Suffering is Not for Nothing: Gratitude

the title of this series as you know is suffering is not for nothing i'm doing my best to try to help you to understand that there is a very logical sequence in the arrangement of my subjects the six talks but the one that i have today is one that's very difficult to distinguish very sharply from talk number three that was on the subject of acceptance first we talked about truth the terrible truth which is the facts of life the twisted and the fallen world that we live in and then the wonderful facts which deal with another world another level another perspective both are true we need to keep them in perspective abraham looked at the facts of his life his own age and his wife's barrenness and it says he staggered not at the promise of god he looked clearly at the facts and christians ought to be people who are prepared to look most steadily at the facts the awful facts and then look at the other level on which those facts may be interpreted and stagger not at the promise of god so that was talk number one and the second one was on the message god will go to any lengths to get our attention long enough to say i am the lord i love you my will for you is joy and so if we can remember those two aspects the truth the message then it will be easier for us to say yes lord acceptance paul accepted the thorn even though it wasn't to his pre tastes and preferences jesus accepted the cup and said not my will but thine be done and that same vision and that same principle ought to characterize each of us christians as we receive from the hand of god the cup of salvation with whatever it contains for our ultimate redemption and perfection there will be nothing in that cup of salvation except what is necessary so having said all that can we then thank god gratitude is my subject today and i'd like to give you three things to think about under this subject i'm very gratified to see that there are some note takers here and i know i haven't been helping you very much with following points one two and three or anything like that so i'm going to do my best to make that a little bit better to this morning first of all i'd like for us to think about three things two things which ought to distinguish christians from the rest of the world and to be quite honest as i travel around and meet all kinds and varieties of christians i'm dismayed to notice that very often there doesn't seem to be any difference in the way they live and the way the rest of the world lives in the way they respond to the experiences of their lives and the way the world would respond in other words if they were arrested for being christians would there be sufficient evidence to convict them and i'm always asking myself the question what kind of a difference would i expect others to see in my life which would at least catch their attention and make them say there is something different about that woman i've said in my book let me be a woman that i'm not a different kind of a christian because i am a woman but i most certainly ought to be a very different kind of a woman because i'm a christian do you know people to whom you can point and say look at him there is a christian watch that woman's life she is a christian what kind of evidence would your friends see in your life two things which certainly ought to distinguish you and me and everyone who calls himself a christian are acceptance and gratitude and it's very difficult to draw a sharp distinction between them if we can accept a gift then we can say thank you now we all have the experience of receiving all kinds of gifts from friends and relatives and great aunts and people for which we have to say thank you but we really aren't exactly tickled with their choice i mean how many crocheted toilet paper covers can a woman use if that's aunt susie's thing then you receive it every christmas and every birthday perhaps from her and the only thing that really is required of the recipient is to say thank you but when we're talking about the gifts of god we're talking about gifts who come from one who knows exactly what we need even though it is not necessarily to our tastes and preferences and he gives us everything which is appropriate to the job that he wants us to do and so understanding that then we can say yes lord i'll take it it would not have been my choice but knowing you love me i will receive it and i understand that someday i'm going to understand the neces the necessity for this thing so i accept it and then i can even go the step beyond and say thank you thank you lord paul says that in everything we ought to give thanks it's not the experiences of our lives that change us it is our response to those experiences and that should be a very noticeable distinction between the christian and the non-christian i mentioned in an earlier talk the responses of various people that i saw in logan airport one day last february when the airport was closed there was a great variety of responses there from tears to anger to resignation and peace we all know people who have gone through terrible things and have turned out to be pure gold i think every one of us knows somebody like that who has been through awful things and yet that hot fire has refined that steel or that gold we also know people who have been through equally bad things maybe not quite as bad but they have turned out to be angry bitter resentful querialists and generally unget along with able now what was the difference it wasn't the experiences it was their response and the response of a christian should be gratitude thank you lord i'll take this i think we could divide the world into two classes the people who make a habit of complaining about what they haven't got or what they have got and those who make a habit of saying thank you lord for what they haven't got and what they have got and you remember my basic definition of suffering having what you don't want and wanting what you don't have which covers the whole gamut from the smallest things like a toothache or taxes to a tumor it was very unsettling for me when i lived with that