Discipline, Commitment and Obedience

what a godly pastor's wife what a unique sweet servant in christ she is and she sure bears a resemblance of her mother and i had a chance a few months later to get to speak in the conference that elizabeth spoke in and you all know how gentle i usually am bob wood gave me the mercy award last year and i thought i had just drawn the line in blood before that was that and then elizabeth followed and boy she drew the line about ten times deeper but she did it in ways that really brought about just a tremendous tremendous effect i believe elizabeth is well i definitely know she's one of the godliest women i've ever met but i believe she's the godliest woman i've read some of her books would be through gates of splendor passion and purity the mark of a man in the shadow of the almighty i don't know what elizabeth's going to share about i'll just mention that jim elliott her first husband was margaret that's valerie's valerie's father she's married to lars green right now and lives in magnolia massachusetts and i just feel like like it's almost christmas getting a chance to see y'all with her i kind of stayed out of the way i was just so excited to share you with her and her with you and i just know that she's only going to talk about things that will just really be uplifting edifying and really glorify christ and elizabeth i can just say when i introduce you and say flattering things to you i know jesus gets the glory so will you please come and share what's on your heart thank you so much it's a terrific privilege for me to have this chance i've heard about sca for years and years but this is my first encounter with you as a group and it's a great privilege i wish i could announce that there were going to be some books over there tonight in the refreshment hall but um they are on their way good boston was totally socked in this morning so there was chaos in the airport and i got re-rooted in my baggage and my books went one way and i came another way so i have the wrong glasses and the wrong everything but i always carry my notebook of my bible with me because this kind of thing happens with dismaying frequency but let me mention two of the books that are over there one that i'm sure it will be there because it came before i did but it's a book that i never hesitate to recommend very enthusiastically because most of the writing is not mine but jim elliot's it's called shadow of the almighty and it's jim elliot's life and testimony with a lot of quotations from his diaries and letters and i don't think i would be exaggerating if i say that literally hundreds of young men have told me that no book outside of the bible has so powerfully influenced their lives and one or two of you have already told me that tonight and i'm very grateful for that i think just about everywhere i go somebody adds to the list and tells me that the real live testimony of that man who died at the age of 28 has influenced them so if you only want to read one of my books i would say that's the most important one shadow of the almighty then if it arrives discipline the glad surrender is a book that i'm sure nobody here needs but you might know somebody that does so do your christmas shopping early it's a book about personal discipline what it means to discipline the body the mind the emotions work time possessions and some general principles i want to read a little quotation from an article that i found in a magazine called again this is from a man named peter gilquist he went out for the high school cross country team on the first day of practice the coach took us to a course that ran up and down several hills over four miles before he fired the starting gun the coach said something i have never forgotten what i'm asking you today to do is to finish the race if you don't plan to finish i don't want you to start simply stay where you are when the gun is fired but if you start then you will finish you may slow down or even quit or even stop for a bit but you will not quit once you start i want you to cross this finish line no matter what the first mile was almost euphoric the cool fresh autumn air was a natural boost to my dog a determination to run a good race but after a mile and a half or so the joy began to fade by two miles whatever pleasure there had been in all of this was totally gone from then on it was sheer drudgery some of my teammates deposited the sandwiches they had eaten at noon at the school cafeteria at the end of the course some would stop for a bit find relief and then fall back into the panting procession my legs started to cramp i did not know thigh muscles could ever be tired i felt my breath would leave me forever my lungs and chest cavity were in almost unbearable pain as i approached an enormous upward hill near the two and a half mile mark there's one thing and one thing only that kept me going before i started i had agreed to finish my body was spent my mind screamed quit but the choice had been made when the gun went off the issue was not open for renegotiation there were no options no shortcuts i'm talking to athletes tonight some of you very professional some of you second class i guess and at least one person in this room not an athlete at all you're looking at her i went to a school in philadelphia up to the fourth grade where they taught softball to girls in the fifth grade i moved during the summer to new jersey where they taught softball to girls in fourth grade so i was expected to play softball not having ever learned it and i like to use that as an excuse for never having gotten into athletics but i have a sneaking suspicion i would never have done very well anyway but i'm looking at people who i think understand commitment and obedience to instructions perhaps far better than the average audience in fact my second husband i don't know whether gary mentioned that i now have number three as far as i know he's feeling fine tonight [Applause] he's already lasted longer than the first two put together so he says he's the front runner now but um my second husband was the dean of a college and used to say that without any question the happiest students on any college campus are the athletes and the musicians for the same reason they're under discipline and they're doing somebody else's thing they're not doing their own thing and so it's kind of a relief to me to feel as though i don't have to start at square one and talk about what discipline is all about and what commitment means because if you're in athletics you already know about a thousand times as much as the average student today you understand