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About the Book
"The Mary | Martha Principles" by Tommy Tenney explores the biblical story of Mary and Martha to provide insight into balancing the spiritual and practical aspects of life. The book emphasizes the importance of finding a balance between intimacy with God and serving others, highlighting the value of both contemplation and action in living a fulfilling Christian life. Through practical advice and biblical wisdom, readers are encouraged to find harmony between worship and work, rest and service, and spiritual growth and practical tasks.
David Livingstone
"[I am] serving Christ when shooting a buffalo for my men or taking an observation, [even if some] will consider it not sufficiently or even at all missionary."
With four theatrical words, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"âwords journalist Henry Morton Stanley rehearsed in advanceâDavid Livingstone became immortal. Stanley stayed with Livingstone for five months and then went off to England to write his bestseller, How I Found Livingstone. Livingstone, in the meantime, got lost againâin a swamp literally up to his neck. Within a year and a half, he died in a mud hut, kneeling beside his cot in prayer.
Berlin Congress spurs African independent churches
The whole civilized world wept. They gave him a 21-gun salute and a hero's funeral among the saints in Westminster Abbey. "Brought by faithful hands over land and sea," his tombstone reads, "David Livingstone: missionary, traveler, philanthropist. For 30 years his life was spent in an unwearied effort to evangelize the native races, to explore the undiscovered secrets, and to abolish the slave trade." He was Mother Teresa, Neil Armstrong, and Abraham Lincoln rolled into one.
Highway man
At age 25, after a childhood spent working 14 hours a day in a cotton mill, followed by learning in class and on his own, Livingstone was captivated by an appeal for medical missionaries to China. As he trained, however, the door to China was slammed shut by the Opium War. Within six months, he met Robert Moffat, a veteran missionary of southern Africa, who enchanted him with tales of his remote station, glowing in the morning sun with "the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary had been before."
For ten years, Livingstone tried to be a conventional missionary in southern Africa. He opened a string of stations in "the regions beyond," where he settled down to station life, teaching school and superintending the garden. After four years of bachelor life, he married his "boss's" daughter, Mary Moffat.
From the beginning, Livingstone showed signs of restlessness. After his only convert decided to return to polygamy, Livingstone felt more called than ever to explore. During his first term in South Africa, Livingstone made some of the most prodigiousâand most dangerousâexplorations of the nineteenth century. His object was to open a "Missionary Road"â"God's Highway," he also called itâ1,500 miles north into the interior to bring "Christianity and civilization" to unreached peoples.
Explorer for Christ
On these early journeys, Livingstone's interpersonal quirks were already apparent. He had the singular inability to get along with other Westerners. He fought with missionaries, fellow explorers, assistants, and (later) his brother Charles. He held grudges for years. He had the temperament of a book-reading loner, emotionally inarticulate except when he exploded with Scottish rage. He held little patience for the attitudes of missionaries with "miserably contracted minds" who had absorbed "the colonial mentality" regarding the natives. When Livingstone spoke out against racial intolerance, white Afrikaners tried to drive him out, burning his station and stealing his animals.
He also had problems with the London Missionary Society, who felt that his explorations were distracting him from his missionary work. Throughout his life, however, Livingstone always thought of himself as primarily a missionary, "not a dumpy sort of person with a Bible under his arms, [but someone] serving Christ when shooting a buffalo for my men or taking an observation, [even if some] will consider it not sufficiently or even at all missionary."
Though alienated from the whites, the natives loved his common touch, his rough paternalism, and his curiosity. They also thought he might protect them or supply them with guns. More than most Europeans, Livingstone talked to them with respect, Scottish laird to African chief. Some explorers took as many as 150 porters when they traveled; Livingstone traveled with 30 or fewer.
On an epic, three-year trip from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean (reputedly the first by a European) Livingstone was introduced to the 1,700-mile-long Zambezi. The river was also home to Victoria Falls, Livingstone's most awe-inspiring discovery. The scene was "so lovely," he later wrote, that it "must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight."
