Making Truth Visible

it is our privilege these days as a college in divinity school to have mrs elizabeth elliott gran with us sharing out of her experience and also from the word of god as i think of elizabeth elliott i consider her as being a modern-day apostle paul she was called to be a missionary she was called to experience suffering so that she might know the grace of god she was called to be a writer and to share her thoughts with believers who are struggling in their christian faith i believe today that she has been called to be god's messenger to us as she imparts to us god's thoughts for us through his spirit and again we welcome you mrs graham thank you so much there are four things that i am thankful for particularly this morning first of all thank you for coming back again those of you that were here yesterday imagine coming twice secondly lars wanted me to say that we are very thankful that there was no fire in that number four building because we found ourselves pennied in this morning [Music] we are not we shouldn't i don't think be grateful particularly to the group that claims credit they call themselves the lord's disposal team if there had been a fire they might have succeeded in disposing of the speaker but uh third thing is that i'm grateful that there was an angel that did rescue us from prison somebody heard us banging and fourthly i am grateful for the song that we just heard you won't realize until i get to the end of my talk how appropriate that was but the reason for living thank you for that the title of my talk is making truth visible one of the things that jim elliott did when he was a college student was to sacrifice one of the most precious things that any college student can enjoy and that is that hour of sleep in the morning before breakfast which he gave up in order to spend time alone with his bible and in prayer when you pay a high price for something you want to make sure you get the best out of it and having paid the price of giving up that hour of sleep jim wanted to make sure that it wasn't wasted and so he began a spiritual journal when his when he was a junior in college we had as a speaker in chapel dr steven ulford he was a very young man back then i think he was about 27 and if you're anything like me you will hardly remember any of the chapel speakers i sat through four years of compulsory chapel five days a week and i could probably count the speakers that i remember on one hand but i very well remember dr alford and one of the things that he said to us then was that we ought to be keeping a spiritual journal and so jim was one of the few i suppose who actually did something about it and he started one and those journals have been published almost unabridged under the title the jim elliott journals but one of the things that he wrote in there when he was 22 were these words he is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose pretty succinct statement isn't it he is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose think about what you've got that you can keep for sure there really isn't anything is there nothing except christ your assurance of salvation you know you can keep but everything else is up for grabs everything else is expendable temporary and highly dubious so when you give up those things in order to gain what you can't possibly lose in god's eyes you're no fool but of course in the world's eyes you are a fool indeed first thing i'd like to point out under this heading making truth visible is that witnessing means to show what we believe it means not only to talk about it but to demonstrate it in the way that we live to make that truth visible what we do speaks far more loudly than what we say the cloud of witnesses that hebrews 12 talks about are those people mentioned in hebrews 11 who as the saying goes put their money where their mouth was and that's what we need to do as christians isn't it put your money where your mouth is do what you claim jesus didn't say by their claims ye shall know them he said by their fruits ye shall know them we are as paul said living epistles living letters known and read by all men and it is a sobering thought to realize that many of us are perhaps the only bible that other people will read there are a lot of people that will never crack a bible will never darken the door of a church but they may indeed be witnessed to through the visible truth that they see in your life so this morning i want to tell you a little bit about five men who did in fact put their money where their mouth was they made the truth of their lives suddenly and starkly visible to a world that was not used to commitment a world not really very well acquainted with matters of life and death significance it was long before most of you were born but it was back in 1956 that the world was stunned by the news of five men who regarded obedience to jesus christ as quite literally a matter of life and death something for which they were prepared to risk everything i'd like you to know a little bit about these ordinary guys in many ways they were just like you even though if you were to see their pictures you would think what strange hairdos what strange clothes i had a letter from a young man just a few weeks ago saying that he didn't like jim elliot and pete fleming when he looked at their pictures in the books and through gates of splendor and shadow of the almighty he said they looked too clean too slick i've forgotten what else he said but he particularly mentioned the way they combed their hair he couldn't stand it well it was a long time ago you know it was way back in the dark ages but in many ways they were probably just like you there was nate saint who was ordinary in many ways extraordinary as a pilot and as an advent inventor he came from philadelphia he was one of the founders of the missionary aviation fellowship he was a genius at small plane flying in the jungles those pilots who have looked at footage film footage that we have of nate's landing a small plane in a jungle on a jungle sand strip not even an airstrip but a a beach of a river have said that it's impossible what he did but he did it hundreds of times he was also an inventor and when he went to ecuador to start the first missionary flying program of missionary aviation fellowship he developed a hydroelectric system for the electricity of his house and he developed something which he called the bucket drop whereby he could