what it means to follow somebody else's instructions and to accept their terms we lived up until last year across from a high school and on every fall afternoon i could look out there and see these kids putting themselves through the most appalling forms of torture in the mud in the slush in the snow and the rain throwing themselves at these unyielding things i don't know what you call them riding their faces in the dust being screamed yelled at hollered at made absolute fools up hour after grueling hour into the dark i thought if anybody had forced those children to do that but the thing that was so staggering to me was that they were doing it voluntarily because as far as i know there couldn't have been any other reason they wanted to play football they had made up their minds that they wanted to play football and no price was too high i mean just five minutes of any one afternoon of that i would think would be too high a price to pay but obviously there are some categories that escaped me altogether and there they were they accepted the terms they put themselves under authority if you were going to play football you are going to play with this particular size and shape ball and you are going to do this particular kind of thing with this ball and you are going to get it over a particular kind of goal posts you're not going to have a net across the field and you're not going to use a racket you're go if you do that you're not playing football if you want to play football this is the way you do it and the player doesn't ask for input he doesn't suggest that maybe for this particular case you could revise the rules for him because you know i don't really feel comfortable with this nobody asks to feel comfortable when he's playing football at least that's the way it looks to me i can't imagine that there's one second of comfort there must be some pleasure in that that overwhelms all the others [Applause] i was married to a wrestler and people used to ask jim if he liked wrestling and he would say well yes i could say that i like it he said before a match i'm terrified during a match i'm in agony and after a match i'm absolutely wiped out but yes i we hear a lot of the news today about athletes and the tremendous salaries they get and trades and perks and terms it's become very very big business and the world does all that they can to try to make it look as attractive as possible the question of course is how far do you want to go as an athlete the question which decides for you what kind of a price you're going to pay how many hours you're going to practice what kind of sacrifices you're going to make all of those things are settled by answering the first question how far do you want to go what do you really want to do how good do you want to be do you just wait want to be able to play tennis for fun or at the club or for a social activity or do you want to be a champion i never in my life heard anybody saying well what i really want to do is to be a good loser that's the highest ambition that he has i've never really heard anybody say that now there's always talk about being good losers because it's inevitable that you're going to win some you're going to lose some but i've never heard anybody brag about being the best loser in the league it's not the height of our ambitions is it most of you i suppose saw that movie chariots of fire and i'm convinced that one reason at least why that movie captured the imagination of the american public was because it's about something that hardly anybody knows anything about anymore and it blew everybody's mind it was about commitment because here was a young man who although he had put a great many eggs in one basket the basket of athletics had already made a choice which overrode that one by far and his first commitment was not to becoming the greatest track man in the world but to jesus christ and so we find this man laying on the line not only his gold medal which was practically guaranteed for what appeared to be a fanatical and rather trivial religious scruple he not only put his own gold medal on the line and his own reputation and his own future but as he was told in no gentle terms he was putting the very honor of the british empire on the line because of this foolish religious scruple you remember the scene when he gets off the boat in france and finds out that the race that he was to run the olympic race is to be run on a sunday and what impresses me there is what you don't see in that movie which you see which you would see in just about every other kind of movie nowadays you don't see the man agonizing and struggling with his feelings and trying to get in touch with his feelings and sharing his struggles with a thousand other close friends you don't find him agonizing over what he's going to do he knows in a split second what he's going to do he's not going to run period case closed why because he made a final choice years before and that final choice was obedience to jesus christ i have to confess a certain edginess whenever we're asked to sing songs that have phrases in them i love you lord or oh how i love jesus because i always hear the lord saying to me what who was it in my fair lady said to lies that zoo little or what lies doolittle said to him she said don't tell me show me you know that song don't talk of love show me and there's very little talk of love in the scripture there are some songs in which the psalmist specifically says i love the lord but there aren't very many places in the bible i'm not sure you can find one if you can tell me where it is but there probably are several but there are not many places where somebody says to god i love you because the bible makes it very plain that there's only one valid and authentic proof of love it's obedience nothing more nothing less than nothing else if you love football you're willing to do that nothing more nothing less nothing else you're willing to pay any price and you don't have to tell me that you love football you show me by the grueling self-torture to which you subject yourself but eric little had made up his mind that he had a mask and therefore he was under orders forever at any cost the masters terms and then the other scene which to me is absolutely unforgettable is where the prince of wales and the president of the olympic games are with great british self-restraint but absolutely withering scorn and sarcasm attempting to talk little out of this decision and they accuse him of arrogance in putting the honor of the british empire at the mercy of this ridiculous little religious scruple of running a race on