Eternity shall be at once a great eye-opener and a great mouth-shutter. It shall be the Rectifier of all injustice (and how vast is injustice!), the Confirmer of martyrs’ blood, the Explainer of years of labor swallowed up in meaningless ruin on earth. Lord, deliver me from sweet doctrinal nothings.
– Jim Elliot –
Oh, it is gripping to think that our eyes are to be blessed so as to see Him, ‘so coming in like manner’ as He went away . . . How poorly will appear anything but a consuming operative faith in the person of Christ when He comes. How lost, alas, a life lived in any other light!
– Jim Elliot –
One doesn’t learn to speak a language in a couple of months. It will be plugging for a good while yet. Seems that I’ll never get through ‘preparing’ for the mission field. But I’ve been comforted this week thinking of our Lord’s thirty silent years of readying Himself at home with His family and bending over a carpenter’s bench. Were those days any less of a fragrance to God than His later work before the eyes of the people? I think not. A well-made piece of furniture and a healed blind man represented the same thing to the Father—a job well done; mission accomplished. So with us here. Nothing great, but what is that to Him with whom there is no great or small?
– Jim Elliot –
If it sounds like I’m sticking my nose into your business, remember that I say this with a regard to the eternal profit of your soul, and that the Lord has stirred me up to write of this. Christ needs some young fellows to sell out to Him and recklessly toss their lives into His work.
– Jim Elliot –
From a letter written to a friend, as quoted in Shadow of the Almighty
O Lord, make me to forget myself. I would not be of those who already have their reward in receiving recognition from men.
– Jim Elliot –
My life is lived now both externally and internally different from what I knew when the old man was in the saddle. Bless the Lord for this . . .
– Jim Elliot –
I may no longer depend on pleasant impulses to bring me before the Lord. I must rather respond to principles I know to be right, whether I feel them to be enjoyable or not.
– Jim Elliot –
Most laws condemn the soul and pronounce sentence. The result of the law of my God is perfect. It condemns but forgives. It restores – more than abundantly – what it takes away.
– Jim Elliot –
Those whimpering Stateside young people will wake up on the Day of Judgment condemned to worse fates than these demon-fearing Indians, because, having a Bible, they were bored with it – while these never heard of such a thing as writing.
– Jim Elliot –