Elisabeth Elliot Session 3: Giving Your Life Away in Every Season of Life, Part 2

[Music] lost the voice i want to give it next time [Applause] that's not that's just to get your attention she will be coming in and save him and the reason i came up here many of you may not know i'm the last of the husbands so far [Music] shipping of folks at all and unfortunately although i assumed i would have enough with the attendance installed you can only order it up to a certain time so i do run out and i run out of a number of them but i will if you want to take the time if you have something that you want i always send it out at the same price as i sell it here and i take care of posters so it's a little unhandy but if you want to do that i'll do it and as far as time people are always asking me how long does it take i would my guess is that we get home on monday night and it should be out by it should be in the mail by the following monday so it's not a really long way and you're going don't stand down there one more thing people ask me well you know do you does elizabeth sign books when you mail them out the truth is we can't because we get back home and she has all the work to do we don't have a staff it's just the two of us there's one principal and one gopher and so you can't do that but what i ask them now is if and this was the first book that i ran out of discipline to glad surrender and i've had some of the people ask about that so what we'll do is that particular book will take the time and try to have those autographs the other ones i'm not going to do uh it it runs into too much time so discipline the glass surrender you can you know if that's if you want one book with a signature or something why get that book [Applause] i'm not supposed to say anything until he gets back and starts to tape but i'll just tell you about a wonderful lady that was an influence in my life and i've had so many and this was a single lady her name was miss catherine and she was the dorm mother when i was a student at queen college and she had a very charming way of clasping her very ample bosom when she spoke she was very short little lady she'd come from augusta georgia very wealthy home and somehow we became very close friends i was just one of 200 girls in the dormitory and of course she had friends with the rest of them too but she was also my sunday school teacher so we used to walk to church every sunday morning together and i would often go into her room and pour out my troubles to her and once in a while she would mention one one or two of her tiny little troubles which she called them and one day she told me that she said in her georgia accent oh baby she called me baby in those days my name was betty and of course southerners know how to drag out a name until it takes a lot longer or the hell they truncate a name my name elizabeth they make two syllables out of four they call me lisbeth but when it came to calling me betty it was baby and she said oh baby i came to wheaton to be a spiritual counselor but here i am carrying mops and toilet paper across the campus that lady had come from a very very wealthy home where they had columns in the front of the house and servants in the back and i'm sure that she had never carried mops and toilet paper in her life but because she became a christian she was disinherited by her family so that they did not allow her to have any of the legacy that she should have otherwise had so i don't know what the world she did for a living until she came as a house mother of wheaton but she was obviously a woman who had given herself away and she was prepared to do what most people would not think was spiritual work she came to be a spiritual counselor but she was carrying mops and toilet paper across the campus now that made a very deep impression on me because she was indeed a spiritual counselor and many of us were blessed by her but years later when she was in a retirement home in florida my second husband and i visited her there and i told her what she had said to me reminded her what she'd said that day and once again she clasped her less than ample bosom and said oh baby did i really say that and i said yes that is exactly what you said and i've never forgotten it i told her what it meant to me and again she said oh betty just think of the mercy of god that he allowed me to carry mops in toilet paper for his glory now see that's the kind of christianity we're talking about and i don't see my husband back there yet but i hope he's somewhere because he told me i was to wait until he could start timing me where is he oh okay talk number two is called give your life away i'm going to tell you all the same things i just said because you didn't get them the first time and i have a three-point outline number one is give up your right to yourself number two is take up the cross and number three is follow because i do want to get it to get it through your heads okay another illustration of a woman who's had a very deep influence in my life was amy carmichael who gave her life away before she was 20 she believed that god wanted her to remain single for the rest of her life when i wrote her biography i came across all sorts of interesting data and it appeared to me that she had had probably at least three proposals but had believed from her teenage years that god was calling her to remain single which she did not realizing that god would someday make her the mother of more than 700 children in south india she gave up the very effective traveling evangelism that she did for the first six years traveling by bullock cart which is probably the most uncomfortable method of travel in the world it's a wooden cart pulled by two bullocks cows with long horns it feels as though they the wheels are made are square because lars and i took a 10 minute ride in a book bullock cart when we were over there and 10 minutes was about nine minutes too many so uncomfortable but it was