Loneliness: 3 Sessions Combined

ligonier ministries the teaching fellowship of rc sproul presents loneliness with elizabeth elliott this message is entitled we are lonely because we are human [Music] it is a pleasure to be here again at ligonier ministries my wife and i are delighted for those of you who may not know it my name is gran and we do buy go by grand at home however it is a little difficult to keep up with marriages and my wife has been married three times jim elliott you may very well know about her second husband was addison leach a college professor and of course i travel with my wife and there's a penalty to pay for that some people come up and say well nice to meet you mr elliot and i just tell them well i'm mr elliott iii it is privileged to be able to have my wife speak and god has indeed given us a combined ministry and that i handle the books and the taping of conferences and for the past 12 years now we've traveled together and i hope that we'll be able to continue for years to come it's a pleasure for my wife to be here and i'll present it to you thank you so much [Applause] i'm so glad that you can meet my husband lars and it is nice that you can relax and realize that his self-image is not going to be damaged if i talk about husbands numbers one and two in fact when people ask him the question well what about your self-image when your wife is the one on the platform and you're always the one at the back he says don't worry about my self-image i don't have one he's uh he and i grew up long before anybody thought about self-images so it's not something that has bothered either one of us you know that the topic of these talks is loneliness and it's a subject which i would hardly have thought of writing a book about i certainly don't consider myself an expert in any sense of the word but it has amazed me over the years to find how many letters i get from lonely people and i finally come to the conclusion that everybody is lonely in some way or other we all have an area into which nobody else seems to enter and although probably many of you would say well i would not call myself a lonely person perhaps by the time i get finished you'll understand that i am referring not only to a personal condition but also to a human condition i think back a number of years to one midnight i was sitting on a plane and off the right wing of the plane the moonlight was flooding the field of clouds and everything inside the plane was dark and silent it was about well as i said it was moonlight and it was midnight and occasionally the stewardess would walk up and down the aisle maybe taking a pillow to somebody or a blanket and there was a couple i assumed a married couple sitting next to me a man and a woman as far as i could tell they were both sound asleep everybody else seemed to be sound asleep but i couldn't sleep the seat was too narrow there was too little leg room for somebody as long-legged as i am the pillow didn't fit nothing was comfortable and suddenly there was a tiny click and the woman next to me had taken out a cigarette and the man had clicked his lighter he reached his hand over and in the light of the lighter i could see the woman's hand and that's really all i could see it was just like a tiny spotlight a very simple gesture which meant virtually nothing i'm sure to them but it just happened that i had been a widow for about a year at this point and that little gesture just reminded me like a sharp pang in my heart of a life which was lost forever to me as far as i knew at that point just the sense of a man and a woman and his hand reached over in a very tiny gesture to help her and i could see the hairs on the back of his hand as he lit the lighter and i thought of the hand that had been so well known to me a hand with square fingernails a little bit squarer than his of hand a little bit more muscular than this man's but a hand that i had thought i was very strong also very capable for drawing he was a builder and a wrestler and also a fairly good artist and it was very tender sometimes for caressing and i had been a widow just about long enough to have forgotten exactly how that felt now at the same time i was realizing how very fortunate i was to be a widow rather than never been married person and i realized what a blessing it was to have been married to this man jim elliott for those very brief 27 months that we had but it was a moment when that sudden tide of loneliness just swept over me and i dare say that everybody listening me listening to me at this moment has had an experience like that a poignant perhaps just instantaneous moment when you had that feeling of being cut off from something or someone or some place that made you feel lonely now that's merely a personal experience and i think of 15 years later when i was a widow again and in that particular case i had had to watch over a period of 10 months as my second husband had died of cancer had to watch him being taken apart month by month as cancer does and i think i had done almost all of my grieving in advance so that by the time he died it was almost a rejoicing because i knew that he was released from terrible pain he had been in the point where he was yelling with pain and i thought of the wonderful words of that hymn guide me oh thou great jehovah there's one stanza that says death of death and hell's destruction land me safe on canaan's side what a wonderful name for jesus christ the death of death and so it was with a tremendous amount of gladness and joy that i attended his funeral service mixed at the same time don't get me wrong with devastating grief and the sense of bereavement that any widow would experience but there were no tears and i'm sure that there must have been people walking out of that funeral thinking that woman must be made of cement but i've had this experience twice myself of being the widow at the funeral and seeing other people just uncontrollably sobbing and i've thought about that a lot and i think that the explanation is fairly simple that the person who has suffered the deepest loss is also the person whom god has provided with the most grace and the peace that passes understanding i have discovered is a very real thing but having said that about my husband's death and funeral it was only about two months later that i was in the grocery store one day just doing my routine grocery shopping and as i went to pick a can or a box of something off the shelf i suddenly found myself sobbing i was very thankful that there wasn't anybody else in that particular aisle at that particular moment because i thought what would i say to them if they came up and said is something that matter can i help you would it have made any sense to them in the grocery store if i had said yes my husband died three months ago what could they have said or two months ago whatever it was that sudden tide it just swept over me and overwhelmed me for for no understandable reason at that moment well you know what i'm talking about we all have these personal experiences but then there's also what i might call a generational experience and i've been reading a very fascinating book about the baby boom and i think that it's understandable that people are conscious of loneliness now in a way that perhaps generations before them never were i'm not a baby boom generation obviously i'm much earlier than that but the transients the mobility the fragmentation of our lives divorce the necessity to move from one place to another because of the short term kinds of jobs that people get and all kinds of factors which make for discontinuity i think have caused loneliness in perhaps an almost like an acute disease or epidemic so there's that generational form that loneliness also takes and there's also what i might call the human experience and if you want a title for this first talk it would be lone we are lonely because we're human it is the human condition it's the human predicament and sin augustine said oh lord thou hast made us for thyself and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee and i think that gets us right down to the very core of the reason for loneliness because basically there is in every one of us a created vacuum created by god that absolutely nothing else will ever fill now what can we do about it that is the predicament that's the human predicament what exactly can we do about it well i remember a few years ago when my husband and i were on a speaking trip together in some little cow town west of the mississippi i can't remember where it was a