- Samuel Zwemer, the “apostle to Islam” (1862-1952)

]]> http://daltonlifsey.com/2012/01/18/does-it-really-matter-how-many-die-or-how-much-money-we-spend-in-opening-closed-doors/feed/ 2 http://daltonlifsey.com/2012/01/09/unto-death-martyrdom-missions-and-the-maturity-of-the-church/ http://daltonlifsey.com/2012/01/09/unto-death-martyrdom-missions-and-the-maturity-of-the-church/#comments Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:05:31 +0000 Dalton http://daltonlifsey.com/?p=2159

Below are the notes to a message I preached on the 56th anniversary of the martyrdom of Jim Elliot and his comrades in Ecuador in 1956. Audio will be added when it becomes available.

I.          THE CALL TO MARTYRDOM AS FOUNDATIONAL TO APOSTOLIC CHRISTIANITY

 The New Testament and the witness of Church history, exalt the call to martyrdom is foundational and indispensable to authentic apostolic Christianity.^[1] It is at the core of the call to Christ-exalting faith and obedience. When and where this calling is faithfully expounded, appropriately emphasized, and rightly demonstrated, the Church will mature and fulfill the high calling for which she was conceived. When and where it is avoided, omitted, and dismissed, the Church will exist beneath the intentions of God, in a state of general irrelevance before the peoples of the earth and the powers of the air.

As I aim to show, the call to martyrdom is not reserved for nations and peoples undergoing persecution. It is for every believer. When Jesus called us, He called us all to “come and die.” 

Though not every believer is called to give a martyr-witness, every believer is called to embrace a martyr-mentality, every church a martyr-mandate, and every minister a martyr-theology.  Whether we live or die is ultimately in the hands of our Master. And if we have not entrusted Him with that decision, we may be deluding ourselves into assuming we are His bondservants when in fact we are not.[2]

As long as we live under the influence of the assumption that we are not called to such a standard we will, by default, live without “a proper and appropriate antagonism to the world in attempts to preclude the possibility that we might die the death of Christ. We [will then secure] our own fates as nonmartyrs.”^[3] Such self-preservation however, does not befit those who worship a crucified King and a slain Lamb.

II.        THE CALL TO MARTYRDOM AS A HISTORICAL CONTINUUM

Martyrdom at The Beginning

In one concentrated timeframe, John the Baptist, Jesus, and Stephen were slain. The bloody executions of these three men set a precedent for first century believers: in order to follow Christ, one must be willing to die.

The prominent place of martyrdom in the early Church is made evident by the stunning fact that in the wake of Stephen’s death (which was overseen by Saul or Tarsus, another future martyr), nearly all of the original disciples were violently killed. Church history suggests that of the 12, it is possible that only John the Beloved died a natural death. All the others stained the far corners of the Roman Empire with their blood.

James, the son of Zebedee, was the first to know death as gain when Herod Agrippa executed him with the sword in Jerusalem around AD 44.[4] Phillip was killed in Phrygia in AD 54 after his head was fastened to a pillar and rocks were hurled at his defenseless body. In AD 63 James, the brother of Jesus, was cast down from the Temple, stoned, and then beaten to death with a club. In AD 64 Barnabbas was dragged out of the city Salamina on Cyprus and then burned. That same year Mark was dragged to the stake through the streets of Alexandria resulting in “his whole body [being] torn open, so that there was not a single spot on it, which did not bleed.” He was dead before he reached the stake. Tradition suggests Peter was crucified upside down in Rome around AD 67-68. Andrew was crucified in Greece. Jude was killed in what is now Iran. And Thomas spilled his blood on the distant soil of India. The death of those young men[5] and the subsequent beheading of the apostle Paul marked the beginning of a historical continuum of martyrdom that persists to this very day.

Martyrdom at Present

Statistically speaking, the subject of martyrdom is more relevant now than it has ever been in light of the fact that it is now more prolific than it has ever been.

In 2002 David Barrett estimated that “approximately 164,000 Christians [would] die as martyrs [that year] and that the average number of Christian martyrs each year will grow to 210,000 by the year 2025.”[6] According to Barrett’s research, there were approximately 45,400,000 martyrs in the twentieth century.[7] This means that the previous century saw more martyrs than every century before it combined. In his book, The New Persecuted (I Nuovi Perseguitati), Italian journalist Antonio Socci argues that 65% of all Christian martyrs were slain in the twentieth century.[8]

In nations like Nigeria, Indonesia, Philippines, Bangladesh, Iran, Columbia, and North Korea, the issue of martyrdom is a cold hard reality. To dismiss this subject is to dishonor those who at this very moment are faced with the threat of violence for their faith in Christ.

