C. S. Lewis was born in November of 1898....Martyn Lloyd-Jones in December of the following year....Eric Liddell in January of 1902....Dietrich Bonhoeffer on February 4 of 1906....and Richard Wurmbrand in March of 1909.....a time span of a little over a decade.
Lewis was the scholar....the Oxford Don.....and the prolific author....and he died on the same day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Liddell was the athlete.....the gold medal winner at the 1924 Olympics....his story made famous in the film Chariots Of Fire....his faithful testimony had an influence in my own salvation. He could have lived as a famed pastor in his homeland of Scotland....and competed in the 1928 Olympics....but choose to serve as a missionary in the country of his birth....China. He died a few months before the camp he was in was liberated. His death in that concentration camp was forty-seven days before the execution of this man....
Dietrich Bonhoeffer.....who gave us his valuable correspondence and writings....whose life was also depicted on film....(Bonhoeffer, Agent Of Grace)....along with numerous biographical books written about him.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones was a medical doctor....very accomplished....even acclaimed.....who noticed that as a doctor he would medically help to heal people....only to see them continue to live apart from Christ.....so he changed vocations....and gave us a long ministry in London to be thankful for....along with his sermons....in his actual voice....of which I have listened to dozens. He died in 1981.
Richard Wurmbrand was the last of the five to be born....in March of 1909....he was never martyred.....but the communists did everything short of martyrdom to him. The primary book that he left to us was....Tortured For Christ....if you are as old as I am....and that's old.....you had probably read it in the 1980s. Jewish born....in Romania....Richard Wurmbrand's ministry Voice Of The Martyrs...is still with us today....reminding us that we have brothers and sisters in Christ being persecuted...and tortured....and martyred....today.
Sometimes I wonder if C. S. Lewis ever met the famous athlete Eric Liddell. Surely he followed the story of Liddell's refusal to run on the Lord's Day. Nether man was a theologian.....both held doctrinal views that were very problematic. Was Bonhoeffer present at any of the events of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. If he was....he would have been warning the visitors from other nations about what was happening in Germany. His theology was also problematic at times. Richard Wurmbrand lived into the new millenium....dying in America in February of 2001. He witnessed the fall of Communism....but also witnessed the beginnings of the fall of the West. Even Martyn Lloyd-Jones was not without criticism. These men were born into the disasters predicted by Charles Spurgeon and J. C. Ryle. Bonhoeffer....like Liddell....could easily have....and was strongly encouraged during his visits to America to save himself and stay in America....but took the last vessel back to Germany before the war began....writing of it...."I have come to the conclusion that I made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period in our national history with the people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share in the trial of this time with my people."
