A Young Man Falls in Love

ligonier ministries the teaching fellowship of rc sproul presents passion and purity with elizabeth elliott this message is entitled a young man falls in love my name is laura scranton and it is my pleasure to invite you to be here with elizabeth elliott as she gives this talk on passion and purity you may wonder why gren and elliott and i said my wife you may know that she was married to jim elliot who was killed in 1956 what you may not know she also had a second husband addison leach he was a college professor and he died after a short four-year marriage we've now been married 12 years and i still feel good and hope that i hang around for a long time and of course with the mix-up in or the little two-name situation i want to assure you that we go by grand in private life and of course on the road there's a penalty that i pay sometimes but it's well worth it people will come up and say oh i'm so glad to meet you mr elliot so i just tell them i'm mr elliott iii and go from there so it is my pleasure to give to you my wife elizabeth elliott [Applause] even though i have had the privilege of having three husbands i want you to know that most of my life i've been single you can figure out the mathematics if you want to i was married for 27 months to number one and for four years and eight months to number two and it will be 12 years in december of 1989 that i will have been married to lars but you can see that i'm an old lady so obviously i've been single most of my life and i'm so glad for the opportunity to talk today about a very popular subject about which i hold some very unpopular views and i'm not ashamed of those because i got them out of a very ancient book i was accused one time when i had spoken on canadian television of holding victorian views and i said well dear lady when the reporter called me to challenge me on this i said my views are much older than that i didn't get them from queen victoria i got them from the bible and i expect to be challenged if you think that i say things which cannot be supported by the scriptures it is my purpose always to give you what god says about things and of course i will occasionally be giving you some opinions especially in talk number three that you may want to discard and i can't tell you that they're the law of sinai but i'm grateful for the opportunity to speak out on some things which i think have been the area of a great deal of confusion it was c s lewis who said that the only place outside of heaven where you can be perfectly free from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell now think of that the only place outside of heaven where you can be perfectly free from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell obviously in heaven there are no dangers or perturbations of any kind in hell there isn't any love so here we are today in between heaven and hell and we are physical bodies filled with roiling emotions we are very of the earth earthy and that is exactly what i want to talk to you about today i have thick files of letters that have come to me in response to this book passion and purity i couldn't tell you how many stories sad stories that i have from people who've said if only i had read that book 10 years ago if only somebody had told me these things back when my when i was young as your parents told you when you were young i thank god for christian parents who were faithful in teaching me about sexual purity i have letters by the dozens from young women who have been taken for ride led down the garden path as it were by young men very often talking very spiritually and one way or another they either just fade off into the woodwork or they manage to steal the girl's virginity and of course in a sense it's not really stolen because she has given it away and they're just heartbreaks i get hundreds of letters so the story i want to tell you in this first talk which i've entitled a young man falls in love i'm going to begin at an odd point it was back in 1960 that i was sitting in a little thatched roofed house in the eastern jungle of ecuador i had a small tape recorder and sitting on the floor my mud floor next to my hammock was a man who was wearing nothing but a piece of string i don't mean a g-string i mean a piece of string this man's name was geekita and he was a member of a tribe of indians called alkas auca i was living there in that tribe with these people also in the same kind of house that he had no walls no floors and no furniture and i had been struggling to learn an unwritten language which hardly well nobody i think literally nobody outside of that tribe had ever learned before finally after a year of hard work and many mistakes i had learned enough of it so that i could ask questions and there were questions that were burning in my mind i asked dikita to tell his story of what had happened four years before in 1956 and so he began with great enthusiasm speaking into this little tape recorder telling me about how one day a little yellow airplane flew over their house and dropped gifts and he said we grabbed the gifts there were things like spoons and aluminum pots and knives and beads and i've forgotten what all and he said the next week the plane came again and the next week it came again and again and again and he said we sat there and we talked about who these people were that were dropping us these nice things it seemed like a bird a big bird from heaven maybe and these might be gifts from the gods but when the plane swooped very low over their houses they could see that these people had a very strange color of skin and very strange colored hair skin that was insipid and pale and hair that looked like palm fiber they said but the day came when we realized that these men were not coming to see us in the plane anymore they had made a camp on the edge of our territory and so he said we had great arguments about whether or not these men were really friendly or whether perhaps they were treacherous so we discussed should we kill them or shouldn't we now there was nothing new to