While we in the West may believe the subject of martyrdom to be fringe and irrelevant, the testimony of the slain around the world in our generation urges us to reconsider. In view of the mounting violence against Christians in the nations, it is likely that those who dismiss the issue of martyrdom are the ones who are fringe and irrelevant, for it is they who are the minority.

Martyrdom Until the End

The prophetic Scriptures are abundantly clear that the greatest expression of martyrdom will occur in the generation of the Lord’s return after “the whole world” receives a “witness” concerning “the Gospel of the Kingdom.”[9] The penetration of the Gospel into every nation, tribe, and tongue will result in a bloody backlash. This is not to say that the end-time missions thrust will be unfruitful. On the contrary. Men, woman, and children from every nation will vow their allegiance to Jesus. The final push towards global evangelism will be met with vehement rage. Jesus said that as the Gospel of the Kingdom is being heralded across the earth during the tumultuous time of tribulation, “all nations will hate” believers and “put [them] to death.”[10] The impact of this unprecedented wave of persecution will claim the lives of Christ-followers in “every nation, people, tribe, and tongue.”[11] This is a staggering prophetic reality. Every nation will be painted red with the blood of the faithful. These end-time martyrs will “come up out of the great tribulation” to be counted among the “full number” of martyrs that, according to Jesus, has already been ordained in God’s sovereignty.[12]

The prophetic texts speak of an age-ending scourge in which a Satanic tyrant will be granted authority “to make war on the saints and to conquer them.”[13] Christians will be “given into his hands” and will be “worn out” as he “makes war with them” and “prevails over them.”[14] During that final time of “tribulation,” that tyrannical “man of sin”[15] will “destroy mighty men and the saints”[16] as he “goes out with great fury to destroy and devote many to destruction.”[17] Many in that day will “stumble by sword and flame, captivity and plunder.”[18]

Martyrdom will be so prolific in that final hour that Jesus declared it to be one of the premier signs of the times indicating the nearness of His return and the end of the age.[19] If we ignore or dismiss this issue now, we seal our fate as those who will be unprepared to “stand” and “endure” in the midst of the coming storm.

III.       THE CALL TO MARTYRDOM AS FUEL FOR MISSIONS

Nowhere in Scripture is this more evident than in Philippians and II Timothy. From prison Paul wrote to a congregation and to a young man. To the congregation he said “to live is Christ and to die is gain” and that he “counted all things as loss for the sake of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord.” And to the young man he said “suffer by he power of God” “like a good soldier.”

After hearing Hudson Taylor speak in 1887 about the mandate concerning frontier missions, young Amy Wilson Carmichael became convinced that the Lord was calling her to the nations and a life of ministry. Before long, she left Ireland by ship as a single woman in her 20’s bound for a distant and hostile land. She never returned. After spending over 55 years in Asia without furlough she met her Maker face to face through a natural death at the age of 83. She was buried in the Indian soil beneath a birdbath after requesting that no stone be set upon her grave. Looking back over her life she penned the following.

 “The night I sailed for China, March 3, 1893, my life, on the human side, was broken, and it never was mended again. But He has been enough.”^[20]

The call to martyrdom should be revered as fuel for the end-time missions movement. Without a martyr-consecration we will not respond to the challenges associated with the final frontier of world missions: Islam.

 Globally there are over 6,000 unreached people groups with a population of over 2 billion people. The largest religious block on the map of the unreached and unengaged is Islam. The Joshua Project reports these sobering statistics.

- The population of the Islamic world is 1,537,185,000.
- Within that population of 1.5+ billion people are 2,840 different unreached people groups.
- 87.4 % of those 1.5+ billion people have yet to hear the Gospel.
- Or, to say it another way, 1,343,613,000 Muslims have yet to hear the name of Jesus.

