About the Book
"Great by Choice" by Jim Collins explores why some companies thrive in uncertain and chaotic environments while others falter. The book presents research-based strategies and practices that successful companies follow, such as disciplined decision-making, consistent innovation, and a focus on long-term goals. Collins and co-author Morten T. Hansen draw on historical and contemporary examples to provide valuable insights for businesses looking to achieve sustained success.
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, “Now, mama, the Lord Jesus can come whenever He wants. He could take our whole family because I’m saved now, and Jane is too young to know Him yet.”
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 didn’t have time for in those early years were girls. He was once quoted as telling a friend, “Domesticated males aren’t much use for adventure.”
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, “None of it gets to be ‘old stuff’ for it is Christ in print, the Living Word. We wouldn’t 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.”
Jim’s 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, “No fruit yet. Why is that I’m 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, ‘Give me children, or else I die.’”
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:
“The breadth of Jim’s vision is suggested in this entry from the journal:
August 9. “God 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 God’s 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 didn’t 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 Jim’s 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 men’s 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.
Jim’s short life that was filled with the desire to share God’s love can be summed up by a quote that is attributed to him. “He is no fool who gives that which he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot lose.”
Death Is Not the End
“And they lived happily ever after. The end.” That’s a common way to end a story that begins “Once upon a time.” We call those stories fairy tales. Fairy tales are imaginary stories for children, filled with magic and with fanciful people and places. We love a good fairy tale because it echoes the real story of the Bible. God has wired us to love stories that resolve — stories that end with not only justice but with exuberant joy. “God will transform your natural, earthly body into a supernatural, heavenly body.” This conviction was held by two friends who wrote some of the most iconic fiction of the twentieth century: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. After the great battle at the end of Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, the characters discover that the new Narnia has been their real country the whole time, and they have nothing left now but to travel further up and further in. Tolkien, in Lord of the Rings, enlists Sam Gamgee to ask, after the ring has been destroyed, whether everything sad would come untrue. Tolkien even coined a term for a sudden happy turn in the story toward this blissful resolve: eucatastrophe. We can summarize the story line of the Bible as “Kill the dragon, and get the girl.” That joyful resolution is what the final two phrases of the Apostles’ Creed capture: “the resurrection of the body” and “the life everlasting.” Resurrection of the Body God will raise the corpses of Christians. That is the main point of 1 Corinthians 15, the Bible’s most famous passage on the resurrection of believers. “How can some of you say,” Paul asks the Corinthians, “that there is no resurrection of the dead?” (1 Corinthians 15:12). The Corinthians believed that God resurrected Christ (1 Corinthians 15:1–2, 4, 11), but some of them denied that God will resurrect the corpses of Christians. “Resurrection” translates the Greek word anastasis (1 Corinthians 15:12–13, 21, 42), which does not ambiguously refer to “life after death,” as if it could be a non-bodily existence. It specifically refers to bodily life after a person has died. The idea that God would resurrect a human corpse revolted Greco-Roman pagans (Acts 17:32). They believed that the material body has no future beyond the grave and that only the immaterial soul is immortal. They valued the soul over the physical body. Consequently, some applied that philosophy to ethics — namely, that what you do now in your physical body does not matter (1 Corinthians 15:32–34). So, Paul corrects the Corinthians who had adopted worldly assumptions about resurrection from their pagan culture. He asserts that God will certainly resurrect the corpses of believers (1 Corinthians 15:12–34). Such a belief is reasonable given two analogies from nature: seeds that die and rise to life, and different kinds of bodies, like the sun and the moon, heavenly and earthly (1 Corinthians 15:35–44). He argues that the analogy of Adam and Christ proves that resurrecting the corpses of believers is certain (1 Corinthians 15:45–49). Finally, he writes that God must transform the perishable, mortal bodies of dead and living believers into imperishable, immortal bodies to triumphantly defeat death (1 Corinthians 15:50–58). God created a material universe. He created humans with physical bodies. Jesus took on flesh and will have his physical, resurrected body forever. God will transform the current physical earth into a new and better one. And God will transform your natural, earthly body into a supernatural, heavenly body. “‘The life everlasting’ is so glorious and satisfying because we get to enjoy the triune God more and more. Forever!” That is wonderful news for us believers in earthly bodies, because our bodies are deteriorating and groaning (1 Corinthians 15:42–44; Romans 8:18–25). Your earthly body is perishable, but your heavenly body will be “imperishable” (1 Corinthians 15:42, 50, 52–54). Christ’s resurrection guarantees that death will die. So, we look forward to enjoying a supernatural body like Christ’s resurrected body: “Our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself” (Philippians 3:20–21). Life Everlasting All humans will exist forever, but only some will enjoy what the Apostles’ Creed calls “the life everlasting.” That refers specifically to the resurrection life of the age to come, which believers experience in some measure now (John 3:15; 17:3). We will fully experience “the life everlasting” after Jesus says to each of us, “Well done, good and faithful servant. . . . Enter into the joy of your master” (Matthew 25:23). In his book God Is the Gospel, John Piper asks a piercing question, If you could have heaven, with no sickness, and with all the friends you ever had on earth, and all the food you ever liked, and all the leisure activities you ever enjoyed, and all the natural beauties you ever saw, all the physical pleasures you ever tasted, and no human conflict or any natural disasters, could you be satisfied with heaven, if Christ were not there? (15) The gospel is good news not merely because God will rescue us from hell and because we can enjoy the pleasures of heaven. It is good news ultimately because we can enjoy God himself like we never could in our shackles of sin. “The life everlasting” is so glorious and satisfying because we get to enjoy the triune God more and more. Forever! We can experience now what David wrote in Psalm 16:11, You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore. We long for the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting because then we will eternally and increasingly experience Psalm 16:11 like never before. Only the Beginning In C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle (the seventh and final book of The Chronicles of Narnia), Aslan explains, “The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.” Lewis continues, And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before. (210–11) “The end” of the story of the Bible is “the beginning of a never-ending, ever-increasing happiness in the hearts of the redeemed, as God displays more and more of his infinite and inexhaustible greatness and glory for the enjoyment of his people” (Desiring God: An Affirmation of Faith 14.3). For now, we need not fear death. Indeed, we should be able to say with the apostle Paul, “My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Philippians 1:23). And if it is far better even now than remaining in a natural, earthly, non-glorified body, it will be far better still to experience the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting with Christ in the new heavens and new earth. So, we pray, “Now to him who is able to keep [us] from stumbling and to present [us] blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen” (Jude 24–25). Article by Andy Naselli Professor, Bethlehem College & Seminary