sunday and with the greatest dignity and perfect courtesy and perfect calm you see eric little say that the arrogance lies and the man who would seek to persuade another man to act against his convictions and that's the end of the interview eric little was first a follower of jesus christ secondly an athlete what is the follower of jesus christ i want to read you just a few verses about one person who thought that he might like to think about joining jesus he kind of thought that maybe you know like wow i mean might be a good idea he might feel good about it i mean like you know so he came to jesus and he said what good must i do to gain eternal life good said jesus why do you ask me about that one alone is good but if you wish to enter into life keep the commandments which command us he asked he must have been thinking to himself i've got it in here jesus answered do not murder do not commit adultery do not steal do not give false evidence honor your father and mother and love your neighbor as yourself the young man answered i've kept all these where do i still fall short that's a breathtaking testimony isn't it and jesus said to him if you wish to go the whole way go and sell your possessions and give to the poor then you will have riches in heaven and then come and follow me when the young man heard this he went away with a heavy heart he was too rich to follow i remember years ago being interviewed one time by an editor from a secular magazine he wanted to do a story on the subject of faith and he didn't know a whole lot about faith and so he thought maybe i knew something about it and he began to question me and probe and took down probably 12 hours or so of talk on his tape recorder and toward the end he shook his head you know and he said you know you've made faith more real to me than anybody has ever done and sometimes i feel as if i give everything i own to have the kind of faith you have but then he says you know i have a hunch that might be what it would cost me and i don't want to pay that kind of a price just a 20th century echo of exactly what this man said obviously he didn't want to go the whole way just part way as long as he felt good about it as long as it didn't invade his territory as long as it didn't require him to do something stupid like eric liddell as long as it didn't cost him anything and the thing that is so impressive about jesus in his individual encounters is the way with most exquisite accuracy he put his finger precisely at the point that he knew was the crucial point you remember that the word crucial comes from the latin word for cross it is the very point at which the cross touches a man's life now it isn't that jesus said to everybody that ever came to him and asked what was i do to inherit eternal life but you must sell everything you have that's not what he said to everybody he simply knew the point at which this man because of his possessions was going to face the real meaning of the cross and the movie chariots of fire is a picture of a man who faces the cross and with almost a lightness and humor he doesn't make much of it at all no the decision is made he wants to go the whole way he knows what matters to him more than athletics more than gold medals and more than worldwide fame and so big deal it's not the first man to ever do a thing like that is he billions has got the same testimony have you found a pearl of great price would you sell everything you possess in order to find to buy the field in which the treasure is hidden or are you too rich to follow jesus laid down the one unequivocal stunning and costly term what are his terms if you're going to come with me you're going to have to come the whole way you don't go part way let's go back to the 16th chapter of matthew where jesus has been trying to instruct his disciples about what he is doing and where he's going and here he is talking to these 12 who had spent the most time with him of anyone on earth outside of his earthly parents i suppose the people who had been instructed most intimately by him and most continuously over a period of three years these 12 disciples and yet how thick they were how dull how hard it was to get anything through their heads and so jesus is telling him once more where he's going and why and he says in matthew 16 verse 21 jesus it says jesus began to make clear to his disciples that he had to go to jerusalem and there to suffer much from the elders chief priests and doctors of the law to be put to death and to be raised again on the third day at this peter took him by the arm and began to rebuke him heaven forbid he said no lord this shall never happen to you jesus turned and said to peter away with you satan you realize that just a few verses before jesus has given peter a new name and said on this rock i will build my church you are peter the rock and peter was the one who had that divine revelation of who god was jesus told him that flesh and blood had not revealed that to him but his father and here he is saying you get behind me satan give away with you save your stumbling block to me you think as men think and not as god thinks jesus then said to his disciples if anyone wishes to be a follower of mine he must leave self behind he must take up his cross and come with him whoever cares for his own safety is lost but if a man will let himself be lost for my sake he will find his true self to me i don't think there's any more perfect analogy of this tremendous spiritual principle than that of sports you must let yourself be lost when everybody else is tooling around or sitting down at the pizza parlor you're out there in the football field or on the track doing somebody else's thing at somebody else's command exactly the way they say it hour after grueling hour because you've made up your mind you've made a final choice and what jesus is asking is a final choice because you will not fulfill even the first condition of discipleship unless you've made that final choice do you want to go the whole way do you want to be my disciple jesus said there are thousands of people you could follow you have an option you could do this you could do that you can play football you can play tennis you can play tiddlywinks but if you want to be my disciple these are the conditions you give up your right to yourself lay it all down forget it you don't belong to yourself anymore you don't own yourself on that football team you're under a master you give up your right to yourself then you take up your cross that means acceptance of the whole thing the whole package anything you say lord i'll take it anything you want to take