The Testimony of Valerie Elliot Shepard, daughter of Jim & Elisabeth Elliot

[Music] good evening everybody and trusting the lord for him to open your ears to what he has to say to you and for me to say what he wants me to say i'm very grateful very humbled by the parents that god gave me and of course i didn't choose them of course i continually am amazed at what they wrote and how my mother spoke and so i just continue to be a recipient of the blessing they were to so many and so i'm just going to share quickly their story which you know most of from watching through gates of splendor but i'm going to uh explain i guess my perspective of living in the jungle and what i learned from my mother and of course what i've learned from my father just through his writings as an adult and of course things that my mother taught me or told me as i was growing up she often said val you're so much like your dad which makes me happy to know but uh i'm i'm not sure exactly what she was referring to back then because i was small and not or young and i don't remember specifically how she equated our personalities uh i think it's because of a love of adventure but i also know my mother had a love of adventure they met each other in college her senior year and her his junior year and they were both greek majors actually they might have met when she was a junior but anyway they started falling in love her senior year after my father had asked her if she would study greek with him she was pretty surprised that he asked her because he was known on campus for telling people not to date and telling people that boy girl relationships took way too much time and we were we were there where the students were there to study to show this themselves approved unto god called it the aug agree degree approved unto god so she was happily surprised to go and study with him but also wondering what this meant because she had thought god had called her to the single life on the mission field and he had eventually told her right before graduation that he loved her and that he didn't think he'd be able to marry her because he felt god had called him to the single life on the mission field also so that was a pretty hard pill or big pill for her to swallow when he told her that he loved her it wasn't in her categories she'd been taught by her dad and her four brothers had been taught very clearly by her dad that they should never tell a woman that they love her unless they are ready to ask her to marry them and here was my father saying i'm not sure i can marry you but i want you to know that i love you as they sat in a cemetery after a long walk they sat on it on a a slab a slap a concrete bench and they talked and were very quiet about thinking of the mystery of dying to self and following christ because my father said we have to die to our feelings after he had told her that he loved her and as they sat in silence thinking on that the shadow of a cross which was on a tombstone behind them fell between them on the ground in front and they looked at it and recognized that god had put it there for them to continue to focus on what jesus had done on the cross for them which meant that they also had to give up their own rights to themselves or give up their feelings in order to obey him so they decided when she graduated that it was really my mother's suggestion that they not right at all for 15 weeks that's through the summer time she was not going to be coming back to wheaton they didn't know when they'd see each other again but she knew she was probably going to pbi which was in alberta canada the plymouth prairie bible institute is what it's called and she was going there for bible study and possibly to teach greek but also praying all the time where do you want me god where should i be going so when my father gave her a little gift for her graduation it was the plymouth brethren assembly's little hymnal called the little flock hymnal and she opened it eagerly when she got back to her room to find out what he might have written inside and he had only written ii timothy 2 3 and 4. a soldier must not be entangled in civilian affairs he is to follow the master or the commander and she realized his message to her was they were to focus on doing what god wanted them to do period so waiting in prayer were the hallmarks of the next five years five years they they were in love they loved becoming more and more intense towards the last two years and for five years they only saw each other five times they wrote letters consistently practically every two to three weeks they were receiving letters from each other and as i said waiting and prayer were what they continued to do when my father was in his junior year at college he began to keep a journal and so some of his writings have definitely influenced me and be and blown me away by their commitment by his desire to truly die for christ's sake so he wrote it one time during his senior year he was studying psalm 104 and he wrote this meditation he makes his ministers a flame of fire it says in that psalm am i ignitable he asked god deliver me from the dread asbestos of other things in quotes other things saturate me with the oil of the spirit that i may be a flame the flame is transient often short-lived canst thou bear this my soul short life in me there dwells the spirit of the great short-lived in other words christ and his short life on earth whose zeal for god's house consumed him and he has promised baptism with the spirit and with fire make me thy fuel flame of god he wrote another time he wrote father if thou let me go to south america to labor with thee and to die i pray that thou would let me go soon nevertheless not my will now he had heard in his junior year about the outca indians in ecuador that they were a savage stone age tribe primitive tribe knew nothing about the outside world but that they usually almost always killed anybody that came into their territory some shell oil workers shell oil company had gone down there for explore exploration and develop oil uh plants i guess and some workers had been killed because they encroached upon the alka territory