Others like evangelism by fire Features >>
About the Book
"Evangelism By Fire" by Reinhard Bonnke is a powerful and inspiring guide to sharing the gospel with passion and urgency. Through personal anecdotes and practical advice, Bonnke encourages readers to embrace their calling as evangelists and spread the message of salvation fervently. The book emphasizes the importance of faith, prayer, and boldness in reaching the lost and bringing them to Christ. Overall, "Evangelism By Fire" is a rallying cry for Christians to ignite a fire for evangelism and see countless lives transformed by the power of God.
Jim Elliot
EARLY LIFE
Jim Elliot began his life in Portland, Oregon in the USA. His mother, Clara, was a chiropractor and his father, Fred, was a minister. They married and settled in Seattle, WA where they welcomed their first son, Robert in 1921.
Later they relocated the family to Portland where Herbert arrived in 1924, Jim in 1927, and Jane in 1932.
Jim knew Christ from an early age and was never afraid to speak about Him to his friends. At age six Jim told his mother, âNow, mama, the Lord Jesus can come whenever He wants. He could take our whole family because Iâm saved now, and Jane is too young to know Him yet.â
THE YEARS THAT CEMENTED HIS DESIRE TO SERVE THE LORD IN MISSIONS
Jim entered Benson Polytechnic High School in 1941. He carried a small Bible with him and, an excellent speaker; he was often found speaking out for Christ. He and his friends were not afraid to step out and find adventure. One thing Jim didnât have time for in those early years were girls. He was once quoted as telling a friend, âDomesticated males arenât much use for adventure.â
In 1945 Jim traveled to Wheaton, IL to attend Wheaton College. His main goal while there was to devote himself to God. He recognized the importance of discipline in pursuing this goal. He would start each morning with prayer and Bible study. In his journal he wrote, âNone of it gets to be âold stuffâ for it is Christ in print, the Living Word. We wouldnât think of rising in the morning without a face-wash, but we often neglect the purgative cleansing of the Word of the Lord. It wakes us up to our responsibility.â
Jimâs desire to serve God by taking His gospel to unreached people of the world began to grow while at Wheaton. The summer of 1947 found him in Mexico and that time influenced his decision to minister in Central America after he finished college.
Jim met Elisabeth Howard during his third year at Wheaton. He did ask her for a date which she accepted and then later cancelled. They spent the next years as friends and after she finished at Wheaton they continued to correspond. As they came to know each other there was an attraction, but Jim felt he needed to unencumbered by worldly concerns in order to devote himself completely to God.
In addition to his hope to one day travel to a foreign country to share Christ with the unchurched of the world, he also felt the need to share with people in the United States. On Sundays while at Wheaton he would often ride the train into Chicago and talk to people in the train station about Christ. He often felt ineffective in his work as the times of knowingly leading people to Christ were few. He once wrote, âNo fruit yet. Why is that Iâm so unproductive? I cannot recall leading more than one or two into the kingdom. Surely this is not the manifestation of the power of the Resurrection. I feel as Rachel, âGive me children, or else I die.ââ
After college with no clear answer as to working for the Lord in a foreign country, Jim returned home to Portland. He continued his disciplined Bible study as well as correspondence with Elisabeth Howard whom he called Betty.
They both felt a strong attraction to each other during this time, but also felt that the Lord may have been calling them to be unmarried as they served Him.
In June of 1950 he travelled to Oklahoma to attend the Summer Institute of Linguistics. There he learned how to study unwritten languages. He was able to work with a missionary to the Quichuas of the Ecuadorian jungle. Because of these lessons he began to pray for guidance about going to Ecuador and later felt compelled to answer the call there.
Elisabeth Elliot wrote in Shadow of the Almighty:
âThe breadth of Jimâs vision is suggested in this entry from the journal:
August 9. âGod just now gave me faith to ask for another young man to go, perhaps not this fall, but soon, to join the ranks in the lowlands of eastern Ecuador. There we must learn: 1) Spanish and Quichua, 2) each other, 3) the jungle and independence, and 4) God and Godâs way of approach to the highland Quichua. From thence, by His great hand, we must move to the Ecuadorian highlands with several young Indians each, and begin work among the 800,000 highlanders. If God tarries, the natives must be taught to spread southward with the message of the reigning Christ, establishing New Testament groups as they go. Thence the Word must go south into Peru and Bolivia. The Quichuas must be reached for God! Enough for policy. Now for prayer and practice.
