Oct 24, 2021 | by Pastor Josh Tate | series: BLESSED
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In his book, “The Treasure Principle,” Pastor and author Randy Alcorn writes about a visit he made to Cairo, Egypt. His guide took him down an alleyway in an obscure, and poor quarter of the city until they passed through a gate into a square filled with trash and overgrown with weeds. It was a nearly forgotten graveyard for American Missionaries. Randy Alcorn had read about a young man, named William Borden, who was buried there, and he had come there to find his grave. Borden had been a graduate of Yale, and sole heir to a family fortune, but he rejected a life of ease in order to bring the gospel to the Muslims of Egypt. Borden gave away hundreds of thousands of dollars to world missions, and eventually took to the mission field himself in 1913, but after only four months of missionary effort in Cairo he contracted spinal meningitis and died at the age of twenty five. Randy Alcorn dusted off the epitaph on Borden’s gravestone. “Apart from faith in Christ,” it read, “there is no explanation for such a life.
After visiting Borden’s grave his guides took him to see some of the wonders of Egypt including the King Tut exhibit at the Egyptian National Museum. Tutankhamun, the boy king, had been buried with vast amounts of buried treasure, a precious horde of solid gold chariots and other rare and valuable artifacts. The Egyptians believed in an afterlife- one where they could take their earthly belongings. But all that Tut had amassed for Himself was still there along with his bones when archaeologists uncovered them.
Alcorn was struck by the contrast between those two graves. One whose bones were surrounded by all sorts of earthly treasures, and the other who forsook earthly treasures as well as friends, family, and career to serve others on the mission field.
In this message we study the third beatitude in which Jesus said, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” If we truly understand this verse than we would no sooner envy Tut his riches than Esau his bowl of stew. It is Borden, not Tut, who truly lays surrounded by a rich inheritance.
