The third talk in this series, "Suffering
Is Not for Nothing," is on the subject of acceptance, and I want to tell you a little
story which may offend some of you. I hope it will not be too offensive, but I
have actually been accused at times of being frivolous about the fact that I've had two
husbands who have died, so I don't want to seem frivolous, but I'm sure you all realize
that the subject of these talks is a very heavy one, and here's a story which does fit
in very nicely under this particular heading. An incident happened a couple of years ago. Lars and I were in Birmingham, Alabama and
it was a breakfast, and Lars was setting up his book table, and there was a little lady
there setting place cards out at the various tables, and he and she were chatting back
and forth. There was no one else around at the time,
and suddenly she turned him and she said, "By the way," she said, "What's your name?"
and he said, "Well, he said, "I'm an Elliott, too." And she looked at him and she said, "Are you
the speaker's husband?" And he said, "Yes," and she said, "Well, that's
funny. They -- I thought they told me you had a different
name." And he said, "Well, I have, actually," he
said, "Really my name's Gren," but, he said, "You know, I'm the third husband," and her
face fell and she said, "Oh my goodness, but we only have one place card!" She was dead serious, and Lars said, "I don't
think you need to worry," he said, "the other two are dead. I don't think they're going to show up." And she said, "Oh, then it will be all right,
then." Well, now how does that fit in with the subject
of acceptance? Quite simply, I could not possibly talk this
way about Jim and add if it hadn't been for the fact that by the grace of God, I was enabled
to accept their death. And people have come to me more than once
in my life and said, "How can you possibly talk about your late husbands in that frivolous
and flippant way?" And I've even had some widows say to me, "How
do you keep from comparing your husbands? And I say, "I don't." I've made all kinds of comparisons between
my husbands and you can be sure that I would never have accepted Lars' proposal if he didn't
compare very favorably with the first two, although they are very different men. At least they had one thing in common, and
that was they liked me. But the fact is that they are men with very
different gifts, and one of the things which God brought to my mind when I was considering
Lars' proposal before I'd given him an answer was a verse in 1 Corinthians 12: "Men have
different gifts, but it's the same Lord who accomplishes his purposes through them all." Acceptance, I believe, is the key to peace
in this business of suffering. As I've said, the crux of the whole matter
is the cross of Jesus Christ, and that word crux means "cross," and it is the best thing
that ever happened in human history, as well as the worst thing. "Herein is love," the Scripture tells us,
"not that we loved us, but that -- not that we loved God. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but
that He loved us and gave Himself. Herein is love, that Christ laid down his
life for us." And when we speak of "love" as the Bible speaks
of love, we're not talking about any silly sentiment, we're not talking about a mood
or a feeling, or warm fuzzies. The love of God is not a sentiment; it is
a willed and an inexorable love which will will nothing less than the very best for us. The love of God wills our joy. I think of the love of God as being synonymous
with the will of God. Young people sometimes say to me, "This whole
business of the will of God is just so scary! I don't see how you can ever just turn over
your whole life to God because you don't know what He's going to do!" Well, that's what faith is about, isn't it? If you really believe that somebody loves
you, then you trust them. The will of God is love, and love suffers. That's how we know what the love of God for
us is, because He was willing to become a man and to take upon himself our sins, are
griefs, our sufferings. And love is in -- is always inextricably bound
with sacrifice. Any father knows this. Any mother knows this. You may have known it in theory, but when
that baby is born, if the mother has not suffered before that during those nine months, which
I didn't do, certainly there comes the time when she has to suffer. And when that baby is born and the labor is
over with, then we all -- we mothers know that that's just the beginning, isn't it? And no father or mother can possibly imagine
what changes there will be in their lives, no matter how much they may have read, and
how much they may have observed, but the presence of that new little human being in their lives
changes everything. And it's sacrifice, day in, and day out, night