gikita and his other friends in killing people they had done quite a bit of that and they had had almost all the men in their tribe killed in that that particular group of the tribe killed there were only seven men left in this particular area 53 women and children and seven men should we kill them or should we not are they coming to eat them or are they not so he said we finally sent four women out of the jungle into that camp to see what these men would do to them and he said we thought we knew what they would do to them but all they did was laugh and talk a language we couldn't understand and they gave them food and they gave them some more gifts but he said i was sitting there in the jungle with my spears in my hand and i said to my friends i am going to use my spear i brought my spear i'm going to use it so he said i jumped out and i sank that spear into the back of one of those men and he went on in very very vivid detail about what had happened that afternoon well of course you may have guessed by now that one of those five missionaries that was in that camp was my husband jim elliott and all five of the men were speared to death and when gekita finished his story he turned to the picture that i had of jim elliott over on the on a stack of wooden boxes that i used for a bookcase and he said so that's your husband there and i said yes he said what was his name and i said jim and he said he tried to say it and he said well he's laughing at us if we had known him the way we know you he would be sitting here laughing with us today but he said we didn't know we thought he was going to eat us now the word went around the world that stone age people had killed american missionaries people were stunned by this event and of course reporters came to ask us why they went in there these five men were they blankety-blank fools were they adventurers was it a stunt and we tried to explain and one of the verses from the bible that i used by way of an attempt to explain to these reporters what made no sense to them was first john 2 17 the world and all its passionate desires will one day disappear but the man who is following the will of god is part of the permanent and cannot die following the will of god so that's what it was all about they said i said yes obedience to jesus christ who told us to go into all the world and preach the gospel well of course the christian church called them martyrs and there aren't very many martyrs that we know about from our country in other countries there have been thousands of christian martyrs in the 20th century but we rarely hear hear of them in our country so it was a startling piece of news and i want to take you back to the making of that kind of a disciple i don't really like the word martyr it originally was the greek word that meant a witness that word i like but the idea that certain people are singled out as being holier than the rest of the world i think is mistaken but it takes something for a man to consider obedience to jesus christ literally a matter of life and death so i'm going to take you back to 1947. i was a college student and there was a college student on this campus that i was very interested in as were practically all the other girls on the campus he was very visible and very popular and much of a leader but there was one peculiarity about him that we all recognized which was that he never dated his name was jim elliott and when he went to college he decided that he was going to get two degrees the ba bachelor of arts which wheaton college was certainly qualified to confer the other degree which to him was much more important than the bachelor of arts was aug approved unto god he took that from paul's letter to the young man timothy and jim had decided that if he was going to be approved unto god he was going to have to eliminate some things from his college schedule things like dating and he had not been a woman hater at all in college in high school in fact he had gone what we used to call steady with a girl in high school and he discovered that girls could be a tremendous fascination and an awful waste of time and money and so they decided that they would that he he decided that he would simply delete girls from his college schedule and the other thing which i did not learn from jim i learned it from my brother dave who happened to be a housemate of his was an hour of sleep in the morning that last precious hour before breakfast time that most college students consider very important somehow they don't seem to consider the time before midnight as being very important but anytime after that is different well jim elliott got up about five o'clock in the morning not to study as some students did but to read his bible and to pray because the thing that mattered to him more than anything else in the world was to be approved unto god and to learn to know jesus christ and that takes a ranging time for prayer and for bible study well that impressed me very deeply when my brother told me about this i was also impressed by the fact that jim was a campus clown you know one of those people that could be called upon in a moment's notice to stand up and do comedy for everybody's entertainment he was a popular spiritual leader as well he was the president of the foreign missions fellowship he was a champion wrestler he had won the championship of four states in his weight class and was called the india rubber man because his opponents could pin him could tie him into the most unbelievable knots but nobody ever once succeeded in pinning him so in addition to being a campus clown and a spiritual leader and an athlete he was also a scholar and he graduated with highest honor in classical greek well i had my eye on this young man he was very handsome in addition to that i mean he had a wrestler's build and nowadays i guess you'd call him a hunk in those days we call them dream boats and he was also what we called a bto a big time operator or a bmoc a big man on campus well i was nothing but a two a teeny weeny operator and there wasn't the slightest chance that jim