Martin Luther King's Connection to an Evangelist and Mahatma Gahandi

This book is a remembrance of the life and work of Mahatma Gandhi, written by the Christian evangelist E. Stanley Jones, was the author's first hand reflection on the nonviolent yet confrontational campaigns of Gandhi and the connections between Gandhi's strategies and the teachings of Jesus.  The book, published in 1948, was a failure in terms of sales, and considered by Jones himself as his least successful book.  A few years later a graduate of Crozier Divinity School in Rochester, New York, who had moved on to attend grad school at Boston University, came upon this book in the university library. That student was Martin Luther King.  He was deeply moved by the book and he wrote in the margin of the book "This is It!  This is the way to achieve freedom for the negro in North America." You can still see King's marginal notation in the Martin Luther King Library in Atlanta. Prior to leaving Boston University for Sweden to receive the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, the university held a convocation in his honor.  There he met Jones's daughter and said to her "E. Stanley Jones was a very important person for me, for it was his book on Mahatma Gandhi that triggered my used of Gandhi's method of nonviolence as a weapon for our own people's freedom in the United States."  Although King had studied Gandhi's method of nonviolence for years, it was not until he read Jones's treatment of Gandhi's did he see the connection to the civil rights movement in the United States.  What appeared to be one of E. Stanley Jones's greatest failures turned out to be something greatly used by God to bring about change for good in the world.  Jones's faithfulness to follow a suggestion by the Methodist Publishing House to write a book on his remembrances of Mahatma Gandhi over time brought about good on God's earth.

Similarly, our acts of faith in the hands of God, will bear fruit, probably not immediately and possibly not in our lifetime, but God is not constrained by place and time.  So respond to God's word to you, both his written word and the Holy Spirit, and know that he will in His time bring forth fruit. 

(This blog post was entirely summarized from the forward of Victorious Living a daily devotional written by E. Stanley Jones and most recently published by Abingdon Press in 2015.)