Tag Archives: Jim Elliot

From routine to the edge of adventure

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Do you ever have the feeling like you are stuck in a routine, doing the same thing over and over, never really getting anywhere, but instead just running in circles, and just wasting your life away?

 

That was the plight of Bill Murray’s character in the movie, Groundhog Day. Every day he would wake up on Groundhog Day and everything would be the same as yesterday. The same pointless routines, the same meaningless dialog, and the same boring and unfulfilled existence.

 

Maybe you feel the same way. You look back at the past year and ask, “Where did time go?” You look back over a lifetime of toil and ask, “What happened to my goals and dreams?”   You’re stuck in a rut that seems like a grave with the ends dug out. You ask, “Is there a way out?”

 

Maybe today is the day to drive a stake in the ground or draw a line firmly in the wet concrete that proclaims, “I’m not going to waste my life. I am going to live a life of adventure with purpose and passion!”

 

What does it mean for a Christian to ditch the wasted routine and start living on the edge of adventure?

 

Jesus said “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9:23). He said it is like one who lost a treasure and gave up everything in order to find it.

 

It might look like Paul who considered everything he once sought to win as becoming like rubbish, worthless compared to knowing Jesus. Not just knowing more about Jesus, but knowing Him in such an intimate way that compels you to follow Him in everything you do. As the martyred Jim Elliot said,

“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”

 

Elliot’s fellow missionary, martyred by his side, summed it this way:

“I have one desire now – to live a life of reckless abandon for the Lord, putting all my energy into it.”

 

Francis Schaefer said it is the life being visibly marked by the expression of God’s love for others. Like a mentor of mine when I was a youth said, “To have even your unconscious thoughts and desires bear the mark of Jesus.”

 

Maybe the question isn’t, “Am I ready to get out of a rut?” Maybe the question is, “Do I really want to bear the full mark of Jesus and live the ‘abundant life’ adventure of following Him?” The call is yours. Answer it today.

 

 

The Power of Forgiveness

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The year was 1956. Jim Elliot and four other missionaries and their young wives and children traveled to the jungles of Ecuador in attempt to reach the Waodani people with the practical love of the gospel. Nothing meant more to Elliott who is quoted as saying,

“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.” (See Luke 9:24)

 

After much difficulty, the young men established a sense of trust among the Waodani. But due to a lie told in the village about the men, the trust was wrongly broken and a group of Waodani warriors went to the river and speared all five of the men who had come to help them. The Waodani had no word in their language for forgiveness. They only knew revenge and their revenge only knew death.

 

Put yourself in the place of the young widows whose families were torn apart by this meaningless act of violence. Act justly? What does that mean? Who would blame them if they called in the State Department to make this people pay the price for their unwarranted aggression? Love mercy and return home to try to forgive and carry on the best they could? Walk humbly before God no matter what He called them to do?

 

What they did was unfathomable. Could you do it, would you? I couldn’t. At least not in my own power.

 

But in the supernatural power that their faith in Christ gave them, they walked humbly before their God and returned to the village whose men had killed their husbands. They lived among the people and loved them with the power of forgiveness. And over time, the villagers, even the murderers, came to understand the meaning of love and forgiveness. And they changed their ways. That is the true sign of belief. It leads to a repentance that brings about real change. It doesn’t make us perfect, but it sets us on a new course.

 

Spending a lifetime learning how to change behaviors, I have never found a force more powerful and transformational than the forgiveness of Jesus, the light of the world. Have you?