Ten Who Changed the World

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword by David Platt

Foreword by Bruce Ashford

Chapter 1 The Great Commission & William Carey: A Passionate Global Vision

Chapter 2 Marked for Death, Messengers of Life: Adoniram and Ann Judson

Chapter 3 Jesus Is Everything to Me: Glorious Truth in the Life and Death of Bill Wallace

Chapter 4 The Power of a Consecrated Life: The Ministry of Lottie Moon

Chapter 5 Let All the Nations Give God Glory: A Passion in the Life and Martyrdom of Jim Elliot

Chapter 6 The Cross and Faithful Ministry As Seen in the Pastoral and Missionary Ministry of George Leile: First Baptist Missionary to the Nations

Chapter 7 The Pattern of Paul’s Missionary Life Revealed in the Ministry of David Brainerd for the Furtherance of the Gospel among the Nations

Chapter 8 God’s Chariot of Fire: The Life of Missionary Eric Liddell and the Race He Ran

Chapter 9 The Missionary Psalm: Beautifully Obeyed in the Life and Martyrdom of John and Betty Stam

Chapter 10 The Vision of the Exalted Lamb Realized in the Life of Missionary James Fraser among the Lisu People of China

Notes

Copyright © 2012 by Daniel Akin

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

978-1-4336-7735-9

Published by B&H Publishing Group

Nashville, Tennessee

Dewey Decimal Classification: 266.092

Subject Heading: MISSIONARIES \ MISSIONS \ MISSIONS IN THE BIBLE

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture is taken from the New King James Version (nkjv), copyright © 1979, 1980, 1982, Thomas Nelson Publishers.

Scripture references marked esv are taken from the English Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. ESV® Text Edition: 2007.

Scripture references marked hcsb are taken from the Holman Christian Standard Bible, Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2009 by Holman Bible Publishers. Used by permission. Holman Christian Standard Bible®, Holman CSB®, and HCSB® are federally registered trademarks of Holman Bible Publishers.

Scripture references marked The Message are taken from the New Testament in Contemporary English, © 1993 by Eugene H. Peterson, published by NavPress, Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Scripture references marked nasb are taken from the New American Standard, © the Lockman Foundation, 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977; used by permission.

Scripture references marked niv are taken from the New International Version, copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society.

Scripture references marked nlt are taken from the New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

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Dedication

This book is dedicated to Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary International Church Planting students, who change the world every day.

Acknowledgments

Ten Who Changed the World grew out of a series of chapel messages that I preached at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina. I was initially inspired to pursue such a series by the wonderful biographical studies done by John Piper at his Desiring God Pastors Conference. Expounding a biblical text, I used the lives, writings and experiences of great missionaries to serve as illustrations throughout the messages. The response and feedback was far more than I ever imagined, and I am grateful for God’s undeserved blessing.

I am especially indebted in this project to Tanner Turley, Michael Guyer, Kim Humphrey, and Debbie Shugart for their service in research and typing of the manuscripts. They are all the best!

In addition, I have received great encouragement from missionaries and missionary professors like Jerry Rankin, Tom Elliff, Gordon Fort, Chuck Lawless, Zane Pratt, Bruce Ashford, George Robinson, Scott Hildreth, Greg Mathias, Joseph Solc, and Al James. I am also thankful for Richard and Gina Headrick who took Charlotte and me to six countries in fourteen days. My burden for the nations was never the same after that.

I am also thankful for my four sons and their wives, each of whom has a great love and passion for the nations. They all

are consumed with a desire to make King Jesus famous among the nations. I am so very proud of each and every one.

Also, a big thank-you goes to B&H and in particular my dear friends Thom Rainer, Brad Waggoner, and Jedidiah Coppenger. Your support and encouragement in all of this was always there. You guys are a tremendous gift to the body of Christ.

Finally, I want to say thank you to my wife Charlotte who is the love of my life. Not only has she loved, cared for, and supported me for more than three decades, she has also gone with me again and again to the ends of the earth on mission assignments. I am a better servant of King Jesus because of the special lady God put in my life.

Foreword

by David Platt

Apart from the Bible, the most profitable books I have read in my spiritual journey are personal biographies, particularly the stories of saints who have gone before us.