elliott was ever going to look at me i had been a wallflower all the way through high school and college very few dates had i ever had and i knew that a man of his stature and his talents and his popularity would never look twice at me well i remember the day when our yearbooks came out i stood in line i guess with probably 50 other girls waiting for jim's autograph and i was hoping in my heart of hearts that he would put something besides just jim elliott well i was thrilled he grabbed my book he wrote his flourishing signature jim elliott over his picture and then he did put something else but he shut the book handed it back to me you can imagine how fast i grabbed it and tried to find the page and i saw that he'd written a scripture verse well i didn't recognize it second timothy 2 4 so you can imagine how long it took me girls to get back to the dormitory and grab my bible and i looked up ii timothy 2 4 and what did i find but this a soldier on active service will not become entangled in civilian affairs he must be holy at his commanding officer's disposal well in a sense my heart sank to my toes because i thought here's a personal message for me he's letting me know that neither i nor anybody else nor anything is going to deflect him from following the path of the will of god but i liked that it was the other side of what that did to me which which showed me that jim elliott in addition to being all those other outstanding things that i had told you had made the decision which was more important to me than anything else in the world which was that jesus christ was lord of his life and as i talk to young people high school kids college kids i find that very few of them have made any final choices you can ask them what they want on their big mac and usually they know you could tell them i'm going to give you 50 000 you can go out and buy any car you want and i dare say most of them would have some idea what kind of a car they would want but if i say what do you want more than anything else in the world then i draw a blank so here was proof positive that jim elliott had made up his mind whose he was we hear a lot about that question who am i but a much more important question is whose am i and so from a distance mind you i had never had a date with jim elliot i had hardly ever had a conversation with him except over greek or something i knew that here was the man with the kind of character that i was hoping god might give me someday for a husband well a few months later just before i graduated to my utter astonishment jim elliott asked me to go for a walk we had just been at a foreign missions fellowship picnic and i was one of the last cleaning up and so was he and he said can i walk you back to the dorm and i said sure so this beautiful sunny may morning we started to walk down the sidewalk and we hadn't been walking more than a block or two when he said well i think we better get squared away how we feel about each other and i said well first place i was floored because number one i was a little a little angry to think that he was taking it for granted that i had some feelings for him because i thought i had done a bang-up job of concealing my feelings and i had not by so much as the flicker of an eyelash let him know that i was interested in him nor had i talked to other people about it but of course my heart leaped to think that he actually had some feelings for me but i said to him what do you mean and he said what do you mean what do i mean you know what i mean i'm in love with you well no i i said i i didn't know that he said you didn't know that he said well you must be deaf dumb and blind he said i've been trying to show you in all kinds of ways and as i look back i could see little things where my heart had jumped and i thought well maybe he did look at me twice maybe he did climb over three people to get to the seat next to me in greek class but then i said don't be a fool don't tell yourself that this guy would ever look at you twice so anyway we turned around instead of going back to the dormitory we went back to the park and we sat down on the grass and we talked for seven hours and we learned that in fact god has been had been taking each one of us through exactly the same course of coming to the place of willingness to say lord if singleness is what you want for me for the rest of my life i'll take it and to our amazement we discovered that god had used the same scripture passages he had used the same hymns we were both great on memorizing hymns jim had memorized 19 verses of the hymns the hymn the sands of time are sinking one of my favorites and we had also memorized the same amy carmichael poetry things like and shall i pray thee change thy will my father until it be according unto mine and so we compared notes and of course it would have been very easy for us to conclude that even though both of us had come to the point of saying lord i'm willing to be a single missionary you can imagine i did not like the idea of being an old maid missionary but i didn't see that i had any prospects of being anything else and jim also had come to the place through much agony of soul of saying lord if you want me to be single i'll stay single for the rest of my life it would have been easy for us to conclude that now god had brought us together and the obvious thing would be for us to get engaged and get married but number one i was graduating jim was not he had one more year to go number two i was going to africa i thought and jim was going to south america and number three and this is much more important than the other two we both knew that sexual passion is a tornado and that we ourselves could not control it now i had been praying since i was 16 years old that god would never allow me to fall in love with anybody that i was not going to be to marry and for both of us and i believe for every young person and if it was true 40 50 years ago it's much more true now i believe that for every young person the area of sexuality is a crucial battleground and if jesus christ is not lord of your love life