now the alkas are now called wyodani so i try to remember to continue to call them that but as i grew up we knew them as alkas they did ask once they became christians and knew that the world had heard about them from the fact that they had killed the five men they asked that they'd be called wyodani which means the people instead of savage alka means savage in the kichwa language now my parents first were missionaries to the kicho indians and they were married only 27 months living among quechuas before my father went with the other four men and was killed a few weeks later in his journal my father wrote i prayed a strange prayer today and this prayer has meant a lot to me i coveted i covenanted with the father that he would do either of two things he would either glorify himself to the utmost in me or slay me by his grace i shall not have his second best for he heard me i believe so that now i have nothing to look forward to but a life of sacrificial sonship or heaven soon perhaps tomorrow what a prospect he said excitedly so he was consumed with longing to know and do god's will and to bring the gospel to people who had never heard he loved to tell american audiences because he did speak in a lot of assemblies or churches that americans don't need a call to the mission field they need a kick in the seat of their pants they needed a kick in the seat of their pants my mother during those five years was praying specifically lord where do you want me to go and still not knowing whether she would marry my dad she thought at first she might be going to africa and then she thought she might go to the south pacific and then she thought she might be going to india because amy carmichael's life and ministry had meant so much to her well god eventually assured her that she was to go to ecuador also and she arrived in ecuador and quito two months after after my father his spanish language study another word from my father's journal was satan's word is go and work and this is this has a special meaning to my husband and me because we were working so hard for 15 years on being righteous and godly people but god said go and sacrifice the world looks at how much we do and what our work is and whether we're accomplishing anything so satan wants to say go and work but god says go and sacrifice so it's a lifetime of learning finding out what does that mean to sacrifice ourselves for him so those quotes really are the main quotes besides the one that most people know people hear in missions conferences my father saying he is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose but those quotes that i've read to you from his journal have meant the most to me because i'm just amazed that at 20 and 21 he was writing things like this very sure that he was to go to the mission field and mostly sure that he was to go single except when he fell in love with my mother and then didn't know what to do with that so in 1952 they're studying uh the spanish language that was required of missionaries to learn spanish first for six months and they were within a few blocks of each other both of them staying in a spanish and they got to take walks they hiked up huge mountain peaks 10 000 12 000 feet from quito and they thoroughly enjoyed their time together and at one point my father actually cried because he was not as fast at learning spanish as my mother was she had an amazing ear she could imitate but she also had a very quick brain to learn it so he felt insecure around her at times especially with her ability to argue very very wisely uh very strongly and she was right she was almost 100 of the time right so i never felt any courage to argue with her if i did she could shut me off pretty quickly because her reasoning was so perfect logical she in fact men often called her she thought men often would say that she seemed to think and speak like a man because there was not as much emotion in her as there was there is in most of us women i would say she could be very emotional and her her heart was very emotional but she had learned to steal herself against being too touchy-feely and too emotional and of course in the 60s and 70s feelings were becoming more and more important to everybody and she was beginning to think that's not the way to go it's about it's about obedience doesn't matter how we feel so as they sat and stared at that shadow of the cross that night before she graduated they were recognizing we have to die to our feelings they get married in october of 1953 they moved into this wonderful house that my father had started building before they got married and they lived in a tent for six months before it was finished the tent leaked all the time but they were so happily in love and so happy to be together that it hardly bothered them at all that it leaked in fact they had times of hysterics over where it would start leaking on their bed or on their pillows or right in front of them when they started to sit down to eat but they had a great time they both got hepatitis those first six months so they were quite sick but they were also so completely happy and so as time went on my father built this house they had a lot of discussion of what she wanted in the house and that house as far as i know is still standing it was standing 40 years later when my mother my husband and i and my mother's husband all got to go and visit it and of course it brought back so many memories because i loved being in that house until i was uh three and a half when we went to live with the elcas or the wawadani we also went back to live with taquitos and lived in that house from the time i was six until i was eight so it's a lovely place and had a beautiful view of the river and i will just never forget the happiness as a jungle kid running around barefoot not having very many restrictions except to obey my mother if she called me in for a meal i had to come in immediately there was no dallying there was no just a minute mama no it was come immediately and she expected me to obey that way so i am so very grateful for what she influenced me as i grew up and i would say there were five things that she taught me well um