but they also know it is their sacrifice which allows them to share in Christ’s death and resurrection. If we want to experience His life in us, if we want to experience the life we were created for, we must first enter into His death in order to receive His resurrected life. In identifying with His death, He will identify His new life with us. It is not rocket science, it’s just sacrifice. And what exactly does that sacrifice look like you might ask? How can you and I identify with His death so that He will identify Himself and His risen life with us? Jesus addresses this question while giving the very same Sunday school lesson to His disciples. As Jesus defends Mary of Bethany’s sacrifice, He says to His disciples, “She did what she could.” ( Mark 14:8). Once again, it’s not rocket science, just the simple call to do what you can to serve the Living God above yourself. This will take on different forms in each of our lives. I couldn’t be a Bible Translator if I tried; I don’t have the God-given intelligence for it. But I can serve God in a zillion different ways by dieing to myself all day long. I can think of others and their needs more than my own and I can obey God’s commands and principles even when my emotions tell me to go the other way. I can enter into Christ’s sacrifice for me and thereby receive the new life He has for me.

My three-and-a-half week ministry trip went on to meet missionaries throughout Europe serving the underground church of Iran and other persecuted people groups. They are truly doing what they can to respond to Christ’s sacrifice for them by living for Christ and His Kingdom work here on earth instead of for their own comforts and profit. As they die to themselves, serving Christ by serving others with God’s love and truth, Christ is identifying his resurrected life in and through them. As a result, their lives are exactly as Jesus described Mary of Bethany’s sacrificial offering, “...beautiful.” (Mark 14: 6)