fairly uh sort of hick town i guess you might call it but we were staying in one of your usual run-of-the-mill motels and it happened to be saturday night and there was a thundering screeching music i guess you call it music coming out of the bar and in order to get to the dining room we had to go more or less through the bar and i noticed that there were a few men standing around there were a few couples sitting at tables but at the bar there were at least four women sitting alone with elbows on the bar hands fingers grasping the rims of glasses legs very generously displayed toward the audience as it were sitting around the bar and as we stood there i just watched and my heart went out to those young women because i could see that their eyes were just ceaselessly scanning the room looking for what well i don't think that they had a date that they were supposed to meet there they were lonely and they didn't know what else to do but go to a bar i'm not sure whether it was exclusively a singles bar but there they were looking for that soul somewhere desperately hoping that there might be that person that would meet their need and it would give them at least perhaps for a few moments a little happiness i picked up a magazine on a mat one of those flight magazines that has to be my last resort when i've exhausted all the reading material i've taken along with me and there was an article there about toronto and singles in toronto something like that i was amazed at the list of things that singles can do in order to find a mate it's going to cost you money and it's going to take you time but in addition to the singles bars there were cruises there were dating services of all sorts there were dance clubs there was something called culinary courtship in which for a very fancy price you could go to a different progressive dinner every couple of weeks and have your first course with one group of people and your second course with the next and etc then there were there was a story about a hostess in birmingham who paired all her guests as they came in the door by handcuffing them and they were forced to spend the rest of the evening together she did make a concession if they had to go to the restroom then she would unlock their handcuffs but she had uniformed guards standing around to make sure that nobody took their handcuffs off so they were stuck together for the whole evening and the interviewer had asked the question have there been any marriages out of these combinations and she said sadly no i i don't think it ever has really worked well right near where i live there's a very large huge grocery emporium that advertises the meat market m-e-e-t and there's one night a week dedicated to singles shopping and presumably you can meet somebody at the meat market to me it's a tragedy and of course i haven't even mentioned the singles columns that are just so pathetic you can bury yourself in busi busyness you can frantically rush around in social life you can take drugs you can take alcohol you can commit suicide but the world doesn't really have an answer i know that there are all kinds of seminars and books and how to do it and endless talk shows on the subject and that's not really what i came here to do tonight i want to take you back to some basics that malaise that generational disease is something for which i do believe jesus christ has an answer i want to read you from this book that i've been reading on the baby boom and the author whose name happens to be landon jones says that in nostalgia the baby boomers have found a haven from anxiety and a means of reaffirming stable identities badly shaken during the passage from adolescence it bears the same relation to anxiety that aspirin does to a headache it offers temporary relief for the baby boomers it was not that the past was so wonderful it was that the present is so troubling and then he goes on to say that one demonstrator during the 1960s student demonstrations at columbia university said that the only place that he felt he could talk to anybody at all and share something and be together and understand was at a baseball game and this authors believes that that may account for the overwhelming popularity of baseball it's one of the very few things that people have in common it gives them a correlative of childhood as something that is stable and predictable and timeless well i think that i have a better answer of something that is stable and predictable and timeless how does a christian look at this whole matter of loneliness which is a form of suffering do we have anything to say now for some people christianity is a very superficial label and it doesn't change their lives at all but i come to you as one who grew up in a home where christianity was a seven day a week business both of my parents were strong christians and their christianity was not only talked about but it was walked and lived in front of us we had a little brass plate over the door of our house over the doorbell button and it said christ is the head of this house the unseen guest at every meal the silent listener to every conversation to my parents jesus christ meant everything and i speak to you not only as one who is very grateful for having been given that kind of christianity from my earliest memories but also as one who does know a little bit about loneliness i spent 11 years in the jungle of ecuador most of them single two years and three months as a married woman but i was a single missionary before i married my husband jim elliott and then i was a single missionary for almost eight years after he died and i speak to you not only as one who believes that jesus christ can make a difference and as one who has experienced loneliness but as one who really does believe that the things that i'm wanting to say to you in this series really do work and i'm one who likes to go way back to the basics and what i discover is that i was created by somebody for something and when god created us as the first chapter of genesis tells us he says about everything that it was good or it was very good but then there is one thing in his creative activity about which he said it was not good and that was that the man should be alone and i think most of us would agree with god on that that it is not a good thing for a man to be alone or for a woman but before adam and eve sinned there was there was a perfect life in the garden of eden two perfect people in a perfect place in a perfect relationship to god and so although they were two separate and autonomous individuals they were created by god and they had a unity in their marriage god said the two should be one flesh but you know what happened in the third chapter of genesis that perfect relationship with god and therefore the perfect relationship with each other was severed because of sin and we've been in an awful mess ever since and so the experience of solitude became an experience of deprivation there's a big difference between loneliness and solitude i think most of us would think of solitude as not a painful one i love to stand on the balcony of our house where we can look out over the ocean at night and look up at the moonlight and see the moonlight on the white caps and hear the thunder of the surf against the rocks that kind of solitude i love and it doesn't carry the connotation of pain but loneliness always carries the connotation of pain there's so many different kinds of loneliness the loneliness of illness for example the ill and the well are two separate worlds aren't they and there doesn't seem to be any congress between them i can remember my husband ad saying that in his uh experience with cancer i have never been ill or incapacitated to any great degree and he said to me you know it's a different world he said you can't even enter into my world i was doing my best to do that but i couldn't do it i had never been there and i cannot say to a person who is seriously ill i know just what you're going through so there are many kinds of loneliness that i don't claim to know anything about the loneliness of divorce the loneliness that came through on the telephone one night late an unknown voice she said is this elizabeth elliott and i said yes and she started to cry and she started then to tell me that she had just been told that she had an incurable disease which would eventually kill her but it would not kill her before a very long and painful process of disintegration and her question of course was why would god allow this to happen to me well could i answer that in words of