i can't say that i'm the perfectly obedient person that i want to be but these were the things that were her sterling examples of what a christian should be she was very loving towards me always affectionate we had a special bedtime routine where she spent time with me telling me bible stories or reading them to me and singing many wonderful hymns and she was always affectionate her family had not been very affectionate but she had decided that children need a lot of affection and she'd also learned from the elliot side which was a very affectionate family lots of hugs and lots of kisses she she's so she was affectionate with me and she was affectionate with my children that love showed of course in her acceptance of the ouka indians just completely accepting where we lived when we moved in and we had to live in a house with no walls for a whole year and she slept in a hammock which she said was more comfortable than a regular bed but everything else was difficult because she had grown up in a very civilized proper home where people always wore shoes and of course always dressed nicely and at the table they always had the polite manners of traditional table manners and they were very strictly taught um how to speak how to speak up how to look at adults all of those things that we all want to teach our children so love was was definitely a hallmark of her life with me and love towards the indians now she would teach me to do chores and i'm sure i started some in ecuador i don't remember them very well but i know that when we got to new hampshire i as an eight and a half year old had to clean one of the bathrooms every week and i had to dust my room and vacuum my room and i had to hang up clothes that i didn't want to hang up i'd always lay my clothes on a chair and my mother would say val if you put them up immediately hang them up right away you wouldn't have a whole pile to do at the end of the day or at the end of the week she taught the truth to me continually so scripture reading and i'll tell you a little story about uh lying on that bamboo bed next to my mother in her hammock every night by 6 15 or 6 30 we were asleep there's no electricity there was no electricity among the outcast then so we had the fire light and because we were on the very close to the equator the sun went down by 6 15 the sun came up at six every morning and so she'd read to me and sing to me and she always taught me that jesus was our tender shepherd that he would always be taking care of us and watching over us so we had a lot of dangerous things in the jungle and that's what everybody thinks oh i couldn't imagine living in the jungle because of all those snakes and panthers and whatever out there and piranhas in the water and anacondas and she uh just gave me that confidence that the lord was taking care of us so i was allowed to walk into the jungle with my friends and one time went with by myself to the little jungle uh garden plot that the women had started when i came back all by myself my mother said without any alarm in her face she said were you afraid as you walked that path and i said no and she said you weren't afraid of anything and i said yeah jellyfish and tigers now the only reason i knew about jellyfish and tigers was because we had a national geographic my mother had shown me those pictures and and so of course there were no jellyfish and tigers on that daylight path there were panthers but we never talked about them we knew they prowled around at night i suppose my mother just taught me that the lord was taking care of us i didn't worry about panthers at night time and of course hadn't seen any terrible movies that would show me what they could do so one night she sang jesus tender shepherd hear me bless thy little lamb tonight through the darkness be thou near me keep me safe till morning light and there are two more verses that i won't sing through for you but that was my truth that i went to sleep with the lord was going to watch over us and as she woke up during the night every night she woke up to stir the fire and to push the logs together because we needed the heat from the fire and we were in the foothills of the andes mountains and it was chilly at night time so she pushed the logs together and that one of those nights she looked over as she usually did at my bed and saw a black circle on my sleeping bag and she touched it with her stick hoping that it was a puddle of water because our thatched roof often leaked and it wasn't a puddle of water it was a snake and the snake just slithered off my bed and off into the jungle so there we are god totally protected us we don't know whether it was a poisonous snake maybe my mother did but she never told me but it was just a okay great you know the lord took care of us for me i was just so carefree i never saw alarm or worry or fear in her she was careful to do the job of learning the language she was very careful about everything she did she did it well and she did things perfectly according to my own observation and so when i had to do a chore when we moved to new hampshire cleaning the bathroom if i didn't do it well she'd bring it back bring me back to the chore and say val you didn't do this while you see this and so i had to do it over again and i'm glad that she learned she helped me learn that thoroughness carefulness but obedience was really expected it was not a hope so and uh i have heard her say many times children will do what their parents expect them to do so if you expect them to obey then you have pretty well-behaved children yes they'll have those times of misbehaving and disobedience but if you expect them to be wild and crazy and show off and do ridiculous things that's what they're going to do because they get an audience so she expected me to obey i grew up being compliant wanting to please my mother and when i did disobey i was brokenhearted over what i had done to disappoint her but i was uh so glad that she showed her sorrow instead of anger when i had disobeyed because she that gave me a very tender conscience so that courage and love of adventure really got into me as i was in the jungle and i am so