in and night out. But it's not something that you sit down and
feel sorry for yourself about. It's not something you moan and groan about,
except once in a while, but it's very real, isn't it? It is my life for yours, and that, ladies
and gentlemen is the principle of the cross. That's what Jesus was demonstrating: my life
for yours. Now, as I've said, and I will probably say
it again and again, before I'm through, suffering is a mystery. It is not explained, but it is affirmed, and
all of Christianity rests on mysteries. Those of you who belong to churches that use
creeds know that you are articulating a set of statements about the faith, every one of
which deals with a mystery. Is there anyone who calls himself a Christian
that can explain the Trinity? Is there anyone who can get at the gynecology,
for example, of the virgin birth? Is there any specialist in aerodynamics they
could tell us anything about the ascension? These are ministries: creation, redemption,
incarnation, crucifixion, redemption; these great key words of the Christian faith, are
mysteries. We stand up as a body in church, the church
that I go to, for example, and we say a creed out loud together. We are not explaining anything. We are simply affirming, and that's what Christianity
is about. God is God, God is a three-Personed God, He
loves us, and we are not adrift in chaos. And to me that is the most fortifying, the
most stabilizing, the most peace-giving thing that I know anything about in the universe. Every time things have seemingly fallen apart
in my life, I have gone back to those things which do not change. Nothing in the universe can ever change those
facts. He loves me. I am not at the mercy of chance. Lars and I got to the airport last February
for a flight to someplace or other, and I think our flight was supposed to be at 11:30
in the morning, or something. We got there about 10:30 and lo and behold
the airport was closed. There were lines all the way from the ticket
counters out to the sidewalk. You couldn't even get through the revolving
doors into Logan Airport in Boston. And we were told that all flights had been
canceled, that the airlines were taking no responsibility for rebooking anything. You had to get in line and start over and
your tickets would mean nothing as far as bookings were concerned, and it was a scene
of real horror and chaos. I mean, people were crying. I felt so sorry for those families that had
little children and they were headed for Orlando to go to Disney World for their winter break,
and college students with skis. But there were fistfights. There were people so angry with the poor ticket
agents that they were actually coming to blows, and we heard that there was one planeload
of people on the runway when they told -- were told at the airport was closed. They refused to get off the plane. Now, you know, you just wonder what kind of
a view of things people like that have, but it was such a peaceful thing to me to realize
in spite of the fact that I had people at the other end of line waiting for me, that
Lars and I were not at the mercy of the weather, let alone of TWA. We are not adrift in chaos. We are held in the everlasting arms, and therefore,
and this makes a difference, we can be at peace, and we can accept. We can say, "Yes, Lord. I'll take it." The faculty by which I apprehend God and who
He is, is the faculty of faith. And my faith enables me to say, "Yes, Lord. I don't like what You're doing, I don't understand
it, You're going to have to take care of those poor people at the other end that thought
I was coming to speak on this particular day, but God, You're in charge. I know the One who is in charge of the universe. He's got the whole world, where? In his hands! And that's where I am. So that to me is the key to acceptance: the
fact that it is not for nothing. Faith, we might say, is the fulcrum of our
moral and spiritual balance. Think of a seesaw: the fulcrum is the point
where the seesaw rests. And my moral and spiritual balance depends
on that stability of faith, and my faith, of course, rests on the bedrock, which is
Jesus Christ. Now faith, like love, is not a feeling. We need to get that absolutely clear. Faith is not a feeling. Faith is a willed obedience. Action. Jesus said again and again, "Don't be afraid. Fear not. Let not your heart be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in Me. Accept. Take up the cross and follow." He said, "If you want to be my disciples,
three conditions: Give up your right to yourself. Take up your cross, and follow." And to me, giving up your right to yourself
is saying "no" to myself, and taking up the cross is saying "yes" to God. "Lord, whatever it is you want to give me,
I'll take it. Yes, yes, yes." There's an old legend, I'm told, inscribed