while she was itinerating with the gospel in various villages in south india that she learned about the terrible traffic of little babies that were committed to the hindu temples for the purposes of prostitution she was horrified and she began to pray that god would enable her to rescue some of those babies and over the years god did enable her to rescue as many as 700 of those children so she gave up what the world would call spiritual work evangelizing and she became a mother a mother gives her life away i told you last night about my own mother's attitude about her not having a life of her own of course she had a life of her own she had six children but she had given herself to god and any mother even a non-christian mother realizes if she's got common sense that mothering means sacrifice it means sacrifice for the nine months before the baby's born in certain amount of ways you may have more or less of morning sickness and other things which make life more difficult and then when you go through labor and birth it means pain it means suffering and there's a certain amount of fear involved sacrifice but then of course once the baby is born that's just the beginning isn't it my mother said she had the idea that when her six children grew up she could somehow cross them off her list and she said i discovered that i not only couldn't cross them off the list but the list was doubled because we all got married and then she had to pray for all those in-laws and then she had to pray for all the grandchildren then she began praying for great-grandchildren giving up her right to herself as a mother as a grandmother is a great grandmother breastfeeding is certainly a very clear illustration a human ordinary illustration of sacrifice my life for yours isn't it amazing that god ordained that we should be life givers now dear ms being single all her life she never nursed a baby but she nursed all of us amy carmichael was a mother to 700 children she had to make the same kind of sacrifices minus the carrying of the child in the actual labor process and the breastfeeding but there was sacrifice sacrifice sacrifice every day the offering up of this body and god has only given you one body and paul says in romans 12 i beseech you therefore brethren by the mercies of god that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice holy acceptable unto god which is your reasonable service it says in the king james and i love a more modern translation that says an act of spiritual worship this physical being becomes in the offering an act of spiritual worship just as the vessels in the tabernacle in the old testament although they were made of gold and bronze things which were often used to make many other things that had nothing to do with the tabernacle but when they were consecrated to god they became holy vessels it wasn't the gold that made them holy it wasn't the bronze that made them holy it's not the dishes you wash that become that make you a holy person it is the washing the dishes the doing the laundry the cleaning out the closet as an offering for jesus christ giving your life away a woman's body is a chalice a cup we are made to bear to carry to nurture and the physical arrangements that god has made remind us up to a certain age we are reminded every month of sacrifice blood means sacrifice it's very significant all through the old testament and god so ordained that you and i be reminded over and over and over again of life coming out of death and when the life is not conceived in the womb then there has to be the death getting rid of the blood and then you start over again so i think that it can't be nearly so vivid for men as it is for us women the whole question of physical personal self-giving men are not excusable of course in not recognizing that they too are meant to be bearers of the life of jesus a passage in the scriptures that came alive for me when i was living in the jungle after my husband was killed i was living in a very remote place with the tribe that had killed my husband and my daughter was three years old at the time and we lived in exactly the same kind of a house that the indians lived in you would hardly call it a house it was six poles with a thatched roof there were no walls no floors no furniture no no doors no windows i had a hammock strung between two poles my daughter slept on a slab of split split bamboo on the floor the mud floor right partly under my hammock and next to my hammock i had a fire which i kept going 24 hours a day as did all the rest of the people in that clearing but there were many long evenings when everyone else had gone to sleep when i would sit there in my hammock by my fire and ponder the strange sovereign will of god in taking my husband in his attempt to reach those people with the gospel and then miraculously and unexpectedly enabling me to make contact with those people about a year and a half later and here i was actually living with them but i couldn't speak a word of their language and you know what it's like you who are foreigners who came to this country and you americans who visit foreign countries you know that you never feel so helpless as when you don't know the language well usually you're going to a language which for which you can get tapes and books and interpreters and teachers i had none of the above with the alkas they had no idea that there were any other languages in the world they thought anybody with any brains spoke their language so when they heard me and valerie talking together they figured that we must be just talking a lot of gobble g gobbledygook all i could do was listen and try to imitate and write down what i heard and then try to figure out what in the world it meant and so in the evening one night i was sitting there in my fire everyone else had gone to sleep i'm sitting beside my fire and i was reading which i couldn't do very often because i didn't have any lights other than candles which