Elizabeth Elliot Devotions

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A Faith Untried
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet


"A faith untried is no faith at all," someone has said. Today I declared my faith before a hundred women and came home to a startling piece of bad news. Hopes were dashed, plans ruined, over a seemingly trivial thing. We did not know what to do. "Trust me" is always the word at such a time. "But Lord, we did trust You. You answered us and everything was working so beautifully. Now this. What shall we do?" "Keep on trusting me. That is my assignment for you tonight. Commit your way to Me; trust in Me; stand still and see."

Why, of course, Lord! I see what You mean. How could I be sure I'm trusting You unless You keep giving me "pop quizzes"? These are the exams in the school of faith.

"More precious than perishable gold is faith which has stood the test. These trials come so that your faith may prove itself worthy" (1 Pt 1:7 NEB).

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Zero Faith
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet


"I had zero faith," a young woman said to me yesterday. "I believed in nothing at all. I wished I could, but it just wasn't there. I began praying, without faith, that God would help me to believe. He did. I know He answers that kind of prayer."

This young woman is a conscientious wife and mother, a faithful church member, and a growing Christian. Her life witnesses to the answer to her prayer. She started with nothing.

Sometimes we start with a small measure of faith, like that of the distraught father who asked Jesus for the healing of his son. "I have faith," he said, then, aware that it was not enough to support the weight of the thing he was asking, "Help me where faith falls short" (Mk 9:24 NEB).

Unbelief is a stronghold of such spiritual power that only mighty spiritual weapons can storm it. We have those weapons--"not merely human, but divinely potent to demolish strongholds" (2 Cor 10:4 NEB). Prayer is one of them. Must we be experts in its use? The young woman's testimony shows that we need not. We must only come, aware that our faith is not enough, aware that the Lord Himself waits to help us if only we ask.

Satan trembles when he sees

The weakest saint upon his knees.

___________________

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Take Strength
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet


These strong, simple words can be spiritual adrenaline for us when we need them. They were written by a man who knew what he was talking about, as he himself was in prison. He was writing to a young minister who was also suffering and evidently tempted by doubt, fear, even uncertainty of his call. The older man admonishes him very lovingly to take his share of suffering, take his share of hardship like a good soldier, and to take strength from the grace of God (2 Tm 2:1 NEB).

Where shall I ever find the strength I need to get through this experience, this ordeal, this day, this week? The answer is Take it! Take it from the grace which is ours already, in Christ Jesus.

"Here it is," He is saying, "Will you have some?"

"Yes, thank You, Lord. I'll take it."

___________________

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In the Stocks, Singing
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet


In the past few days my husband and I have experienced the sudden arrest of activity that had been one form of our service to God. We are prevented from continuing. We are uncertain as to why this has happened and what we are to do.

Paul and Silas were arrested while they were proclaiming the gospel in Philippi and put into stocks. Not only was their work halted altogether, but they themselves were physically immobilized in a dungeon, held fast in stocks. What strange treatment for two earnest servants of God! What did they do? It would be quite understandable if they had raged or wept or sunk into depressed silence. Instead, they continued what for them had long since become habitual--they continued "at their prayer," and sang praises to God.

To the frantic question, What do we do now? there is a very simple reply: Pray and sing.

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Sunrise is an Act of God
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet


The night sky, when I went to the front window this morning, was a clear dark blue, with a few sharp stars. Now, as it reddens toward dawn, a thick quilt of slate-colored cloud is moving over the whole sky, leaving only a strip of rose gold. But I am sure the sun will rise even though covered with a quilt.

We assume the sun will always rise. It always has. But it rises because God continues to will it so, not because it must in and of itself. I breathe, not because I am a smoothly functioning breathing machine, but because He who holds my breath in his hand wills me to breathe, as He wills the squirrel to breathe in the oak grove beside my house and the crow that perches in the scrub pine.

The will of God is not a given quantity. It is creative, dynamic, flowing action. Jesus participated in that action by submitting to the Will and moving with power along the "appointed way," according to the "appointed time," choosing the Father's will above his own.