away from me i'll give it to you and the third thing follow me how many times have you and i stumbled along behind the lord thinking that we had made the final choice and here we are on the way our faces set toward jerusalem following him who was crucified and things begin to go wrong and all kinds of things happen that were not on our schedule they just really weren't according to the blueprint that we had laid out for ourselves and the thought comes to us is this really the way did i make a mistake am i out of the will of god if this is the way is this the only way does he really have to take us this way have you ever said no lord i just can't take that story is told of a scottish preacher i believe it was graham strawbey to whom a young woman came and told of her terrible struggles to accept the will of god in a certain manner in which he felt that the will of god was totally contrary to her own and graham's froggy took out of his pocket a little slip of paper he wrote down two words and he handed her the slip of paper he said i want you to go over there and sit down for about 10 minutes and cross out one word and then come back and we'll talk she took the piece of paper she went and sat down and she read no lord she had to cross out one word and she realized that she could not say no if she wanted to say lord and she could not say lord and preceded with a no it just won't work it's what peter said jesus said away with you satan you think as men think you think you can run things you think you can get the rules revised that god's going to pare down his standards to suit your sins and your weaknesses and your tastes and your temperaments of what you feel good about in your self-image it's not no lord if you've made the final choice to be his disciple you've already given up your right to yourself and so then when things begin to happen that you really didn't expect at all you didn't think we're on god's program let alone yours and you say lord why are you doing this to me and he says isn't this what you asked for have you ever prayed thy will be done if you've ever prayed thy will be done you are praying by implication my will be undone what did you expect god to do your thing i thought you'd already made up your mind to do his well i dare say that in fca there are some people that are thinking right now that they weren't really sure that things were going to be the way they are they're just not working the way they expected they're not turning out the way they thought is this how god works is what happened to all those miracles what happened all those testimonies that i hear from the other guys what happened to the thrills of working with kids you know when you graduate from college and you've got athletic honors i'm sure that it must be very natural to say i'd like to work with kids i'd like to be in athletics i'd like to bring kids to jesus i'd like to combine all these things i've met so much in my life and use them for god and gradually the lord has to sort of tap you on the shoulder and say now just a minute i accepted that from you back when you were a young christian but now you're going to have to learn what this means you're not using these things for me you gave up your right to yourself which includes everything doesn't it your love for athletics and your love for kids your ideas about yourself and what you're going to do you've turned over all the counters to me yes this is my way this is the way it's going to be not the way you thought and so forget the miracles and the thrills yes i could do those but that's kind of unusual that's not the everyday monday tuesday wednesday thursday friday saturday thing most of life is fairly humdrum i don't mean to say that it's boring i love routine and monotony just because the fact that a good part of my life makes that impossible my husband and i travel a lot together and you don't have any routine or any monotony i thought i was leaving boston at 10 20 this morning and consequently i left the house at 8 30 and i didn't leave boston until about 12 30. instead of going to philadelphia to get my plane for indianapolis i went to pittsburgh and sat there for two hours it wasn't on my schedule so there's no routine and there's no monopoly there but when i'm at home i like routine and monotony and everything is more or less laid out every morning i sit at my desk every day i fix three meals for my husband and i wash and i iron and i cook and i clean and i do everything that any ordinary housewife does and on saturdays i clean the house and clean the toilets and do the wash and quite honestly i love that kind of work this past saturday i had the most fun that i've had in a long time because my husband was away i cleaned the garage but i suppose when you look at my life you may be like the little girl who came running up to me after a student convention which i've spoken and she said mrs elliott i think the lord's called me to do just what you do oh i said what's that well write books and travel around and speak well i just think it'll be so exciting i mean just it sounds wonderful and i said yeah i'm sure it does i i think i resisted the temptation to say to the girl are you prepared to go through the same course of training that i went through but of course if i were to total up the number of hours that i actually spend standing on a platform speaking to people or the number of hours that i actually spend at my desk writing a book they wouldn't even come close to the number of hours that i spend doing very ordinary things that aren't at all exciting and at all interesting so let's face it whatever your job is a good part of it is just plain d-u-t-y a whole lot of it may be drudgery a whole lot of it may be very humdrum and after all the most exciting most thrilling thing the world can get pretty old after a while this is what it means to take up your cross and follow i would hope that we don't think of our crosses as being something odious and something always crushing it's the simple and glad acceptance of whatever god's plan for me may happen to be that's why i entitled my book discipline the glad surrender an athlete makes a glad surrender i really have never been able to think of any other analogy that makes any sense to modern people they cannot stand the word discipline i had a woman my age to say to me the other day in a seminar you're always talking about obedience i hate that word well that's tough isn't it i don't know what i can do about it you know where i got it i got it out of this book i can't change this book i'm not giving you elizabeth elliott opinions i wouldn't