were very hard to come by and i read this passage second corinthians 4 verse 6 god who said light shine let light shine out of darkness made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of god in the face of jesus christ but we have this treasure in earthen vessels or in jars of clay to show that this all surpassing power is from god and not from us we are hard pressed on every side and that's the way i felt but not crushed we are perplexed i certainly was that but not in despair persecuted now i was not persecuted but paul was but not abandoned and struck down but not destroyed we always carry around in our body the death of jesus we always carry around in our body the death of jesus you know what that means have you thought about that why do we do this he says so that the life of jesus may be revealed in our body for we who are alive are always being given over to death for jesus sake and that being given over to death is what we were talking about in this morning we are always being given over to death for jesus sake why so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body so then death is at work in us and life in you death went to work in the chinese farmer and life sprang up for his enemy death went to work when amy carmichael had to give up her evangelistic work and life sprang up for all those children death went to work endearments coming wealthy lady used to servants who became a servant and life sprang up in us girls many of you are single are you thinking all the time is god going to give me a husband maybe he's given you several and one or for one or the other reason you don't have a husband anymore and you're sitting there thinking well elizabeth elliot she's got three of them she's had three of them and one girl said to me i don't understand why the lord gives you three husbands and he hasn't even given me a date and they asked me why why did god give you three husbands how do i know i don't know i thought it was a miracle that i got married the first time i wasn't a popular girl i wasn't pursued by the guys in either high school or college we have a sovereign lord who knows exactly what he's doing don't we and so i've been learning ever since those years with the alka indians what this means that death must go to work in us in order that there be life in others and so i challenge all you who are single stop worrying or being obsessed with the idea when is god going to give me a husband maybe he's not going to give you a husband people always want me to say well one of these days the lord is going to give you a husband how do i know it's just as mysterious to me why he doesn't give you one as it is that he gave me three it's none of our business is it god knows exactly what is best for each one of us now i could not be doing what i'm doing today if it weren't for lars grinn i would not be doing what i'm doing today if jim elliot had not been killed because that was what precipitated me into writing a book i was going to be a jungle missionary for the rest of my life i never dreamed of being anything but a jungle missionary doing linguistic work well god saw to it that a whole lot of things which were far from my imaginations came to pass do you trust him have you given your life away and said lord here i am do anything you want with me what did mary say when the angel came with that piece of news she said behold the handmaiden of the lord let it happen as you say be it unto me according to thy word jesus echoed those words didn't he in the in the garden of gethsemane not my will but thine be done and it was because mary said yes to god that jesus was born mary said yes to god there's an old legend that perhaps that angel who came to mary's house with that stunning piece of news had had to make many stops trying to find a girl who would say yes instead of well but what about me what about my plans mary didn't say what about joseph what will i tell my parents what will the people in the town think no objections no hesitations just behold the handmaiden of the lord do with me anything you want are you scared to say that does it terrify you to think of what god might require a girl came up to me one time she said mrs elliot it really scares me when i hear your testimony she said i mean like well um you know um well i say well what do you mean why does it scare you well i mean like you know um well it's just really scary to hear that that testimony what's scary about it i say well but i mean like what what if god did to me what he did to you and i say well what did god do to me well you know like he took away all he took away two your husbands and i said god has never done anything to me that wasn't for me it takes a while for us to realize that doesn't it of course i didn't know what god was doing but i learn it from this passage and i have to keep reviewing it over and over again we carry death in our body so that the life of jesus may be revealed it is no to myself and yes to god now i cannot think of a more crucial area in which this these three principles are going to be lived out in our lives than in marriage now before i go on to marriage let me encourage you who are single to be spiritual mothers instead of worrying about whether god's going to give you another husband or a husband ask the lord to give you the grace to give your life away for somebody else you know there are desperately needy women in the world perhaps younger than you are perhaps not younger than you but perhaps they don't know anything about jesus christ my life has been greatly blessed by these spiritual mothers who were single amy carmichael was single ms was single my friend catherine morgan was a widow practically all of her life she had four little children the oldest was five and a half when catherine's husband was killed and she is still a missionary in colombia south america at the age of 88. she's been there about 65 years spiritual mothers you're not exempt because