circle in a huge circle of about a mile in diameter and drop a bucket from the plane to the ground and that bucket of course would drop to the vortex of the cone as the plane circled and somebody on the ground could grab it and take out whatever was in it i'm told that aeronautical engineers have studied his plans for this on paper and they say that there's no question that it won't work but the truth is that it worked they never have figured out why then there was a man named roger eudarian he was a cowboy from montana and he went into world war ii as a paratrooper and was wounded in action and went back eventually to ecuador as a missionary to the hebrew indians some of you have heard of the hebrews they were notorious because they shrank heads human heads they were hunters and killers and when they got one of their enemies they would chop off his head and shrink it through a mysterious process so that the features were still recognizable but the size of the head would be about the size of an orange and then they would stick it on a pole around their houses they'd have the heads of their enemies or they would wear them hanging from their hair on their belts so they were pretty awesome fearsome people and it was to these that roger eudarian was called by god and went out to ecuador then there was a young man who was very bookish not what i would think of as missionary type at all he was had an m.a in literature from the university of washington and was planning to be a professor of literature his name was pete fleming and there was ed mccully whom i knew as a student at wheaton college he was a big football player and also a track star which i'm told is a rather unusual combination he was a man six feet three or four and a very good runner and a very good football player he was the president of his class he was planning to become a politician and all of us were convinced that ed would make a very successful one might even be president of the united states sometime when he was a senior ed won the national championship in the hearst newspaper oratorical contest in which there were 20 000 contestants ed took first place so he was an unusual guy and when i think back over the men that i knew in college i can think of no one who seemed to me less likely to become a missionary he was too good to be a missionary he was too handsome for one thing and missionaries aren't supposed to be terribly smart or terribly good-looking at least they weren't in my book they were people who couldn't really do anything else they went to the mission field because they couldn't think of anything else to do at least that seemed to be the truth about some of them anyway ed was a good friend of a man named jim elliot i've told you a little bit about jim and jim was a leader on the campus too in many ways but he was also the kind of a guy that would be avoided sometimes by his classmates and other students because he was likely to go up to somebody in the dining hall line in the morning and say what did you get from the lord this morning buddy and of course it was a rare student that could come up with a very fast answer most of them hadn't gotten anything because they had just rolled out in time to get into the dining hall line before the door closed and those who had read their bibles weren't prepared with an answer for anything specific that they had gotten another thing that jim would do would be to go up to a friend and say how come you're not going to the mission field buddy and if he stuttered and stumbled around and said well i don't know i mean like you know i don't think i'm really not too sure that i'm called jim's answer to that was you don't need a call you need a kick in the pants he took the view that a man who was not going to the mission field must prove that he was not called it was much more difficult to prove that than it was to prove that he himself was called because he said after all there is the inescapable calling clearly in black and white go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature baptizing them in the name of the father and the son of the holy spirit and so jim took that to mean him unless he could come up with a very good excuse and when his mother and others urged him to pursue the ministry that the lord seemed to be opening up for him in the states jim's reply to that was i don't have a right to stay here in this country when god has given me the physical body capable of withstanding the rigors of the jungle and or any other difficult place and he has opened my eyes to the need of the foreign field and i'm willing to go what possible excuse could i think of for not going and if ten men are carrying a log and nine men are on one end which end are you going to help out on of course there's always plenty of ministry in this country but if the disciples had taken the view that they had to finish the job in jerusalem before they went to judea and samaria and the utter uttermost parts of the earth they'd still be in jerusalem nobody would have ever gotten any further than that so that was the kind of a man jim was and when he was going to the mission field he felt that god called people to go two by two and so he began to pray that god would give him a buddy to go along with him since god had already made it clear to him that he was not to get married he was to go out as a single man because there's a lot of work that needs to be done on the mission field by people that are not burdened with a wife and children and so he prayed for a buddy and he thought maybe it was going to be ed mccully even though ed was already in law school by this time preparing to be a politician ed had taken a job as a night clerk in a hotel in order to spend his time studying at night and making some money at the same time and jim went to visit him on one of those nights and he said you ought to be reading your bible some of this time well ed came from a very strong christian family he knew his bible backwards and forwards but he really wasn't spending a whole lot of time reading it and jim's words sank in for some reason and he began to read his bible and another time jim went and said to him hey buddy how come you're not going to the mission field and the usual discussion ensued well to make a long story short ed decided to go to the mission field he gave up law school he gave up his ambitions for politics and he decided go to to go to ecuador so jim thought maybe his prayers