one syllable could i possibly speak to her need and she felt cut off she said what good am i going to be flat on my back i'm going to be useless i'm going to be cast aside why would god do a thing like this to me well all i could do was take her back to the cross of jesus christ and tell her the old old story jesus loves me this i know for the bible tells me so and there are people who will respond to words like that with anger and bitterness and resentment well if god's so loving why is a thing like this happening to me if god loves me why am i suffering loneliness and what can i say well i can't say i know exactly what you're going through but i can say that i know the one who knows and when i received word that my first husband was missing immediately the lord brought to my mind the words from isaiah 43 verse 2 when thou passes through the waters i will be with thee and through the rivers they shall not overflow thee when thou walkest through the fire thou shalt not be burned neither shall the flame kindle upon me for i am the lord thy god now loneliness is a wilderness and as the title of the subtitle of my book puts it it can be a wilderness and it can also be a pathway to god and when i think of wildernesses i think of jesus and his experience if you're asking is there anyone out there who really knows how i feel is there anyone who has been exactly where i've been who can enter in 100 to my experience of loneliness i'm here to say yes there is one you know that immediately after jesus was baptized he was led by the holy spirit and here's a mystery led by the spirit of god into the wilderness to be tempted by satan now think about that imagine just after his baptism where god had validated who jesus was by the voice that came from heaven when he said this is my beloved son hear him then he was led by the spirit of god into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil and you remember that the devil came along with three kinds of temptation jesus was there alone it says with the wild beasts and i can remember when i was a little child reading that and thinking that's kind of scary to be out in the wilderness with the wild beasts but as i've grown older and thought about my tremendous love for animals and the fact that the animals are sinless creatures and they're doing the will of god just by being what they are i have a sneaking suspicion that the animals were comfort to jesus and there were also angels there but they did not protect him from satan's temptation and satan came along with these three temptations one for the satisfaction of physical desire if you're the son of god command these stones to be made bread because they knew that jesus was hungry hungry he hadn't eaten for 40 days and 40 nights so it was a temptation to perform a miracle for his own satisfaction satisfaction of his physical desire and then immunity from danger he said cast yourself down off this pinnacle and he shall give his angels charge over thee satan actually quoted scripture and then the third thing was if you'll bow down and serve me and worship me then i will give you all the kingdoms of the world and i can only believe that satan did have the power to give jesus those kingdoms and in every case jesus met the temptation of satan by saying it is written it is written it is written and so he was able to overcome the temptation of satan in the wilderness there is a sense in which the temptation to jesus to fall down and worship satan carried a very cheap cost all he had to do was to perform a few little miracles and then fall down and worship satan it didn't even need to be sincere did it but the price of obedience to his father was high the price of obedience to his father was the cross and that's what i what i said i would take you back to that cross jesus had been through the wilderness he had experienced what you and i experienced in the way of temptation in the experience of loneliness and he had been victorious i speak to those in physical isolation those in emotional isolation spiritual isolation people who experience divorce something that i know nothing about or disease death that i know a little bit about and the loneliness of misunderstanding i say to you that this experience of a wilderness can be a pathway to god let me read to you from hebrews the second chapter it tells me that jesus has been through it verse 16 it is not angels mark you that he takes to himself but the sons of abraham that's you and me and therefore he had to be made like these brothers of his in every way so that he might be merciful and faithful as their high priest before god to expiate the sins of the people for since he himself has passed through the test of suffering he is able to help those who are meeting their tests now jesus had to learn obedience by the things which he suffered now there is a little clue there if jesus himself who was perfect had to learn obedience by the things which he suffered shouldn't you and i as fallible and sinful human beings have some lessons to learn through the experience of loneliness think of the fact that jesus was forsaken by all 12 of the disciples in the hour of his extremity you remember that he had prayed in the garden of gethsemane if it be possible let this cup pass from me and then his second prayer was if it is not possible nevertheless not what you want not what i want lord but what you want and then almost immediately after that he said the son of man is about to be delivered into the hands of evil men now we're up against mystery again aren't we not only the mystery of the spirit of god leading him into the wilderness to be tempted but the will of god allowing his own beloved son to be put into the hands of evil men and he did that for you and me so when i speak of the mystery of suffering particularly the mystery of loneliness i speak of one who knows more about it than any of the rest of us and as he hung there on the cross you remember that his last next to the last words were my god my god why hast thou forsaken me he was forsaken for the sake of you and me so that's where we go for an answer for the stilling of our questions we've talked about the fact that loneliness is a human condition it seems to be a generational condition and certainly all of us have experienced it in some form as a personal condition the answers the remedies that the world is offering are far from helpful far from permanent like an aspirin they offer temporary relief but if we go back to the cross back to the one who holds the whole world in his hands and he says when you pass through the waters or through that wilderness i will be with you and through the rivers they shall not overflow you god bless you ligonier ministries the teaching fellowship of rc sproul presents loneliness with elizabeth elliott this message is entitled in acceptance lies peace the title of this second talk is in acceptance lieth peace and i've taken those words from a poem written by amy carmichael a woman whose life has meant more to me than i could ever possibly express she was an irish missionary who went to india back in the late 1890s and spent 53 years there she died in india never had a furlough and she remained single all of her life and she knew i think a great deal about loneliness for many different reasons but this is just one of the many poems of hers that has had a profound impact on my own life and it is where i got the title for my talk she uses the pronoun he i'm sure referring to herself he said i will forget the dying faces the empty places they shall be filled again oh voices moaning deep within me cease but vain the word vain vain not in forgetting life peace he said i will crowd action upon action the strife of faction shall stir me and sustain oh tears that drown the fire of manhood cease but vain the word vain vain not in endeavor lieth peace he said i will withdraw me and be quiet why meddle in life's riot shut be my door to pain desire thou dost befool me thou shalt cease but vain the word vain vain not in aloofness lie of peace he said i will submit i am defeated god hath depleted my life of its rich gain o futile murmurings why will ye not cease but vain the word vain vain not in submission lieth peace he said i will accept the breaking sorrow which god tomorrow will to his son explain then deep then did the turmoil deep within him cease not vain the word not vain for in acceptance lieth peace i think that one aspect of the pain of being alone is the thought how did i deserve this what did i do to deserve this and we are greatly tempted