The screech of colorful parrots, the call of the howler monkeys, and the crow of the cock awakened the village of Corozalito each day deep in the jungles of Colombia. A cluster of thatch-roofed huts, Corozalito was the home of 94 people when I first visited there. Ninety-two of these were Christians, having come to Christ through the faithful witness of an uneducated farmer named Victor Landero.
Victor came from a profligate background. In addition to farming, he had operated a brothel and, without being married to any of them, cohabited with three women at the same time. But when the Lord took hold of Victor’s life, he gave him an amazing gift of personal evangelism. In addition to leading his family—nine brothers and sisters and his parents—to the Lord, he evangelized his entire village.
Then from Corozalito he began to reach out to surrounding villages, establishing churches wherever he went. In my missionary ministry, I traveled by horseback, dugout canoe, and on foot to remote areas of the jungles. Again and again I found little churches that had sprung up in the hinterlands. When I asked where they had heard the gospel, the answer was invariably the same: “Victor Landero came last year and told us about Christ.” “Victor was here six months ago and explained the gospel to us.” “Victor brought a Bible to us.”
Over a period of about 15 years, Victor was used of God to lead hundreds, possibly thousands, of people to Christ. Dozens of churches sprang up in northern Colombia. Then came the time when Victor realized that practically every person in this vast area had had an opportunity to hear the gospel. He heard there was an Indian tribe, deep in the jungles of the Choco region near the Panamanian border, that had never heard the message. So he decided to move there to evangelize these Indians.
Victor had to hack out a small farm for survival, and, at the same time, he had to learn the Indians’ language. Never having had any formal schooling, Victor had to pick up the language just by living and interacting with the Indians. This he did faithfully. But the results of his witness were nothing like what he had experienced in the first 15 years of his Christian life.
In December 1990, I returned to Colombia to participate in a large conference organized by Victor’s brother Gregorio. I had not seen Victor for nearly 15 years while he had been working among the Indians. To my great delight, he was at the conference, and we rekindled the warmth of our fellowship.
As he told me of his ministry among these Indians, I asked him cautiously if he now had a church among them. Quietly and sadly, he replied, “No. These Indians are so nomadic and so volatile that I have not been able to start a church among them.” Fifteen years in the same village, yet no church? After seeing dozens of churches spring up during his first 15 years? Yes, that was the situation.
Nevertheless, Victor added with confidence, “I will spend the rest of my life with them, because that is where my heart is.” Victor is now about 70 years old, but even though he sees almost no results, he carries on faithfully.
At the conference, Victor reminded me that years before I had told him about my older brother, Phil, a missionary among the Slave Indians of Canada’s Northwest Territories. Phil worked for 16 years in one small village before he saw the first tiny rays of light as the gospel finally began to penetrate the hearts of a resistant people. Victor said, “I remember what you told me about Phil, and this is an encouragement to me to carry on here.”
How does one explain Victor’s and Phil’s lack of success—especially when overwhelming success had been the dominant pattern of Victor’s early Christian life? While in some cases sin can come in to block the work of the Spirit, I know Victor and Phil well enough to dismiss that possibility. How does one keep going in the face of failure, with no clear reason for it and with no little successes to keep hope alive? The same faithfulness Victor showed in his early Christian life characterized his later years. What keeps men like Victor and Phil going over the long, dark years of discouragement? And what can keep us going?
Victor showed me, first, that we must have a settled sense of God’s calling and, second, that we must be obedient to that calling. Both Victor and Phil understood God’s call to them and held on to it in faith. (Knowing what God wants us to do—and then doing it—are, after all, two different things, as Jesus taught in his parable of the man with two sons [Matt. 21:28–32]).
Third, Victor’s faithfulness reminded me that obedience must be lived out daily, with the conviction that faithfulness for each day is what God ultimately requires. Jesus’ parable of the servants watching for their master’s return underscores the need for daily—for constant—obedience (Luke 12:35–48).
Fourth, Victor showed me hope. Hope, as the author of Hebrews writes, is inextricably tied to faith: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for” (11:1–2). But as the list of the commended “ancients” unfolds in Hebrews 11, it becomes plain that faith is not simply believing some truth, but a faithfulness—a “hanging in there”—in difficult circumstances.
And the faith that holds to hope is not abstract and airy; it is firmly planted in the experience of God’s people. The history of God’s people is the story both of those who saw results, like Gideon and David (11:32), and of those who saw little, like Abel and Abraham (11:4, 8) as well as the others of 11:35–38.
In a curious way, the apparent failures of the faithful can give us all hope. Those who “died in faith, not having received what was promised” inspired the author of Hebrews and his readers, although they also expected to die without seeing the promise fulfilled. My brother Phil’s faithfulness without fruit inspired Victor—although neither missionary was seeing results.
Whether success (as understood in human terms) is seen or not, the faithfulness, obedience, and hope of the Lord’s servant is what God requires. “Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful” (1 Cor. 4:2).
I am sure that the unlearned Victor never read the prayers of Scottish apologist John Baillie, but if he had he would surely find a kindred spirit there, as Baillie prays:
“Seeing that it is Thy gracious will to make use even of such weak human instruments in the fulfillment of Thy mighty purpose for the world, let my life today be the channel through which some little portion of Thy divine love and pity may reach the lives that are nearest to my own.”
David M. Howard is international director of World Evangelical Fellowship.