jungle tribe called alkas the so-called stone age savages that killed my husband i had the opportunity a couple of years after their death to live with those people and to get to know the people who actually did the killing and i lived in a house with no walls everybody else lived in a house with no walls so this gave me an opportunity to observe very closely virtually everything that went on day and night and i was also under the most relentless and keen scrutiny from them because i was a freak in their midst and everything that i did was not only freakish but highly hilarious and also worth imitating so i got a lot of i got a lot of that i really had never thought of myself as a comedian until i lived with the alka indians and i discovered that i was expected to be non-stop entertainment but one of the things which stood out to me in my observations of their family life was that they never complained about anything and my daughter of course grew up there in the jungle with indians and she was three years old when we went to live with the alkas she had lived with other indians before that and we went back later and lived with other indians again but her husband made a statement to me which i'm sure my husband maybe i should say i'm sure none of my husbands could possibly make about me walt said to me one day he said you know that woman never complains about anything and of course my mother's heart just swelled with pride and i suddenly realized that i probably had nothing whatsoever to do with that in fact it was in spite of me rather than because of me that my son-in-law could say that because number one valerie is more an elliot than she is a howard and the elliots were much more cheerful people i come from a long line of pessimists on both sides champions but i realized that probably the major reason was that she had grown up with indians who never complained we lived in a place where there was terrible weather we had 144 inches of rain per year which is 12 feet i don't know what florida's rainfall is but it was a lot of rain and so when we traveled which was always by foot and trail and sometimes canoe we generally got soaked we got mud sometimes splashed from head to foot but at least up to your knees and we were at the mercy of gnats and mud and mildew and mosquitoes and various other discomforts and the indians would come from maybe a four-hour walk over the trail with say a 50-pound basket of food on their backs the women anyway the men couldn't carry 50 pounds but the women could and i never once saw a woman take that trump line off her forward and set her basket down and say never they just didn't do that now these people were not christians and to my shame i say that i saw among them a cheerfulness a gracious and peaceful and serene acceptance of what we would consider very hostile conditions which was taken for granted no one was patting himself on the back because he didn't complain so let's take a lesson or two from those simple people and make a habit instead of complaining of saying thank you lord my daughter right now is dealing with probably one of the most difficult questions that parents have to deal with in training their children and that's this business of whining her children are obedient they've learned that they know that daddy and mama mean exactly what they say but they don't necessarily do it cheerfully they don't do it necessarily with a smile and sometimes one of them has to get sent back to his bedroom until he finds a nice a nice face val or walt will say now we really don't like that face we don't like that tone of voice you go back into the bedroom and when you find a nice face or a cheerful voice then you can come back and amy carmichael missionary to india whose biography i wrote called a chance to die tells how when she was growing up in a little village in northern ireland they not only had to immediately stretch forth their hand for the spanking which was given by a small paddle called a pandy but they had to say thank you mother well that's a tough discipline isn't it and i had a very charming young lady staying with me a couple of weeks ago who told me this wonderful story about the kind of difference that jesus christ made in her own life when she was probably about 18 years old and this is the sort of story that i'm always looking for and it thrills my soul to see that there is a practical down-to-earth visible difference that jesus christ has made in somebody's life and she said she had been going to i think it was a young life meeting where the speaker talked about honoring your father and your mother and she said most the time it was going in one ear and out the other and all of a sudden something clicked and she said oh i'm supposed to honor my father and my mother and my mother and i are like two cats a lot of times and she said i went home and i began to think about it and i thought oh i can't do that this thing about being a christian is too much but she said i began to pray that god would help me to do that whatever it meant she said i really didn't know what it meant but i knew that complaining and being grumpy and hard to get along with was certainly not fitting to someone who honors father and mother so she said i wanted to go to a certain event and i asked my mother if i could go now she was still living at home and so although she was 17 or 18 she knew that she was under their authority and she said my mother said no and she said i said okay and she said i couldn't believe my ears i couldn't believe it i went into my room and i sat down and i said whoa you know how these kids say i mean like whoa i just said okay it's the first time in my whole life that i have an argument with my mother now that was step one in that girl's obedience to jesus christ and it's all very well to make wonderful professions about being a christian to do your praying and your reading and your hymn singing and go to church and do this and that and the other thing but when it comes right down to where the rubber hits the road what kind of a difference does it make and that girl was able to say thank you