Trusting in the Lord and Being Obedient to Him and His Word

[Music] my [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] a christian writer but more so she's a great woman of god she loves the lord and she is intent on living for him and proclaiming that christ is the head of her life and the head of the church of the head of the church and um everything that she writes and everything that she speaks centers on the essential reality of that we were talking today at dinner about the topic tonight the one that we gave you was evangelization but what she really will speak to you about is trusting in the lord and being obedient to him and to his word let's welcome this [Music] rebellion [Music] my brother tom howard spoke here a few months ago and i understand he's come back again and he came back from great reviews and i read one of your president's books i'm not sure how many he may have written but i was very fascinated by that if i may be permitted to mention a couple of several of the books that are back in the book table i'd like to do so because knowing human nature i think that the chances of your remembering anything i say are very with a book at least you can take something home and read and check back on some things so first of all i mentioned two which are perhaps of more interest to students i wrote this little one called a slow and certain light because the question that students have asked me more than any other i think is how they can know the will of god and so this is a little book about how god guides us a slow and certain light and then because as i travel around and speak to students i find that see the primary concern seems to be their love life it's just as much of a concern whether they have one or they don't have one so this is a book about what it means to bring your love life existent or non-existent under the lordship of jesus christ it's called it's called passion and purity and as one man said to me well he says i've tried the purity root now tell me about this passion for some of the older ones who have children between the ages of 11 and 16 whom you love maybe their grandchildren maybe their children but anybody in this room who knows anybody between 11 and 16. here's a little tiny book with 12 pages called sex is a lot more than fun it was written because i got so appalled when i read time magazine's cover story about six months ago about teenage pregnancy and i wonder what we can do to get to these kids early enough so that they stay out of bed it's a book not about how to do it it's a book about how not to do it sex is a lot more than fun and then a book for nobody in this room i'm sure but you might know somebody that needs a little discipline this is when they're glad surrender and it's a book about personal discipline the discipline of the body the mind the emotions time work and possessions so much for that i hope you'll meet my handsome norwegian husband back there at the book table i want you to know that my name really is elizabeth graham g-r-e-n but as some of you may know lars is husband number three and it is a bit much to expect my audiences to keep up with all my marriages [Music] my first husband i'm going to be telling you a little bit about this evening my second husband was addison leach who was once president of pittsburgh seminary i'm delighted that one of his three daughters is here tonight with her four children and her husband they live in pittsburgh and lars gets called mr elliott every now and then and he can roll with the punches he said i'm mr elliott iii [Laughter] his name is really lars rhymes with stars grin rhymes with red and so things make yourself known begin and you'll be glad to help you with the books or case or whatever it was nearly 30 years ago that i was living in a very strange place among a very strange people to whom i was more than strange i was a freak in every imaginable way i was living in a small clearing in the eastern jungle of ecuador the amazon rainforest actually with a people called alkas auca they were a stone age tribe about which very little had been known until we went in to live with them and they lived in houses with no walls no floors and no furniture so being a missionary who felt very strongly that her responsibility was to identify as much as possible with the people to whom she went i also lived in a house with no walls no floors and no furniture i drew the line when it came to adopting their costume it was a piece of string not a g string a piece of string they wore around their hips men and women alike if they wanted to be very dressed up they sometimes wore a piece of string around their upper arm occasionally around their thigh but i was a freak in every imaginable way already so the matter of freakishness and dress was really not very distracting today i thought i would just give you a little vignette of what an ordinary day it was like living with those people they were smart enough to come home after work eat their supper and go straight to bed in civilized countries we haven't caught on to the wisdom of that yet and we come home exhausted we eat we sit around and talk and try to be scintillating and interesting or we slump in front of the television until we fall asleep but we haven't got sense not to go to bed the fact that the indians went to bed between 6 30 and 7 meant that they got up usually between two and three but i don't mean they got a bit i mean they began their social life which was a much more sensible time to have it than what we do with these so-called civilized countries the fact that they had no walls meant that they could carry on conversations all the way around the clearing getting out of bed their heads were hammocks everybody's left in habits but