Elizabeth Elliot Devotions

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The Desires of My Heart
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet

I had been praying for something I wanted very badly. It seemed a good thing to have, a thing that would make life even more pleasant than it is, and would not in any way hinder my work. God did not give it to me. Why? I do not know all of his reasons, of course. The God who orchestrates the universe has a good many things to consider that have not occurred to me, and it is well that I leave them to Him. But one thing I do understand: He offers me holiness at the price of relinquishing my own will.

"Do you honestly want to know Me?" He asks. I answer yes. "Then do what I say," He replies. "Do it when you understand it; do it when you don't understand it. Take what I give you; be willing not to have what I do not give you. The very relinquishment of this thing that you so urgently desire is a true demonstration of the sincerity of your lifelong prayer: Thy will be done.

So instead of hammering on heaven's door for something which it is now quite clear God does not want me to have, I make my desire an offering. The longed-for thing is material for sacrifice. Here, Lord, it's yours.

He will, I believe, accept the offering. He will transform it into something redemptive. He may perhaps give it back as He did Isaac to Abraham, but He will know that I fully intend to obey Him.

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His or Ours?
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet


The property on the sea is now ours. We can hardly believe it.

"But it was what you had dreamed of, wasn't it?"

"Yes, Lord."

"Did I not promise long ago to give you the desires of your heart? This is one of them. Often I cannot give them in the form you dream of because it would not, in the end, give you happiness. This time I give exactly what you asked. What will you do with it now?"

"First we thank you, Lord. Then we offer it back to You. Do with it, for us, for anyone who comes here, as You choose. Make it a place of peace, a desired haven."

"I receive your offering. Whose is it now?"

"Yours, Lord. Help me to remember this as King David remembered it when he prayed, 'Everything comes from thee, and it is only of thy gifts that we give to thee. We are aliens before thee and settlers . . . everything is thine'" (1 Chr 29:14,15,16 NEB).

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Where Do We Start?
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet


To be transformed into the image of Christ I must begin to do the will of the Father in the same place where He began: He emptied Himself. There is for any serious disciple, quite simply, no other starting place. It is a matter of beginning today to say no to yourself--specifically, about something you've been insisting you must have, specifically about something you have been refusing. This is step one. You travel the road "toward Jerusalem" from there, gladly taking up the cross (which is step two: saying yes to God) and following, knowing where the road led Jesus. It did not--and don't forget this!--end with a cross. The third day He rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven.

His prayer for us is, "Father, I desire that these men who are thy gift to me, may be with me where I am" (Jn 17:24 NEB).

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The Terms
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet


"The man who is challenged by Fate does not take umbrage at the terms," wrote Dag Hammarskjold. So the man called by Christ. Any terms at all are acceptable if we may be permitted to walk with Him.

"But is this the path, Lord? Must we take this one in order to reach Home?"

"Trust Me."

When the way to the house of the Lord leads through the "Valley of the Shadow," we accept those terms, too. If we suffer loss, scorn, misunderstanding, false accusation, or any other form of trouble, it is what we agreed on to begin with. Compared with the rewards promised, it is nothing; so let us not take umbrage. Let us be quite clear and matter-of-fact about it: "In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer [cheer up!] I have overcome the world" (Jn 16:33).

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I Will Not Be Afraid
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet


News reports come every day concerning economic and political calamities about to befall us all, not to mention famines, tornadoes, earthquakes, and volcanoes, things which may at any moment strike us or people we love. There are always plenty of good reasons to be afraid--unless you know that things are under control. A Christian has this "inside information." Things are, in fact, under control. God is our Refuge, our Strength, our Mighty Fortress. Nothing will get by the moat of his protection without his permission. To be afraid of what happens today or what may happen tomorrow is not only an awful waste of energy, it is not only useless, it is disobedient. We are forbidden to fear anything but the Lord Himself.

When Christians in China were being hounded to death in the 1930s, one of them (I am told) wrote this simple song, which has helped me in countless times of fear ever since I learned it as a high school girl:

I will not be afraid.
I will not be afraid.
I will look upward, and travel onward,
And not be afraid.