lord my mother said no it was my opportunity to obey jesus christ so gratitude and acceptance should distinguish the christian number two gratitude honors god and i got this idea straight out of the bible from the new international version of psalm 50 verse 23 this is what it says he who sacrifices thank offerings honors me and he prepares the way so that i may show him the salvation of god he honors me and prepares the way so that i may show him the salvation of god let me go back to october 25th 1972. that was rather an eventful day in my life i found an apartment for my mother who was moving from florida up to massachusetts to be near three of her six children so that was a major thing that happened that day then the close the son of a very close friend of mine was killed in an automobile accident i had a visit from a young woman who had a three-year-old son with a serious heart anomaly and we had sat down in my living room and talked about the lessons that god was teaching her through this one of which was acceptance and gratitude the condition was such that the doctors had told her you you never know when you may find him dead in his bed or in his playpen and there's nothing we can do until he reaches the age of four but he may not make it to four and then that very same day my husba my husband had to go to the hospital for a lump on his lip and that morning i had written down on just a little piece of scratch paper these words how to deal with suffering of any kind i didn't know all the things that were going to happen in that particular day and i don't know where this came from except i suppose from god how to deal with suffering of any kind number one i wrote recognize it number two accept it number three offer it to god as a sacrifice and number four offer yourself with it and whether i had a premonition that this thing was going to be serious or whether i was just reviewing lessons from other years i really don't remember but that same afternoon we were told by the doctor that my husband had cancer and the next night there was bleeding from another source which had nothing to do with that lump we were filled with fear and resentment and worry and it was all terribly real for both of us and necessitating our coming to christ for a refuge you can imagine the dialogues that i began having with god at that point lord we've been haven't we've been through this once before you took husband number one now surely lord you wouldn't take ad would you and it was as if the lord said i might. trust me so i had to begin all over again i thought learning lessons which i really thought i had learned well enough before i was saying lord did i flunk the test we have to go over this again and the answer was yes you have to go over it again and where do you turn what do you do you cry you pray you ask why but then there's a much better thing to do which is stated in this verse that i read you he who sacrifices thank offerings honors me and he prepares the way so that i may show him the salvation of god now there are a good many circuitous routes to learning to know god but there are some shortcuts and i'm here to suggest that gratitude is one of those shortcuts just start thanking god in advance because no matter what is about to happen you already know that god is in charge you are not adrift in a sea of chaos so what is there to be grateful for well god is still love nothing has changed that god is still god he's sovereign he's got the whole world in his hands he knew that my husband was going to get cancer on that particular day or that we would find out about it before the foundation of the world he knew that so he wasn't taken by surprise and love still wills my joy now i can always thank god for all of those things those are the facts along with these other horrible things with which we can hardly cope it prepares the way so that i may show him the salvation of god so when we went to the doctor again about the second problem we discovered that he had a second kind of cancer the two things were totally unrelated and as we walked across the parking lot my husband began to quote from gray's elegy the curfew tolls the knell of parting day and i could see that he had taken already a view of total despair his first wife had died of cancer his father had died of the kind of cancer which he had just discovered he had and i went back praying that god would keep me from tears particularly since i was going to my brother's house for supper that night and i thought i can't be sitting there dissolved in tears i prayed that he would take my anxieties and my fears and that he would deliver me from making a career out of my troubles which is a lesson that that young woman who had the little boy with a serious heart anomaly had pointed out to me just a week before she said i realized that i could make a career out of my child's illness and she said i began to pray that god would free me from that in order that i might serve others and that lesson had sunk deeply into my heart how little i realized how desperately i was going to need that and so i thought of a little chinese song not that i speak chinese but i heard that this song was sung by chinese refugees in world war ii i will not be afraid i will not be afraid i will look upward and travel onward and not be afraid and god reminded me of the verse in the psalms where he says what time i am afraid i will trust and the verse that says i will bless the lord at all times his praise shall continually be in my mouth now that's a willed conscious deliberate obedience isn't it i will bless the lord regardless of what's happening around here because there is that other level that other perspective a different vision the visible things are transitory it is the invisible things that are really permanent the doctor's verdict was fact i had to believe it but god's word was also fact and i was able to write in my journal these words which i certainly would have forgotten if they weren't there in black and white good and peaceful all day that was my feelings good and peaceful does that make any sense from any other