His Will Brings Her Joy
: Elisabeth Elliot
"The glory of God's will for us means absolute trust. It means the will to do His will, and it means joy."
With these words, Elisabeth Elliot, the famed American missionary whose husband was speared to death while taking the Gospel to the Stone Age tribe of Auca Indians in South America, began a major address at the 1976 Urbana convention.
"The Apostle Paul was absolutely sure of his Master," she continued, speaking to a crowd of 17,000 — mostly students, 700 missionaries, and a sprinkling of pastors — who had given up part of their Christmas vacation to flock to the little prairie town in southern Illinois to hear the commands of Christ for evangelism, discipleship, and missions. Elisabeth, wearing a long-sleeved full-length dress, smiled as she stood behind a battery of microphones on the podium. The name, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, sponsor of the triennial Urbana conventions since 1947, was emblazoned diagonally across the side of the speaker's stand.
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"Paul never said, 'I know why this is happening.' He said, 'I know whom I have believed. I am absolutely sure that nothing can separate us from the love of God,' " Elisabeth told the attentive audience jamming the huge assembly hall on the campus of the University of Illinois.
Her message was forged in the fire of personal experience.
Much of that experience is told in her eleven books, which include the well-known Shadow of the Almighty and Through Gates of Splendor.
Other details of the glory and the cost of following God's will were poured out later by the purposeful and twice-widowed Bible translator and theology teacher during a summer interview.
Born in Brussels, Belgium, of missionary parents (her father also was editor of the Sunday School Times in Philadelphia), Elisabeth majored in classic Greek at Wheaton College. There she faced the first serious test of her faith. It came in the form of a man who later was to become her husband. The test was her love life.
CAREER CHOICE
"When I was a senior in college," she related, "I believed God was taking me through a period of exercise of the soul in order to be willing to go to the mission field as a single woman. I had told God that I was willing to be a missionary, but that I was not really willing to be single for the rest of my life."
She knew that chances of finding a husband in the mission field were slight, and it was considerable time before she was able to surrender the matter to the Lord.
Soon after saying Yes, Lord, to being single, Elisabeth found herself in love with a student named Jim Elliot. To add to the predicament, and to her utter astonishment, the week before graduation at Wheaton Jim confessed his feelings for her. Worse, from the human point of view,
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Jim also confessed that God had taken him through exactly the same period of testing. He had come to the place where he was willing to go to the mission field as a single man, following the steps of the Apostle Paul.
"As far as we knew at that point," Elisabeth remembers, "that was that."
How God led the two of them from that point on is detailed in her book, Shadow of the Almighty, essentially a biography of Jim.
"It is logical that God tests those who would follow Him most severely and painfully at the point of their love life," Elisabeth commented.
That is one of the most acute issues in the life of a young person — and those not so young, too.
"If we are followers of the Crucified," observed Elisabeth, "it stands to reason that we will encounter the Cross. And, where would we expect that Cross to be presented to us? Is it not at the point of deepest need or deepest feeling?"
For Elisabeth and Jim that was the case; it was her first trying and difficult time. It lasted for five years. Not until then did God give any clear direction that they were to be married.
"We were both single missionaries in Ecuador, on different sides of the Andes, where communication was erratic, to say the least. It could easily take six weeks to write a letter and receive an answer from the other side of the mountain.
"So," reflected Elisabeth, "there were many lessons in loneliness, patience, and self-restraint — and waiting on God — because of our love for each other."
SEVERE TRIALS
Asked to recall other trying or difficult events in her life, Elisabeth, who first went to South America to do translation work in 1952, mentioned three experiences of loss in
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that first year working with a small tribe of Indians called the Colorados in the western jungles of Ecuador. Elisabeth, then single, was reducing the Colorado's language to writing.
The first calamity was the murder of the informant who was giving her information about the language and culture of the Colorados. There was no one to take his place.
A second catastrophe was the loss of all the work Elisabeth did that year. All her files, tapes, notebooks, and vocabulary compilations were stolen, and no copies or duplicates existed.
The same year, Jim was reconstructing a small jungle mission station among the Quichua Indians. During a sudden flood one night, all of the buildings he had rebuilt plus three new ones were swept away down the Amazon River.
These three experiences of total earthly loss taught Elisabeth and Jim the deep lessons that Jesus taught His disciples: "Truly, truly I say unto you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit" (John 12:24 RSV).
The practical outcome of that lesson was this, according to Elisabeth: "I had to face up to the fact in those stunning losses that God was indeed sovereign; therefore, He was my Lord, my Master, the One in charge of my life, the One who deserved my worship and my service. The road to eternal gain leads inevitably through earthly loss. True faith is operative in the dark. True faith deals with the inexplicable things of life. If we have no explanations — if things are clear and simple — there's not very much need for faith.