Will power, of course, will not always overcome human emotions. But willed obedience to the One who is in charge, coupled with prayer for his help in vanquishing our natural fears, is something else.

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Fear God and Fear Nothing Else
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet

The world is shaking with fear. "What will become of us? Where will it all end? What if Russia...? What if cancer...? What if expression...?" The love of God has wrapped us round from before the foundations of the world. If we fear Him--that is, if we are brought to our knees before Him, reverence and worship Him in absolute assurance of his sovereignty, we cannot possibly be afraid of anything else. To love God is to destroy all other fear. To love the world is to be afraid of everything--what it may think of me, what it may do to me, what may happen today or tomorrow for which I am not prepared.

"The Lord is the stronghold of my life--of whom shall I be afraid?" (Ps 27:1 RSV).

And yet, Lord, the truth is that I am often afraid. I confess it. All the weight of your promises seems sometimes to be only a feather, and the weight of my fears is lead. Reverse that, Lord, I pray. Give me the healthy fear that will make light of all the others--"The fear of the Lord is life; he who is full of it will rest untouched by evil" (Prv 19:23 NEB).

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An Encircled Shield
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet

Different phases of life have different sets of fears. A newborn baby demonstrates fear of falling and of loud noises. Swaddling clothes, used for thousands of years, are still wound tightly around the babies of the Quichua Indian tribe of Ecuador. As soon as a child is born his arms are bound to his sides, his legs straightened in a neat firm package. When this is removed the baby feels insecure and cries.

Adolescent fears about popularity, pimples, and peer pressure give way to adult anxieties about responsibility and life's major decisions.

As we grow old we are beset by the fear of aging, which may bring us weakness, pain, dependence on others, loneliness. We wake in the early dark and find ourselves the targets of many fiery darts of fear. We may think we are on guard, and suddenly a dart comes at us from an unexpected angle. We can't cover all the possibilities. We dodge and duck, but some of the fears get to us--unless we take refuge in the Lord. The psalmist calls Him "my encircling shield, my glory." No need to stare into the darkness, allowing our imaginations to torment us with the "what ifs"--"Now I can lie down and go to sleep and then awake, for the Lord has hold of me" (Ps 3:3,5 JB).

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The Fear of Loss
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet


In C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters we see with startling clarity the cleverness of the enemy in deceiving human beings.

Selfishness has a thousand forms, most of which we are slow to recognize for what they are. I was thinking about the fear of loss and what a stranglehold it can have on me. As I listed some of the things I dreaded to lose, it occurred to me that this fear is a deadly form of selfishness. Selfishness does terrible things to us, but it does not stop there. It does terrible things to others. "Saving our own skin" usually results in skinning somebody else. Think, for example, of the fear of losing: reputation, opportunity for advancement, credit, recognition, position, beauty, youth, health, money, the love of friends or children, compliments, popularity, security, privacy, rights, people you love, job, home, dreams, power.

As I considered each of these separately, I began to think what sort of sin each kind of loss tempts me to commit. Then I thought about what kind of faith is required to enable me to commit those fears to God. Has He, in fact, made provision for these things? The list is not a list of sins--make no mistake about that. It is a list of blessings, of gifts from God. But to grasp them selfishly and greedily, to hang onto them fiercely and allow myself to be enslaved by the fear of losing them, is to deny Christ. Do not fear, He says to us. I am with you.

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Submission and Independence
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet


Paul tells us to submit to one another out of reverence for Christ, and James tells us we ought to have "the right sort of independence" (Jas 1:4 JBP). Can the same person obey both commands? The answer is yes, for in both he is being obedient to Christ. Submission is the recognition of and obligation to authority. An independence that refuses all accountability to those assigned by God to exercise authority--parents, husbands, employers, teachers, government--is the wrong sort. The right sort, according to James, begins with the acceptance of adversity. That in itself indicates a measure of maturity. One who has not attained that maturity but tries to achieve independence will certainly have the wrong sort.