generally before there was conversation there would be singing and i never quite got on this schedule myself i would sit on sit in my hammock by the fire and pray meditate and try to go over what few words of their language i might have learned that day i didn't have light at night candles were pretty precious when they had to be carried three days over the trail and so generally i spent an hour or so just sitting there by the fire and pondering what i was doing in a place like this so i wouldn't be quite so eager today and morning or joining the conversation but i would lie there in my hammock and sometimes this music would fit into my dreams for a while and then gradually i would come away and hear the conversation and start my usual job of taking notes trying to put down everything i heard people say but their singing was different from what we heard tonight they had a maximum of three notes sometimes two and the song would go like this so i felt just the way you do how do you turn it off mercy on you because i'm accountable as many as 70 [Music] repetitions there were two teenage boys who they built themselves an observation platform in the house next door to mine in order not to miss anything that went on in my house i was head and shoulders taller than the tallest woman i was a head taller than the tallest man i had the most pitiful color of the skin that they had ever seen these people were so isolated that hardly any of them had ever seen a stranger i don't say that they had never seen a white woman they had never seen anybody of any color other than themselves they'd never seen anybody they didn't know there were other indian tribes in the area but they had never come across them they were so isolated and so not only was i a giant i was a pitiful pale washed out color i had hair they said that looked like palm fiber eyes that looked like jaguars and so these two teenage boys whose names were coming would be lying prone on their stomachs on the illness observation platforms built a bamboo leaning over the edge every morning waiting for the first event of the day of which they could make an announcement that would be when i would open my eyes those weird blue eyes and these two boys would call out [Music] which means she's awake and that stunning piece of news would be relayed my little daughter was three years old she lived in that same house she slept on a bamboo slab about three inches off the ground and my hammer was sort of strung over to the top of that there was another farm lady that in the house next door she was the sister of one of the men that was with my husband i'll tell you that a little bit of that story later on but here we were three pale foreigners with blue eyes living in midst of these strange people and nothing about us was anything but weird and freakish and laughable i would get then get out of my hammock unwrap myself from the blanket in which i slept hang the blanket up underneath the thatched roof and take out a rubber bag a small transistor radio which i would then start to carry across the clearing to attach to a bamboo pole on which was the aerial this was in order to give us contact with the missionary aviation base and so as i took the radio out and began to walk across the clearing the second announcement will be made which means there she goes with that radio again if you have a word for radio the ning god which means the talking thing and as i walked across the clearing each step would be accompanied by sound effects in unison if you want to make your next door neighbor feel extremely sheepish [Applause] absolutely everything i did was just hilariously funny they didn't walk the way they did i didn't look the way they did i didn't talk the way they did i didn't eat the way they did i didn't know how to make clay pots i didn't know how to weave hammocks i couldn't catch fish with my hands i couldn't swim and they would throw up their hands in despair after asking me to try these things and they insisted that i try them and i demonstrated to them that i couldn't do them [Music] and they would say what do you do well i walked around with a notebook and i made funny little squiggles on the paper and they smelled it and they said that's made of wood isn't it pretty astute and i said yes well what was i doing well how was i supposed to tell them what i was doing i couldn't even understand the question for the first year or so all i could do was try to write down as i had been trained at the university of oklahoma to write any sound that the human voice is capable of making hoping that one way or another at some time i would be able to figure out what it meant there were no interpreters nobody had ever learned this language before they didn't know any indian language which i knew i had learned spanish and two other indian languages before i went to live with this this particular tribe and [Music] you can imagine how much you would get down on paper if somebody said to you danny and if you can say what did you say which is a certain phrase that i did learn fairly soon what did you say that they would very likely give you a paragraph of explanation of what they said rather than repeating the phrase so that you could write it down but that's more or less what i did all day long and i'm not going to go through a minute by minute but just to give you a picture of how alien a missionary may often be and perhaps not very much more alien than you and i sometimes feel in our own culture in our own town when we're trying to present the claims of jesus christ to someone to whom religion is just one tiny little rather boring area that some people are interested in but he isn't we are all of us faced with the problem of communication of identification as