It was Jesus Himself who said, “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds” (John 12:24).
Consider the many seeds produced by the five martyrs in Ecuador in 1956, Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Peter Fleming, and Roger Youderian, who engaged in a very dangerous outreach mission to an unreached tribe known for its violence.
Steve Saint, the son of the pilot Nate Saint, learned the details of their martyrdom many years after the fact. Steve had frequently worked among the people who killed his father, since all of them had become believers through the widows and relatives of the martyred men. (Yes, the widows of the martyred men led their husbands’ murderers to Jesus.) He knew that his father and the other missionaries had guns, but they had made a covenant never to use those guns in self-defense against a human attack.
What then actually happened on that fateful day in 1956?
It turns out that the killers of the missionaries—most of whom were teenagers and not experienced killers—were involved in a dispute with their own tribe, and they tried to shift the blame to the missionaries, taking out their anger on them. But the missionaries did not defend themselves or try to flee, a striking fact that the natives noticed, paving the way for their conversion later. After killing their victims, the Indians saw and heard strange sights and sounds: They saw people who looked just like the martyred foreigners (called cowodi in the Indian dialect) standing above the trees, singing songs that they later identified with choir music (which, of course, they had never heard before). Others saw the sky filled with lights, moving around and shining. It seems the angels—or heavenly witnesses—were singing! What a sacred moment to God.
Five young men were killed in the line of duty, leaving widows and children behind. They were cut down—actually speared to death—by the most violent of the Huaorani Indians (called Auca, meaning “savage,” in their language). Was it worth it? Steve Saint—left as a boy without a father—looked back forty years later and gave the answer.
“God took five common young men of uncommon commitment and used them for his own glory. They never had the privilege they so enthusiastically pursued to tell the Huaroani of the God they loved and served. But for every Huaorani who today follows God’s trail in part because of their efforts, there a thousand cowodi [foreigners] who follow God’s trail more resolutely because of their example. The success withheld from them in life God multiplied and continues to multiply as a memorial to their obedience and his faithfulness.”
This is part of the Jesus-way to win the world, the principle of multiplication by martyrdom. It is the forgotten secret of church growth, the unstoppable weapon of our spiritual revolution. It is the spark that can ignite a whole generation. And while we do not have a death wish – to the contrary, we love life – we are committed to following Jesus regardless of cost or consequence. And He is worth it all!
As Nate Saint said,
“People who do not know the Lord ask why in the world we waste our lives as missionaries. They forget they too are expending their lives and when the bubble has burst they will have nothing of eternal significance to show for the years they have wasted.”
What wise words!
And in the light of eternity, how wise it was for Jim Elliot to write these now-famous words: “That man is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”
And how wise it was for him to lift up this petition before the Lord as a young man in college: “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.”
Oh, that all of us would lead truly full lives!
Excerpted and adapted from Michael L. Brown, Revolution: An Urgent Call for a Holy Uprising (second edition, 2020).
