C.T. Studd: The Cricketer Who Gave It All Away

Charles Studd — everyone called him C.T. — was one of the most famous young men in England. He was a brilliant cricketer, among the finest in the whole country, who played for England while crowds cheered his name. He was rich as well, for his family had a fortune that would one day be his. He had everything the world says a young man should want.

But C.T. had given his heart to Jesus, and he found he could not be happy just playing games and spending money while millions of people had never once heard of his Saviour. While he was still a young man he made an astonishing choice: he would go to China as a missionary, joining a band of well-born young men who all gave up bright futures together, and whom people called the Cambridge Seven.

Then C.T. did something that made the newspapers gasp. When he came of age and his great fortune became his own, he gave nearly all of it away — thousands upon thousands of pounds — to feed the poor and spread the gospel, keeping almost nothing back for himself. He said that if Jesus Christ really is God, and died for him, then no sacrifice could ever be too great to make for Jesus in return.

C.T. served in China, and later in India, but even as an old and often sick man he could not rest while there were still people who had never heard. He read that in the very heart of Africa lived whole peoples with no missionary at all, and he could not get it out of his mind. Though everyone told him he was far too old and too ill, he went — into the forests of the Congo — to preach where no one else would go.

There in Africa, C.T. Studd spent the last years of his life, founding a mission to carry the good news into places others had passed by. He had begun with fame, and a fortune, and a game the whole country loved, and he had traded them all for a hut in the forest and the joy of telling lost people about Jesus. He had decided, quite simply, that Christ was worth more than everything else put together — and he lived as though he truly believed it.