you're single ask god to teach you what isaiah 58 10 means wonderful verse for those who are feeling sorry for themselves wondering why god doesn't do this or that that verse speaks of pouring yourself out for other people and then the lord will make your life a watered garden now let's get right down to the nitty-gritty on what it means to give up your right to yourself take up your cross in marriage you walk down that aisle your eyes glued to that most wonderful man in the whole world and you knew you were getting a prize package about 24 hours later you find out that he's a surprise package and i don't care how long you may have known him you may have known him since kindergarten but you didn't know all that there was to know about this man and it begins to be unreal unraveled but you have already made a solemn and irrevocable promise before god and witnesses that you are going to love honor and i hope you didn't leave out the word obey this man and it's going to be for better or for worse in for in sickness and in health for richer or for poorer now of course you're not expecting it to be worse and sickness and poorer but it's probably going to be all three and so from day one god expects a sinful man and a sinful woman to live together in harmony 365 days a year and they're going to be some tensions aren't there and some surprises and god is going to be speaking to you in that still small voice and saying i know what i'm doing this is my will for you now this man in this place with or without this job whatever the situation may be here is where i want you to learn the principle that death has to go to work in you let's look at the second principle take up your cross which means acceptance the giving up your right to yourself is relinquishment the taking up of the cross is acceptance it is mary's word yes lord i will receive this man who stands in the place of christ in my home and your husband is your head not because he's smarter than you are not because he's better looking than you are not because he's bigger and stronger than you are and not because he's more spiritual than you are he might be all of those things or he might be none of them but he is your husband because he has been assigned a divine office which represents christ and your office represents the church the bride of christ that's why we are to submit to our husbands because there is a deep mystery being enacted here the mystery of christ and the church christian marriage human marriage represents that mystery we're not going to understand it all we're going to rebel against it in our sinful human nature but god has certainly taken me through some deep lessons because i've been married to three very very different men believe me very different my first husband was one year younger and i had known him in college and i mean he was just the perfect man in the whole wide world and of course he and i had 27 months of marriage after waiting five and a half years for each other i never expected to be married again i just knew that there was never there wouldn't be any possibility that i could ever love anybody the way i loved jim elliot and 13 years later when i was in my 40s along came addison leach and addison leach was a very different kind of a man he was 18 years older than i he was a phd he had been the president of a seminary and vice president of a college and the dean of another college brilliant speaker brilliant writer wrote about eight books jim one year younger ad 18 years older and lars i'm not going to tell you how many years younger but you certainly can see that he's younger and so the lord is teaching me this is the man to whom you have to submit now and i have to submit in different ways than i had to submit to jim and add be careful how you define your own cross it's easy to think that it is something that you cannot avoid people often say well i guess that's just my cross something that's happened perhaps they take have to take care of a handicapped person or a senile old person well this is my cross it's easy to think that the cross is something that you cannot avoid the true cross is avoidable god is asking us to will to do his will you can say i will not take up that cross i refuse that cross you would never say that of course in so many words but deep down in your heart that's what you're saying you are refusing a cross that jesus may be offering to you a glad yes may transform a grudging got to a glad yes may transform a grudging got to and that thought came to me just recently through a letter that a young woman had written to me telling me that she had grudged the fact that she had to submit to her husband because husbands are fallible aren't they they're not always right they may make very big mistakes and i think one of the main reasons that women refuse to submit to their husbands is fear they're just so afraid that if we do what he says then this and this and this are going to happen they're just going to be disastrous and so they take it upon themselves to disobey god they refuse that cross and they will not make the offering this woman was sort of running the show this lady that wrote to me her husband sort of collapsed as a wimp and just let her do everything well that's what happened back in the garden of eden wasn't it eve was the one with the idea of eating the fruit and adam said fine if that's what the little lady wants that's what the ladies gonna get and he wimped out this lady said i realized that i had to step back start honoring my husband because he is my head and he represents jesus christ another time i was speaking in massachusetts and i mentioned matthew 25 40 which says in as much as you've done it for one of the least of these my brothers you've done it for me and jesus was talking in that particular context about a small child pointing out that this is one of his brothers that's the principle on which all of mother teresa's work was based these derelicts in the