While every religious block constitutes a substantial challenge to the global Church clearly Islam is the most daunting. It is the largest and the most hostile. Consequently, the amount of missionaries on the field is tragically small. Joshua Lingel explains the level of activity within this block by saying that

Only one percent of all Christian missionaries go to do direct ministry amongst Muslims (1,800 missionaries total). That’s one missionary for every 550,000 Muslims! For every Mormon you have ever met, there are 130 Muslims in the world. That’s equivalent to having about five churches and 150 pastors for all of North America. Said differently, it would be like having the option to go to church in Texas (if you’re fortunate to be that close) or say Boston perhaps, and three other locations in the U.S. on any given Sunday morning.[21]

Christian martyrdom is motivated by the believer’s Spirit-wrought desire to spend eternity with his enemy that he loves enough to serve through suffering—even unto death. Until the Church displays this desire to the nations, especially Islamic nations, her witness will fall on deaf ears, if it even falls at all.

Our proclamation of “the Gospel of the Kingdom to the whole world”[22] will be undermined to the degree that our desire to preserve our lives rivals our desire to “finish [our] course and the ministry that [we] received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God.”[23] Or, to say it positively, our contribution to the task of global missions will be as great as our conviction that the fame of Christ’s name among those who are perishing is worth the investment of our mortal lives. Without that conviction we simply will not go.

—

Today in 1956, five missionaries to the Auca indians in Ecuador were killed. Their deaths brought a sudden end to the project they called “Operation Auca,” but the tragedy became a defining moment in the history of evangelical missions. Hundreds of young people were inspired to take up missionary work, thousands were moved to deeper commitment to Christ, and millions of dollars in resources were mobilized. And the work with the Aucas went on, too.

In the headline, I name only Jim Elliot, the most famous of the group. While the other four men on the team (Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Peter Fleming, and Roger Youderian) were all important to the work and have all received commemoration and attention (they all have Wikipedia pages, if that’s a good index of status in 2009), Elliot has somehow stood out from the group. Why? It may be that Elliot had that certain something as part of his personality, a charisma or magnetism or star power. But I think there’s another reason: Jim Elliot and his widow Elisabeth were unusually articulate. They had words on the tips of their tongues and were able to give a compelling account of why they were doing what they were doing.

Start with Jim Elliot’s most famous statement, written in his journal in 1949: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”

It explained, in advance, how Elliot had thought through the relative value of the most important things in life. The sentence sprang from Bible study (Luke 16:9), was honed by personal meditation, and aimed at obedience. It’s one small example of how Elliot had words ready to explain his actions.

And that one saying is not all; his diaries are filled with passages which would do just as well to sum up his service:

One treasure, a single eye, and a sole master. (1948)

God, I pray Thee, light these idle sticks of my life and may I burn for Thee. Consume my life, my God, for it is Thine. I seek not a long life, but a full one, like you, Lord Jesus. (1948)

Saturate me with the oil of the Spirit that I may be aflame. But flame is 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. ‘Make me Thy fuel, Flame of God.’ (1948)

As your life is in His hands, so are the days of your life. But don’t let the sands of time get into the eye of your vision to reach those who sit in darkness. They simply must hear. (1948)

I must not think it strange if God takes in youth those whom I would have kept on earth till they were older. God is peopling Eternity, and I must not restrict Him to old men and women. (1950)

The will of God is always a bigger thing than we bargain for. (1952)

Jim Elliot knew what he was about, and knew how to explain it. That’s what sets him apart as a martyr: He testified so well. Remember that the greek word martyr originally meant “somebody who testifies.” What caused its meaning to change into “somebody who dies for a cause?” The word took on that new meaning when the early church, under persecution, brought forth a large number of people who were so good at standing for what they believed in that their message became clear to the whole ancient world: they testified themselves to death; they witnessed mortally; they underwent death by testimony, and their testimony was heard.

One last reason for Jim Elliot’s special prominence over the years since his death: Elisabeth Elliot, his widow, had the same gift of communication. In fact, she seems to have had vastly more of it than Jim did. The year of the team’s martyrdom, Elisabeth wrote Through Gates of Splendor, the massively influential account of the mission. It is an impassioned and exceptional book. A book written under such remarkable circumstances, by somebody personally involved in the events, would be worth reading even if it had little literary merit. You could justify it by saying that in the absence of a real author, it is still worth having the story told by somebody who is not quite up to the task. But Through Gates of Splendor is genuinely well written. In it, Elisabeth Elliot succeeds in speaking for the whole mission team and setting before the whole listening world the inner reasons for what they did. And two years later, Elliot brought out Shadow of the Almighty: The Life and Testament of Jim Elliot, which is even better. Note that it covers his life and also his testament: what he did and what he said. In Shadow, Elisabeth quotes directly from Jim’s journals as much as possible, but her own voice is strong and clear throughout it.