to self-pity which i think is one of the most deadly emotions in the world because self-pity is a swamp of your own choosing that nobody can drag you out of now what does self-pity come from basically i believe that the source of self-pity is pride now that may make some of you a little angry with me but i know enough about it myself because i certainly have been tempted to self-pity and i think at the back of one's mind when we start feeling very sorry for ourselves and we sink into this little swamp and say poor little me and we have a little pity party for ourselves and we think everybody else ought to join in the pity party in the back of our minds is the thought i deserved better than this what have i done to deserve this with the thought i haven't done anything and actually god has cheated me of something you remember the story of job satan approached god in heaven and there's another one of those spiritual paradoxes mysteries satan is permitted to enter the courts of heaven and to challenge god and he challenged god about faith and god called job's attention satan's attention god called satan's attention to his servant job and he said have you considered this man and satan said i sure have he said does he serve you for nothing he's a rich man you've given him everything but take away some of his riches and his lands and his houses and his servants and his children and then see how much he trusts you and god accepted the challenge and gave satan permission to do whatever he wanted to do short of taking job's life and so in quick succession job lost everything his houses his lands his herds his flocks his servants his children and finally the confidence of his wife she said to him why don't you just curse god and die what else is there to do so the question is will job trusts you and job did a lot of complaining we read about the patience of job well i think if you study the book of job you don't find a very patient man but job's answer to god was yes i will trust you in fact he said if you slay me i will still trust you and god i believe is always looking his eyes are running to and fro throughout the whole earth to find a man or a woman who will say yes lord no matter what happens and by the s i mean an a voluntary willed choice i do not mean resignation i don't mean a weary and sort of lazy acceptance of oh well there's what else can i do i don't have any choice sort of helpless acquiescence or worse a teeth gritting white knuckle kind of fist clenching well if this is what you're going to do to me i guess i have to take it i don't have a choice but rather the acceptance that amy carmichael speaks of here it's not mere submission it is a voluntary yes lord yes lord way back in 1949 i was sitting on the side of a mountain on the edge of portland oregon mount tabor it was a beautiful moonlight night there was the warm fragrance of the douglas firs and the warm breezes and sitting about this far away from me was the man that i was desperately in love with and the man that i was desperately hoping was going to say on this idyllic night in this moonlight in this beautiful place with the majesty of mount hood there in front of us will you marry me and that's not what he said he said bet have you thought about the fact that singleness is a gift well the last gift in the world that i wanted was singleness i had thought a lot about singleness and he and i had talked a lot about singleness and as a matter of fact we have actually fallen in love a few months before that actually almost about a year before that experience and he had confessed his love for me but he told me that as far as he knew god wanted him to remain single maybe for the rest of his life but at least until he had been a missionary in the jungle long enough to to assess the situation for himself and decide whether marriage would be a hindrance or a help and i said what do you mean singleness is a gift and i should have known that jim elliott was not likely to make a startling statement like that without having a scripture right at his fingertips so of course he opened he didn't have to open his bible he had it all in his head he said you can check first corinthians 7 it says in there that singleness is a gift and the apostle paul was single when he wrote that and he was strongly recommending that everybody ought to be single just like him before he finishes the chapter how however he does acknowledge that each person has his own appropriate gift from god some the gift of marriage and some the gift of singleness and that it is within the context of that gift that we are to glorify god well i had the gift of singleness a lot longer than i wanted it jim and i were actually married by the time we were both 26 in fact we were married on his 26th birthday i was 10 months older than he but when we came out of that marriage ceremony i remember thinking that now god had given me the greatest gift that any woman could ever desire and i had received the gift of this man that i thought was just the most wonderful man in the whole world i could never possibly love anybody else and i came out of that marriage ceremony elated just thinking about those words till death us do part that was undoubtedly 50 years down the road but now i had the gift that i wanted more than anything else the gift of marriage i'd had the gift of singleness and i'd had to say yes lord and i haven't got time to tell you that story now but that story is told in my book called passion and purity but it was five and a half years of having to say yes lord i will accept this loneliness and this singleness but now god had given me the gift of marriage well it was only 27 months later that i was standing by my shortwave radio one morning when i learned that my husband jim was missing along with four other american missionaries and the lord gave me the scripture that i quoted earlier isaiah 43 2 when thou passes through the waters i will be with thee and it was five days before we knew that the men were actually dead and you can imagine the desperate praying that we five wives did during those days asking god begging god pleading with god to bring our husbands back safely from what we all knew was a very dangerous venture and ultimately when a ground party was able to reach the site where the men had camped the report came again by shortwave to tell us that they were all speared to death and i realized over a long period certainly it was not the first thought that struck me but gradually the realization grew that god had given me a third gift which was widowhood certainly the last gift that any woman would ask for i hope that before i finish with these talks i'll be able to at least help you to understand why this makes sense to me maybe it'll never make any sense to some of you to think of singleness or widowhood as a gift but it was the context of the will of god for me at that point god had permitted this thing to happen and now it was my job either to say yes lord or no lord now if i had shaken my fist in god's face or gritted my teeth and said well there's nothing else i can do about it i would have still had to go through the agonies of widowhood so i only had two choices it was either yes lord or no lord but way back when i was 12 years old i had prayed that god would work out his whole will in my life at any cost and it was as if the lord was saying to me did you want to rescind that prayer did you want to renege on your promise to do my will whose will did you ask for and i said well yours lord so i began to see that it was within the context of being a widow that i was to glorify god and over these years i have seen that the experiences through which god took me the deep water through which i had to go when he walked with me the hot fires whatever else whatever other metaphors you would choose to describe the experiences of widowhood it is that very deep valley deep water hot fire that gave me a platform that gave me a responsibility and a privilege of speaking to others in the same situation well that was 1956 when i became a widow for the first time and i was married again in 1969 that was the miracle that i was sure could never happen i thought it was a miracle i got married the first time i couldn't imagine that anybody would want to marry me the second time and this amazing wonderful man came along and i knew that i would probably be widowed a second time in the ordinary course of human events because my second husband was 18 years older than i but i didn't expect it to be quite so soon we learned three years