"Through these three experiences of loss before either of us had been a jungle missionary for a full year, we came to know Jesus Christ in a deeper way and to begin to enter into the lessons that Paul describes in Philippians: 'But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of
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Christ. Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord . . .' " (3:7, 8 RSV).
Elisabeth clung to those verses, and several other favorites, during that first year and at other crises in her life.
In particular, the Lord helped her in 1956 when she had been married only three years and had an infant daughter Valerie. That was when Jim and four American missionary companions were massacred by the Aucas.
The promise that God gave her that first year is in Isaiah 50:7 RSV: "For the Lord God helps me; therefore I have not been confounded; therefore I have set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be put to shame."
Elisabeth does not spurn human counselors during times of trouble. Many are willing to hear out recounting of the troubles of most people today, she feels. But in her case, she was more or less alone. During the eleven years she was a missionary in Ecuador, seldom was anyone near at hand to whom she could turn. Even other missionaries had their hands full ministering to the Indians without having to minister to an anxious, suffering missionary. So Elisabeth learned to turn to the Lord directly, and to His Word, for her consolation and stability, rather than to cry on other people's shoulders.
God's comfort was sufficient.
SOURCES OF STRENGTH
Elisabeth has always turned also to reading material as a source of strength and guidance. The Bible, of course, is basic. She reads it regularly, studies it, underlines it, and makes notes in the margin and in her own notebook. The Daily Light, a small devotional book of pure Scripture, has been of help to Elisabeth, as it has to many, and she reads it every day. Great missionary books are on her list. She singled out works by such greats as Amy Carmichael of India, whom she calls perhaps the greatest influence on
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her life of any single writer. She has read the biographies of Hudson Taylor, David Brainerd, James Frazer, Mary Slessor, and others. Devotional favorites include Thomas a Kempis's The Imitation of Christ, and Brother Lawrence's Practice of the Presence of God.
Prayer? "Of course," she replied. "I prayed very often with almost no faith at all — probably faith much smaller than a grain of mustard seed" — (see Matthew 13:31-32). Yet, according to Jesus' parable, that minute seed produced a mighty shrub, large enough to accommodate birds and their nests.
The visible results of prayer are not that easily discernible in human terms, Elisabeth feels, because prayer is not subject to the kind of measurement one can project from a seed to a tree. To her, prayer is a force, like gravity, that God has built into the universe and with which we must cooperate. Equally powerful and inevitable, prayer is a spiritual, rather than a physical, force. It is one way God allows us to cooperate with Him. But the results must be left in His hands.
Elisabeth is convinced God would not have commanded His people to pray if it were a useless activity. To illustrate her point, she cited Revelation 8:3, which gives a picture of an angel with a golden censer who offers up prayers of the saints along with the smoke of incense to God.
"That seems to be an indication that no prayer to God is ever lost," she said. "Just exactly what forces are set in motion when a human being prays is a mystery. And yet, God is accomplishing His purposes. There was never any doubt at all in my mind, in the midst of these losses — the death of my informant, the theft of my materials, the destruction by flood of the station where Jim had been working — there was no question that God was sovereign, that He was in charge, and that He would ultimately give to Himself glory, because of these things.
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"And yet, the experience of loss is inevitably painful. We are human beings. We suffer. The Scripture makes it clear, from beginning to end, that there is no glory without suffering, no gain without loss, no joy without sorrow. These are all the paradoxes of Christianity. The Cross is a symbol of suffering and a symbol of glory. The Cross doesn't exempt us from human woes, but transforms these woes. That is the secret of Christian faith — the transformation of sin and suffering and evil."
DOUBTS, ANXIETIES, DISAPPOINTMENTS
Turning to the area of doubts, anxieties, and disappointments, Elisabeth paused for a moment, then admitted that every day something comes up that puts her right back in the kindergarten of faith. That seemed like quite an admission from one known for the sturdy quality of her commitment, faith, and endurance.
Elisabeth went on to explain by asking a series of rhetorical questions: "Do you believe God loves you? Can you trust Him for this thing? Will you rest in His promises? Is He in charge? In other words, how do you get the victory when things seem to be going wrong?
"To answer that question simply would make it look as if this was 'Elliot gets the victory' immediately and continually as she needs it. This would be very far from the truth."
Elisabeth recalled that her grandfather used to have a motto over his desk that read, "Not somehow, but triumphantly."
