Daily Verse
Monday, June 8, 2026
Discipleship
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Monday's Reflection
Matthew 16:24 — Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.
Lottie Moon was a small woman — barely four feet three inches tall — with a large education and larger ambitions. She arrived in China as a Southern Baptist missionary in 1873, and she spent the next forty years there. She learned Mandarin so well that local people were sometimes startled to discover she was not Chinese. She walked from village to village in the Shandong province, often alone, entering communities that had never seen a Western woman. She taught, preached, and planted churches in territory most missionaries considered too remote and too dangerous.
But what defined Lottie Moon at the end was not her language skills or her courage. It was her giving. During a severe famine in the early 1900s, she began sharing her food with starving Chinese families around her. Then she began giving her money. Then she stopped eating regular meals so that others could eat. By 1912, those who knew her were alarmed — she weighed only fifty pounds. She was physically wasting away because she had given everything, including her own food, to the people she had come to serve. Her colleagues arranged for her to be sent home to America for medical treatment. She died on Christmas Eve 1912 aboard the ship, never reaching American shores. She was seventy-two years old.
The Christmas offering that Southern Baptist churches take every year for international missions is named the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering. It has raised billions of dollars. The woman who gave away her last meal became, after her death, one of the greatest sources of missionary funding in the world. She denied herself — not as a spiritual exercise, but as a practical daily reality. She took up her cross. She followed. And God took what looked like loss and turned it into an offering that is still bearing fruit more than a century later.
Prayer: Lord, give us Lottie Moon's generosity — the kind that does not calculate what it keeps, but gives until there is nothing left and trusts You with the rest. Amen.