Question from a reader:

As a young believer, what books most impacted you and taught you what it means to follow Jesus?

Answer from Randy Alcorn:

When I came to Christ as a high schooler in 1969, I read Foxe's Book of Martyrs, Richard Wurmbrand's Tortured for Christ, and Brother Andrew's God's Smuggler. I was deeply touched by these stories. I also read The Hiding Place and the story of Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, and the other three missionary martyrs in Ecuador. To me, they were the essence of what it meant to follow Jesus wholeheartedly, like the 19th-century missionaries, who went to Africa packing their goods into the coffin they knew they would be buried in. 

May God raise up people like this, in every generation, to His glory.