I remember how my perspective on the Christian life fundamentally changed when I first read about the life of Jim Elliot. He and his four missionary comrades were murdered on an Ecuadorian beachhead by the men they sought to reach with the gospel. The words from Elliot’s journal still resound in my head: Consider the call from the Throne above, ‘Go ye,’ and from round about, ‘Come over and help us,’ and even the call from the damned souls below, ‘Send Lazarus to my brothers, that they come not to this place.’ Impelled, then, by these voices, I dare not stay home while Quichuas perish.

I remember my introduction to Adoniram Judson, who spent thirty-eight years of his life in Buddhist Burma. He suffered through cholera, malaria, dysentery, and unknown other miseries that would claim the lives of his first wife, second wife, and seven of his thirteen children, as well as numerous

colleagues. Yet he persevered, and today Burma has hundreds of thousands of believers spread across that country.

I remember getting my first glimpse of William Carey’s heart in his Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen. Carey passionately maintained that it was the solemn obligation of the church to take the gospel to those who have never heard. He later preached his well-known deathless sermon consisting of two main points: expect great things from God and attempt great things for God. Soon thereafter, the Baptist Missionary Society was formed, and in the words of one historian, The world has never been quite the same since.

This is truly the testimony of these saints and countless others like them: the world is different because of them. More appropriately, the world is different because of God’s work in them. Throughout history God has used ordinary people to accomplish his extraordinary purposes. He has bestowed great grace on certain individuals for the sake of his glory among entire peoples.

The stories of these saints are not intended simply to inform us about how God has worked in the past. They are given by God to inspire us concerning how he is working in the present. For the same Holy Spirit that filled Jim Elliot, Adoniram Judson, William Carey, David Brainerd, George Leile, Lottie Moon, James Fraser, Eric Liddell, John and Betty Stam, and William Wallace is the same Holy Spirit who dwells in every follower of Christ. And He desires to use your life and mine in multiplied ways to make His majestic glory known to the ends of the earth.

For this reason we are indebted to my dear friend, Danny Akin. In this book he has brought the lives of ten such saints to our attention. He has uniquely told their stories through the lens of scriptural truth that saturated each of their lives.

The result is a book that is historical and biblical, concise and challenging, personal and penetrating. My prayer is that the truth of God will come alive in your heart through the stories of these saints, to the end that you will be compelled to spend your life, without condition and regardless of cost, making the glory of our great God known throughout the world.

—David Platt

Author of Radical: Taking Back

Your Faith from the American Dream

Foreword

by Bruce Ashford

Missions matters because God is a missionary God. Therefore, his people must be a missionary people. From Genesis to Revelation, we see God’s central promise that he would send Messiah, and that Messiah will win the nations unto himself. Through Messiah God’s glory will cover the earth. Through Messiah the lost will be saved.

And yet almost two billion people have little or no access to Messiah. Many corners of the globe have no churches, no Bibles, and no Christians to bear testimony. Many of these two billion people could leave their homes and search—for days and weeks and months—and never find a Christian, a Bible, or a church. It is our responsibility to remedy this. Our Lord commands us in Matthew 28:18–20 to make disciples of all nations.

The magnitude of this task is great, but it is matched and exceeded by the magnitude of our biblical convictions: that God is a missionary God; that all people without Christ are

lost; that a central theme in the Scriptures is God’s desire to win the nations unto himself; that since the coming of his Son, God has chosen that all saving faith be consciously focused on Christ; that the church’s task in each generation is to proclaim the gospel to her generation; and that this progress of the gospel to the ends of the earth may be hindered temporarily, but there can be no doubt about its final triumph.

In Revelation 5 our Lord gives John a breathtaking vision. In this vision all of heaven bursts forth into praise. Among those worshipping, John sees men and women from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation. This is the vision that drives us—that our Lord will be worshipped from all corners of the globe. He alone is worthy of such worship. Our lives should be lived in such a way as to contribute to this triumphant march of God, as he draws unto himself worshippers from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation.

