There
is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
Maybe you have
heard of missionary Jim Elliot. He and
other missionaries lost their lives seeking to win the Auca tribe of Ecuador to
Christ. His life and testimony continue
to live long past Elliot as he and his team were killed in 1956.
Not just is
his life or death as a martyr incredible, but the fact that his family
continued his work after the tribe ended the lives of the missionaries. Elliot’s life and writings before his death
open up much more for us to think about and to work through.
Here are some
of the journal entries Jim Elliot wrote before his death (these can be found at
this WEB SITE):
March 22, 1947
"I lack the fervency, vitality,
life, in prayer which I long for. I know that many consider it fanaticism when
they hear anything which does not conform to the conventional, sleep-inducing
eulogies so often rising from Laodicean lips; but I know too that these same
people can acquiescently tolerate sin in their lives and in the church without
so much as tilting one hair of their eyebrows."
July 1948
"Father, make of me a crisis man.
Bring those I contact to decision. Let me not be a milepost on a single road;
make me a fork, that men must turn one way or another on facing Christ in
me."
November 6, 1955
"You wonder why people choose
fields away from the States when young people at home are drifting because no
one wants to take time to listen to their problems. Ill tell you why I left.
Because those Stateside young people have every opportunity to study, hear, and
understand the Word of God in their own language, and these Indians have no
opportunity whatsoever. I have had to make a cross of two logs, and lie down on
it, to show the Indians what it means to crucify a man. When there is that much
ignorance over here and so much knowledge and opportunity over there, I have no
question in my mind why God sent me here. Those whimpering Stateside young
people will wake up on the Day of Judgment condemned to worse fates than these
demon-fearing Indians, because, having a Bible, they were bored with it---while
these never heard of such a thing as writing."
Finally
"He is
no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose."
Are we willing
to give up anything so that others may live?
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