in the gutter these dying people almost corpses that she would go out and pick up and take back to her hospital she said when malcolm muggeridge asked her why do you do this she said because we want to do for them what we would do for jesus if we could see him and god is asking us to do for our husbands what we would do for jesus if we could see him and this lady had just made it she and her husband had agreed that their marriage was absolutely untenable any further they had gone through 33 absolutely miserable years and they had agreed that it was time to get a divorce and she made the mistake of coming to that church that day when i was speaking and she went out of there in a rage elizabeth elliot's got to be out of her tree she's telling me that i'm supposed to treat him as though he were jesus christ how in the world can i treat this bum as if he were jesus christ and she said as she was driving home she was thinking it over and thinking it's ridiculous it's outrageous and it's impossible but i'm going to try it i'm going to try it she got home she found her husband sitting she said as usual like a mummy on the sofa watching tv she said i hated that scene but she said i walked in and i said in a gentle voice honey could i speak to you for a minute and for the first time in 33 years he turned off the tv to listen well she said i didn't know what to say what do you say when it's jesus sitting on the sofa she had a long list of things that she thought she was going to say about why they shouldn't be married anymore but the list was completely transformed and she began confessing her sins against him and she didn't get very far with her list before he said wait a minute honey i read a few things to myself of my own to confront too confess well to make a long story short she said our marriage has been totally transformed she said we are in love elizabeth as we were never in love even when we were engaged give up your right to yourself and take up the cross which sometimes means an apology an acknowledgement that you were wrong you may go to that person and they don't want to hear your apology and they're not going to forgive you but you are still going to accept that answer it is a cross but you take it up we are asked to give our flesh and blood our daily life our thoughts our service to one another we are asked to give our affections our intellect our gifts our love we're speaking still about relationship with a husband we're asked to give him love when he doesn't deserve it when he doesn't feel like receiving it and sometimes that love means keeping your mouth shut quite often doesn't it i was talking the other day the group of girls in california all almost all of them married i think and one of them raised this question she said elizabeth she said when you get into a conversation with your husband which is only meant to be a conversation and she said you can see that it is going to move toward an argument she said i don't want it to be an argument i don't want to argue with him i just want to have a friendly discussion what do you do well she was hitting me at a very sore place because i am a born arguer i was a champion debater in high school and college my mother used to say to me bets don't argue with me i can't answer your questions well it hit me right down where i lived and i said i'm not sure i can answer that question because it happens quite often i get into what i want to be a friendly conversation with lars suddenly i find that i'm instantly tempted to come up with what i think is an absolutely perfect argument that he will not be able to say no to i'm sure i can win and so when she said what do you do i said shut up that's the best thing i know just shut up don't say all the things that you think are so brilliant and so needed you give him your love you give him your waking and your sleeping your ordinary human joys and your sorrows now don't give him too many of those no man is interested in hearing how you feel about everything keep your feelings to yourself just choose to feel good about him choose to love him and that is what it means to bear christ in the world we're not going to be bearing christ in the world accepting death in our body and life in those whose lives we impact we will not be in a position to do that until we're prepared to take up the cross christ lives in me and the life which i now live in the flesh i live by the faith of the son of god who loved me and gave himself for me has it occurred to you to think a whole lot about mary's predicament and what it meant for her to be the mother of the son of god i was thinking the other day about the fact that she was never asked to become extraordinary we don't know much of it much at all about mary do we do you know the last thing that mary ever said that's recorded in scripture the very last words that the scripture has were at the first miracle when jesus was at the wedding of cana and the servants came and said we don't have any more wine and mary realized that this was an embarrassment for the host and so she said to the servants do anything he tells you speaking to jesus speaking of jesus do anything he tells you we don't know anything else that mary ever said we do know that she stood at the cross of jesus when he was being crucified not lay in a sobbing heap at the foot of the cross but stood a woman of strength character trust and total self-giving she was not asked to become extraordinary she raised this little child in that little out of the way place which was considered a laughable place nazareth is can anything good come out of nazareth the disciples had said she was not set apart from other women in any way or to make a hard and fast rule of life or to compile a manual of self-mortifications or heroic resolutions you and i are not going to be asked to make a manual of self-mortifications god will see to it that we have sufficient mortification that means dying to ourselves you