were answered for a buddy to go along with but then ed disappointed him by getting married and so jim began to pray for another friend and he thought of his buddy pete fleming whom he had known in seattle so he went up to seattle and he saw pete he said how come you're not going to the mission field and of course pete gave him the answer that he had been giving everybody that he was going into the academic world he had his master's degree he was going for a doctorate etc etc but the long and short of it is that pete decided to go to the mission field i don't want to give the impression that those are the only reasons i'm not even sure that those are the most important reasons i just know that jim did ask each of them to go and the end of the story is that they went nate ended up in a place called shelmetta opening the missionary aviation program there raj in the southern jungle southeastern jungle of ecuador with the hebrews nate i mean pete ed and jim all worked with the kichwas these are the modern descendants of the incas and jim and i were married after he had been working with the kichwas for a year and i had been working in the other in another section of the jungle with the colorado's and one day in 1955 nate flew into our station with the usual food and mail and other things gasoline things that he brought into our station on a regular basis and also with a tremendously exciting piece of news which was that he had just discovered an alka house the alkas were tribe known to be savages known to be naked and almost nothing else was known about them because nobody had ever gone in there and come out alive the shell oil company had sent in 12 employees all of whom had been speared to death and so for years missionaries have been praying about these indians that somehow the lord would open the door for the gospel to go in there and jim was one who had been praying even before he went to ecuador he had prayed that if it was god's will to send him to a place where christ had never been named he was willing to go and specifically to go to the alkas if that was god's plan for him many times in nate's years of flying he had seen alca houses which were abandoned roofs rotting no plantations visible no people nearby but on this day he came in to tell us that he had found one that was inhabited there was smoke coming through the thatch there were fresh plantations nearby there were naked people visible from the plain and so this was a tremendously exciting piece of news and it gave rise to an immediate burden of prayer that god would enable the men to find a way to go in there it was jim and ed and nate who started what they called operation alka they began to pray they began to plan together and nate decided that his uh the little pod that he had constructed underneath the wing of his plane for dropping parachutes would work fine for dropping gifts to these indians if they dropped gifts on a regular basis over a period of weeks or months perhaps their hostility would be broken down and they would be prepared to receive some visitors face to face on the ground and so they began in october of 1955 this program of dropping gifts by the time a couple of months had gone by they had asked two other men to join them and these men were raj and pete it was in january of 1956 that the men believed that god's time had come they had received not only signs of friendship in the form of gestures the indians gesturing to them to come down and nate was so skilled at flying that he could get right down low enough to actually see the expressions on their faces and week after week he would see the people out there holding the gifts that he had dropped to them the week before smiling gesturing yelling of course things that they couldn't hear or understand but they began to believe that god was answering their prayers that their hostility would be broken down and that it was time to go in there one day we received gifts in exchange the indians had not only taken things out of the bucket that nate dropped sometimes he dropped things from parachutes sometimes he dropped the bucket that i described and on one occasion we received a comb and a feather fan and the next week we received a live parrot complete with a half-eaten banana in the little basket in the bucket and then we received a cooked monkey leg and so we believed that it was that they were indeed ready things that they couldn't hear or understand but they began to believe that god was answering their prayers that their hostility would be broken down and that it was time to go in there one day we received gifts in exchange the indians had not only taken things out of the bucket that nate dropped sometimes he dropped things from parachutes sometimes he dropped the bucket that i described and on one occasion we received a comb and a feather fan and the next week we received a live parrot complete with a half-eaten banana in the little basket in the bucket and then we received a cooked monkey leg and so we believed that it was that they were indeed ready to be friendly and to receive these missionaries and so in january of 1956 the five men agreed that god's time had come all of them and all of us wives had been praying for god's clear direction that god would stop us if we were making any mistakes or running ahead of him we prayed over every single detail of the plans and in january the men left to go down to a little sand strip that nate had found from the air on which he could land a plane jim had prefabricated a treehouse made fluid in piece by piece and flew the men in one at a time landing on a 200 meter soft sand strip which was in itself almost miraculous and they set up a camp on the evening of their departure they sang together a hymn by edith cherry we rest on thee our shield and our defender we go not forth alone against the foe they had what appeared to be a completely friendly contact about five days after they set up their camp three alkas suddenly appeared out of the jungle two women and one man they talked they gesticulated they assumed that the missionaries understood them which of course they didn't and they even ate the food that the missionaries gave them things like hamburgers which they'd certainly never seen before and bred and then the man was so completely at ease that he accepted a ride in the airplane and nate flew him over his village he was able to let the people on the ground know that he was in the plane he