A Lesson from John D. Rockfeller, Sr.
As a young man, John D. Rockfeller, Sr., was as strong and husky as a farm lad. When he entered business he drove himself harder than any slave was ever driven by the whip of a taskmaster. At the early age of thirty-three, he had made his first million dollars. By consecrating every waking moment to his work he controlled, at fortythree, he was the richest man on earth and the world’s only billionaire.
For this achievement he had bartered his own happiness and health. He developed alopecia, a condition in which not only the hair of the head drops off but also most of the hair from the eyelashes and eyebrows. One of his biographers said that he looked like a “mummy.” His weekly income was a million dollars, but his digestion was so bad that he could eat only crackers and milk.
Like Scrooge, John D. was as solitary as an oyster. He once confessed that he “wanted to be loved,” but did not sense that people love only those who emanate affection. Lacking in consideration for others, he had often crushed the helpless into the mire in his lust to make bigger profits. So hated was he in the oil fields of Pennsylvania that the men whom he had pauperized hanged him in effigy, and he had bodyguards day and night. The mass of wealth he had accumulated gave him neither peace nor happiness. In fact, as he sought to protect and control it, he discovered that he was being smothered by it. He could not sleep; he enjoyed nothing. When John D. was only fifty-three, Ida Tarbell wrote of him, “An awful age was in his face. He was the oldest man that I have ever seen.” The crackers and milk he glumly swallowed could no longer hold together his skinny body and restless soul. It was generally agreed that he would not live another year, and newspaper writers had his obituary written and ready in their files.
Then John D. began to do some thinking in the long nights when he couldn’t sleep. One night he made a startling discovery: he would not be able to take even one of his dollars with him into the next world! His was the despair and helplessness of the little boy who sees the relentless tide coming in to sweep into oblivion all the sand castles he has been building.
For the first time in his life he recognized that money was not a commodity to be hoarded but something to be shared for the benefit of others. In the morning he, like Scrooge, lost no time in transforming his money into blessings to others. He began to help worthy causes.
He established the Rockfeller Foundation so that some of his fortune could be channelled to needy areas. It would require a book to describe the benefits that resulted from the many hundreds of millions of dollars that he showered on universities, hospitals, mission work, and millions of underprivileged people. We can thank John D every time our lives and the lives of our children are saved by an injection of penicillin because his contribution aided in the discovery of this miracle drug. His money sparked the research that saved and is still saving millions of people from untimely deaths from malaria, tuberculosis, diphtheria and many other diseases.
It is not our purpose to detail the blessings the world received when John D changed the current of his thinking from getting to giving. Our object is to tell you that when he began to think outwardly toward the needs of others, a miracle occurred. He began to sleep, to eat normally, and to enjoy life in general. The bitterness, rancor and the deadness of self-centeredness went out of his life, and into the soul of John D, came refreshing streams of love and gratitude from those whom he was helping. He who had been repulsive and lifeless now teemed with vibrancy and activity.
When Rockfeller was fifty-three, it certainly appeared that he would never celebrate another birthday, but he started to practice one of God’s eternal laws, and he reaped its promised benefits:
“Give, and you will receive. Your gift will return to you in fullpressed down, shaken together to make room for more, running over, and poured into your lap. The amount you give will determine the amount you get back.” (Luke 6:38 NLT)
Rockfeller proved the value of this promise for he lived not only until his fifty-fourth and fifty-fifth birthdays, but he experienced “the good measure … running over” – he lived until he was ninety-eight years old!
CHRIST IS VICTOR
By J R