Father, I ask now that you would come and help me be faithful to what Luke is trying to communicate by your inspiration,

and that you would come upon this people with a spirit of humility and hearing and obedience and sight, and that you would do

your saving and strengthening and empowering and guiding and healing and reconciling work among us.

In Jesus' name, amen.

Did you know that the five martyrs that were speared to death on January 8, 1956,

Jim Elliott, Nate St. Ed McCulley, Peter Fleming,

Roger Udarian had guns.

At least one of them, as the natives were spearing him, shot it in the air and not at them.

That was not an accident, that was not an impulse, it was a plan, a principle.

First they said, Christ conquered suffering, conquered by suffering.

Christ conquered the world by suffering and death,

and he called us to deny ourselves and shoulder our crosses,

not shoot our guns.

And second, they said,

the natives are not ready for heaven and we are.

I wonder if that's the way you think.

I wonder if any of us would presume to say, God, if they had saved their lives, five young, strong, valiant, Christian, devoted,

missionaries had saved their lives by taking out just a couple of natives,

they would have had five decades of glorious, fruitful ministry far better than that.

Would anybody dare say that?

I wouldn't.

So I'm going to try to show from Luke 22, 35 to 53, that the mission of the church, your mission, our mission, is to call people from all the ethnic groups of the world to repentance and faith, and we do it through prayerful suffering, not self-defense.

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