"My motto," she confided, "if I were to be truthful, would have to be 'Not triumphantly, but somehow.' " But she added: "Yet I know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that the only victory that overcomes the world is faith. I don't look at the data of my life and deduce that God is benevolent, loving, and kind from that data. In fact, there are data which a skeptic would interpret as a stunning
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array of evidence that God does not care, that He is not sovereign, that He is not loving — perhaps that He is not even there."
How, then, does she look at the evidence and still believe the love of God and His sovereign purpose? By faith. Belief. "I really believe with my whole heart that all things do, in fact, fit into a pattern for good. As the J.B. Phillips translation of Romans 8:28 puts it: 'Moreover we know that to those who love God, who are called according to his plan, everything that happens fits into a pattern for good.' "
Though some may think of Elisabeth, who lived and worked with the Aucas in a jungle clearing for two years, as some sort of supersaint, she is quick to admit that she, too, is subject to anxieties and moods. Yet the promises of God lift her out of such times: "Because He lives, I can face tomorrow," she said, quoting a line from one of the best-known Gaither hymns.
In answering my next question, Elisabeth made it clear she didn't like the phrasing of it. "How do you plug into the resources of God to overcome anxieties?" I had asked. To her, it sounded too much like some technique.
"A Christian doesn't 'plug into' God," she explained. "A Christian surrenders to God. He chooses the course which is the will of God. He doesn't simply add the will of God to his own plans and purposes. He surrenders them."
SURRENDER
Elisabeth finds help in surrendering her plans to God through repeating the prayer of another great missionary — Betty Scott Stam. She and her husband, missionaries to China, were beheaded in the 1930s. Elisabeth Elliot first prayed that prayer when she was eleven years old. Later, she copied it into her Bible when she was a teenager. She quoted it from memory:
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"Lord, I give up all of my own plans and purposes, all my desires and hopes. I accept Thy will for my life. I give myself, my life, my all, utterly to Thee, to be Thine forever. Fill me. Conceal me with Thy Holy Spirit. Use me as Thou wilt. Send me where Thou wilt. Work out Thy whole will in my life at any cost — now and forever.
That dedication took Elisabeth Elliot from the Auca work back to language and Bible translation with the Quichua Indians in 1961 and to the United States in 1963. Three years later she married Addison H. Leitch, a theologian and professor, who died in 1973. The following year, Elisabeth became visiting professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Wenham, Massachusetts.
About the same time, two seminary men from Gordon-Conwell came to Elisabeth's house in Hamilton as boarders, both of them tall, blond, blue-eyed southerners. Walt Shephard, Jr., and Lars Gren stayed with Elisabeth for two of their three seminary years.
"I found Lars a most thoughtful, tactful, helpful, pleasant, and amusing lodger," Elisabeth said, "but after he graduated I began to see him with eyes other than a landlady's."
On December 21, 1977, Lars and Elisabeth celebrated her fifty-first birthday, Christmas, and their marriage in Christ Church in Hamilton. Meanwhile, Walt Shephard had married Elisabeth's daughter, Valerie!
Elisabeth described her wedding to Lars: "The ceremony, from the Prayer Book of 1662 (with bits about procreation deleted), was very brief, followed by a reception given by the women of a little Bible class I've been teaching. We had three nights in the Parker House in Boston and then returned to Hamilton for Christmas with Walt, Val, and little seven-month-old Walter III."
After the holidays, Elisabeth and Lars moved to Smyrna, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, so Lars could com-
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plete a hospital chaplaincy internship at a state hospital in the area.
Through the years, one of the greatest encouragements in Elisabeth's spiritual life — in overcoming — has been the testimony of other believers. She points to that testimony in the Scriptures as well, particularly Hebrews 12:1 RSV where the writer says, "Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses . . . ." Elisabeth reminded me that the writer has just cited in the eleventh chapter all the people from Noah right down to the people who were sawn in two.
"I recognize that the race that is set before me is not the same as somebody else's," she said, "but for another person to know that God is faithful to me in every crisis of my life — in every moment of every day — is to know that it is the same God who loves everybody else. So spiritual lessons that I have learned surely can benefit others if they will trust that same God."
To be helped, she added, others don't need to have had experiences similar to hers. In fact, she sees herself sometimes at a disadvantage in this respect because her life has been unusual, if not exotic, in many ways.
"I always try to point out that it is the same Lord who chooses the arena in which we are to run our own race. He is the one who chooses the set of circumstances in which we are appointed to glorify Him," she declared. "So, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the God of Paul and Silas, and Amy Carmichael, James Frazer, Hudson Taylor, and Elisabeth Elliot is the same God who is available to everyone. I know that He is totally trustworthy."