In the Epilogue of Shadow of the Almighty, Elisabeth Elliot culls from Jim’s journals some of the quotations I printed above. She notes that after Jim’s death these sentences were all “fraught with new meaning,” and that “to them I can add nothing.” But of course she did add something. She added hundreds of pages that were necessary if the inner meaning of the team’s sacrifice was ever going to be spoken clearly and understood by many.

Adoniram Judson

When he arrived in Burma he set a goal of translating the Bible and founding a church of 100 members before his death. When he died, he left the Bible, 100 churches, and over 8,000 believers. A century and a half later, Myanmar has the third largest number of Baptists worldwide, behind the United States and India.

“God is closing in on some of you. He is like the “Hound of Heaven” who means to make you far happier in some dangerous and dirty work. Missionaries and ministers of mercy don’t come from nowhere. They come from people like you, stunned by the glory of God and stopped in your tracks. Sometimes it happens when you are going in exactly the opposite direction.”

– John Piper

    (from Don’t Waste Your Life, pg. 155)

I was encouraged by Jerry Rankin’s recent article regarding the willingness of Koreans to lay down their lives on the mission field among the unreached and unengaged. With the American missions force steadily depleting, reports like this are important for us in the West. I found this paragraph particularly gripping:

I have discerned a deeper than normal devotion of Koreans who respond to a call to missions. Most Americans will respond in consideration of the possibility of missionary service but continue to rationalize and explore whether or not that’s what God wants them to do. When Koreans come to the altar they are forsaking all, expecting someone to put a passport and airline ticket in their hand and send them to the ends of the earth the next day!

What is the difference in a day when the number of missionaries from the West are in decline and most American churches are reducing financial support for missions. Why does God seem to have His hand on Koreans and is allowing them to lead the way in fulfilling the Great Commission? An uninhibited, authentic worship style in which Koreans seem to capture a passion for God’s glory may have something to with it. A devotion for early morning prayer meetings, a willingness to pray and intercede for the nations all night and in days of prayer and fasting is probably a factor. And they seem to have an indiscrete zeal for witnessing and sharing Christ that makes a difference.

You can read the whole article below or at Jerry’s website.

I have just returned from the Global Korean Young Adult Mission Festival (GKYM) held this year in Rochester, New York. I was not able to accept invitations to speak at this conference previously, so this was my first time to gather with more than 3,000 second-generation Koreans, primarily from the U.S. and Canada for this end-of-the-year event. Seldom had I been at a conference that reflected such intense passion and commitment for evangelizing a lost world.

It reminded me of one of my earlier experiences of seeing how God is moving among Korean youth. The first GCOWE (Global Consultation on World Evangelization) was held in Seoul, Korea in 1995. It was a gathering of evangelical denominations and mission agencies from all over the world, convened to meet the challenge of engaging unreached people groups with the gospel. One night the delegates gathered at a public arena for the purpose of commissioning young people from churches in Korea who were committed to going as missionaries. The 4,000 GCOWE delegates were seated on the floor of the arena while the 10,000 young people being commissioned filled the stadium seats!

In Rochester, participants were challenged to be the ones to take the gospel to the remaining 639 unengaged people groups with a population of more than 50,000 who have yet to be touched with a Christian witness. As speaker after speaker reminded the audience that leadership transitions in North Korea were a precursor to providential events that would eventually open that country to the gospel, the entire crowd of more than 3,000 lifted their hands in commitment to say they were willing to be the ones to go when that time came.

We have found a remarkable response of Korean Baptist churches to missions involvement over the years. About eight years ago pastors from the Korean-American Baptist churches in the U.S. asked the IMB to conduct four area mission rallies in their largest churches. They expressed a vision for 100 missionaries to be called to missionary service. In the first rally more than 200 made commitments to go as missionaries, so the pastors reconvened and announced they had changed their vision to a thousand missionaries being called out of their churches. More rallies were scheduled in subsequent years and over 800 have responded to the call with at least 300 already appointed to overseas service.

Partnership with the CKSBC (Council of Korean Southern Baptist Churches) has led to expanded opportunities for partnership and training in churches in South Korea. A few years ago I led a mission conference with the 3,000 students at the Baptist Seminary in Pusan, many who were headed to the mission field. Later I was keynote speaker at a conference of inter-denominational and para-church mission agencies in Korea who altogether send out more than 15,000 foreign missionaries.

