Romans 10

This morning I found myself looking through the movies available to watch on Netflix instant watch and was not really expecting to find anything great to watch. They do a pretty good job of putting new titles up, but for the most part, I don’t typically find all that much. Well, this morning I noticed they had just put up a movie called Beyond the Gates of Splendor. This film is a documentary that catalogs the ministry of five missionaries (Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Roger Youderian, Ed McCully, and Pete Fleming) who were killed by the Waodani Indians in the jungle of Ecuador in 1956. I wont go into much more detail on this post so if you have never heard the story of these five missionaries I would encourage you to watch this movie or the movie The End of the Spear.

As I watched and heard the stories that each of the wives told of their husbands I kept thinking back to some Scripture I have been continually reading lately.

Romans 10:13-15

For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can anyone preach unless they are sent? As it is written: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!

This passage has been playing over-and-over in my head lately. One thing that stuck out to me as I listened to the interviews in the movie with the families of each of the martyred missionaries was that there was no anger toward the people that killed their loved ones in cold blood. Instead, there was love...a love rooted in Jesus Christ. You see the Waodani indians, at that time, were probably the most violent culture that lived on this earth. They had two laws they lived their lives by; autonomy and vengeance. If someone made you feel that you could not live your life the way you wanted, they would kill that person, no questions asked. Even knowing this, five families believed that the Waodani still deserved to hear the Gospel and about the love of Jesus Christ. What many would view as a defeat proved to be quite the opposite. The families of each missionary continued to minister to the Waodani tribe and eventually saw most of them come to accept Christ. A people who once knew absolutely nothing of love in any sense came to know the truest form of love through those who were willing to pay the ultimate price for the Gospel. I’m sure if you were to ask them they would not view their martyrdom as anything but what they were expected to do. I’m sure if you were to ask them, they would say that Christ dying on the cross set the bar as to what we should give up in order that others may know the message of the Gospel.

God has been asking me to think about what it truly means to sacrifice for Him lately. If we truly want to pursue the heart of God we must make Him our only desire. In that, we must be willing to give up everything...including our lives for His sake. Being willing doesn’t always mean that we will be asked to do so, but that’s not the point. The point is that we are all called to live a life that desires to be His. In one of his journals, Jim Elliot wrote this before he was killed:

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

Paul says it this way in Philippians:

“For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.”

4.5 billion people in the world have no idea what it is to have a Savior that loves them enough to die for them. They don’t know because no one has told them! As Paul said in Romans, how could they know if no one is willing to go tell them? Yes, you could lose everything...but take comfort in knowing that what stands to be gained is so much greater than that which can be taken away!