Their Death Validated Their Message

At the one-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of missionaries in Zaire, Christians gathered to celebrate from that part of Zaire that was once called the Belgian Congo. Near the end of the celebration, a very old man stood to give a speech. He said that he would die soon and that he needed to tell something that no other man still living knew.

He explained that when the first white missionaries came, his people didn’t know whether to believe their message or not. So they devised a plan to slowly and secretly poison the missionaries and watch them die. One by one, children and adults became ill, died and were buried. It was when his people saw how these missionaries died that they decided to believe their message.

The missionaries never knew what was happening. They didn’t know they were being poisoned, and they didn’t know why they were dying. Their faithfulness to the Lord convinced the people they ministered too that their message was true.