I have discerned a deeper than normal devotion of Koreans who respond to a call to missions. Most Americans will respond in consideration of the possibility of missionary service but continue to rationalize and explore whether or not that’s what God wants them to do. When Koreans come to the altar they are forsaking all, expecting someone to put a passport and airline ticket in their hand and send them to the ends of the earth the next day!

What is the difference in a day when the number of missionaries from the West are in decline and most American churches are reducing financial support for missions. Why does God seem to have His hand on Koreans and is allowing them to lead the way in fulfilling the Great Commission? An uninhibited, authentic worship style in which Koreans seem to capture a passion for God’s glory may have something to with it. A devotion for early morning prayer meetings, a willingness to pray and intercede for the nations all night and in days of prayer and fasting is probably a factor. And they seem to have an indiscrete zeal for witnessing and sharing Christ that makes a difference.

May God continue to bless and sustain this mission vision of Koreans around the world and may others follow the example of their passion and commitment to the Great Commission.

“The only man who has the right to say that he is justified by grace alone is the man who has left all to follow Christ.”

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German pastor and theologian condemned to death on April 8, 1945, by an SS judge.

from The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 55.

“The vine . . . is not the root merely, but all – root, stem, branches, twigs, leaves, flowers, fruit: and Jesus is not only that: He is soil and sunshine, air and showers, and ten thousand times more than we ever dreamed, wished for, or needed.”

- Hudson Taylor

from Dwelling in Him. Robesonia: Overseas Missionary Fellowship

After being profoundly impacted by the life and ministry of Hudson Taylor, the seven gladly left the wealth and comfort of England for a life of labor in the nations for the sake of the advance of the Gospel among the unreached in Asia.

The seven helped catapult the China Inland Mission (the missions agency founded by Hudson Taylor) from obscurity to “almost embarrassing prominence.” In 1885, when the Seven first arrived in China, the CIM had 163 missionaries; this had doubled by 1890 and reached some 800 by 1900 — which represented one-third of the entire Protestant missionary force.

The testimony of the seven stirs my spirit to invest much time and energy into prayer and fasting for another wave of consecration of such men in our day and another juncture in the history of global missions.

I highly recommend Pollack’s book. You can get it on Amazon here.

“Early in 1885, on a wet winter’s night in London, the Strand was crowded with carriages and hansom cabs converging on Exeter Hall.

The ‘large room’ holding three thousand was filling rapidly with men and women of all ages and ranks. Ladies in silks and jewelry, whose carriages waited to carry them back to Belgravia or Mayfair, mingled with flower-girls and working women in plain dark dresses who had found their way on foot from East End slums. Smart young city men were sitting beside drab shopmen and kindly rogues who, on a superficial glance, might have seemed more at home in a music hall.

On the platform sat forty Cambridge undergraduates. Above their heads hung a large map of China, stretching from side to side. On the table lay a small pile of Chinese New Testaments.

At the stroke of the hour the Chairman entered, followed by seven young men slightly older than the undergraduates but all, from their dress and bearing, men of education and position. After prayer, a hymn, and some introductory remarks those, whom the world had already dubbed the Cambridge Seven rose in turn to tell the crowded hall why they were leaving England the next day to serve as missionaries in inland China.

One by one they spoke – Stanley Smith, of Repton and Trinity, a former stroke of the Cambridge boat; Montagu Beauchamp of Trinity, a baronet’s son; D. E. Hoste, till lately a gunner sub-altern, son of a major-general; W. W. Cassels of Repton and St. John’s, a Church of England curate. Then came Cecil Polhill-Turner, an Old Etonian, who had resigned his commission in the Queen’s Bays (2nd Dragoon Guards) to join the others; and his brother Arthur, of Eton and Trinity Hall. And lastly C. T. Studd, the Eton, Cambridge and England cricketer, acknowledged as the most brilliant player of the day. One by one they told how in the past year or eighteen months God had called them to renounce their careers and give themselves for Christian service overseas.

The Cambridge Seven struck with force the consciousness of a generation which set much store on social position and athletic ability. A century later the story of how the Seven was formed is still relevant. Any account of God’s working on the human soul is timeless, but the Cambridge Seven provide particular evidence about growth in grace and on God’s calling to full-time service. Furthermore, the events of 1885 had a formative influence on the history of missions, and of Christian work in universities throughout the world.”

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