in a parsonage in England somewhere on the seacoast, a Saxon legend that said, "Do the
next thing." I don't know any simpler formula for peace,
for relief from stress and anxiety, than that very practical, very down to earth word of
wisdom. "Do the next thing." That has gotten me through more agonies than
anything else I could recommend. And when I found out that my husband Jim was
dead, I had gone out to the missionary aviation base in a place called Shell Mera, the edge
of the jungle, to be with the other four wives as we waited for word about our husbands. And when the word finally came that all five
of the men had been speared to death, then, of course, we had decisions to make. Were we going to go back to our jungle stations
or what we going to do? And I went back to my jungle station. I had never considered any other alternative,
because, for one thing, I had been a missionary before I ever married Jim Elliott, before
I was even engaged to Jim Elliott, so nothing had changed as far as my missionary call was
concerned, but I had to go back to a station where there was no other missionary and try
to do the work that two of us had been doing between us. So it wasn't as though I was hard up for things
to keep me occupied. I had a school of about 40 boys to sort of
oversee. I wasn't the teacher, but I was sort of in
charge of things in one way. I had a brand-new church of about 50 baptized
believers with no Scriptures in their hands, and I was supposed to be the one doing the
translating. I had a literacy class of about 12 girls that
I was teaching to read in their own language so that eventually they could learn to read
the Bible translation that I was working on at the same time. I had a 10-month-old baby to care for, I had
a thousand details of running things on a jungle station, like learning how to run a
diesel generator, and also, I was giving out medicines right and left and delivering babies
in between times, and what with one thing and another, I really didn't have time to
sit down and have a pity party and sink into a puddle of self-pity. I did the next thing, and there was always
a next thing after that. And I have found many times in my life after
the death of my second husband, just the very fact that although I was living a very civilized
house, I had dishes to wash, I had floors to clean, I had laundry to do. It was my salvation. Last couple of years ago now, I lose track,
I had the privilege and the fun of taking care of four of my grandchildren while number
five was being born, and no, I guess she had already been born, and her parents went off
for a weekend, taking the nursing baby along, and I took care of the other four. And that was the only time when I've ever
had the chance to do that. My grandchildren live in Southern California,
and I live in the Northeast, so I'm one of the lonely grandmothers, as opposed to the
exhausted ones. And after the first day, my daughter had the
thoughtfulness to call that evening, and she said, "Well, mama, how are you doing?" And I said, "Well, they're wonderful children,
and they're very, very obedient, and everything, but I don't know whether I'm going to make
it through the next four days." So, I was tired, to say the least, and I had
to ask the question that my daughter really doesn't like me to ask, "How do you do it?"
because every minute of the day, I'm thinking, "I'm flat out all day long with things that
need to be done every second, but my daughter has a nursing baby, which takes about six
more hours in the day!" And I kept thinking, "How does she do it? How does she do it?" So I had to ask the question. I knew she didn't want me to, but I said,
"Val, how do you do it?" And she laughed on the phone, and she said,
"Mama, I do just what you taught me years ago. I do the next thing." She said, "Don't think about all the things
you have to do; just do the next thing." So, I took her advice and we got through the
next four days triumphantly, not just somehow. But it is acceptance that enabled me to do
that, because I really believed that this was not an accident. God had something up his sleeve, something
in mind. Well, about six weeks after Jim died, I had
a letter from my mother-in-law. I had been writing letters home and trying
to reassure my parents and my in-laws that God was there, everything was fine, they were
not to worry about me. They were both -- my in-laws and my own parents
were just dying a thousand deaths, as you can imagine. And we parents, I'm sure, suffer sometimes
a hundred times more than our children suffer, although we think that it's worse than it
is. What we never can visualize is the way the
grace of God goes to work in the person who needs it, and so my mother-in-law wrote me