later that he had cancer and he died after four and a half years and so god had given me the gift of marriage the second time and then he gave me the gift of widowhood the second time and now uh ever since 1977 i've been married to lars grant and as far as i know he's feeling fine tonight as you can see on camera and he's still back there so i'm grateful for that and i think of of what a gift lars is to me and actually when lars was courting me and he did so in a very gentlemanly um you might say southern slow way i mean he is a bit laid back as you can probably tell but he moved with deliberate speed if he had done it any other way he would have scared me off but it was with deliberate speed that he was courting me and as i could see that he was beginning to close in for the kill i began to pray for god's answer because i had absolutely no idea of ever getting married the third time and it just didn't fit my idea of what i was supposed to do it certainly was not anything that i had imagined that god could possibly want me to do and my answer would have been a flat no except that i felt that there was a still small voice saying to me possibly i'm trying to give you a gift have you considered that possibility and i said no lord i really hadn't considered that possibility and the lord was saying well you jolly well better and so i began to pray for an answer if when if and when lars did come around and pop that question i needed to have god's answer and one of the scriptures that he gave me because i always go back to this straight edge in order to straighten out my crooked thinking and it was in first corinthians 12 that i found this verse men have different gifts but it is the same lord who accomplishes his purposes through them all and i began to see that although lars could not do all the things that jim could do and lars couldn't do all the things that ad could do ad couldn't do all the things that jim could do either and lars could do some things that neither jim nor ad could do i was making these odious comparisons people have said to me oh you would never think of comparing your husbands would you and i said of course i would i do it all the time and as lars will tell you the most perfect men in the world are your why your wife's first and second husbands but i don't think i do make those odious comparisons too often do i darling um but that verse was pretty important men have different gifts it is the same lord who accomplishes his purposes through them all and so i saw that god was asking me to accept a totally new gift unexpected unasked but it was going to be within the context of being the wife of lars grant that i was to glorify god and the gift of widowhood or the gift of loneliness is in fact a a gift given for the sake of the body body with a capital b i mean the body of christ you know god doesn't give us any gifts just for ourselves alone if you have the gift of a wonderful baritone voice maybe you sing in the shower and you probably enjoy that but i would hope that you sing for somebody else too and when you stop and think about it there isn't a single gift that any of us has that's just for ourselves alone it is to be received with thanksgiving offered to god and used for the sake of the body and every gift carries with it not only the privilege but also a responsibility and i think of my friend daphne cronin she is back there in a wheelchair on the back row and i didn't know daphne very well at all before she had her accident she was headed for the olympics in horsemanship and how long ago was it daphne two years has it been two years now she was going over a jump i think it was one of the last jumps in one of those preparatory events before she was to go to the olympics and the horse fell on her and so she is now quadriplegic now daphne told me a wonderful story she told me how there was one woman in that hospital in the rehab hospital who just gave herself to daphne to bring her back to all the capability that the muscles that she had left were capable of doing was her name brenda is that correct and daphne said that only god knew what brenda had meant to her well lo and behold the next year it was brenda who was ill and daphne said i found myself the one at the end of the bid and brenda was in the bid and i wish i had more time to tell you more details of this story but the point i'm trying to make is that daphne had accepted this thing that had happened to her such a totally devastating thing and had offered it back to god maybe not even in so many words i'm not really sure about that but she had accepted it there was no question about that she gave a testimony in our church about how god had enabled her to accept this thing and then god gave her responsibility responsibility for somebody else and daphne said it was a wonderful thing to see the progress the leaps and bounds that i made in physical progress because i was giving myself to brenda now she has a platform that i don't have i have never been ill to me not to mention paralyzed but every gift is a privilege given to us by god every privilege carries responsibility and in every situation there are lessons for us to learn lessons which absolutely cannot be learned in any other way now i know that's true in my own life i could not possibly know god in the way that i have known him because of the loneliness that i have experienced in romans 4 14 verses 7 to 9 we read this no one of us lives and equally no one of us dies for himself alone if we live we live for the lord and if we die we die for the lord whether therefore we live or die we belong to the lord this is why christ died and came to life again to establish his lordship over the dead and the living i imagine that some of you have had an experience that to you is worse than death you would rather have died than have gone through that experience and i suppose that that thought must have crossed daphne's mind a few times in those agonizing struggles and it's not as though they're ever going to be over but the lord didn't give you that privilege because he said i want to teach you something i want to reveal myself to you in a way that you would not have eyes to see or ears to hear or heart to understand without going through this wilderness this deep water this dark valley this hot fire well think about the gifts that god has given to you will you believe in god's love and purpose will you seek his instruction in it for example if you have right now some new experience of helplessness and dependency all of us have experiences when we feel totally helpless and to be quite honest i felt very helpless yesterday i was very tired because the earlier part of this week was rather rigorous with other things in lincoln nebraska and we traveled on wednesday and yesterday i was trying to get myself prepared and psyched up and finally prepared for tonight and i just said lord i don't know whatever gave you the idea that i could do this and i certainly felt that i couldn't do it and i know that i could not have done it without your prayers and i know many of you have been praying for me in the prayers of other people and without my own prayers and my husband's prayers the branch cannot bear fruit of itself it's only when we abide in the vine jesus said without me you could do nothing now when we come to this position of helplessness and dependence remember that jesus has been there too jesus was in such an agony over the conflict of his own will with the will of his fathers that he swept great drops of blood but he came to the point where he said not my will but thine be done now lest you think that i'm some kind of a paragon um without any feelings or that i'm made of cement i'm not going to read you one of my love letters to jim but i thought i'd read you one of just a portion of one of his to me during this long period when we were agonizing because of loneliness for each other missing each other to the point where i was almost physically sick at times and he wrote me this he said your sense of loss that are not being able to share things these past few months is not new to me he had left for ecuador south america and he was writing these exciting letters about his journey by boat down the west coast of central and south america and all the wonderful new experiences in ecuador and i was just in agony to think that he was going through all that as a single man and here i was back in new jersey he said i know this feeling and i often tell him about it and then the realistic facing of non-accomplishment comes to me and crushes to