Dear Friends,

David Livingstone, the great missionary who opened Africa to the gospel, had not been heard from in a long time. Rumors were circulating that he had died in Africa. The New York Herald sent an ambitious young reporter, Henry M. Stanley, to either find him or his grave. The funny, amazing, glorious thing that happened was that while Stanley was trying to find Livingstone, Christ found Stanley. The story is thrilling and is today’s devotional. God bless you.

Because of Calvary,

John Janney

Psalm 19:7

“H. M. Stanley wrote of his experience in the heart of Africa: ‘Years of indifference and excitement have an unconscious hardening power…. But my selfish hustling stopped in time…. My sicknesses were frequent, and during my first attacks of African fever I took up the Bible to while away tedious, feverish hours in bed. Though incapacitated from the march, my temperature being constantly at 105° Fahr., it did not prevent me from reading when not light-headed. When I laid down the Book the mind commenced to feed upon what the memory suggested. There rose the ghosts of bygone yearnings haunting every cranny of the brain with numbers of baffled hopes and unfulfilled aspirations. Here was I, only a poor journalist, with no friends, and yet possessed by a feeling of power to achieve! How could it ever be? Then verses of Scripture rang iteratingly through my mind as applicable to my own being, sometimes full of promise, often full of warning…. I flung myself on my knees and poured out my soul utterly in secret prayer to Him from whom I had been so long estranged, to Him who had led me here mysteriously into Africa, there to reveal Himself and His will.’” [The Speaker’s Bible XIII edited by James Hastings and Edward Hastings, (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, n.d.), p. 112]