"Progress..................."

I’m about half-way through a biography of Jim Elliot’s life. He was the 28 year-old missionary killed, along with four other men, in Ecuador back in 1956 by the very people they were trying to win for Christ. It’s a hard read for me, his faith, as represented here by his wife, the author, a bit too “holier-than-thou” in his younger days, a condition perhaps due to a very strict up-bringing by his parents, members of something called the Plymouth Brethren. He would outgrow some of that during college while, at the same time, evolving into a feeling of having failed, himself, to achieve a certain level of “righteousness”. Hopefully that, too, changed at least somewhat before his death. On the other hand, while I want to believe that A.W. Tozer held no misconception that it’s possible for any of us to obtain such actual state of perfection, in this book of his that we’re reading for class, he talks of “levels of spirituality” one can know if we are willing to just be “possessed” by the Holy Ghost. He puts that in terms of the Spirit not permitting us any sins of “self”-ishness and makes it sound as if Christians can gradually climb to a place where humanity is completely lost along the way. If that be true, I’ve not yet met such a person in my journey of four decades. The Apostle Paul said that he had to “die daily”; and that seems to suggest there is no complete transformation, not in this life, anyway, the journey a matter of learning to put it all, stumbles, bad decisions, sin, our mess, into His hands and, with Him, take the next step.....