go across the street to do that and i'm sure you wouldn't bother to bring me to indiana if that's all you're going to get i'm not telling you anything new trust and obey for there's no other way if you want to be my disciple you are going to give up your right to yourself you're going to take up your cross and you're going to follow and following means putting one foot in front of the other now i want to tell you a story briefly about five men who in the 20th century did obey they put themselves under orders and they paid a price sometimes i have felt that i really shouldn't be telling this story so much and it bothered me that i was asked to tell it over and over and over again one time i had the opportunity to talk with dear old corey tenbu because i remember thinking when i heard that corey tenboom was coming to our town i hope she will talk about her prison experience and then i thought oh my goodness the poor woman she's been talking about her prison experience for 35 years she must be so sick of it everybody wants to talk about her prison experience so she did talk about her prison experience and i was so grateful and afterwards i had an opportunity to have tea with her and so i asked her this question that was bugging me i said does it ever bother you that you're supposed to tell that story over and over and over again and she said yes at one time it did and i said to the lord i must have something fresh and the lord said to me that's the story i gave you you tell that story and this is the story god has given me he's given me far more than this and many other stories but i don't know one that i feel is more appropriate for this particular group of men and women even though many of you know the story and have read the story maybe you haven't heard all the aspects that i want to emphasize tonight i particularly love to tell about these five men because there is so much sheer sentimentality in what masquerades as christianity today and so much if i may use the word wimpishness i am so sick of wimps and so sick of this idea that faith is a mood a feeling or that love is a glandular condition faith is action faith is obedience love is action love is obedience there is no other kind of faith there is no other kind of love according to the bible let's get with it well five men who were they nate saint from philadelphia an amazing jungle pilot a man of tremendous vision he was one of the founders of the missionary aviation fellowship an inventor as well as a very very skillful pilot he invented things which i'm told that aeronautical engineers are still scratching their heads over they look at them on paper and they say it won't work the thing is it did then there was ed mccully from milwaukee wisconsin i knew it when he was a student in college he was a big football player six feet four he was also a champion track man the athletic field at wheaton college is named for ed mccully he was president of his class he was a senior he was very handsome he was headed for political career and all of us thought that he would make a very great politician and we had no difficulty imagining ed as the president of the united states he entered the hearst newspaper oratorical contest when he was in when he was a senior there were 20 000 contestants and ed mccully took first place he played a beautiful trombone i could go on and on but i re when i think back on my fellow students of wheaton i can think of nobody whom i would have who i would have less imagined being a missionary than ed mccully for one thing he was far too good looking you know missionaries are supposed to be people that can't make it any other way and so they decide the lord must have called him to the mission field but it had it all then there was roger udarion whom i did not know until he became a missionary and i didn't know him very well there but he was a cowboy from montana and he went into the second world war as a paratrooper and was wounded and ended up as a missionary in the jungle of ecuador with the notorious hebrew indians the hebrews are the ones that have become famous because they have a secret formula for shrinking human heads to the size of an orange so that the features are still recognizable and the hair is still attached and they use these for decorations on their belts by way of visual aids to their enemies they also stick them up on poles around their houses anyway raju darian went to those indians to take them the gospel then there was a very bookish young man from seattle washington by the name of pete fleming who had a master's degree in literature from the university of washington and ed mccully and pete fleming were both friends of the fifth man whom i knew very well he was jim elliott he was a student at wheaton college when i was there and he had a very unsettling way of going up to fellow students and grabbing him by the arm and saying hey buddy how come you're not going to the mission field and very often the answer was the same well you know i mean like i'm just really not sure i feel called and jim would say well you don't feel you don't need a call you need a kick in the past and jim was an impressive character i had been hearing about jim for years because my brother dave was a close friend of his they were both on the same wrestling squad and dave was always saying you got to meet this guy elliot well i wasn't terribly eager to meet my little brother's friends but finally i did and i used to watch him on campus the more i watched him the more interested i became in him he was a campus clown the kind of person that could be called upon at a moment's notice to recite the face on the bar room floor or the shooting of dan mcgrew or the cremation of sam mcgee he had those poems by robert service memorized he was a spiritual leader he was the president of the foreign missions fellowship and i respected him for that i knew he was headed for latin america and he thought of this summer missionary program long before anybody else ever did it he hitchhiked all by himself twice from oregon to mexico in order to spend the summer with missionaries and begin to learn some spanish by way of preparation he was not only a campus clown i'm a spiritual leader but he was an athlete as i said he won the championship of four states in his weight class in wrestling they called him the india rubber man he could be tied into the most unbelievable knots by his opponents but was never once pinned and he was also a scholar he graduated with highest honor in classical greek so he was an unusual combination and the more i watched jim the more i thought he does fulfill practically