silence all telling for if really we have denied ourselves to and from each other for his sake then should we not expect to see about us the prophet of such denial and this i look vainly for it comes to this i am a single man for the kingdom's sake for the sake of the body in other words it's more rapid advance it's more potent realization and then skipping some he says there is the somewhat philosophical real realization that actually i have lost nothing we may imagine what it would be like to share a given event event and feel lost at having to experience it alone but let us not forget the loss is imagined not real i imagine peaks of enjoyment when i think of doing things together but let not the hoping for it dull the doing of it alone let not the hoping for it dull the doing of it alone and then he says let not our longing slay the appetite of our living a pretty well expressed letter for a love letter isn't it for a guy who was only let's see how old was he 25 i guess at that time so there is a world of difference between a yes which doesn't have any agony attached to it and a yes which means agony i've described i've given you jim's description of his own feelings and i think i was probably going through worse agonies than he was i wasn't having all the fun that he was and the distractions but jesus was on his knees in the garden of gethsemane sweating great drops of blood but finally coming to the place of saying yes to his father's will it's one thing to agonize it's another thing to respond with bitterness and resentment and anger and you and i have that choice in first peter the first chapter he's speaking to exiles people who must have been very lonely very cut off very alienated and he comforts them with these wonderful opening words he's speaking to the he tells them the places where they live that he's writing to and he said you're chosen of old in the purpose of god the father hallowed to his service by the spirit and consecrated with the sprinkled blood of jesus christ you are under the protection of his power until salvation comes that's verse 5 and then he says in verses 6 and 7 this is cause for great joy even though now you smart for a little while if need be under trials of many kinds even gold passes through the assayer's fire and more precious than perishable gold is faith which has stood the test these trials come so that your faith may prove itself worthy of all praise glory and honor when jesus christ is revealed and i would remind you of the verse that i gave you in my first talk since he himself has passed through the test of suffering he is able to help those who are meeting their tests now whatever your experience of loneliness may be whatever wilderness god is calling you to go through remember he went through it first there's an old hymn that says christ leads us through no darker rooms than he went through before i can testify with all my heart that in acceptance lieth peace and by acceptance i mean a simple willed act of saying lord i don't like it i don't understand it i don't know how i'm going to bear it but by your grace i'll take it my answer is yes god bless you ligonier ministries the teaching fellowship of rc sproul presents loneliness with elizabeth elliott this message is entitled something to offer god [Music] our first talk in this series loneliness was on we are lonely because we're human and then the second one was called inacceptance life peace my third talk i've entitled something to offer god as i've said earlier there are many forms of loneliness that i've never experienced but a friend of mine was divorced and she wrote this which she gave me permission to put into my book loneliness my joy is becoming less dependent upon my own immediate circumstances and more attached to what he is doing as limited as my understanding is now i know that he is a god who never loses a god who has taken the ultimate humiliation and defeat and turned it inside out somehow my ruined plans fit into his larger plans and so in the moments when i am forced to face my own loneliness i find that i'm not really alone at all it's always good to hear things said by more than one witness and i think of paul's words to the roman christians he said we can be full of joy here and now even in our trials and troubles these very things will give us patient endurance this in turn will develop a mature character and a character of this sort produces a steady hope a hope that will never disappoint us full of joy here and now even in our trials and troubles it is possible if you know jesus christ but to know jesus christ to be a christian means a total unreserved identification with him in his death and in his resurrection christians are people who say that they believe in the cross but to say that you believe in the cross is one thing to be willing to die with him and to take up the cross and to follow him is something very different and there is never a day that goes by for any of us i really believe when we are not given the choice between ourselves and the cross and the cross remember is when the will of god cuts across the will of man and we have the choice then of saying yes lord and know to ourselves if we say no lord then we cannot legitimately call him lord we talked about peace coming out of acceptance and if we have accepted fully the gift of loneliness this situation which we cannot change right now and i don't mean to be misunderstood as saying that there is never any solution here on earth for loneliness or that there aren't some things that you can do about it and there are plenty of books and thousands of seminars and all the rest of it that'll give you some how-to's and i don't mean to say that i'm against those various human methods at least some of them i wouldn't recommend that you go to the singles bar and sit there with your eyes ceaselessly scanning the room but those are not permanent uh i can't even call them solutions because what i'm offering to you i wouldn't call a solution either it is a way of handling something that we can't really handle somebody has not only somebody but a number of people have said to me when you lived in the jungle weren't you very isolated and i said yes i lived in one place where i was three days away from the nearest mission station three days by trail and canoe and i was in a position where nobody spoke any english except my three-year-old daughter who was certainly not a very scintillating conversationalist and she spoke the indian languages too so yes i've experienced loneliness and the question has often been well how did you handle it and i would hope that the things that i've already said to you would indicate that it's not a case of my handling it it's a case of my handing it over to god and that does not necessarily instantaneously change the feeling it may never change the feeling but it is something to be offered to god that's where i take my title for this talk we do have something to offer to god once i have accepted my situation my loneliness my human condition and said yes lord then the next thing that i can do is to offer to him what the bible calls the sacrifice of thanksgiving there are several sacrifices spoken of in the new testament and one of them is the sacrifice of thanksgiving and by the grace of god i can say thank you lord for this experience of loneliness because i believe in his love because i believe that in his love there is a purpose and i don't have to know what that is now i don't have to see how that fits into god's pattern the time will come when i will see that but in the meantime what is called for well you guessed it faith it's simply trust and again and again in my life where i've had experiences that have made me look up and say why lord his answer is trust me just trust me i do know what i'm doing i do have the whole world in my hands i've got everything that concerns you not only in my hands but on my heart now will you trust me and so i can say yes lord thank you lord and offer back to him the sacrifice of thanksgiving now there are some other things that we can offer as well one of them i've already spoken about and that is my will to be a christian is to identify myself wholeheartedly unreservedly and irrevocably with jesus christ in his death and in his resurrection and i surrender my will to him and say not my will be done echoing the prayer of our savior in gethsemane not my will but thine be done so i offer the sacrifice of thanksgiving i offer up my will and when i offer my will it is in the willingness also to share in christ's