Commenting on the fact that she had lost two husbands, Elisabeth suggested that her experience — though similar — would not exactly match that of others who have been widowed. Each widow will respond, in some measure, in light of who she is, who her husband was, and what the circumstances of the death were.
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"It is comforting to me to realize," Elisabeth elaborated, "that it is not the experiences of our lives which change us, but it is our response to those experiences. After all, the children of Israel, wandering in the wilderness, all had the same experience. But some responded with faith and others responded with rebellion. We have exactly the same choice today.
"There are people who go through indescribably horrible circumstances who come out as refined gold. Others go through lesser trials and are embittered. Why? Because their response is rebellion — defiance of God rather than obedience. Everything you do is swelling the chorus of praise — or swelling the shout of defiance against God."
NOT ALWAYS ON TOP OF THINGS
Can a Christian feel on top of things all the time, then? "Emphatically not," asserts Elisabeth.
"We need only to read the Psalms to realize there is such a thing as miry clay, the pit out of which the psalmist himself describes his deliverance. Many of the psalms are moans and wails to God: 'How long, Lord? Why are You doing this to me? Why don't You listen? Where are You?'
"Paul himself describes anxiety and fear. Jesus was delivered from His fear when He prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane. We are subject to all kinds of emotions and temptations. So I think it is a very cruel distortion of Christianity to advertise nothing but happiness all the time — 'wonderful peace of mind since I found the Lord,' plink-a-plink-a-plink — that kind of thing. It is a hideous distortion of the Gospel, which deals with suffering. The victory over that kind of suffering can be won only by faith, not by feelings."
Elisabeth believes that the present age is one in which feelings are given priority. But nothing, she says, can be more misleading or destructive, because a person's feel-
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ings are so ephemeral. As soon as they sink, a person who bases his faith on them will be immediately shaken. That kind of faith will collapse very quickly under the pressure of life.
Elisabeth says, "I have to operate without reference to my feelings. It doesn't really matter how I feel about a thing, my responsibility is to be obedient. I need not wait until I feel like obeying."
The case of Ezekiel illustrates the need to obey, she noted. In Ezekiel 24:18 (KJV) the prophet tells about the death of his wife, which God had told him to prepare for: "So I spake unto the people in the morning: and at even my wife died; and I did in the next morning as I was commanded."
"This," Elisabeth said confidently, "is the victory that overcomes the world, through faith. Paul said, '. . . I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day' (2 Timothy 1:12 KJV). Regardless of my feelings I am to be obedient and to walk in faith, recognizing that seldom will I feel spiritual about it. But I don't have to feel ethereal or pious or holy to present my body daily to God.
"I offer up to Him in prayer my time, my energy, my talents, my work, my money, my reputation, my body, all that I am and have. That is an act of spiritual worship. And I have to believe that God accepts that."
WITH THANKSGIVING
Elisabeth closed the interview by singling out something not previously mentioned but terribly important: thanksgiving.
"If I really believe that God loves me," she said, "if on the evidence of the whole Bible and all those Christians whose lives I've read about, and those whose lives I've personally observed, I can see that He's a faithful God,
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then surely there is infinite cause for thanksgiving.
"Nothing could be a more effective balance wheel to my life than the giving of thanks. And I believe a strange transformation takes place in the way I see things — in the circumstances themselves — when I give thanks."
In clarification, Elisabeth interjected that she does not see in Scripture a command to give thanks for everything. If so, that would mean that we should thank God for evil, sin, and suffering of every kind.
Though Elisabeth cannot imagine thanking God for evil, yet she does thank Him in the midst of whatever circumstances come her way.
"To see my first husband murdered and to see my second husband disintegrate with cancer were things for which I could hardly give thanks. But they were circumstances in which I was absolutely convinced that God was in charge. And therefore, I was able to give thanks, because He was ultimately working out His purposes."
During those experiences, she is certain, God gave her opportunity to comprehend His plan in ways that otherwise would not have been possible.
The congregation of the church Elisabeth attended in Massachusetts affirms together three tremendous statements: Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again.
"I hang my soul on those strong pegs," she said resolutely, realizing that nothing that happens today, nothing that has happened, nothing that can possibly happen, can ever change in the smallest detail those tremendous facts.
"That is the ground, the bedrock, of my faith. My faith rests there — on the death, Resurrection, and coming again of Christ — not on my own notion or blueprint of how my life is supposed to work. Not on my own feelings. Not on my own spirituality. But on Jesus Christ Himself."