all of my list of requirements for a husband i had written down 19 things in the back of my five-year diary when i was about 16 years old and i think jim elliot fulfilled about 16 out of the 19. i'm not quite sure what the last one was but he was not six feet he was not six feet four and he did not have an operatic baritone voice but just about everything else was there anyway i had no reason in the world to think that there was a chance in the world that he would ever look at me because he was what we used to call a bto a big time operator campus and i was a two just a teeny weeny operator i was a wallflower i was not by any means the kind of girl that the guys ever dated i had the dates that i had in college i'm sure i could count very easily on one hand maybe on one finger but um i couldn't help being interested in it and so it was with a certain amount of hesitation not to say trepidation that i approached jim when our yearbooks came out to see if he would sign his autograph on his picture which of course everybody did for everybody it didn't signify anything but we girls of course cherished the faint hope that the guy that we were interested in might write something besides his name something cute or sweet or maybe even cryptic and so jim grabbed my book and with his very flourishing hand wrote jim elliott and underneath the reference second timothy 2 4. and you know how long it took me to get back to the dormitory to grab my bible to look up the cryptic or sweet or cute message that he had put in there and this is what i found no a soldier on active service will not become entangled in civilian affairs he is to be holy and his commanding officer's disposal the message was not cryptic it was loud and clear that jim elliott had made the final choice he was wholly at his commanding officer's disposal now there were overtones there that i felt did perhaps indicate that jim might have looked at me twice because otherwise why would he put that particular verse in my ear or did he put it in everybody's of course i checked around and found out that he hadn't put it in everybody so i hoped and i prayed but i did exactly what my mother told me she gave me exactly two rules on the subject of sex number one don't chase them number two keep them at arm's length well i didn't have any problem at all with the second one because i had never got them within arms they didn't have anywhere near me but don't chase them was a very good piece of advice it's one that i've tried to dish out in more modern terms in my book passion and purity but i tried very hard to keep my eyes on my books jim and i were taking the same greek classes so we saw quite a bit of each other but i didn't give him any hint or any reason to think that i was interested in him but shortly before we graduated he confessed to me that he was in love with me i nearly died on the spot and then told me that as far as he knew god wanted him to remain single perhaps for the rest of his life it's like saying i'll see you around chances at though because i was graduating from college and he was not i lived in new jersey he lived in oregon so there wasn't a whole lot of chance that we were going to see much of each other well i haven't got time to go into that story tonight it is told in detail from his standpoint in the book shadow of the almighty and in greater detail in passion and purity suffice it to say you know from the name elizabeth elliot that god did eventually bring us together but it wasn't until after five and a half years of what seemed to be grueling discipline five and a half years not of commitment to each other please understand i hear these kids talk about this relationship that they have and these commitments and they can't define them and i'm always trying to probe and find out what are you talking about what is this relationship are you engaged to this guy oh no he isn't asking to marry him or anything like that but i mean we just have this really neat relationship and i said well what the world's a really neat relationship what's it all about [Music] [Applause] [Music] no i don't know christ i was going to africa i thought that's where god was leading me and jim was absolutely sure he was going to south america he was going to stay single forever if that's what god wanted and he certainly wasn't even going to look at a girl twice until god gave him green light and god had not given him any such green light and so his advice to me was you go right ahead and do whatever you think god wants you to do if he's taking you to the south pacific or to africa you just get there as fast as you can go and don't expect to hear anything from me so that's more or less the way it was separation silence uncertainty period we had made a final choice we really did want to be disciples with all my heart i wanted to do the will of god i had given up my right to myself which is my right to my feelings i had given up everything to jesus christ and i said lord here i am all be for you forever do anything you want work out your whole will in my life at any cost and i had written that prayer down in my bible and i was trying daily to take up my cross and i certainly meant to follow him he would just show me where he wanted me to go each of these five men could have made it probably very big as the world terms it in probably almost anything he wanted to put his hand to it and each of these five men had lots of advice that they were doing a very foolish thing in burying themselves in some god forsaken corner of the jungle where nobody would ever hear them again going down there to work with those little tiny indian tribes where did you say where's ecuador people never even heard of ecuador they mixed it up with french french equatorial africa and jim wrote a very stern and strong letter to his parents when they had tried to encourage him to stay in the states because he had such a tremendous ministry and he did i've got tapes of his preaching he and ed mccully had a radio station in southern illinois and they preached every week they took turns one would be the emcee and the other would be the preacher they called it the march of truth and when i listened to those tapes now they it's hard to distinguish them from billy graham at that age they were jim was a little younger than billy graham but their preaching sounds very much alike back that time and he had lots of gifts and jim wrote to them that he had no right to even consider not going to the mission field because the vows of god were on him and he could not stay to play with flowers and he said i have no right he said to his mother