Eric Liddell (1902-1945) was a Scottish gold-medalist Olympian and Christian missionary to China. His sporting career was immortalized by the Oscar-winning 1981 film, Chariots of Fire, which highlighted his principled stand to not participate in the 100-meter dash and two relay races at the 1924 Paris Olympics. The 100, thought Liddell’s best chance at an individual medal, would require running on Sunday. Instead, he ran and won the 400-meter dash, a new event for him, setting a world record. But his biggest tests and achievements likely came years later, in an internment camp in China. John Keddie indelibly documents Liddell’s extraordinary, albeit relatively brief, life in his 2007 book, Running the Race.
Liddell had a unique running style. Knees churning, arms flailing, head tilted seemingly to heaven, he appeared to be marshaling every fiber of his being toward the finish line. And doing it with obvious joy. He loved to run. He believed God had made him fast for His purposes. The movie recounts the apparently true confrontation with his missionary sister, Jenny. She is questioning Eric’s commitment to the family business of Christian missions. She sees his running as, at best, a distraction. He replied by saying that God gave him his running ability, and that to run was good and God-honoring: “When I run, I feel His pleasure.”
All evidence indicates that Eric Liddell saw his running life, indeed his entire life, as an opportunity to glorify God. To Liddell, Christianity, properly understood, revolutionized one’s life. He approached Christianity with the same focus and commitment that he needed to become a world-class athlete. Compromise was out of the question. He owed all he had to God, and he would live with constant awareness of that fact.
He spoke at evangelistic events fairly frequently in the late 1920s. His talks highlighted the gospel and the belief that the best life included Jesus Christ as Lord. Anything less was missing something vital. For example, his talks in May, 1925 for the Edinburgh Evangelistic Union meetings included the following:
We are placing before you … the thing we have found to be best. We are setting before you one who is worthy of all our devotion–Christ. He is the Saviour for the young as well as the old, and He is the one who can bring out what is best in us…
I looked for one I could admire, and I found Christ. I am a debtor, and no wonder I am a debtor, for He has given me a message which can only be experienced. If this audience was out-and-out for Christ, the whole of Edinburgh would be changed. If the whole of this audience was out for Christ, it would go far past Edinburgh and through all Scotland.
In 1925, Eric Liddell gave up fame, probable fortune, and comfort to become a missionary in north China, a region of increasing instability and peril.
After working with Chinese students at Anglo-Chinese College, by the mid-1930s Eric was occupied with field work in the north China plain. The district he covered was the size of Wales. Tensions in the region were building due to the Chinese civil war and the escalating Sino-Japanese conflict. Eric visited churches, prepared plans, and held regular conferences with Chinese preachers. His preaching focused on obedience in a ‘God-controlled life.’ His audiences, whether European doctors and nurses or the common people of China, by all accounts heard him gladly.
In June, 1941, Eric and his wife Florence decided that it was prudent for Florence and their two girls to travel to safety in Canada. Florence was pregnant with their third daughter, a child Eric would never see.
Things worsened for Eric after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, ratcheted up the danger for British nationals in Japanese-occupied China. The Tientsin College where Eric lived and worked at the time was closed by the Japanese in January, 1942. Still, Liddell stayed and did what he could.
Why did he stay? Perhaps we can get a clue from a devotional he authored for the Union Church in Tientsin in the early 1940s, entitled Prayers for Daily Use. In a section titled The Key to Knowing God, Liddell writes:
One word stands out above all others as the key to knowing God, to having His peace and assurance in your heart; it is OBEDIENCE… OBEDIENCE to God’s Will is the secret of spiritual knowledge and insight. It is not willingness to know, but willingness to DO (obey) God’s Will that brings certainty… Take OBEDIENCE with you into your prayer hour, for you will know as much of God, and only as much of God, as you are willing to put into practice.
Once Eric Liddell had come to a conviction about God’s will, he would do his utmost to obey. That included staying in China after sending his family to safety, at the increasing risk of being imprisoned by the Japanese then in control of Tientsin.
In March 1943 Eric and all other British, American, and other non-Chinese in Tientsin were forced into an internment camp at Weihsien, also in Japanese-controlled China. The camp conditions were stark. Eric shared a 9 ft x 12 ft room with three other men. The camp held 1800 internees in such tight quarters.
There were plenty of children, mostly from missionary families, in the camp with not enough to do. So Eric took initiative to organize sporting and other activities for the youth. For example, he ran a weekly youth club, where he spoke on Christian topics. His typical day: teaching mathematics all morning and organizing sports through the afternoon. Survivors would later testify that Eric Liddell had remained the same content, selfless, godly man in the camp as he had always been.
Liddell died in the camp from an untreated brain tumor in February 1945. His last words were, “Annie, it is surrender.”
At a memorial service in the camp a few days later, Rev. Arnold Bryson paid this tribute to Eric Liddell: “What was the secret of his consecrated life and far-reaching influence? Absolute surrender to God’s will as revealed in Jesus Christ. His was a God-controlled life and he followed his Master and Lord with a devotion that never flagged and with an intensity of purpose that made men see both the reality and power of true religion. With St. Paul, Eric could say, ‘I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”