Excerpt From: Dennis F. Kinlaw. “This Day with the Master.”
“And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him.” 2 Corinthians 5:15
“I was in Macao, a tiny colony off the China coast. I was there for a pastors’ conference and was staying in the home of an American missionary couple. Toward the end of my stay, my host asked if I was interested in seeing the missionary Robert Morrison’s grave. I was, so he took me to a Roman Catholic cemetery. I stood beside that grave, now weather-beaten and mossy, barely able to make out the name, date, and inscription, and I found myself uncharacteristically moved with emotion.
Robert Morrison had been a young British man studying accounting when God saved him and called him to the mission field in China. When the Chinese learned what his mission was, they escorted him out. In those days people who went to the mission field went for life; there was no such thing as a furlough. Robert went to Macao, a Portuguese colony. He stayed for a brief season and then returned to China. He was again deported. He found a job with the East India Company as an accountant. Periodically he would travel into China, only to be expelled each time. Morrison worked all day for the East India Company, which hated missionaries, and at night he translated the Bible into Chinese. Eventually he finished translating the Bible, and later he died in Macao. For days after his death, there was no agreement on where to bury his body. The Chinese certainly did not want a Christian to be buried in their cemetery, and the Roman Catholics were not about to have a Protestant buried in their cemetery. Finally, someone negotiated with the Roman Catholic archbishop, who sold one cemetery plot so they could bury Robert Morrison. He was rejected all his life and even rejected in death.
As I stood there by Robert Morrison’s grave, an astounding memory scrolled through my head. I had been on trip to China back in 1982. Right at that time the government permitted four churches to open in Canton. We attended the services in one of these new churches. On Wednesday night we went to prayer meeting, and there were nearly three hundred people in a church that had just been opened.
While the Bible study was taking place, I looked around and received the shock of my life. Sixty percent of that audience was under thirty years of age, which meant that all but the smallest of those had been born under Mao.
They were born under a government so hostile to Christianity that Christian parents hesitated to talk to their children about Christ lest the police hear the children speak about him and the whole family be imprisoned. The salvation of those children came from reading the Bible that Robert Morrison gave his life to translate.
Rarely do we recognize the cost that other people have paid to be faithful to the Lord Jesus. In our society, we focus so much on our own personal needs that few people will stand up and say, “Whatever God asks, I will do.” Are you willing to do that?”