This is the driving passion behind this series of missions messages preached by Danny Akin and collected in this book. In each message he couples a passage of Scripture with a missionary biography. As he preaches through Matthew 28:16–20; Romans 8:28–39; Philippians 1:21; Romans 12:1; Psalm 96; Revelation 5:8–10; 2 Timothy 1:8–12; Galatians 6:11–18; Psalm 67; and Hebrews 12:1–3, he expounds and illustrates those same passages with riveting lessons and stories from the lives of William Carey, Adoniram Judson, William Wallace, Lottie Moon, Jim Elliot, James Fraser, David Brainerd, George Leile, John and Betty Stam, and Eric Liddell.

Be forewarned, however. This book is for those who like their coffee strong. Those who read these messages will find themselves informed, rebuked, challenged, and motivated. They may even find themselves able to say, as Jim Elliot does

in the pages of this book, that he is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.

—Bruce Riley Ashford

Dean of the College at Southeastern

Associate Professor of Theology and Culture

Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary

Wake Forest, North Carolina

CHAPTER 1

The Great Commission and William Carey: A Passionate Global Vision

Matthew 28:16–20

William Carey may have been the greatest missionary since the time of the apostles. He rightly deserves the honor of being known as the father of the modern missions movement. Carey was born in 1761, and he left England in 1793 as a missionary to India. He would never return home again, instead dying in 1834 among the people he had given his life to save.

William Carey was poor, with only a grammar school education, and yet he would translate the Bible into dozens of languages and dialects. He established schools and mission stations all over India. Timothy George (dean of Beeson Divinity School) described Carey as a lone, little man. His resume would have read: Education—minimal. Degrees— none. Savings–depleted. Political influence—nil. References—a band of country preachers half a world away. What were Carey’s resources? Weapon—love. Desire—to bring the light of God into the darkness. Strategy—to proclaim by life, lips, and letters the unsearchable riches of Christ.¹

William Carey understood Matthew 28:16–20. It was his farewell text to his church at Harvey Lane before departing to India. Though he had been rebuked earlier by the respected minister John Ryland Sr., Carey was undeterred. Ryland had told him, with his now infamous words, Young man, sit down. When God pleases to convert the heathen, He will do without your aid or mine.² Despite this he would powerfully proclaim, Expect great things. Attempt great things. (Later tradition would add from God and for God, though this is undoubtedly what he meant.)³

He would publish his famous An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens.⁴ Here he would pen searing words for the church of his day as well as our own. Commenting on the Great Commission text, found in Matthew 28:16–20, Carey wrote:

This commission was as extensive as possible, and laid them under obligation to disperse themselves into every country to the habitable globe, and preach to all the inhabitants, without exception, or limitation. They accordingly went forth in obedience to the command, and the power of God evidently wrought with them. Many attempts of the same kind have been made since their day, and which have been attended with various success; but the work has not been taken up, or prosecuted of late years (except by a few individuals) with that zeal and perseverance with which the primitive Christians went about it. It seems as if many thought the commission was sufficiently put in execution by what the apostles and others have done; that we have enough to do to attend to the salvation of our own countrymen; and that, if God intends the salvation of the heathen, he will some way or other bring them to the gospel, or the gospel to them. It is thus that multitudes sit at ease, and give themselves no concern about the far greater part of their fellow sinners, who to this day, are lost in ignorance and idolatry.⁵

Carey would later add, I question whether all are justified in staying here, while so many are perishing without means of grace in other lands.⁶

The words found in Matthew 28 constitute the last words of Jesus in this Gospel. They are intended to be lasting words and the final marching orders for Christ’s followers until he returns. I once heard Adrian Rogers in a sermon say that in this passage we find the heartbeat of the Son of God. Here we are told that we are all to bring all men by all means to Jesus by any cost.

Acknowledge He Has All Power (Matt. 28:16–18)

The eleven disciples minus Judas go north to Galilee to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go (v. 16 niv). The scene is reminiscent of the setting of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:1). It is interesting to note that the climatic temptation (Matt 4:8–11), the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7), the transfiguration (Matt. 17:1), the Olivet Discourse prophecy (Matt. 24–25), and now the Great Commission of the Great King all took place on a mountain.

Suddenly they see the resurrected, risen