sufferings people have said to me you're always talking about suffering does a christian have to suffer and the answer is yes jesus said in the world you will have tribulation but be of good cheer i have overcome the world but faith is the victory that overcomes the world we cannot see that there's any victory around us we see tragedy heartbreak disaster everywhere we look and most people most people's response if they believe in god at all is to shake their fist in god's face and then there are those who try to tell themselves that there isn't any god and we're all at the mercy of chance but he waits in silence for you and me to say yes lord i not only accept this experience but i accept the possibility of entering in via this experience to your sufferings now do you think this is just an elizabeth elliott notion i trust that everything i say is backed up with scripture i don't always have time to give you the references for everything but i will give you the reference for this one first peter 4 12 and 13. colossians 1 24 and philippians 1 29 those are three verses that speak of this mystery of sharing in the sufferings of christ let me just read first peter 4 12-13 my dear friends do not be bewildered by the fiery ordeal that is upon you as though it were something extraordinary it gives you a share in christ's sufferings and that is cause for joy and when his glory is revealed your joy will be triumphant now can you understand that i can't i can't imagine how it's possible for me as an ordinary human being to enter into the sufferings of him who was crucified and bore all of our griefs and all of our sorrows and as f w h meyer says in his poem saint paul desperate tides of the whole great world's anguish forced through the channels of a single heart that's what happened to him and he in his mercy looks down at you and me and he says will you suffer with me will you share in christ's sufferings and in those passages in in the passage in colossians that i mentioned colossians 1 24 there is an even more mysterious word which is that these troubles these very sufferings that paul is referring to and he was in prison when he wrote this and i'm told although the scripture doesn't mention this but at in those days he was chained he would have been chained between two guards chained to these guards his left his left arm chained to the right arm of one guard and his right arm chained to the left heart arm of another guard can you imagine a situation like that and he said it is in my poor human flesh i am able to help to fill up the sufferings of christ yet to be endured for the sake of the body now there is a profound theological mystery there that's way beyond anything i can understand but i leave it for you to think about all i can mention in this brief time is that i am permitted the privilege of offering my will to god my willingness to share in his sufferings another offering is my trust just my willingness to say yes lord i don't have to understand it i will trust you i can trust him because i know there's a purpose that the measure of my suffering is meted out according to his wisdom and it is under his control it's never out of his control it may seem to be and there are times when we feel as if we're just overwhelmed and we can't possibly survive anymore and then we have a verse that comforts me greatly first corinthians 10 13 there is no temptation that has taken you but such as is common to mankind and god is faithful and will never suffer you to be tempted beyond your power to endure but will with the temptation make a way of escape so when you think that you've just had it and you can't take anymore just remember that the measure of that suffering is very carefully meted out and god knows where the end of your rope is you may think you've gotten there but he knows that there's still a little bit more and he also knows that he's the one that is there to provide the grace that you need and when the burdens grow greater the grace grows greater the grace will always be there exactly apportioned to the need so i can offer him my trust i can offer him my gladness gladness that the loneliness is in itself can you get this concept in your head i can't explain it to you but i can state it that the loneliness itself is material for sacrifice god has offered you something which by saying yes lord i'll take it and accepting it and offering it back with thanksgiving it then is in itself material for sacrifice and i have found this to be a life-changing fact when i have been devastated by sorrow or disappointment or loneliness or suffering of whatever kind to take that very thing itself whatever it is it stabs your heart empties your hands demolishes your dreams you take that very thing in a simple act of faith i would recommend that you get down on your knees that helps me and i like to be physical about things because i'm very much of the earth earthy and i'm not by any means very spiritual so it helps me to make my spiritual commitments to god in a physical way so i get down on my knees i lift up my hands and i put whatever that thing is my loneliness my disappointment my sorrow in my hands and i say lord i can't handle this you take it i offer it up to you and he knows how to transform it how is he going to transform it don't ask me i gave you the example of my friend daphne a transformed life which is in the in the process of being transformed herself she is given the privilege of helping to transform somebody else's and that's what we're here for the gift of loneliness is for the sake of the body for the sake of the world i think of a widow lady who was like a gift from god to our family when i was a young young woman i guess i was in college when my mother discovered this widow lady who was in her 70s who lived in the same town she was lonely she lived in a great big old rattling empty house by herself she was stone deaf but she was to me an icon of godliness the very visible sign of what true simple humble cheerful godliness is all about she came to be a helper in our house and she would come in the daytime and one of us would always have to go and pick her up and when i was home from college in the summertime or whatever i would often be the chauffeur and i would have to go over to her house and it was really a bleak miserable horrible place and there would be a little sign in the on the door that said i am home please come in because she couldn't hear the doorbell she couldn't hear a knock she couldn't she had no telephone and she had such trust that the lord was going to take care of her obviously anybody could have walked in and done anything they wanted to her but i would have to walk in and walk through the house till i'd found her and as soon as i found her you know i tap her on the shoulder and she'd look up with this radiant smile and say she'd say in her funny voice because she had no idea what she sounded like oh here you are and then she'd come and get in the car and whatever the weather was if it was beautiful sunny day she'd say oh it gives folks a chance to do what they want and if it was a miserable day sleeting or raining or snowing she'd say oh it gives folks a chance to do what they want and everything was just fine with her and she came to our house and she would make piles of brown sugar cookies and gallons of applesauce and she would sit and entertain my invalid grandmother and she was a ray of sunshine and a godsend to us and i thought of how in her widowhood she spent her whole life giving to others in fact she took care of the 95 year old man across the street she was always talking about him as an old man she herself being only about 75 didn't think of herself as old at all and she talked about when they get old they gets like this and that and she would describe old mr voorhees across the street she had only one son and as far as we could tell he never came near her never did one single thing for her but we became her family and she became absolutely indispensable to us and i've thought of how without any self-consciousness that woman laid down her life for us she made her life an offering for us she had no interest in herself never talked about herself was interested in everything that we did and she was the visible manifestation of what jesus meant in matthew 25 verse 40. where he has told them that when i was hungry you fed me when i was naked you clothed me when i was sick you visited me when i was in prison you came to me and they said when did we ever see you naked when did we ever feed you when did we ever give