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

Most Americans have never heard of Jim Elliot, the young man who died as a missionary in the jungles of Ecuador on January 8, 1956. Many Evangelical Christians have, and as something of a hero for his sacrifice to take the faith to the Indians in the jungles of Ecuador. What he, and his four companions did, giving their lives to take Christ where he had not been preached, appears completely insane to the modern secularist. Since this life is all their is, and since we can’t really know that it isn’t, we need to do everything we can to avert all risk, and squeeze every last second out of it we can. As Christians, this secularist mentality ought to be anathema to us, but too often it isn’t. The all pervasive influence of the secular culture all too easily turns us into secularists, but it doesn’t have to.

This famous quote taken from one of Elliot’s journals is the only proper approach to life, and death, for the Christian. We cannot keep this life. We cannot lose eternal life in Christ. So we are not fools for giving up this one. I can’t relate to a Jim Elliot as he was a man given to an absolutist view of things. Like most people I’m pretty tied to this world, this life, and loathe to give it up. So as I was ruminating on such thoughts, our pastor on Sunday, Dustyn Eudaly, preached the perfect sermon for this blog post. I love it when that happens! He preached on I Corinthians 7:29-31 (highlights to make his point):

²⁹ What I mean, brothers and sisters, is that the time is short. From now on those who have wives should live as if they do not; ³⁰ those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not; those who buy something, as if it were not theirs to keep; ³¹ those who use the things of the world, as if not engrossed in them. For this world in its present form is passing away.

Dustyn used a phrase that captures how we are to think about our lives: “a pilgrim theology.” Various definitions of pilgrim capture our mortal sojourn on this earth as followers of Christ: a person who journeys, especially a long distance, to some sacred place as an act of religious devotion. Another might be even better: a traveler or wanderer, especially in a foreign place. The Apostle Peter  explains well our relationship to this fallen world: We are foreigners,  properly, someone living close to others as a temporary dweller, i.e., in a specific locale as a non-citizen with limited rights (identification). We are also aliens (a variation on the same Greek word for foreigners), which means this world is not our home. Oh, but how we treat it as if it is!

It isn’t easy to not have the this-world mentality effect us. It is subtle, yet obvious. The exhortations of Paul above tell us how we know we are being sucked into it (Christians in the first century succumbed to it, so we can’t blame it all on the secular culture; it’s just more difficult today). I learned a phrase from Tim Killer, I think going back to C.S. Lewis, that idolatry is treating good things as if they were ultimate things. What Paul is saying, as hard as it may be to live it out, is that marriage, or sorrow, happiness, or possessions, or anything in this world are not to be our source of fulfillment, hope, or ultimate satisfaction.When we fall into the this-world trap, that is exactly what these things become to us, and they will never deliver! Ever.

I learned of a Latin phrase recently that we would do well to keep in front of us as we struggle to live the “as if they were not” Christian life: Memento Mori. It means, “remember that you must die.” I found the link for the phrase at a website called The Daily Stoic. Stoicism is not the answer. Such a mentality is hope-less. Our hope is the resurrection of the dead to life eternal in paradise with the author of life himself! He rose from the dead so we can live a life with things as if they were not. Only in such a life is true freedom to be found.