understand the word mortician mortuary these are derivatives of the same word aren't they they all mean death mortifications death to myself we won't most of us be allowed to do anything like that god wants us to live ordinary lives in an extraordinary way bearing the life of christ in our mortal bodies we are asked to be broken bred and poured out wine and of all the chapel speakers that i heard when i was a student at wheaton college very few are still in my memory very few things that any of them said but i have never forgotten what one chapel speaker said if your life is broken when given to jesus it may be because pieces will feed a multitude when a loaf would satisfy only a little boy if your life is broken when given to jesus it may be because pieces will feed a multitude when a loaf would satisfy only a little boy one writer said if impatient thou let slip thy cross thou will not find it in this world again if comma impatient comma thou let slip thy cross refuse to carry it in other words thou wilt not find it in this world again god is presenting the cross to you in a form which perhaps you're not recognizing some way in which he wants you to accept suffering that's what the cross was for wasn't it when jesus took up the cross was the acceptance of suffering i don't know what form that suffering may take but god does and so he's asking you will you accept this pain this difficulty this strange thing that has happened my very first year as a missionary i was working in the western jungle of ecuador single i was not even engaged to jim at that time jim was working way over the eastern side of the andes with another tribe in the eastern jungle and i had three i should say four actually huge blows to my faith in that very first year as a missionary the first was the murder of the man who was my linguistic helper he was a christian he was the only man in the world that spoke both the colorado indian language which was what i was supposed to be reducing to writing and spanish so he and i could converse in spanish and he could interpret into this indian language so he was indispensable and there was nobody else in the whole world that knew those two languages except don mccario his name was macario and he was shot to death just a few weeks after he and i had been had begun our work and i looked at that corpse with a hit with the hole in the head and i said lord why and i looked into an abyss no answer no light no echo except that the lord is constantly saying to us will you trust me just trust me i do know what i'm doing i didn't make a mistake well before that year was over i had watched a mother die in childbirth then toward the second half of that year i had a proposal at long last from jim elliott he asked me to marry him but he said i'm not going to marry you until you learn quechua so i had to learn spanish then i had to learn the colorado language now i was going to have to learn quechua if i was going to accept his proposal i didn't think it was too high a price to pay for a man like jim elliott so i said yes that meant that i had to leave the western jungle and go over the andes into the eastern jungle on another station not with not where jim was but start the study of the quechua language i had not been there very long when i heard my fiancee's voice on the radio he was on another station he was announcing that the entire station on which he'd been working that year had just gone down the amazon in a flood all the buildings he had built three of them with his own hands that was another blow and then a few weeks later i received a letter from my british colleagues who had been working with whom i had been working among the colorado indians i had left all of my colorado material with these two women they were not linguists but i had shown them how to go forward on the foundation that i had done they wrote to say that all of that language work had been stolen there were no xerox xeroxes in those days and no tape recorders so there were no copies of anything a murder a death a flood and a robbery there's that three-letter word always in our minds isn't there why and the lord says trust me follow me one step at a time i do know what i'm doing but amy carmichael wrote a poem called these strange ashes it was one that had a tremendous influence in my life it summarizes and capsulizes everything i've been trying to say here but these strange ashes lord this nothingness this baffling sense of loss this is what she calls in her poem the son and she she never wants to use her own name or her own sex even she always writes in the masculine but it's as though this man is having a dialogue with god these strange ashes lord this nothingness this baffling sense of loss god's answer is son was the anguish of my stripping less upon the torturing cross was i not brought into the dust of death a worm and no man i yea turned to ashes by the vehement breath of fire on calvary oh son beloved i think he says to you and me today oh daughter beloved this is thy heart's desire this and no other thing follows the fall of the consuming fire on the burnt offering go on and taste the joy set high afar no joy like that to thee see how it lights the way like some great star come now and follow me if you want to be my disciple give up your right to yourself take up your cross and follow one other do i have one minute lars okay one other chapel speaker said this to us if you are going to sing where he leads me i will follow you better be prepared to sing what he feeds me i will swallow and when the indians presented me with some very odd things to eat i had to remember that will you love him will you trust him will you praise him and i would like for us to have that one minute now bowed heads closed eyes ask the lord to show you what he wants you to do i'm in you

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Length: 51min 23sec (3083 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 04 2021