THE ECUADOR YEARS
In February 1952 Jim finally left America to travel to Ecuador with Pete Fleming. In May Elisabeth moved to Quito and though they didnât feel the need to get engaged she and Jim did begin a courtship.
In August Jim left Elisabeth in Quito and travelled with Pete to Shell Mera. At the Mission Aviation Fellowship headquarters in Shell Mera, Jim and Pete learned more about the Acua Indians, a people group that was largely unreached and very savage.
Leaving Shell Mera, Pete and Jim moved on to Shandia where Jim was captivated by the Quichua. He felt very strongly that this was exactly where God intended for him to work to spread the Gospel.
While Jim was in Shandia, Elisabeth was working to learn more about the Colorado Indians near Santa Domingo. In January of 1953 he went to Quito and she met him there and they were finally engaged. They married in October of that year and their only child Valerie was born in 1955.
They settled in Shandia and continued their work with the Quichua Indians. It was Jimâs desire to be able to reach the Waodoni tribe that lived deep in the jungles and had little contact with the outside world. A Waodoni woman who had left the tribe was taken in by the missionaries and helped them to learn the language.
Jim, along with Pete, Ed McCully, Roger Youderian, and their pilot Nate Saint began to search by plane in hopes of finding a way to contact the Waodoni. The found a sandbar in the middle of the Curaray River that worked as a landing strip for the plane and it was there that they first made contact with the Waodoni. They were elated to be able to finally be able to attempt to share the love of Christ with this people group.
After their first meeting, one of the tribe, a man they called George lied to the tribe about the menâs intentions. This lie led the Waodoni warriors to plan an attack for when the missionaries returned. The men did return on January 8, 1956 and were surprised by ten members of the tribe who massacred the missionaries.
Jimâs short life that was filled with the desire to share Godâs love can be summed up by a quote that is attributed to him. âHe is no fool who gives that which he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot lose.â
What Is Lifeâs Ultimate Good
Dear Dan, I agree; any view that has God as the foundation of morality â like the Christian view I described in my last letter â will have further, serious issues to address. In fact, your two objections get at the most central ones. Let me respond to both. What Makes Godâs Laws Good? Your first objection has a great pedigree and can be traced all the way back to Plato. Namely, what makes Godâs moral laws â his moral values â good? Does he like these laws because they are good? Or are they good because he likes them? Either way seems to spell trouble for Christianity. Take the first option. Are Godâs laws good because they meet some separate standard of good, one âoutsideâ of God? If so, God has to defer to â is beholden to â some higher authority. And thatâs impossible, according to Christianity. But the alternative seems just as bad. If Godâs laws are good because he likes them, it makes morality seem arbitrary, dependent merely on his personal tastes or whims. After all, what if he had preferred things like murder, rape, and torture? Would these therefore be good? Do we really want to define âgoodâ as âwhat God likes,â similar to the way âcoolnessâ is just whatever the cool kids like? Wouldnât this rob statements like âGod is goodâ of all significance, reducing them to saying merely that âGod is the way he isâ? Again, neither choice looks very promising. So, which horn of the dilemma should the Christian choose? Goodness Is Godness I think the second option is the right one: Godâs laws are good because he likes them. That is, anything that God likes or values is good by definition. Goodness just is Godness. So then, is the phrase âGod is goodâ nothing but an empty tautology, saying no more than âGod is Godâ? âAnything that God likes or values is good by definition. Goodness just is Godness.â Well, no. In this specific context, where weâre defining âgood,â âGod is goodâ tells us something informative â namely, that Godâs values are what make things morally good. But in most other contexts, when we say, âGod is goodâ we can generally take for granted which properties or characteristics go on the âgoodâ list. In these ordinary cases, âGod is goodâ expresses something different â for example, âHereâs what God is like: he hates lying, murder, stealing â things we all agree are bad.â But then, if goodness is defined as whatever God likes, doesnât my view mean that murder and rape would have been good if God had liked them? In a sense, perhaps; at least their advocacy would have been included in his moral laws. But remember that weâre currently defining âgood,â and I think some of the rhetorical force of the wouldnât-rape-therefore-be-good objection comes from ignoring this context. After all, it seems that regardless of what we say ultimately âmakesâ something good, if that âgood-makerâ were different, good would be different. And in any case, the traditional Christian view of God holds that he couldnât have liked these things, that itâs logically impossible for God to be different than he is, just as a square couldnât fail to have four equal sides. It turns out, therefore, that things arenât as nearly as bad as the objection initially implied. Why Follow Godâs Moral Law? Then