Despite its beauty, the Zambezi was a river of human misery. It linked the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, the main suppliers of slaves for Brazil, who in turn sold to Cuba and the United States. Though Livingstone was partially driven by a desire to create a British colony, his primary ambition was to expose the slave trade and cut it off at the source. The strongest weapon in this task, he believed, was Christian commercial civilization. He hoped to replace the "inefficient" slave economy with a capitalist economy: buying and selling goods instead of people.
The ill-fated Zambezi expedition
After a brief heroic return to England, Livingstone returned to Africa, this time to navigate 1,000 miles up the Zambezi in a brass-and-mahogany steamboat to establish a mission near Victoria Falls. The boat was state-of-the-art technology but proved too frail for the expedition. It leaked horribly after repeatedly running aground on sandbars.
Livingstone pushed his men beyond human endurance. When they reached a 30-foot waterfall, he waved his hand, as if to wish it away, and said, "That's not supposed to be there." His wife, who had just given birth to her sixth child, died in 1862 beside the river, only one of several lives claimed on the voyage. Two years later, the British government, which had no interest in "forcing steamers up cataracts," recalled Livingstone and his mission party.
A year later, he was on his way back to Africa again, this time leading an expedition sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society and wealthy friends. "I would not consent to go simply as a geographer," he emphasized, but as biographer Tim Jeal wrote, "It would be hard to judge whether the search for the Nile's source or his desire to expose the slave trade was his dominant motive." The source of the Nile was the great geographical puzzle of the day. But more important to Livingstone was the possibility of proving that the Bible was true by tracing the African roots of Judaism and Christianity.
For two years he simply disappeared, without a letter or scrap of information. He reported later that he had been so ill he could not even lift a pen, but he was able to read the Bible straight through four times. Livingstone's disappearance fascinated the public as much as Amelia Earhart's a few generations later.
When American journalist Henry Stanley found Livingstone, the news exploded in England and America. Papers carried special editions devoted to the famous meeting. In August 1872, in precarious health, Livingstone shook Stanley's hand and set out on his final journey.
When Livingstone had arrived in Africa in 1841, it was as exotic as outer space, called the "Dark Continent" and the "White Man's Graveyard." although the Portuguese, Dutch, and English were pushing into the interior, African maps had blank unexplored areasâno roads, no countries, no landmarks. Livingstone helped redraw the maps, exploring what are now a dozen countries, including South Africa, Rwanda, Angola, and the Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire). And he made the West aware of the continuing evil of African slavery, which led to its being eventually outlawed.
can i follow my new heart
âWhy shouldnât I follow my heart? If I am a Christian â if God has caused me to be âborn againâ and has given me âa new heartâ â isnât my new heart trustworthy?â Readers have raised some version of this objection when Iâve exhorted Christians, âDonât follow your heart.â And the objection is warranted. After all, the Bible clearly teaches that in this era of the new covenant, God writes his law on our new hearts so that we willingly follow him (Jeremiah 31:31â34; Hebrews 8:8â12). This would seem to not merely imply, but even mandate, that Christians should follow their hearts. But the Bibleâs description of what a regenerated person actually experiences in this age reveals a more spiritually and psychologically complex picture â one that I believe gives Christians biblical warrant to cultivate a healthy suspicion of what they recognize as their heartsâ desires. So, while we may, and hopefully will, reach a point in our lives as Christians where itâs right, at times, to follow our hearts, allow me to make a brief case that the phrase actually undermines Christians as they labor and struggle to discern their various desires, and that Scripture itself discourages us from thinking this way. War Within How might we summarize the complex picture the Bible paints of the born-again experience in this already-not-yet age? The New Testament explains that when the Spirit brings us from spiritual death to spiritual life (John 5:24; Romans 6:13), we enter a strange new reality. Our regenerated new self  emerges, âcreated after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.â And yet our â old self , which belongs to [our] former manner of life,â is still âcorrupt through deceitful desiresâ (Ephesians 4:22â24). We are âborn of the Spiritâ (John 3:6) while still inhabiting the âflesh,â our âbody of deathâ in which ânothing good dwellsâ (Romans 7:18, 24). âThe hearts of regenerated people are not yet fully free from the influence of their flesh.