i have no right to let the body that you have given me grow fat leaning on pulpits and one of his favorite verses was what the king james version is i buffet my body and bring it under subjection i pummel my body as another version and bring it under subjection lest when i have preached to others i myself should be a castaway and jim disciplined himself and i'm sure that his family would not object if i tell you that every member of that family was overweight except jim and it was a constant fight and a constant offense to his mother and his sister who were always baking up goodies which he called rock gut i said i'm not going to touch that stuff and it was just one little indication the kind of purpose and determination that he had he had set his face like a flint to do the will of god nothing more nothing less than nothing else and i'm sure that the other men had to stand up against the same kind of pressure and they all ended up in that little god forsaken corner of the jungle called the oriente in ecuador the eastern jungle and they were working with two different tribes three of the men ed and pete and jim were working with the kichos and roger you durian with the hebrews as i mentioned and nate saint was the pilot that served all of their stations and there were profound spiritual struggles jim was only in ecuador four years he went two he died in 1956 so it wasn't as though there were many long years of struggle but those four years were packed full of spiritual struggles and the feelings that i'm sure many of you here are experiencing right now and all of you have at some time or other what is the use am i getting anywhere is anybody listening am i making any kind of a dent am i making any kind of an impact my husband at least my second husband as i mentioned was the dean of a college he was also a professor in the seminary later and he would talk to his students who were going to be preachers and try to prepare them for what the life of a preacher was going to be in reality and not in sentimentality and he likened it to a boxing ring and he said when the boxer gets into the ring and gets knocked down he doesn't get up off the floor and run over to his trainer in the corner and say that man hit me what are you doing in the ring what are you doing on the mission field what are you doing as a disciple of jesus christ if you don't expect that there are going to be tough times what kind of tough times did you expect did you want to choose your particular set of difficulties well it doesn't work that way you know we don't get to choose our crosses it's the lord that uses the cross all you have to do is take it up say yes lord i'll take it i'll go through this time i will work with these impossible kids and my heart goes out to you when i when i think of the college generation of kids i my mind is just boggled just this past week i spoke in a class at gordon college history professor asked me to come and talk to the kids about the indians in south america and i must confess i was apprehensive about it the first place i don't know anything about history at all and i told the professor that i flunked i almost walked almost every history history but i never studied south american history so i said i just can talk about the indians and i was so afraid that it was going to be boring to these kids and so i tried my very best to make it as interesting as i could i described three different indian tribes that i lived with and what they wore and what they ate and their weapons and what they did and all this kind of thing two guys were absolutely out cold on the back row i mean sound somebody was surprised they weren't snoring and as far as i could tell there wasn't more than about there weren't more than about two intelligent looking faces in the audience i mean they were blazed they sat there absolutely glazed like this as if they were looking at a television screen waiting for something to happen i get the impression that their whole attitude is what have you got to tell me can you tell me anything show me and they can just tune you out the way they tune out noise and television and everything else anyway i've only seen that my heart goes out to you if you feel as though you're not getting any place i saw that professor on sunday he came up and thanked me and raved he said the kids loved it i said you could have fooled me but is this the job that god has called you to do then this is the job that you do this one thing do it and do it for jesus think of the multitudes that jesus preached to how many of them followed him for anything other than loaves and fishes for miracles hardly anybody and of the disciples how many of them understood what he's trying to get across is this one thing that he has called us to the time came when the opportunity presented itself for these five men to attempt to take the gospel to the alka indians the alkas were no more related to the kichwas and the hebrews than the let's say the cherokees would be the language was totally different they lived in a different part of the jungle and next to nothing is known about the alkas except that they were savages they were stone age people they were naked and they killed people nobody had ever gone in there and come out alive quite a few people had gone in there the shell oil company had sent 12 people in there to prospect for oil and they had all been speared to death years before so there were legends about them they were very greatly feared and missionaries and other people had been praying for years that god would eventually send somebody in there to take the gospel to these people if jim elliott for example had sat down and said now wait a minute am i supposed to go in there i who got highest honors classical greek won a championship in wrestling was a spiritual leader suppose ed mccoy had said me i could have been president united states look at this prom bow that i played look at the honors that i won 21st out of 20 000 in the r historical contest suppose pete fleming had said but what about this m.a i've got in mass in literature etc etc what did paul say about all those earthly honors he said i count them but and really it was a four-letter word that could be much more vividly translated nowadays refuse is what one translation says nothing garbage in order that i might win christ and it was not up to jim and ed pete nate and raj to decide how their talents were supposed to be used or what god was going to do with all of those things he they were holy at their commanding officers disposal it's the coach that decides what he's going to do with each member of the