The following is an excerpt from my message this morning. I am attracted to stories of humble service like this one.
In 1979, my parents and I spent a week in Cairo, Egypt. While there we visited the Egyptian National Museum. The King Tut exhibit was mind-boggling. King Tut was only 17 when he died. He was buried with solid gold chariots and thousands of gold artifacts. His gold coffin was found within gold tombs within gold tombs within gold tombs. The burial site was filled with gold.
The Egyptians believed that you could take earthly treasures with you but all of the treasures intended for King Tut’s afterlife were still in his grave until they were discovered in 1922 - over 3000 years later.
Not far from the museum, if you go down the dusty streets of Cairo and turn down an alley you will find a plot of overgrown grass. It is a graveyard for American missionaries. At the top of one old tombstone it says, “William Borden, 1887-1913.” He was twenty-five years old.
William Borden graduated from both Yale and Princeton and was a multi-millionaire due to his family’s business, i.e., Borden Dairies. In many ways he was the King Tut of his day. William Borden could have lived a life of luxury but instead chose to give his life as a disciple of Christ and he had a burden to be a disciple maker as a missionary to the Muslim world. He refused to spend money on himself and instead gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the ministry. He died when he contracted spinal meningitis at the age of 25 while serving in Egypt.
If you dust off his tombstone further, you will read on his epitaph his love for God and the Muslim people. Then the inscription ends with this phrase, “Apart from faith in Christ, there is no explanation for such a life.”
What a contrast! One man buried with a ridiculous amount of gold and the other buried in an obscure, dusty, overgrown, back alley graveyard. One lived in complete opulence with everything the world had to offer and the other lived a modest life of service to the one true king and he is enjoying his everlasting reward in the presence of God today.
King Tut’s life was tragic because of an awful truth discovered too late – you can’t take it with you. William Borden’s life was triumphant because instead of leaving his treasures behind, he sent them ahead.
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