mary kay mentioned i was asked to speak on the subject of evangelism and i've never been an evangelist i am not an evangelist and i hardly know where to begin but i do like the word witness because i'm convinced that every one of us as christians are called to be a witness a witness is simply somebody who knows something that other people don't know if you're called upon to testify in court it will be because you know something or you have seen something that others don't know and if we know jesus christ then everything that we do ought to make that truth visible that's my definition and witnessing making the truth visible it's not by any means always making it audible and verbal but everything that we do reveals who we are and more importantly infinitely more importantly whose we are so there i was living in a house with no walls with my little daughter being a freak being as they could not help but be convinced that i was seriously retired because they had never heard of anybody that didn't speak their language and they would examine my ears to see if my ears were made like theirs and they thought well maybe it doesn't go in and they would ask to look down my throat to see if i had the proper equipment for speaking well they could hear me speaking to my daughter but it didn't make any sense what i said to her and the most appalling humiliation is to find that my three-year-old daughter learned to speak their language within about two months and i had made up my mind that i would learn exactly what she learned every day i had the experience of watching her learn two other languages already she was bilingual by the time she was three and she was trying to go shortly thereafter and so i thought well maybe in view of the fact that i majored in language in college and studied linguistics after college and have learned three languages and have a notebook and a tape recorder perhaps i can keep up with the three-year-old and so it was just further proof proved again that this huge seemingly adult female was i lived there i learned their language and my purpose of course there as everywhere else that i have ever lived or worked was to love god to know god and to make him known and loved that is my purpose in life to know him to love him to make him known and loved one of those long evenings when i was sitting there meditating by my fire i lit a candle and i was looking at the 43rd chapter of isaiah and i came across a verse about witnessing which rather startled me it says this you are my witnesses and my servant whom i have chosen that you might know and believe me and understand that i am he and i was taken aback to realize that if i had been asked to write about witnessing i would have said you are my witnesses that they might know and believe and understand that i am but god says you are my witnesses that you might know and believe me and in my feelings of utter frustration and helplessness in a situation such as i have never been in my after then eight years of missionary work i was given great rest and relief to realize that my primary job was still what it had always been to learn to know god with the hope and the prayer that in his way and by the power of his holy spirit that loving him and knowing him would become visible even perhaps before i would be able to make it verbal to these people how do we learn to know and love god well two simple words two simple words that i always think of when i think of the old gospel song that we used to sing when i was growing up in a christian home in philadelphia where we had family prayers twice a day we began the morning time with prayer with him singing both my parents play the piano and so one of the elephants sit down with piano and we went straight through a hymn book one hymn per day the next human book and we sang all the stanzas and consequently all six of us children learned literally hundreds of hymns by heart without any effort at all as your parents know the memorization powers of the child up to the age of about three or four are nothing short of miraculous they can learn almost anything anything let's say without effort and visible effort whatsoever and so we learned theology by learning hymns and one that can't be surpassed in profundity or in simplicity is one that says trust and obey for there's no other way to be happy in jesus but to trust and obey so when we ask what is the method by which we know learn to know and love god this is the answer by trust and obedience as i look back over six decades and see the hand of god leading me faithfully unfailingly through all those years and all those experiences i'm more convinced than ever that every single experience in life whether a joy of sorrow light or darkness of shadow or sunshine is meant for one [Music] and that is to bring me to the knowledge of jesus christ to give me the opportunity and the privilege of learning to know him and so let me go back before a few years before i was living in that clearing jungle that i described to how i got there it was when i was a college student that i began to observe a certain student on campus of the opposite sex i and probably several hundred other women particularly observed this man because he was known to be a woman hater and guys i've got advice for you if you really want to be pursued by all the barracudas just let it be known that you really aren't interested and you're probably more pursue than anybody else well this man his name is jim elliot and it wasn't by any means that jim was not interested in it it's just that he had discovered that they were a tremendous waste of time and money when he was in high school but what he called the aug he was going to have to eliminate some things from his program aug he took from