thereâs your second objection: why should we follow Godâs laws? Is it because, if we donât, heâll submit us to everlasting punishment? Should we follow Godâs laws simply to avoid pain? Does it turn out, after all, that morality is merely a matter of might makes right? Well, I think Christians should acknowledge that avoiding pain and suffering is a good reason to follow Godâs moral laws. Moreover, I concede that this would be a genuine problem â if this were the only reason for obeying God. And as I said, even this reason isnât without its virtues. After all, if we think of God as a parent â which the Bible encourages us to do â itâs a perfectly good reason, morally as well as rationally. As children we often obeyed our parents, in part, to avoid discipline. In fact, this was the reason for discipline in the first place â to help motivate us to obey. But of course, our obedience wasnât merely motivated by a fear of discipline. We also obeyed our parents because we loved and trusted them. We knew that their requirements were an integral part of their deep love and affection for us, that they gave us these rules to benefit us. Their laws were evidence of our parentsâ love. This interweaving of love and law, this close relation between our love for our parents, their love for us, and their moral values (that is, their moral loves) usually resulted in us adopting their morals; their values naturally became our values. We liked these values. And it didnât stop with moral values; we sometimes adopted our parentsâ values about sports teams, movies, and music â again, sometimes simply because we loved them. So, according to my view, we ought to follow Godâs laws because, ultimately, we want to â and the main reason we want to is that we love him. In this way, morality is ultimately personal and grounded in what we love. Meaning of Life The personal aspect of value isnât limited to moral value; itâs a component of all value, including lifeâs ultimate value. What we might call lifeâs ultimate meaning or purpose is perhaps the most important topic of all. So, what is our ultimate value, meaning, purpose, or goal in life? Well, suppose youâre right that thereâs no God. The meaning of life, then, would be like all value in a godless cosmos: subjective and relative. And because each person has his own values, there would be as many meanings of life as there are persons. In such a world, there would be no objective meaning that life has. But according to Christianity, humans have been made for something, for a purpose. Moreover, this purpose does not depend on us, and so, in this sense, itâs objective, human-independent. And because we were designed for a specific purpose, humans will only truly flourish and thrive by fulfilling this purpose. Fulfilling Godâs purpose for us is lifeâs ultimate meaning. That doesnât mean that, in a world without God, humans could not find some measure of meaning or value in things like family, work, art, gardening, or whatever. But unless these individual goods are put into the context of the much larger, overall purpose, they will never be as meaningful (to us) as they could be. Only by fulfilling this ultimate purpose is our meaning of life maximized. What Are Humans For? What is this larger context or purpose? What were we made for? We find a hint by noticing that, for many of us, relationships and community are what we most value, where we find our greatest fulfillment. We flourish best in community with people we love. And this fact is entirely in line with the Christian view that our ultimate purpose is to know and love the ultimate Person, God himself. Christianity is of one voice on this. As one famous confession says, our ultimate purpose âis to glorify God and enjoy him forever.â Indeed, God is a loving relationship, as odd as that sounds. The mysterious doctrine of the Trinity says that the Godhead is an intimate community of three (divine) persons. Thatâs what he is. (This is one reason why monistic religions canât truly make sense of the view that God is love: Who was God loving before he created persons other than himself? Such a being couldnât essentially be love; at best, he would need creatures in order to love.) âOur ultimate purpose is to know and love the ultimate Person, God himself.â Notice that the centrality of relationships is also evident when Jesus sums up all of Godâs laws in just two: love God and love your neighbor. The moral law â and, not coincidentally, lifeâs ultimate meaning â is about relationships, both human and divine. God, then, created humans for his own purpose. Our purpose â the meaning of life â is also importantly objective, just as morality is: it is human-independent. Yet itâs obvious that we can and do reject Godâs purpose for us. In fact, the gospel message â and the entire Bible â is predicated on such rejection. But God has given us another chance to truly flourish, to find ultimate meaning through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He has made this possible at an immense cost to himself. Dan, I get why you would reject Christianity, viewing it as you do from the outside. I hope youâll continue to consider all this and at least begin to sense that genuine atheism might be a lot different from your current âkinder, gentlerâ version. I also hope that in the process youâll reconsider Christianityâs claims â in particular, Jesusâs offering of himself and the relationship you were made for. Article by Mitch Stokes