To accept adversity, obviously, goes against the grain of all of us. We don't like adversity. Acceptance takes fortitude and faith--faith that Somebody knows what this trouble is all about and has the situation well in hand. In other words, acceptance is submission to God Himself. Often the real proof of our obedience is the willingness to submit, not only to adversity, but also to the specific individuals whom God has put over us (and sometimes this comes to the same thing--those individuals spell "adversity!"). Take a close look at what James says: whatever tests our faith leads in the end to the right sort of independence.

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How to Be Free
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: All That Was Ever Ours

Page 1 of 4


Isak Dinesen, the great Danish storyteller, describes two men traveling by boat to Zanzibar on a full-moon night in 1863. Mira Jama, a much-renowned old man, "the inventions of whose mind have been loved by a hundred tribes," tells a red-haired Englishman "who had been blown about by many winds," that "there are only two courses of thought at all seemly to a person of any intelligence. The one is: What am I to do this next moment?--or tonight, or tomorrow? And the other: What did God mean by creating the world, the sea, and the desert, the horse, the winds, woman, amber, dishes, wine?"

I am captivated by the scene--the warm night, the smooth sea, the creak of the mast, and the quiet voices. But beyond that Mira Jama's statement has for me the ring of truth. It touches the foundation of all that the Bible says to us, for it is a book about man's responsibility and God's purposes. But there is a question which alone is regarded as "relevant" (Mira Jama's word seemly is a much better word!) to today's generation, one "up with which I can no longer put," a question discussed in schools, churches, clubs, and "sensitivity groups" ad nauseam. It is WHO AM I? I protest the endless probing and pulse-taking, the anxious inward examination which assumes that the ego is the place to look for answers, and that the truth will somehow be found in "knowing oneself." Can we not call it plain old-fashioned selfishness if we ignore the possibility of responsibility to others and to God as the road to freedom? According to Mira Jama, "a person of any intelligence" would want to be informed not of who he is, but of what is expected of him.

One weekend three things happened to my teenage daughter, Valerie, which brought home, more powerfully than any lecture of mine could have done, the tragic delusion of modern youth's quest for identity and freedom. On Friday night her best friend ran away from home. On Saturday night Valerie saw the movie Easy Rider. Then on Sunday morning the rector's sermon was on freedom, using Easy Rider as an illustration of a misguided pilgrim's progress. Valerie herself saw the relation between these events, and was awed by the "coincidence," to me not less than providential.

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Freedom from Fear
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet


There is a sense in which every form of fear is essentially the fear of death. Jesus came to deliver us from that in all its forms. "He became a human being so that by going through death as a man he might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil; and might also set free those who lived their whole lives a prey to the fear of death" (Heb 2:14,15 JBP).

I know people whose lives are totally controlled by fear. There is no bondage more powerful and crippling. Fear takes over the mind, coercing and circumscribing all its activity. We know where that spirit of fear originates, and we know the name of the enemy who would hold us enslaved. In the name of our God we must tread down our enemies, including all the nagging "what ifs" of our lives. To those frightening possibilities Christ answers, "I will never leave you or forsake you." Let the very worst thing come to pass--even there, especially there, his hand will hold us. If we go into darkness, He is there, has been there before us, has conquered all its powers. That's why He became a man. That's why He died. That's why He rose again.

My Lord and my God--forgive my fears. Deliver me from bondage by the power of your resurrection.

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How to Be Free
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: All That Was Ever Ours

page 2 of 4

Her friend, whom I'll call Becky, had suggested once or twice that she'd like to run away. She had not been happy with her mother, so had decided to try living with her father and stepmother. She didn't like that either. They also expected her to let them know where she was, and come home at reasonable hours. This was a bit much for Becky, who had attended a school in New York where "we never had to worry about things like getting homework done or coming to class on time." She filled Val's and other friends' ears with astonishing tales of things she had experienced, and took a condescending view of people who were not pot smokers. To her, freedom meant doing what she wanted to do. She had not yet acknowledged to herself that she did not know what she wanted to do. "Maybe the trouble's inside me," she confided to Val. "But I think it's outside. It's my environment. If I can get away from it all, find out who I am, do my own thing. . . ."

