Christian Life

January 11, 2014

Sweet, sweet grace of God! It was a happy day, spent with saints and sinners. Street meetings tonight brought me into contact with a successful man who has an empty heart. How shall I praise God sufficiently for the inexplicable miracle of divine grace in my soul? And how explain it to others? I have committed this man’s soul to God, and His Word, expecting to write one day in these [journal] pages of his turning to the Lord and finding great peace. You see these words, Lord, and are my Judge as to whether they are in faith.

– Jim Elliot –

January 10, 2014

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 –

January 9, 2014

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 –

January 8, 2014

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 –

January 7, 2014

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

January 6, 2014

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 –

January 5, 2014

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 –

January 4, 2014

. . . in the whole work we desire to stand with God, and not to depend upon the favourable or unfavourable judgment of the multitude . . .

– George Müller –

January 3, 2014

Tenacity is more than endurance, it is endurance combined with the absolute certainty that what we are looking for is going to transpire. Tenacity is more than hanging on, which may be but the weakness of being too afraid to fall off. Tenacity is the supreme effort of a man refusing to believe that his hero is going to be conquered . . . If our hopes are being disappointed just now, it means that they are being purified . . . One of the greatest strains in life is the strain of waiting for God.

– Oswald Chambers –