paul's letter to timothy that he was to be approved unto god and if jim had to choose between the va and the aug he had decided that what was more important was the aug he was hoping to get both and so he decided that among other things he would eliminate dating and so he was much watched and scrutinized and talked about and observed by any of the women on campus and i was wondering i liked what i saw you know it would stand in dining hall lines with little packs of white cards sometimes he was memorizing greek verbs sometimes he's memorizing scripture verses i saw here's a man who doesn't waste his time he was very friendly it wasn't that he showed himself all from other people he was a campus clown we could call on him for any occasion to get up a moment's notice and recite from memory things like robert's services poetry the face on the bar room floor or the shooting of dan brew or the cremation of sam mcgee jim was not only a campus clown he was a spiritual leader he was the president of the foreign missions fellowship and was avoided by some of his fellow students because he would get up he would grab a guy by the arm or lapel and say hey buddy how come you're not going to the mission field because jim took the view that if a man was not going to the mission field he jolly will better be able to prove that god had not called him it's not james business to prove that god had called it because it was very plain in scripture jesus said go into all the world and preach the gospel and so jim felt that that was what we call the categorical imperative unless you could prove otherwise so he was a spiritual leader a campus clown he was also an athlete they called him the indian rubber man he was a wrestler and it could be tied into unbelievable knots by his opponents but never once in his career was he pinned and he won the championship of four states in his weight class in addition to all those things he graduated with highest honor in classical greek i don't think it was because he was a genius i think it was because he applied himself and he eliminated what he called the non-essentials and another thing schedule was an hour of precious sleep before breakfast in the morning he got up early enough to spend an hour in prayer and bible reading before breakfast i didn't know any other college students that did that and i was impressed the only reason i found out about that was because my brother happened to live in the same house with jim and reported that to me when our yearbooks came out i was a senior jim was a junior and during my senior year i had become more and more interested in watching this man but i had no reason to think that he had ever looked twice at me but when our yearbooks came out we used to try to get everybody's autographs and it was with a good deal of trepidation that i approached jim for an autograph hoping that he would write something besides just his name perhaps some little cryptic message that might give me some reason to hope that he had thought about me but i didn't think i had a chance in the world but he did write his name with a flowing sweeping hand and then very quickly some something underneath shut the book handed it back to me i quickly found the page and saw that he wrote the scripture reference now you know how long it taken it took me to get back to the dormitory grab my bible and find out [Music] but to my other amazing a soldier on active service will not become entangled in civilian affairs he must be holy at his demanding officer's disposal second timothy 2 4. i like that too and i saw that he was a man who had made a final and irrevocable choice and as i talked to college students today i find that there are precious few of them who have made any final let alone irrevocable choices they know what they want on their big mac and that's about it they're not really really sure about much of anything else whether they like this college or this major or this professor or this roommate or this idea of a career or this girlfriend they're just not really sure and what i liked about jim elliott was that here was a man who had set his face like a flint and he went down that back like a thunderbolt and he had decided that he had a commanding officer and he was holy at his disposal now i will skip over the next seven years if you want to hear the story of how i became jim elliott's wife then you have to read either his biography shadow of the almighty or this book passion purity which i mentioned but after we were married we were working together with the tribe of indians called the kitchus when the pilot flew in one day that the pilot had served our station with a tremendously exciting news that he had located the savage tribe called alex located from the air and it was then that what was called operation alka began jim and nate the pilot ed mccauley another young man whom i had known in college pete fleming a man from seattle washington and roger you darion a cowboy from montana who had been a paratrooper in world war ii banded together to pray and plan for an entrance into the outca tribe to take the gospel in january of 1956 they believed that god's time had come and they went to that territory they set up a camp in the edge of albert territory they had what appeared to be a very friendly contact with three alka indians a few days later they took movies of that contact movies which are still available in the form of a documentary show and two days later they were speared to death now i said that my purpose in life is to know god to love him my method is trust and obedience jim was a tremendous example to me as we're all five of us of trust and obedience because we knew very well the reputation of these indians nobody had ever gone into their