you clothes and his answer was inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brothers you have done it for me and i think how that's exactly what mrs kershaw did i feel sure that she is going to be so far ahead of me and probably others in heaven because jesus said the first shall be last and the last shall be first in as much as you've done it for one of the least of these my brothers you've done it for me so her life was an offering her service of sacrifice was an offering i think of anna in scripture she was a widow 84 years old in the temple when mary and joseph arrived to have jesus dedicated and circumcised and anna recognized him immediately and went out and told people about the child that had been born but we read that she spent her days she had only been married seven years and then had been a widow until she was 84. so that's a lot of years of widowhood assuming that she was married as a young woman but the scripture says she spent her time worshiping fasting praying and giving thanks in her widowhood she had something to offer i think of mary and martha and lazarus all of them single and all of them living together and they made a home for jesus it's very plain from the scriptures that jesus loved to go to that home in bethany where mary and martha and lazarus lived we don't know much else about them except that they did make a home for him and it was a place of refuge and a place of peace for him in their loneliness so instead of the ceaseless hungry search for fulfillment that we see on every hand around us the search for companionship and for solutions will you waste your enem will you waste your energies and your time and your strength on trying to figure out the whys and the hows of how god is going to do this these are secrets of his or will you simply trust him some of you i'm sure are familiar with the poem the hound of heaven and i'm not going to read you the whole poem it's a very long one but it's a story of a man and i'm told that he was an alcoholic francis thompson and he had tried to find god in every way that he could and then he decided to try to fl to flee from him he had sought for god in nature and in the faces of children and he says this i fled him down the nights and down the days i fled him down the arches of the years i fled him down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind and in the midst of tears i hid from him and then he tells how he tried romantic love he tried the love of children he tried nature while still with unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace deliberate speed majestic instancy came on the following feat and at last the hound of heaven chases him to earth and he hears a voice around him like a bursting sea which says all which i took from thee i did but take not for thy harms but just that thou should seek it in my arms all which thy child's mistake fancies as lost i have stored for thee at home rise clasp my hand and come some of you feel as though you've lost a great deal maybe some of you have recently lost someone that you love remember these words all that i took for thee i took not for thy arms but that thou might find it in my arms now it'd be very easy for us to get hung up with the house and the wise how are we going to find whatever it is we've lost in his arms now it's very easy for us to have lost someone who is a christian to imagine that someday we will see that person again in heaven but other things that you lose stored for us at home i have stored for thee at home he said did we only fancy it at la as lost well we can't ask too many questions i've made a list of some of the questions that people asked in the scripture can god spread a table in the wilderness has your god been able to save you from from the lions can these bones live again how is the lord to save jerusalem is this your care for the widow you can see that there's a note of slight derision not sarcasm in some of these questions which way are we to turn why wait any longer for him to help us where can we buy bread how can a man be born when he is old how can you give me living water how can this man give us his flesh to eat how is it that this untrained man can teach what is the good of that for such a crowd remember when the little boy brought his five loaves and two fishes one of the disciples said that what is the good of that for such a crowd who will roll away the stone some of those questions you'll recognize and you'll know what the answers were so the second thing that we have to offer for god to god i gave you a list under number one primarily the sacrifice of thanksgiving the sacrifice of your will the offering up of your trust and now your obedience and i have found the most wonderful therapy in my periods of deepest grief is obedience there is no consolation like obedience and when my first husband died i was living alone on a jungle station then trying to do everything that he and i had done together and i just found that by doing the next thing without trying to think about how i was ever going to get through tomorrow or even how i was ever going through this afternoon just doing the next thing it was in doing my duties faithfully and humbly before god offering up offering them up to him that i found the transformation of my suffering and i can't offer you any greater remedy than to seek your fulfillment in his arms and to recognize that this is your job here and now in spite of your feelings some of you may be suffering with the empty nest syndrome i don't see too many of you in my present audience who look as though you would be that age but there may be others who will be watching later and i had a letter from a friend of mine who was just on the verge of that very thing she had just married off her second daughter and she had just one left at home and she said this as painful and emotional as it seems now that amy will be at home only one more year i know that then there will be grace sufficient and a new set of marching orders and this gives such hope for the giver of the promise may be trusted and i believe that this is what follows loss of any kind a new set of marching orders a mother's loss of her child a wife's of her husband a lovers of his beloved a man's loss of his job devastating thing the loss of health of self-esteem of a home we have to have ears to hear what that new set of marching orders will be well there i was on a jungle station alone and i certainly was not catapulted to sainthood i went back over some old journals and i'll give you a little sample i got so impatient with the girls in school that i had to come downstairs for a while and write a letter just for a break then the afternoon held the instruction class for those who teach the children's meeting i feel helpless without jim he always taught that class a thousand little things come up constantly gasoline for the lamps where did he store it someone broke into the storeroom what did they steal i don't even know what was in it hector the teacher of the indian school came up to discuss his salary such a complicated business i don't even know i don't even understand it all but although my spiritual ambitions were high i just give you that little insight lest you think that the gift of widowhood and of loneliness catapulted me to sainthood it didn't i'm a very long way from it and it's been over all these many years since 1956 that god has been teaching me these lessons with tremendous patience with grace with love and he will do that for you if any of you feel as if you're just beginners in the school of faith and maybe you feel as if you've blown everything that it's one step at a time one day at a time and the next thing you do the next thing and the third thing the last thing that i can just barely touch on try to look at the invisible it's when we look at the circumstances around us that we fall apart the eye of faith sees beyond the stuff of this ordinary world when we're lonely we feel useless unloved helpless and we even hate ourselves remember that saint augustine said lord thou hast made us for thyself and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee loneliness is a wilderness but it can also be a pathway to god ask god to help you to see that pathway which leads to him to enable you to say yes lord i'll take it to offer it back to him with thanksgiving and then to offer him your trust and your obedience god bless you you

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Length: 94min 11sec (5651 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 10 2020