Who Are Some of Your Favorite Missionaries?
Who are some of your favorite missionaries and what do you find inspiring about their lives?
Two of my favorite missionaries are Robert Jermaine Thomas and Henry Martin. Robert Jermaine Thomas was a missionary from Wales who went to China to take the gospel there and then heard about how very cut off from the gospel the people in Korea were. He was a a brave quite impulsive man and he got on board the USS Sherman which was an armed boat and went up towards Pyongyang, up the river. This was treated as a very hostile act by the Koreans and they sent fire ships down river to to intercept the USS Sherman. He'd been distributing some Bibles up the river as he'd been going, but in 1866 he landed. The ship was fired and he got off the boat. Other people were screaming for mercy. Robert Jermaine Thomas was holding out yet more Bibles. Now, with Thomas what happened was he was executed immediately on the banks of the river, and he never saw any of the fruit of his endeavors. But the one who executed him then took one of the Bibles that he held, ripped it up and used the paper to line his house, and then read the Bible. And it was reading that that converted him. There you see the seed of the church in Korea in the blood of one of the martyrs. As Tertullian said, "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." You see a man giving his life so that Koreans might have life, and the word of God itself proved its power.
The second missionary who I find so inspiring is Henry Martin. Not just for the impressive deeds he did. He was a linguistic genius who was so committed to Christ he wanted those in Iran, particularly in Persia, to know Christ. But it's his motivation that is so stirring. Henry Martin once heard of how there had been so many Christians killed in Persia that, he was told, in heaven Jesus had bowed down before Muhammed and begged for mercy for the Christians. When Henry Martin heard this he said, "I was cut to the soul at this blasphemy. I could not endure existence if Jesus is not glorified." And that is the heartbeat of a missionary––to long to see, not their name, nor their organization's name, but Jesus’s name glorified, lifted up, and his light shine into the darkness.