this letter saying she was very much afraid that I was repressing my feelings, that I
-- it wasn't normal the way I was reacting and just carrying on, I was just trying to
be busy and maybe I was burying myself in my work, and she said, "Eventually, you're
going to crack." Well, then all a sudden my peace disappeared,
and I began to say, "Well, is she right? Is there really no such thing as the peace
that passes understanding. Can God really fulfill His Word?" And I kept going back again and again to the
promises that God had given me, and I had the right them there in my journal, day after
day, God was giving me, promises which just enabled me to get through: "Jesus Christ,
the same yesterday, and today, and forever." Jim died yesterday, but the same Lord was
with me today, and I didn't need to worry about the next 50 years, which is a temptation
for anyone who's lost someone they love. You think, "Well, I guess I could make it
through supper tonight, but not real sure about tomorrow or next week, let alone the
next 50 years." And in the very same mail with my mother-in-law's
unsettling letter, I got this poem from Amy -- by Amy Carmichael, which came in a form
letter from her mission. "When stormy winds against us break, establish
and reinforce our will. O hear us for Thine Own Namesake. Hold us in strength, and hold us still. Still, as the faithful mountains stand, through
the long silent years of stress, so would we wait at Thy right hand in quietness and
steadfastness." Well, that sounds pretty brave and strong,
doesn't it? But listen to the last stanza: "But not of
us, this strength O Lord, and not of us, this constancy. Our strength is Thine eternal Word, Thy presence,
our security." And this vital truth was laying hold of my
mind and my heart, that God really did mean what He was saying, that He was right there,
and one of the verses that God had given me before I went to Ecuador was in Isaiah 50:7,
"The Lord God will help me. Therefore, shall I not be confounded. Therefore, have I set my face like a flint,
and I know that I shall not be ashamed." And I was tempted, as all of us are, to say,
"Well, Lord you promised to help me but you do have kind of a funny way of going about
it. It's not my idea of the way God is supposed
to help one of his servants who is trying to be obedient and trying to be faithful,
and what does God say to an argument like that? The same thing He's always saying: "Trust
Me. Trust Me. Some day, even you will see that there's sense
in this. Your suffering is not for nothing." Now, my husband Jim was a fairly good carpenter
and he built a very nice house in the jungle, a very civilized house with a cement floor
and wooden walls and aluminum roof. He even built a wonderful water system by
collecting the roof from the aluminum -- collecting the water from the aluminum roof and then
piping it into the house so that we actually had a flush toilet and a shower and a sink. And he set about filling the house with very
serviceable and not terribly beautiful furniture. But while Jim was building a piece of furniture,
if there was one thing he could not stand, it was for me to hang over his shoulder. And I would say, "Well, what's this thing?"
you know, and "What you doing with that tool?" and, "Why do you do it this way?" and, "How
in the world are you going to fit that thing into this?" And he would say, "Would you get lost! When it's finished, you'll see." A very simple analogy. God is saying, "Trust Me. Accept it now." How many choices have you got? To go back to those alternatives, you either
believe God knows what He's doing, or you believe He doesn't. You either believe He's worth trusting, or
you say He's not, and then where are you? You're at the mercy of chaos, not cosmos. "Chaos" is the Greek word for "disorder;"
"cosmos" is the word for "order." We either live in an ordered universe, or
we are trying, like the poor lady who sat next to me on the plane yesterday, to create
her own reality. Can you imagine a more desperate situation
to be in than to be creating one's own reality? Acceptance is a voluntary and willed act. God was giving me something to do. The next thing was, "Yes, Lord." Accept it. And that is the key to peace. Now, does it make sense to an ordinary human
being to say, "Accept this suffering"? Isn't it contrary to human nature? And I want to make something very clear here,
because I realize every word I say can be distorted and twisted and misunderstood. I want to try my best to make very plain what
I mean here when I say "accept." I'm not talking about things which can be
changed, and or, ought to be changed. There are some things which can be changed
that ought not to be changed. For example, a dear young man that I know
decided to unload his wife and two children when the second child was one week old, and