jesus christ is not lord of your life now if jesus christ is your savior if you claim to be a christian then you are automatically bound by what the scripture says and by what jesus taught his disciples and so there we were sitting there in the park talking about this strange course through which god had been bringing us and i remember jim sitting there on the grass and looking at me and he said i'm not asking you to marry me i'm not even asking you to wait for me he said you go ahead and go to africa i'm going to go ahead and go to south america he said we're going to turn this whole thing over to god and if god wants to bring us together god knows how to do that if it takes miracles or whatever he knows how to do that but we are not taking this thing into our hands and then he looked me straight in the eye and he said it's not going to be easy he said you know you've got the body of a woman and i've got the body of a man and quite honestly i'm hungry now we were sitting at least this far apart facing each other on the grass he never touched me well we had about two weeks i think left before i graduated and we took some more walks and we had some more talks and one night on one of those walks we sort of wandered without thinking into a cemetery and we sat ourselves down on a convenience slab and we talked some more and i said you know jim if you're serious about turning this thing back completely to god and not taking it into our own hands do you think it makes sense for us to correspond because he had suggested that we could at least write letters well it was a long silence he didn't jump at the idea but then he said i think you're right bet because this morning in my bible reading i came across the story of abraham and isaac and god asked abraham to give to him the most precious thing in his life and abraham went up the mountain laid the wood on the altar tied his son isaac down on that altar and raised a knife and he said i asked myself what's the most precious thing in my life and of course the answer was you so he said i put you on the altar and in the will of god that is where you're going to stay unless in some way somehow sometime god gives you to me but until such time if god ever gives me the green light i'm going to be a single man maybe for the rest of my life he was going into jungle work pioneer work the sort which other missionaries had told him required single men and so jim had committed himself to be single until such time as god might indicate to him that marriage would not be a hindrance to his work and we sat there in silence and suddenly we realized that the moon had risen behind us and was casting the shadow of a stone cross on the slab between us and now you know how far apart we were sitting that time and i wrote a poem at that time a little later hold thou thy cross between us blessed lord let us love thee to us thy power of forward to remain prostrate at thy pierced feet there is no other place where we may meet set thou our faces as a flint of stone to do thy will our goal be this alone oh god our hearts are fixed let us not turn consume all our affections let thy love burn well it was a battleground and we fought it on our knees not in the back seat of a car not in positions where we would have known that temptation would have overcome us but i go back to the determination that that young man had made when he was a high school student mind you he was no spiritual giant at this point but at in high school he had made up a he had made a final choice in high school he had said jesus you are my commanding officer and a soldier on active service will not become entangled in civilian affairs he must be holy at his commanding officer's disposal and that's exactly where jim elliott wanted to be now i hope that i've given you enough details that would indicate to you that he was a man he was a real man he was a man of tremendous passion but he also wanted to be a man of purity and i want to say to you today that if your goal is championship in sports or financial success in the business world or stardom as an entertainer nobody is going to think you're weird if you discipline yourself if you make sacrifices maybe sacrifices as great as your family your marriage everything that we ought to be holding dear don't we see that happening people sacrificing virtually everything for money for sports for stardom nobody will think of you as strange but if a man sets as the goal of his heart purity if he wills one thing that is the will of god he has to be prepared to be thought very weird indeed and jim elliott memorized also a poem of amy carmichael's which he quoted to me more than once lord crucified oh mark thy holy cross on motive preference all fond desires on that which self in any form inspires set thou that sign of loss and when the touch of death is here and there laid on a thing most precious in our eyes let us not wonder let us recognize the answer to this prayer i speak to you today will you make a final choice to let jesus christ be lord of your life some of you have undoubtedly also blo already blown it i would be very naive if i thought i was speaking only to virgins in my next talk i'm going to talk a little bit more about what to do in that case but for those of you who have not yet given away your virginity may i ask you in god's name to face the truth of his of his word our bodies are not meant for ourselves to present that body to him as a living sacrifice and to bring all your desires for the opposite sex that natural good holy desire as long as it's brought under the lordship of jesus christ remember that sex was god god's idea it wasn't ours and c.s lewis says you wouldn't have thought of it bring all of that under the lordship of jesus christ present it to him and say lord here i am all of me all of my desires for you forever i testify to you today you'll never be sorry may god give you the strength to make that final choice you

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Length: 30min 56sec (1856 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 12 2020