September 2003

Mission Heroes

Jim Elliot

Jim Elliot was born to farmer-evangelist parents in Portland, Oregon. He accepted Christ at age 6 a decision which influenced the rest of his life. Jim was a gifted writer, speaker, and teacher. He had a commanding presence while a student at Wheaton College, even coming a champion on the wrestling team. During his Wheaton days, Jim “encouraged a small group of us to meet everyday at 6:30 a.m. to pray for ourselves and our fellow students on behalf of missions,” said David Howard, Jim’s brother-in-law and the General Director of the World Evangelical Fellowship. “Jim also organized a round-the-clock [prayer] cycle, asking students to sign up for a 15-minute slot each day when he or she would promise to pray for missions and missions recruitment on our campus. The entire 24 hours were filled this way. Thus, every 15 minutes throughout the day or night, at least one student was on his knees interceding for missions at Wheaton College” (Piper, 67-68).

Jim met Elisabeth Howard on March 23, 1947. Just before she graduated from Wheaton College, Jim confessed his love for Elisabeth. “Rainbows are made of sunlight and rain,” Elisabeth wrote of Jim's love confession in Passion and Purity, the story of their courtship. “The sunlight which turned my world into a radiance of color was the knowledge of Jim Elliot's love. The rain was the other fact that God was calling him to remain single. Perhaps for life, perhaps only until he had firsthand experience in the place where he was to work as a jungle missionary. Older missionaries had told him that single men were needed to do jobs married ones could never do. Jim took their word for it and committed himself to bachelorhood for as long as the will of God required.” They longed to be husband and wife, but Jim would not agree to the yoke of marriage until he was certain of God's plan (In Touch Ministries).

Jim and a friend from Wheaton served as jungle missionaries in Ecuador for five years before he knew it was God's will that he and Elisabeth marry. They were married on Oct. 8, 1953 in a civil ceremony in Quito, Ecuador, and after a brief honeymoon, they continued to work among the Quichua Indians while making plans to reach the Auca, a cannibalistic, unreached tribe in Eastern Ecuador. In 1953, after two years of marriage, their daughter, Valerie, was born, and ten month later while trying to make contact with the Aucas, Jim and three other missionary men were killed by Auca spears. The Aucas had killed all strangers for centuries.

“Other Indians fear them but the missionaries were determined to reach them. Said Elliot: ‘Our orders are: the Gospel to every creature.’” (In Touch Ministries)

Jim’s focus on obedience to God’s will and taking the Gospel to the peoples of the world resulted in his death, but thousands of people have been influenced by both his short life and his death. Many Aucas have followed Christ as the result of Elisabeth's work among them after Jim’s death, along with Rachel Saint, the sister of another of the martyred missionaries, Nate Saint. Elisabeth chronicled the life and death of her husband in Shadow of the Almighty and Through Gates of Splendor and her time with the Aucas in These Strange Ashes.

Despite the personal cost of delaying marriage and early death, Jim was intense about discipleship and obedience, focused on pleasing God and not humankind. During college, Jim wrote in his journal about his passion for God to use him and almost a foreshadowing of death: “[He makes] His ministers a flame of fire,” Elliot wrote while a student at Wheaton College. “Am I ignitable? God deliver me from the dread asbestos of ‘other things.’ Saturate me with the oil of the Spirit that I may be aflame. But flame is transient, often short-lived. Canst thou bear this my soul—short life? In me there dwells the spirit of the Great Short-Lived, whose zeal for God's house consumed Him.”

“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose,” Jim Elliot

More information at:
http://www.intouch.org/myintouch/
mighty/portraits/jim_elliot_213678.html
http://www.christianmissions.net/bios/jelliot.html