standpoint except the perspective of eternity can't possibly make sense to anybody else and that's why i keep saying that it isn't explanations that we need it's a person we need jesus christ our refuge our fortress the stronghold of my life it takes desolation to teach us our need of him i think of the list of miracles in the new testament that jesus performed if you were to go through the whole new testament and make a list of the situations that people were in when jesus arrived now some of them were relatively trivial for example the embarrassed host at the wedding of cana where the wine had run out now people don't really desperately need wine all the time i guess back then it was pretty much of a stable one of the staple foods but you don't really need seconds at a party do you and yet when the wine ran out the first miracle that jesus performed was to provide not only seconds for the party but better wine than the host had been able to serve on the first round so if the wine hadn't run out the people would not have been prepared to recognize jesus in the way that they did when those 5 000 or 15 or 20 000 people were in need of food on the mountain when jesus had been preaching to them the disciples said they've got to have something to eat they probably could have made it home i don't think they would have starved to death between the mountain and their own houses it was a relatively small thing but it was a miracle and it was in that situation and i remind you of these things because so often we can get completely preoccupied with theory metaphysics invisible principles up here which are very hard to put into practice in our own lives so what is your place of need today has the wine run out are you hungry is it something more desperate like the man who had been crippled for 38 years or the child who had died or the widow who had lost her only son or the baby born blind or the storm that came up when the disciples thought they were perishing what is your place of need where is jesus putting his finger in your life today maybe there is an unanswered prayer that you have been battering away at god's door for years about and it just seems as though he's not paying attention maybe there is some deep resentment in your heart because somebody has hurt you somebody has done something which humanly speaking is unforgivable forgiveness is for real offenses it's not like saying excuse me when you step on somebody's toe by accident excuse me is one thing but forgive me is for real offenses and jesus comes into our lives in these places of need and if we recognize him because of our need then we can receive whatever it is that he's prepared to offer us whether it's the grace of forgiveness or the patience to wait for the answer to that prayer or healing or serenity in the midst of the worst times of your life whatever it is you can receive it and say thank you lord now i personally have never thanked god for cancer i have never thanked god specifically that certain indians murdered my husband i don't think i need to thank god for the cancer and for the murder but i do need to thank god that in the midst of that very situation the world was still in his hands the one who keeps all those galaxies wheeling into in space is the very hand that holds me the hands that were wounded on the cross are the same hands that hold the seven stars the hands that were laid on old john when he was there on that island of patmos and the voice that was like the sound of many waters said to him don't be afraid i am i have the keys now i told you i was going to tell you three things and i don't think i've specified what that third thing is but i've already said it the first thing was that there are think two things which distinguish the christian gratitude and acceptance the second thing was that it honors god and the third thing comes from the second half of the same verse that i read to you psalm 50 verse 23 it prepares the way and it is in these very situations which are so painful having what you don't want wanting with all your heart something that you don't have that thanksgiving can prepare the way for god to show us his salvation ten weeks after that doctor's office visit i wrote in my journal one down 29 to go ad had his first betatron treatment yesterday three and a half minutes under the eye of a machine that size of a freight car making the noise of three motorboats danger high voltage signs in the hallway nuclear medicine on the door alarm system this morning snow on the ground the bare dogwood trees against a blue sky the little raggedy form of mcduff he was my scottish terrier running in the snow all these things in the action of the betatron and we ourselves held in the hand that held the seven stars the hand that is now laid on us again with love and his loving words fear not don't be afraid i am the one who died i am alive and i have the keys remember elisha and his servant sitting there on the mountain and suddenly the word is behold the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about elisha they hadn't been able to see them except with the eye of faith and you and i have no idea of the things that are going on in the unseen world except we do have an idea that they are for our perfection for our fulfillment for our ultimate blessing i close with one verse again from psalm 55 verse 22 cast your burden upon the lord and he will sustain you and to my amazement and delight i discovered that that word burden in the hebrew is the same word as the word for gift this is a transforming truth to me if i thank god for this very thing which is killing me i can begin dimly and faintly to see it as a gift and to realize that it is through that very thing which is so far from being the thing i would have chosen that god wants to teach me his way of salvation i will take the cup of salvation and call on the name of the lord i will say yes lord i will say thank you lord you

Channel: The Elisabeth Elliot Foundation

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Length: 32min 28sec (1948 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2021