The sun does no choosing. God chooses--every morning so far--to make it rise. Yet the Lord of the universe asks me to choose to follow Him--to participate, as Christ did, in the flowing action which is his ill. "Dwell in my love. If you heed my commands, you will dwell in my love, as I have heeded my Father's commands and dwell in His love" (Jn 15:10 NEB).

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Cosmic Orphans
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet


Modern man has been described as a cosmic orphan. He no longer knows the Father of us all and feels isolated and bewildered in an ever-expanding universe. The diameter of our own galaxy is 100,000 light years, and astronomers tell us that the farthest object they can see in the universe is perhaps ten billion (billion!) light years away. Such distances, the enormity of that space, are awesome, even terrifying to those who feel orphaned. The huge advances of scientific knowledge serve only to notify us of how huge our ignorance is.

When we've explored ten thousand worlds
By scientific scan,
Omniscience still belongs to God
As always--not to man.

The prophet Isaiah wrote that with the span of the palm of his hand God "set limits to the heavens." To Him coasts and islands weigh as little as specks of dust. "Lift up your eyes to the heavens; consider who created it all, led out their host one by one and called them all by their names....Do you not know, have you not heard? The Lord, the everlasting God, creator of the wide world...gives vigor to the weary, new strength to the exhausted" (Is 40:12,15,26,28,29 NEB).

If God can fling out a galaxy so that it stays where He wants it and yet observes one exhausted person and strengthens him, can we believe that we are adrift in a fathomless void? Hear the promise of Jesus: "No, I will not abandon you or leave you as orphans in the storm--I will come to you" (Jn 14:18 LB).

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Christ My Armor
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet


When faced with threat of any sort of invasion or attack, whether from human or spiritual foes, it is quite natural to draw back, throw up my guard, attempt to defend myself. The Christian has a far better defense--"Let Christ Jesus Himself be the armor that you wear" (Rom 13:14 NEB). Let me take my stand in Him, come to my enemy without fear, responding only in the power and with the love of Christ.

Who can hurt me then? And what hostility on earth or in hell can destroy me? That person whom I most dread to see, let me meet him as Christ meets him. Let Christ meet him. He is my armor, I am hidden in Him. My weakness, my fear, my hostility will be covered by his strength, his courage, his love.

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Weapons of Righteousness
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet


The means of conquering the world, spiritually speaking, are not weapons of violence or organized power. In fact they are not thought of in the world as "weapons" at all, but as pitifully ineffective for obtaining any kind of victory. They are patience and kindliness, gifts of the Holy Spirit, sincere love, declaring the truth and the power of God. They are weapons which we wield in both hands, right and left (2 Cor 6:6,7 NEB).

The object of our conquest not being power, position, property, or personal satisfaction, the weapons required are not such as would be used by men seeking those things. Our Captain had one aim in dying for us--that we should cease to live for ourselves (2 Cor 5:15). This is our aim. Therefore our weapons will seem to those whose aim is worldly (i.e., "natural," and selfish), a strange set to choose.

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Wastelands
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet


There are dry, fruitless, lonely places in each of our lives, where we seem to travel alone, sometimes feeling as though we must surely have lost the way. What am I doing here? How did this happen? Lord, get me out of this!

He does not get us out. Not when we ask for it, at any rate, because it was He all along who brought us to this place. He has been here before--it is no wilderness to Him, and He walks with us. There are things to be seen and learned in these apparent wastelands which cannot be seen and learned in the "city"--in places of comfort, convenience, and company.

God does not intend to make it no wasteland. He intends rather to keep us--to hold us with his strength, to sustain us with his sure words--in a place where there is nothing else we can count on.

"God did not guide them by the road towards the Philistines, although that was the shortest...God made them go round by way of the wilderness towards the Red Sea" (Ex 13:17,18 NEB).

Imagine what Israel and all of us who worship Israel's God would have missed if they had gone by the short route--the thrilling story of the deliverance from Egypt's chariots when the sea was rolled back. Let's not ask for shortcuts. Let's keep alert for the wonders our Guide will show us in the wilderness.

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Transforming Power
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet


If God is almighty, there can be no evil so great as to be beyond his power to transform. That transforming power brings light out of darkness, joy out of sorrow, gain out of loss, life out of death.