shouted to them nate had worked out a radio uh some kind of a telephone system that could actually broadcast from the plane and so this man whom the men nicknamed george shouted to his people and told them that everything was fine we assume that's what he told them anyway it looked as though things were working beautifully that was on a friday afternoon and on the following sunday afternoon nate radioed to his wife that he had just flown again over the alca village he had seen 10 people on their way toward the men's camp and he was very excited and he said we'll call you again at 4 30 this afternoon and at 4 30 there was nothing on the radio we didn't know whether perhaps the radio had malfunctioned or perhaps the men had even received an invitation to go into the alka village with the indians and so we wives waited of course anxiously for word from them but no word came another pilot flew out over the territory the following day saw the plane stripped of its fabric on the beach and no sign of any of the men it was five days later that a ground party made up of missionaries ecuadorian soldiers and quiche indians reached the men's camp and found that all five of the men had been speared to death i'd like you to think about what it means to make truth visible think about the words that jim had written in his journal they were just words weren't they he is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose he hadn't paid a very high price for that truth the words were true and the words were prophetic jim could not have imagined that six years later he would bleed to death on the point of an alka spear but he did mean what he said and his commitment was total to jesus christ the world was dumbfounded the news went around the world very quickly this was in the days of television's infancy and perhaps that's one reason why so many people heard about it and we're so startled nowadays i don't know what it would take to startle any of us we're so calloused by the mass media but at any rate this seemed to make a tremendous impact there were stories in all the newspapers and leading magazines of the world reader's digest time magazine life magazine and life sent a photographer to ecuador at the time when we knew that the men were missing before they were actually discovered dead his name was cornell kappa he's a good friend of mine now but he'd hardly ever heard of missionaries he was not a christian he was a jew and not even a religious jew and he asked me a thousand questions all of them sort of uh reducing to that one why why would these men go into their place like that why would they do this and of course i told him over and over again and he just kept shaking his head it didn't make any sense and while he was there you can imagine a number of missionaries witnessed to him and tried to make a christian out of him and he just laughed and shrugged and he was very gracious and received what they said but he would always say well that's your faith and that's fine for you but it doesn't mean a thing to me and just before he left ecuador he said to me you know they're never going to convert me with these books they're giving me in these tracts but you might with the diaries of these men and i had showed him jim elliott's diary and some of the things that jim had written and he was just completely baffled you know just before jesus left his disciples he said to them the prince of this world is coming and he has no rights over me but the world must be shown that i love the father the world must be shown and that's still true jesus came into the world and was made flesh so that we could see his glory so that we could see all the truth that had been written and spoken about for thousands of years visibly demonstrated and the world had to be shown what god was like the prince of this world has no rights over us christians but the world must be shown how how will it ever be shown i'd like to ask you what's worth dying for if you don't know what your reason for living is then you certainly don't have a reason for dying because nothing is worth dying for that isn't worth living for it says in first john 2 17 the world and all its passionate desires will one day disappear but the man who is following the will of god is part of the permanent and cannot die the world's judgment on these five men was that they were blankety blank fools they had to be out of their tree to go down into a place like that didn't they know what the possibilities were of course they did what a waste some of them said but of course we look at things invisible we live on two levels as christians faith is a two-world word we look at the visible and we interpret it in terms of the invisible the world doesn't have anything to go by but the visible but there were some who saw the truth of god lived out through the death of those men and there were some who came to jesus christ i have been told that there were a thousand volunteers for the mission field as a result of that i never have believed that maybe there were a thousand volunteers i don't think a thousand people actually went but there are literally hundreds who have told me that no book outside of the bible has so deeply influenced their lives as a story of jim elliott shadow of the almighty hundreds have told me that what was so different about him he was quite an ordinary guy in a lot of ways i know i was his wife very down to earth very hearty one of the things he wrote in his diary was wherever you are be all there live to the hilt every situation you believe to be the will of god and he did that but think of those words he is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose a witness is somebody who believes something and is willing to demonstrate it have you seen something do you know something that the world doesn't know how much is it worth to demonstrate it i hope there are some this morning who are asking themselves what do i really believe what am i absolutely sure about paul said i know whom i have believed and i am absolutely sure that he is able to keep what i have committed to him [Music] what are you sure about and what difference does it make does it make a difference in your life is it worth living for then it's worth dying for god bless you

Channel: The Elisabeth Elliot Foundation

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Id: LMExxthUYzY

Length: 30min 51sec (1851 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 05 2020