Ask people who shaped them most, and the answers rarely involve money or status. They name a grandmother, a great-grandmother, an old friend, a pastor, a youth leader. They name someone who is no longer present—sometimes long gone—yet still speaks into their life because of the way that person lived out the Christian faith. What we inherit from those who went before us is something more valuable than gold: words of encouragement, examples of perseverance, and models of faithfulness that continue to instruct us after their authors have left the scene.
This is the great theme of Hebrews 11, the chapter that lists one figure after another who lived and died by faith and who, through that faith, keeps contributing to every generation that follows—including ours. The key verse is the fourth: “By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous, God commending him by accepting his gifts. And through his faith, though he died, he still speaks.”
Consider how remarkable that is. Abel was one of only four human beings on the planet. He offered a sacrifice in faith, and that single act of worship has reverberated through thousands of years. There are now eight billion people on the earth, and we still remember him—not for what he accumulated, but for what his heart offered to God. It is the words and actions generated by faith that have a long tail. They travel down through the centuries and keep exerting influence, so that what we say and do out of faith can shape others long after we are gone. That is an encouraging reality. None of us knows what our own legacy will be, but Abel’s example suggests that the measure is not fame or fortune; it is faithfulness.
There is also a quiet lesson here about how God remembers history differently than we do. When most people hear the names Cain and Abel, they think first of the murder—the first recorded killing in human history, a brother maliciously slain, the crime covered up. But that is not what God chose to commend. God remembered Abel for the faith behind his offering, for the posture of worship in which he gave. The violence done to him is not what Scripture lifts up; his faith is. It is worth asking ourselves, then, what we treat as important versus what God treats as important—and whether the things we are building in faith might outlast the things that merely happen to us.
The encouraging truth is that people who say and do things as the outworking of their faith continue to speak to us. Church history is full of such voices, and three in particular illustrate how faithfulness echoes across generations and even across cultures.
A Missionary Among the Mountains
One of these voices belongs to James O. Fraser, a British missionary who went out from England to China in the early twentieth century. Few people today—even few Christians—would recognize his name, yet his story is one of the most remarkable in the history of missions. Fraser was, in many ways, an ordinary man. He suffered greatly. His ministry met with disappointment, and he wrestled with severe personal depression, at times sitting on the edge of one of those steep mountain precipices, considering whether to throw himself into the river gorge below. And yet he walked through that darkness in faith, and in time the Lord broke through with a bountiful harvest among the Lisu people, a minority group living high in the mountains along the border with Burma.
For a missionary serving in China and battling clinical depression of his own, Fraser became something like a mentor across time—proof that depression need not disqualify a person from ministry, and that God can bring an abundant harvest through a conflicted, everyday man. Depression is a deep and profound mystery, a dark place to walk through even with the comfort of the Holy Spirit. To find someone who had endured the same valley and emerged into fruitfulness was a gift.
Fraser’s labor still stands today. He reduced the Lisu language to a written alphabet, taught the people to read it, and translated the Bible so they could hold Scripture in their own tongue. The fruit is visible. In Lisu villages, families live simply in plain cement-block houses, cooking over open fires by sliding sticks in and out of the coals. But in the center of town stands the church—a beautiful building painted in bright colors, crowned with a red cross, freshly kept while everything around it is drab and poor. It is where the community invests its energy and locates its value. One could almost sign that picture with Fraser’s name, for it is what his faith left behind. Today some ninety-six or ninety-seven percent of the Lisu people are Christians because of the work he did. He might well belong in an extended Hebrews 11—or what some call “Acts 29,” since the church’s story is still unfolding. Fraser shaped more than doctrine; his example inspired others to recruit teams of intercessors to pray daily for missionaries on the field, in the conviction that the real harvest is wrought by the Lord through the prayers of His people.
From Hatchet Man to Herald
Another voice that still speaks is Chuck Colson. He began as a ruthless political operator, Richard Nixon’s so-called “hatchet man,” and during the Watergate scandal he was arrested and sent to prison. But not long after, he wrote Born Again, an account of his conversion to Jesus Christ, followed by Loving God, a powerful book on living out the Christian life—the first describing his transformation, the second his sanctification. Then in 1987 came Kingdoms in Conflict, which made the case that personal faith carries a public point of impact: that believers are called to cultural transformation, to courage paired with compassion, to challenging the moral trends of their times.
Colson’s own hero was William Wilberforce, the statesman who fought to abolish the British slave trade. Colson held up Wilberforce as the model for defending innocent human beings whose rights are being stolen from them. In Wilberforce’s day the cause was the slave trade; in ours, Colson argued, it is the life of the unborn child. There is little doubt that if Wilberforce lived today he would take up abortion as the preeminent moral crisis of the age. Wilberforce’s own words still speak across two centuries: “Never, never will we desist till we extinguish every trace of this bloody traffic, of which our posterity, looking back to the history of these enlightened times, will scarce believe that it has been suffered to exist so long, a disgrace and a dishonor to this country.” Two great sins have marred this nation and kept it from its better self—slavery in the past and abortion today—and both strip a group of human beings of their God-given rights. Those who labored against the first still summon us to labor against the second.
Voices That Outlast Empires
Faith that still speaks is not confined to the church; sometimes it reshapes whole cultures. In India, no one looms larger than William Carey, the missionary who arrived in the early 1800s. Carey translated the Bible completely into two major Indian languages and rendered the Psalms or a Gospel into some two dozen other dialects. He founded colleges that still operate in West Bengal today. He also confronted social evils head-on, lending his voice to the law remembered as Carey’s Edict, which outlawed sati—the burning of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres—and he fought the practice of infanticide, common in his day, in which babies were thrown into the Ganges. Because of him, those barbaric customs became illegal. Nearly everyone in India still knows who Carey was and what he gave to their country. He continues to speak there, to Christians and non-Christians alike.
In China, a similar legacy belongs to Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit missionary who entered the country in the late sixteenth century. Earlier efforts had been erased by time, but Ricci’s endured. He was not only a theologian but a scientist and mathematician who introduced the mechanical clock to the imperial court in Beijing, winning the favor that allowed the gospel to take root. Remarkably, even after the Cultural Revolution’s campaign to erase foreign influence, his memorial still stands in a Beijing cemetery among the graves of other missionaries who laid down their lives. He remains one of the few foreign names China still honors.
Abel, Fraser, Colson, Wilberforce, Carey, Ricci—each lived by faith, and through that faith, though they died, they still speak. Their lives press a question upon us: when our own time is past, what will continue to speak? The answer, Hebrews insists, will not be what we gathered for ourselves, but what we offered to God and what we did, in faith, for the sake of those who came after.
This article is adapted from the episode transcript.