Story
George Müller ran orphanages in Bristol without fundraising appeals. He asked God, and he told the story afterward. One morning…
Prayer · Faith · Generosity
Muller · Matthew 6 · Philippians 4
Quote
No fool
Jim Elliot, journal, 28 October 1949
Jim Elliot wrote in his journal on 28 October 1949: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.” Six years later he and four friends were killed on a sandbar in Ecuador while trying to make contact with the Waorani. The line is often printed on posters. It was first a private calculation about a life. Elliot was not romanticizing death. He was doing the math of the kingdom: the things we clutch are already slipping. The things Christ keeps are not.
How you’d preach it
Use with texts on losing one’s life to find it. Do not turn Elliot into a recruitment poster. Let the sentence do its work on ordinary clutching — reputation, money, control — before you speak of martyrdom.
- Obedience
- Calling
- Generosity
Elliot · Matthew 16
Matthew 16:24–26