he went ahead and did that against all advice to the contrary. And a couple of years later, I said to him,
"Why?" And he said, "It wasn't working." Now, I hear this on all sides. We all hear it, don't we? We know that this is happening on all sides. There was a situation which he thought ought
to be changed, and he was told by so-called Christian counselors, "That's the thing to
do. You just have to get rid of her because this
is a case of incompatibility." So when I say that there are things which
can be changed, but ought not to be, that might be one example. There many things which cannot be changed,
and there are things which ought not to be changed. So I'm not -- I want us to be clear that I'm
not saying, "Accept everything. Just resign yourself," and the worst things
that happen, you don't do anything about it. That is not my purpose in this talk. The apostle Paul, remember, prayed for the
removal of that thorn in his flesh, and what was the answer? He prayed three times that God would remove
that thorn. And the answer was, "My grace is all you need. My grace is sufficient for you." And it's very interesting, it's very significant,
I think, that Paul says, "I was given a thorn in the flesh to keep me from becoming absurdly
conceited." And then he says it was a messenger of Satan. Now that seems like a contradiction because
obviously it had to be God who cares whether he becomes absurdly conceited. Satan would be delighted if we become absurdly
conceited. But he said, "In order to keep me from becoming
absurdly conceited," over a particular spiritual experience which he has just described in
that chapter, 2 Corinthians 12, he said, "In order to keep me from that, I was given a
thorn in the flesh." So it was a messenger of Satan, he says. So, if you get all hung up thinking, "Now,
is this thing from God, or is it from Satan?" "Is this the voice of God, or the voice of
Satan?" Stop worrying about it; you don't really need
to sort that out, because here's a case where the thorn was, in a sense, given by God as
a messenger of Satan. And there's another, at least one other example,
in Scripture that I can think of, of the same apparent contradiction, where Joseph says
to his brothers that they -- that it was they who sent him into Egypt, but he says, "God
sent me to Egypt." We know that Joseph's brothers were sinning
against him, and yet it was God who sent him there. So when the answer was "no" about the thorn
in the flesh, and the answer of Jesus' prayer in Gethsemane, "If it be possible, let this
cup pass," we know that there's nothing wrong with praying that God will solve our problems,
and heal our diseases, and pay our debts, and sort out our marital difficulties. It's right and proper that we should bring
such requests to God. We're not praying against His will, but when
the answer is "no," then we know that God has something better at stake, far greater
things are at stake. There is another level, another kingdom, an
invisible kingdom which you and I cannot see now, but toward which we move, and to which
we belong. And a verse which to me sums up just the things
that I've been trying to say under this heading of acceptance is another seeming contradiction
which I found in the 116th Psalm. The psalmist says, "What shall I render unto
the Lord for all his benefits?" And I was reading this one day when I was so overwhelmed with gratitude
for all the blessings of my life, that I was just sitting in a chair, looking out over
the ocean -- we live on the coast of Massachusetts, and I was looking at this magnificent view
in a very comfortable room, and just saying, "Lord I -- I don't how to thank You. How can
I say thanks? And I opened my Bible to this verse where the psalmist says, "What shall
I render?" and then I saw that the next verse is, "I will take the cup of salvation." "What
shall I give you Lord?" And the answer is, "I will take the cup of salvation." Now, what is in God's cup of salvation? Obviously,
the psalmist in the Old Testament times was not thinking of salvation in the somewhat
narrow terms that we -- we sometimes do. But whatever is in the cup that God is offering
to me, whether it be pain, and sorrow, and suffering, and grief, along with the many
more joys, I'm willing to take it because I trust because Him. Because I know that what
God wants for me is the very best. I will receive this thing in His name. And I hope
you'll forgive me if I give you two more lines of poetry from that poet George Herbert, or
perhaps it's John Donne -- I've forgotten. "I need Thy thunder, O my God. Thy music will
not serve me." I need pain sometimes because God has something bigger in mind; it is not
for nothing, and so I say, "Lord, in Jesus' name, by your grace, I accept it."