team isn't it it's the master who decides what a servant is going to do hundreds of young men have had their lives turned 180 degrees around because they have seen in vivid 20th century terms real men who were not winners who had all kinds of potential who said lord here it is all of you for you forever do anything you want i come to you on your terms i'm going to follow you straight to the cross anyway you know the rest of the story they went they sang on the eve of their leaving we rest on thee our shield and our defender and six days later they were all speared to death i got to know those indians that did the spearing a couple of years after that in the province of god god took me and my daughter who was three years old and rachel saint to live there we got to know the men who had done the killing i got two tape recordings from the actual men that did it asking them all kinds of questions blow by blow exactly what happened how did it happen why did it happen the long and the short of it is yeah because we're afraid they thought that the missionaries were cannibals does it make sense the indians would sit there and tell me this story with the most vivid automotive poetic terms i mean believe me you would hardly have to understand alpha to understand what money to do [Music] yeah that's the kind of thing that's on this tape over and over and over does that make any kind of sense and of course that's what the world said what were these blankety-blind fools doing down there why don't they keep their blankety-blank noses out of other people's blank and flying business and of course the answer that i had to give over and over and over again to the newspapers and the magazines that interviewed us why did they do it for one reason obedience to jesus christ not for adventure not for fame not as a stunt obedience because jesus said do it their death epitomizes to be the verse in 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 how far do you want to go that's what jesus said to the rich man what do you really want do you want to be his disciple we live on the coast of massachusetts i've never seen anything like that hurricane it was my first hurricane and it hit us full force because we lived facing the south on the south coast of cape ann we watched those waves my husband and i went outside after the rain had stopped and the wind began to rise and we literally had to hold on to the railing to stand up and i thought then of the motto of the coast guard i had heard that this was their motto i've never seen it posted in any recruiting poster i don't think it would get a whole lot of recruits but i did check it out not long ago with the coast guardsman and he said yes it's posted in every rescue station along the east coast these are the words you have to go out you don't have to come back shouldn't that be the motto of every christian you have to go out you don't have to come back in other words it's not your business what the results are of your obedience it was not the business of those five men whether or not they would get speared of course we pray that they wouldn't be speared of course they trusted god to be their shield and their defender but they also knew that god did not preserve stephen from the stones or james or john the baptist from being beheaded nor did he intervene and send legions of angels to keep his son from being nailed to a cross and the world flung the same words that jesus on the cross they said if you're the son of god come down and he didn't come down so what did that prove to them same kind of talks that they threw at eric little what dimmers does it make you're not going to do this for such a ridiculous reason keep on following i say to you never give up when i was in sixth grade we learned palmer method penmanship and we had to write little poems for practice and one of them has stuck with me all my life has become a rule of my life if a task is once begun never leave it until it's done be the labor great or small do it well or not at all and i'm a great believer in sticking with a decision if god has led you to make this particular decision then you stick with that decision come hell or high water no matter what happens no matter whether you feel comfortable no matter whether things are working no matter whether everything seems to be falling down around your ears you stick with that decision until god gives you overwhelming reason to leave and make sure it's god's reason and not yours and that has been a beacon light to me i suppose the most difficult decision i ever made in my life up to that point was going to the alkas myself and taking my daughter risking her life as well as mine but the most the more difficult decision was leaving the outcast and i had to have overwhelming guidance in order to do that i had determined that i would not leave until god gave me overwhelming reasons to leave which the time came that he did but don't quit stick with it this is the way of the cross when jesus was trying to show his disciples i'm going to jerusalem i am going to suffer many things i am going to be killed and peter said no lord that can't happen to you and that's just what we say that can't happen to me i don't want this to happen to me i didn't expect it to be this way lord doesn't have to be this way can't you take me a different way and he says follow me give up your right to yourself and take up your cross and follow may god give you the grace of continuance a verse that he gave me when i left for ecuador was isaiah 50 verse 7. in the king james version 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 i want to close with the poem that jim elliot had memorized when he was a college student and quoted very often when he would speak to college groups on the subject of missions it's a poem written by a very great missionary amy carmichael of india she wrote probably thousands of poems and about 40 books these are the words passed out no scar no hidden scar on foot or side or hand i hear these sung as mighty in the land i hear them hail thy bright ascended star hassan no scar hasta no wound yet i was wounded by the archers spent leaned me against a tree to die and rent by ravening beasts that compassed me i swooned hast thou no wound no wound no scar yet as the master must the servant be and pierced are the feet that follow me but god are whole can he have followed far who has nor wound nor scar

Channel: The Elisabeth Elliot Foundation

Views: 27,180

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Id: Easm8ikVJcc

Length: 70min 11sec (4211 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020