“The love of Christ constrains us….”

An illustration from a Tim Keller sermon

"My favorite example of that is the great story in 1865 when Korea was closed to foreigners. Foreigners were not allowed to go there except on pain of death. A single American ship tried to sail up the Taedong River into Pyongyang. Almost everybody on that ship was an American, and they were desperately hoping when they got to Pyongyang they would trade with them anyway. It was terribly dangerous. They were risking their lives, but if they got Korean goods and brought them back to the West, everybody on that ship would be a zillionaire forever. They’d be set up for life.

They all risked their lives hoping to get rich, except one guy. One guy was risking his life for something else. His name was R.J. Thomas. He was a Welsh missionary. Things didn’t go well, because the Koreans lined up both sides of the river, and they wouldn’t let the ship land. The ship ran aground on the rapids in the middle of the river, and the ship caught fire. They realized they had to get to land, so everybody on the ship except one got their guns, got their knives, and they came in and tried to fight their way through.

They came in shooting and killing, but they were all clubbed. They were all killed. One guy came without a gun, without a knife. His arms were filled with books. It was R.J. Thomas, and as he came to the bank wading with his arms full of books, as they clubbed him, as they killed him, he kept putting these books into their hands. They were Bibles.…

Why was he doing that? As Saint Paul says, “For the love of Christ constrains us … [Therefore] they who live [henceforth] should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him who died for them …”