so grateful for those happy years um as she taught me first second and third grade she realized during my third year that i did not care whether i got f's or a's on my tests because i didn't have any peers also trying to get good grades so she decided then that we would move to the states for my education an american public education and we moved to franconia new hampshire and it was a very happy time i do remember being a little nervous first days of school but the lord had helped my mother find two girls that i could be good friends with and they were my best friends from then on moving on to the rest of my life and how the lord used all that my mother said and did as well as her marriage she married a time when i was almost 14. she married a presbyterian minister from the northern church and he was a godly wonderful man uh taught me a lot of wisdom though i wish i'd learned even more from him i was a pretty happy-go-lucky and carefree teenager too didn't want to spend too much time studying hard so school was hard for me because i didn't want to give the time to it that it needed but my stepfather was a great example to me of again the truth wisdom carefulness in doing things well uh faithfulness he was a faithful preacher of the word and we often went to hear him as he was pulpit supply and he also was a professor at the seminary which my my husband went to he died only four and a half years after my mother married him my mother had only been married 27 months to my dad and then four and a half years to my stepdad and that's a whole nother story of how i learned god's sovereignty in that death accepting what god had done so after college i happily married my husband who i had said even in high school that i wanted to be a minister's wife and hadn't met him yet but god gave us uh i gave me a wonderful husband funny i love to laugh so he is always making me laugh and we've been married now 44 and a half years and i am still laughing at him but uh that sense of adventure was kind of in both of us and i went into marriage thinking i'm going to have a huge family and it's all going to be happy and wonderful and fun guess what i had to face my own sin then i had to face my children's sin and then i had to face also my husband's sin and not that i had to change my husband but that's what i was trying to do i remember very clearly my mother setting us sitting us both down when we had just gotten engaged in her home and she said you know you're marrying a sinner and you will hurt each other's feelings and i thought no way i could never do that but unfortunately i turned out to be one of those wives that wants to change their husbands i don't know if any of you are like that but um i turned out to be a wife that was really critical and for 15 years i was very very critical and always trying to give him all kinds of suggestions and ways that he should be changed or he should change well in 15 years of marriage we were in california we had moved from mississippi in 1987 to california and i went there thinking that's not where i want to be i want to be overseas in a mission field that would be fun for my kids because i had so much fun and so so did my husband in africa but here we were in southern california the capital of entertainment um the capital of perfectly manicured lawns and perfect looking houses but everything sprinkled because it was the desert sprinkled with water and i i just thought this is not where i want to be so for five years both of us were kind of disgruntled but at the same time thinking we could grow a huge church we went to a church of 30 people when we first got there and my husband by 1992 was beginning to think i'm a complete failure as a pastor and i was beginning to think i'm a complete failure as a mom the lord took us through a study of galatians and we learned in that study that we had been living for our reputation just like the pharisees we learned that we had to die to our reputation and so a huge change occurred when we did that study of galatians we began to be much more humble much more accepting of one another especially i of my husband and the lord showed us his grace and the lord showed us that we had to live by his grace and not by our amazingness or by our obedience we thought we were being obedient and yet inside we were in turmoil because things weren't turning out the way we wanted and after eight children i was feeling after actually seven children is when we started the study i was feeling like a complete failure as a mom so the lord had to use this study which he did to help us be honest with ourselves honest with each other and recognize that we really had been living for approval rather than for christ's glory and so we began to know that phrase it's all about him it's not about us and so i just want to finish with it's not about who valerie elliot shepard is it's about who god is and what he has done in each of your lives and what he will continue to do because he is a god of grace a gr god of love and a god of wisdom and he is wise in what he brings us through he is absolutely perfect and sovereign in all that he leads us through so may you be blessed in learning to love his word learning to not read his words just because it's a duty but learning to read it because it is a relationship you are building with your creator and your jesus your savior jesus christ may the lord bless you and may you be challenged by my parents story to live only for him and to die to your feelings god bless [Music] you

Channel: Isaiah 53 Design

Views: 11,275

Keywords: Jim Elliot, Elisabeth Elliot, He is no fool, South America, Ecuador, Waorani, Auca, Martyrs of the 20th century, Valerie Elliot, Valerie Shepard, Valerie Elliot Shepard, Elisabeth Elliot Gren, Christian love story, Christian love stories, fools for Christ, Quito, Wheaton, Walt Shepard, Be all there, God's will, How to know who you should marry, singleness, 1 Corinthians 7, Passion and Purity, courtship, Beneath the Cross of Jesus, how to marry God's will, Bible, Jesus, wait on God

Id: dfwm8pEGy0k

Length: 28min 52sec (1732 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 25 2021