territory and come out alive quite a few people had gone in there that nobody had ever heard from again so it wasn't lightly that any of us participated in operation outcome it was with the full recognition of the risks but obedience to god always requires a certain element of risk doesn't it because obedience is our job the results are his and so as we planned and prayed these men had already long since made up their minds that they were expendable for god not that any of them was looking for death not that any of them really thought it would happen to him you know there's always that human idea that we have that well it might happen but it can't really happen to us and they sang on the eve of their departure for that enterprise a hymn we rest on thee our shield and our defender we go not forth alone against the foe and you can be sure that when we got the word by shortwave radio that these men were dead i thought a lot about that in him and him that we had sung and family prayers at home too we rest on the our shield and our defender and that god who teaches us to trust him who had called these five men from possibly very lucrative careers if they had stayed in this country made them obedient given them a concern for these people who had never heard the name of christ led them step by step through the months of operation alka answered hundreds of prayers that that god would in fact allow them to be speared to death my question to you tonight is what kind of a god do you trust and what might your obedience cost i trust a god who's got the whole world where in his hands he's got you and me brother in his hands and there is nothing from here to eternity life or death things present with things to come that can ever ever ever touch me or anybody i love without the permission of that god and that god who demonstrated forever for all time his love on this cross he loved me and gave himself for me i have two choices in life either i believe that he is god and he's got the whole world in his hands and he does know what he's doing and he still loves me or he's not god he hasn't got the whole world in his hands i'm at the mercy of chance and what happened on that cross didn't mean to think as i see it there is no middle round it doesn't make any difference what happens he's still there christ has died christ is risen christ will come again trust and obedience is what he asks and so when it seemed to be god's will that i was to go and try to make contact with these same people i thought this is preposterous god would never ask the widow of the baby she was 10 months old and he was killed to do anything about the outfits but i said to the lord a prayer that i thought i was very safe and praying uh unavailable lord and i guess that there's hardly anybody in this room who at some point or other hasn't said thy will be done and when god starts doing it we get very surprised and he says isn't it what you asked it's either thy will be done which is the rule of heaven or it's what i will be done which is the rule if you know where there isn't any other choice and so i had said lord i'm available and then a very amazing and roundabout way it seemed to be around about god got me there and i haven't got time to tell you that story called savage the purpose is to love god to know him to make him loved and known the method trust and obedience the cost what did jesus say you lose your life for my sake you'll find it the man who wants to save his life will lose it the world is constantly coming at us with all kinds of suggestions about how to save ourselves and jesus cuts right through that nonsense and says if you want to be my disciple you must give up your right to yourself and take up your cross and following the man who would lose his life will find his true self and jim elliott had written his diary he was only 22 these amazing words he is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain for he cannot lose is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose and of course the whole world heard about this massacre in ecuador the news went around the world and people came and began to ask us widows why did they do it and they were called all kinds of terrible names and there was a lot of very glib editorializing in the christian magazines and newspapers that i found [Music] some of more upsetting that came from the world which incidentally wrote relatively few blind magazine gave us very fair and respectful treatment when people honestly wanted to know why did they go in there did they know what they were getting into of course we said yes i thought of the verse in first john 2 17. the world and all its passionate desires will one day disappear but the man who's following the will of god is part of a permanent and cannot die now those men gave witness to their trust in a faithful god through their death far more powerful than they could have ever imagined doing if they had lived and of course we are left to ask all the painful questions why and many of the older missionaries in ecuador said we've never had five such promising young men they were the cream of the cream why didn't god take me and of course god is not under any obligation to explain himself to you and me we're infants we have no idea what our father is up to he's engineering a universe he's got a whole lot more things to choreograph and orchestrate that you and i can even begin to imagine another thing jim wrote in his diary was god is peopling eternity i must not limit him to old men and women in another page he said i ask not for a long life but for a full one like yours lord jesus have my blood lord prayed have it all let it be poured out for the life of the world in second corinthians 5 it says christ died that men should