Jim Elliot - The Degree of A.U.G. Part I

When Jim was a college student in 1949 he wrote these words, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” Seven years later, deep in Ecuador, the quiet waters of the Curaray flowed over the bodies of Jim and his four comrades, slained by the men they had come to win for Christ. The book ‘Shadow of the Almighty’ relates the martyrdom of these missionaries at the hands of the Auca Indians. Jim’s diary exposes the roots of what makes a person at the threshold of life commit his very being to a God who he felt might call him to unexpected death at any time. Reproduced below are extracts from a chapter in the book entitled: Degree of A.U.G.

We should remember that while knowledge may make a man look big, it is only love that can make him grow to his full stature. For whatever a man may know, he still has a lot to learn, but if he loves God, he is opening his whole life to the spirit of God.

Many a freshman entering college has no clear idea of what he is there for. Vaguely, it is ‘to get an education’, but many have done it without going to college, and many have gone to college without getting educated. The idea of an education presents itself to the freshman in a bewilderingly vast variety of forms - the orientation programs, with its lectures, and examinations, and faculty receptions: the confusion of registration day, with its lines of frantic students trying to sign up for the course they have chosen before the loud-speaker crackles to announce that Section B of History 115 has closed: catalogues, with its listings of professors who are only names to him so fat, and courses electives and requisites; the booths representing organizations; athlete fees, somehow included in that broad term ‘education’, and the student whose value scale places social acceptance and reputation high may be sucked into a world of ECA from which he finds it difficult to extricate himself.

When Jim Elliot entered Wheaton College in Illonois in the fall of 1945, his goal was clear. First of all, he had committed himself entirely to God and recognized the disciplines this commitment would involve. “No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life, that he may please Him who had chosen him to be a soldier (2Tim 2:4)”. This automatically eliminated many problems, and many ‘good’ things, in order to give place to those which furthered his purpose. Other students, however, lacking a defined primary aim, often pursued too many of the secondary ones presented to them.

It was this singleness of purpose which his fellow students noticed especially. If some thought he had a ‘one track mind’ becos’ he talked so freely about Christ, there were others who, for the same reason, regarded him as especially ‘spiritual’ and wanted him to be ‘prayer chairman’ of the freshman class. Neither opinion moved him. A frequent prayer of his was “O God, my heart is fixed”.

Jim was sure that God had led him to Wheaton. He had not come simply becos’ father had sent him. Nobody was ‘putting him through’. In fact, he did not know where the money would come from. God honored this faith, however, and funds were supplied, through a friend, thru’a scholarship, and through a part-time employment, so that in November he was able to write:

“This schooling experience is one wherein I can perpetually celebrate that all has been supplied by His ever-tender loving kindness. To Him be all the glory and thanks”.

The only record we have of his freshman and sophomore years is in his letters to his family, which, aside from very brief notes on what he was doing, were heavily sprinkled with thoughts of eternity, and occasionally a bit of advice to a brother or a sister, of which the following is a sample, written to his sister Jane early that fall:

“Begin each day with private reading of the Word and prayer (Ps 5:3). Bunyan has well said, ‘Sin will keep you from this Book, or this Book will keep you from sin’. From the very start, as you begin high school, gives out gospel tracts to those you meet. Make a bold start - its easier that way, rather than trying to begin halfway through. Memorize scriptures on the street car. Buy up the time! It’s costly becos’ it’s so fleeting. These are terse remarks, and trite, but I wish someone had said them to me about Labor Day 1941. ‘Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who has no need to be ashamed’ (2Tim 2:15).”