Easy Rider is the story of two young men who do just that. They use money made in selling dope to cut loose from their responsibilities and head for what looks to them like the Holy City--New Orleans, at Mardi Gras time. One of them starts out by discarding his wristwatch. None of the restrictions of time for him! He is free. And off they go, roaring across the great sunlit spaces of the West, the warm peacefulness of the South. Neither of them notices that if it weren't for the Establishment there would be no smooth highway to travel on, no high-powered bikes to carry them.

The rector's sermon pointed out that true freedom is not to be found in throwing off personal responsibility. The man who runs away from the truth will never be a free man, for it is the truth alone, sought within the circle of his commitments, which will make him free.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man who epitomized true freedom in his acceptance, for God's sake, of the prison cell and death, wrote: "If you set out to seek freedom, then learn above all things to govern your soul and your senses. . . . Only through discipline may a man learn to be free."

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How to Be Free
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: All That Was Ever Ours

Page 3 of 4

Freedom and discipline have come to be regarded as mutually exclusive, when in fact freedom is not at all the opposite, but the final reward, of discipline. It is to be bought with a high price, not merely claimed. The world thrills to watch the grace of Peggy Fleming on the ice, or the marvelously controlled speed and strength of a racehorse. But the skater and horse are free to perform as they do only because they have been subjected to countless hours of grueling work, rigidly prescribed, faithfully carried out. Men are free to soar into space because they have willingly confined themselves in a tiny capsule designed and produced by highly trained scientists and craftsmen, have meticulously followed instructions and submitted themselves to rules which others defined.

I spent some time living with a jungle tribe whose style of life looked enviably "free." They wore no clothes, lived in houses without walls, had no idea whatever of authority, paid no taxes, read no books, took no vacations. But they had a well-defined goal. They wanted to stay alive. It was as simple as that. And in a jungle, which can look very hostile indeed to one not accustomed to living there, they had learned to live. They accepted with grace and humor the awful weather, the gnats, the mud, thorns, snakes, steep hills, and deep forests which made their lives difficult. They never even spoke of "roughing it." They didn't know anything else. They'd walk for hours with hundred-pound baskets on their backs and when they reached their destination, perhaps in a tropical downpour, they did not so much as say, "Whew!" They knew what was expected of them, and did it as a matter of course. None asked, "Who am I?" They asked only, "What am I to do this next moment?" If it were to hunt or to make poison for darts, a man did that, or if it were to go out and clear new planting space, a woman did that. Their freedom to live in that jungle depended on a well-defined goal and on their willingness to discipline themselves in order to reach it. No one could "give" them this freedom.

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How to Be Free
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: All That Was Ever Ours

Page 4 of 4

I lived with these footloose people in their "jungle" environment--a nonproductive member of their community--and enjoyed a kind of freedom which even hippies might envy. But I was free only because the Indians worked. My freedom was contingent upon their acceptance of me as a liability and, incidentally, upon my own willingness to confine myself to a forest clearing where all I heard was a foreign language.

So we come back to Mira Jama and Becky and the "Easy Riders," and their search for meaning in life. It can be found only in God's purpose, I believe, in what he originally meant when he made us. "If you are faithful to what I have said, you are truly my disciples (those who are being disciplined),'' Jesus said. "And you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.

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God's Secret Purpose
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet


Whatever the enemy of our souls can do to instill doubt about the real purpose of the Father of our souls, he will certainly try to do. "Hath God said?" was his question to Eve, and she trusted him, the enemy, and doubted God. Each time the suspicion arises that God is really "out to get us," that He is bent on making us miserable or thwarting any good we might seek, we are calling Him a liar. His secret purpose has been revealed to us, and it is to bring us finally, not to ruin, but to glory. That is precisely what the Bible tells us: "His secret purpose framed from the very beginning [is] to bring us to our full glory" (1 Cor 2:7 NEB).

I know of no more steadying hope on which to focus my mind when circumstances tempt me to wonder why God doesn't "do something." He is always doing something--the very best thing, the thing we ourselves would certainly choose if we knew the end from the beginning. He is at work to bring us to our full glory.

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