cease to live for themselves that brings us to the cost discipleship obedience to jesus christ demands everything nothing short of everything you must present your body the living sacrifice and if god chooses to make that quite literal and physical after all you've turned over the rights haven't you and there was no question in my mind that jim had turned over the rights all the rights many years before this incident and that if god had given the choice of how he wanted to die i have no doubt that jim would have chosen exactly the way god permitted him to die in that effort to take the gospel to those people well some of you may be sitting there thinking oh well that's an amazing story that's a wonderful story but that happened a million years ago a million miles away it's got nothing to do with me and where i live here in ohio or pennsylvania with my job my responsibilities and my children my family or whatever hasn't it hasn't got anything to do with you isn't the lord calling you to do exactly the same thing to which he called those five men to make the truth visible in the way you live and in the way you die whose are you are you holy at his disposal a soldier on active service does not become entangled in civilian affairs he must be holding his commanding officer's disposal we are people whose lives are shaped by what we love do you love god do you want to make him known if we are christians does the gospel that we offer the world promise exemption from suffering can we say if you'll become a christian god will sort out all your marital problems pay all your debts give you a volkswagen i'll give you a cadillac instead of a volkswagen and it's all your problems we've suffered tonight is that the gospel that we preach the gospel is christ crucified the son of man the son of god was put into the hands of evil men for me for you and so if we're going to follow him it entails suffering because one who is crucified is going to lead us to a cross and that's our message that cross does not accept us but it transforms our sufferings i love what george mcdonald wrote in the 19th century he suffered not that we might not suffer but that our sufferings might be like his and i can speak from the experience of losing two husbands as well as other kinds of losses and sorrows and say with all my heart god is faithful he does give the oil of joy for mourning the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness and beauty for ashes the message of the cross is not a message of exemption for the message of transformation and i'm always wanting to ask people who call themselves christians what kind of a difference does it make in your life do you never get sick does nothing bad ever happen to you does god sort out all your problems and usually the answer is of course no in fact i've had more trouble since i became a christian than i ever had before does that sound familiar to something think of those disciples what simple peaceful lives they live in especially and think of peter being crucified upside down because he followed christ not always faithfully but he was a follower so what kind of a difference does it make well i just told you a tiny bit of the difference that i made in my life when i stood beside my radio and learned that my husband was missing the words that god brought to my mind in were when mouth passes through the waters i will be with you and through the rivers they shall not overflow here he doesn't tell us that we will not have to walk through the valley of the shadow of death but he does promise us that we will never have to walk through it alone i will fear no evil not because there isn't any but because they are with me evangelism witnessing means making the truth visible my purpose is to know and love him and to make him known and loved the method is trust and obedience and that means every hour of every day of every week of every month of every year until i reach the celestial city and the cost is everything but now think about this what pray tell do i have to offer that isn't going to be repaid so many thousands of times over that it would be like giving one cent for can i say a billion dollars does that even begin to give a glimpse of the hundredfold that christ promises [Music] that transformation i bring him my sins and he gives me his righteousness i bring in my sorrows it gives me his joy i bring in my losses he gives me his gain i bring him my sufferings he gives me his glory if you suffer with me he says you will also reign the sufferings of this present time the apostle paul said are not worthy to be compared with the weight of glory which is to be revealed that makes a difference that makes the difference between night and day for the life of a christian he is the god whom we serve and every day i pray that god will make my life a witness in the sense of making that truth visible i'd like to close with a poem written by a great missionary to india named amy carmichael a poem that jim elliott used to quote very often when he would go out on gospel teams from college to try to stir up other college students to be interested in foreign missionary service this is the poem hasta no scar no hidden scar on side or foot or hand i hear you sung as mighty in the land asked a little scar no wound yet i was wounded by the archers spent leaned me against a tree to die and ramped by ravening beasts that compassed me i swooned has found a wound no wound no scar yet as the master must the servant be and pierce it are the feet that follow me the guy are whole can he have followed far who has no wound or scar god bless you you

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Length: 51min 21sec (3081 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 06 2020