â When Christians are born again, we enter into a lifelong internal war where âthe desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to doâ (Galatians 5:17). Stepping back and viewing these desires objectively, âthe works of the fleshâ that result from fleshly desires âare evident,â and so is âthe fruit of the Spiritâ (Galatians 5:19â23). But Christians often struggle â on the ground, in real time â to discern the desires of the Spirit from the desires of the flesh. This is why the New Testament Epistles are full of exhortations and corrections addressed to Christians. James tells his readers (and us at relevant times) that their âpassions are at war withinâ them (James 4:1). Peter warns his readers (and us), âDo not be conformed to the passions of your former ignoranceâ (1 Peter 1:14). Paul describes this internal experience of warring passions as âwretchedâ (Romans 7:24). And he admonishes the Colossian Christians (and us) with strong language: âPut to death therefore what is earthly in you : sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatryâ (Colossians 3:5). Why did these apostles feel the need to speak this way to regenerated people? Because the hearts of these regenerated people were not yet fully free from the influence of their flesh, their old selves. Follow the Spirit Much of the Christian life is a war to die to remaining sin and live by the Spirit. John Piper calls it âthe main battle of the Christian lifeâ: The main battle is to see our hearts renovated, recalibrated, so that we donât want to do those sinful external behaviors, and donât just need willpower not to do them, but the root has been severed and we have different desires. In other words, the goal of change â of sanctification, of the Christian life â is to be so changed that we can and ought to follow our desires. Thatâs exactly right. And when we have been so changed through progressive sanctification, so renovated that our hearts (and therefore our desires, dispositions, motives, emotions, and passions) are, as Piper says, âcalibrated to Christ,â then we should  follow our hearts. However, at any given time within our churches, small groups, friendships, and families, different Christians are at different places for different reasons in this heart-renovation process. Some hearts are more sanctified, and therefore more reliable to follow, than others. I think thatâs why we donât hear the apostles generally counsel us to follow our hearts in our fight of faith against remaining sin, but rather to follow the Holy Spirit . Let Not Sin Reign Paul is the one who delves most deeply into this issue: âI say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the fleshâ (Galatians 5:16). He devotes most of Romans 6â8 to explaining the nature of the strange new-self/old-self, Spirit/flesh reality of the Christian life, including Romans 8:13: âIf you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.â Paul lays the theological foundation of our understanding by explaining âthat our old self was crucified with [Christ] in order that [our] body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sinâ (Romans 6:6). Our new selves were âraised with Christâ (Colossians 3:1) so that âwe too might walk in newness of lifeâ (Romans 6:4). Therefore, we âmust consider [ourselves] dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesusâ (Romans 6:11). In light of this, Paul admonishes us, Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. (Romans 6:12â14) And how do we do this? By learning to âset [our] minds on the things of the Spiritâ and not on âthe things of the fleshâ (Romans 8:5) â by learning to follow the Spirit, to âwalk by the Spiritâ (Galatians 5:16), because âall who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of Godâ (Romans 8:14). Follow the Treasure One of the reasons I find âfollow your heartâ generally unhelpful as counsel for Christians is that many of us, from the time we were young, have absorbed this as a pop-cultural creed that says if we just look deep into our hearts, weâll be shown our deepest truth, and discover the way we should go. Given the significant amount our sinful flesh still influences our hearts, itâs not hard to see how this phrase can easily increase confusion when applying it to the Christian life. âSome hearts are more sanctified, and therefore more reliable to follow, than others.â I also donât believe the Bible encourages that idea since, when it comes to engaging our hearts, far and away what we hear in it is counsel to âdirect our hearts,â not to follow them. We see that clearly in Paulâs instructions above. God made our hearts to follow, not to lead. And what do our hearts follow? Jesus gives the clearest answer: âWhere your treasure is, there your heart will be alsoâ (Matthew 6:21). In time, our heart always pursues (follows) our treasure. When we are born again, the eyes of our hearts are enlightened (Ephesians 1:18) and, through faith, we begin to see the Treasure: God himself in Christ. And since our heart learns to pursue the object  that stirs its greatest affections, its treasure , I suggest we not counsel each other to âfollow your heart,â but instead to âfollow the Treasure.â Looking into our hearts for direction can be spiritually hazardous. It is usually more helpful for us to direct our hearts to what is most valuable and delightful. Which is why I believe David counsels us, âDelight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heartâ (Psalm 37:4).