Sometimes we boggle at the evil in the world and especially in ourselves, feeling that this sin, this tragedy, this offense cannot possibly fit into a pattern for good. Let us remember Joseph's imprisonment, David's sin, Paul's violent persecution of Christians, Peter's denial of his Master. None of it was beyond the power of grace to redeem and turn into something productive. The God who establishes the shoreline for the sea also decides the limits of the great mystery which is evil. He is "the Blessed Controller of all things." God will finally be God, satan's best efforts notwithstanding.

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The Work of the Accuser
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet


One of the names of the enemy is the Accuser. It is his doing, when we have sought God's guidance and been as obedient as we knew how, and then remain in an agony of doubt as to whether God did guide, whether we really did obey. There is no end to the "proofs" the Accuser can present to sow doubt in our minds. "Hath God said?" (Gn 3:1 AV) was the first seed he sowed in the mind of Eve, and he has had a great deal of practice at that kind of planting ever since.

It is to be expected that every decision made with the desire to be obedient to God will be attacked. Spread your doubts before the Lord. Pray for correction of any wrong in thinking or doing and for his word of assurance as to the action you must take. If there is nothing else required of you at this moment, leave it at that. Trust God. Put the whole weight of your doubts and cares on Him--that will foil the Accuser.

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Out of All Proportion
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet


When my husband was near death from cancer, depression often seemed to overwhelm him like great black waves, and he was at times convinced (we know the source of this conviction) that his sins were unforgivable.

"Do you really think God can forgive my sins?" he would ask, for he felt that his sins were out of all proportion to the light that had been given him as a Christian (a Christian home, a Christian education, a wide sphere of Christian service).

The popular notion of somehow "balancing" our good deeds against our sins will not hold much reassurance for any of us when we face the final truth. Then we need grace, infinite grace, and plenty of it.

It is there for us--mighty waves, deeper and stronger than our blackest despair.

I had to remind my husband of what he knew very well intellectually: that his particular sins could not possibly exhaust the grace of God.

"God's act of grace is out of all proportion" to our wrongdoing (Rom 5:15 NEB).

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Who am I?
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet


This was Moses' question when God said He would send him to Pharaoh to bring release for the enslaved Israelites. The early part of Moses' life shows him to be a champion--that is, a defender and protector (of the man being wronged, of the shepherd girls), but this was not the strength he was to depend on. The real question for Moses, as for us, is not "Who am I?" but, Who is it who summons us? It is the Lord, the I AM, the same yesterday, and today, and forever. He is with us. This is what matters. This is our reason for confidence.

Today we may find ourselves summoned to a task which we know is quite beyond us. "Me, Lord?" we quaver, "Who am I?" God answers. "I am with YOU."

The Lord of Hosts is with us

The God of Jacob is our refuge. (Ps 46:11 AV)

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What It Means to be Human
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet


If Jesus had not become man, we would not have known the full meaning of being men. He, whom Richard Crashaw described as the One "who in a Throne of stars Thunders above...He whom the Sun serves...He, the old Eternal Word" came to earth as a helpless newborn, utterly dependent on his mother. Humanity is dependence. Jesus grew up in a poor peasant home in an out-of-the-way village and learned obedience.

Adam and Eve rejected God's word and accepted satan's. Their disobedience was their Declaration of Independence, which in fact meant the loss of the freedom God intended for them. It is by our acknowledging our own need, our helpless dependence on Him, that we may come to God.

Learning that in Him we live and move and have our being, we are slowly conformed to his image. Thus and only thus, in what the old Puritans called "creaturely" dependence and obedience, we become fully human and fully free.

Lord Jesus, Master of my life, my very breath is in your hands. Remind me throughout the hours of this day to depend on You for the help I need and to ask You for it.

O what peace we often forfeit, O what needless pain we bear, All because we do not carry everything to God in prayer. (Joseph M. Scriven)

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Content to be Weak
By Elisabeth Elliot
Taken From: A Lamp For My Feet


What weakness are you feeling today? The inability to manage circumstances that cry out to be changed? Helplessness in the face of another's deep need, or of evil you have to watch perpetrated on others you love? A sense of inadequacy for some task laid upon you? Physical weakness or pain? The need for power to forgive an injury or keep silence about unjust accusations against you?

Christ has been there before you. Every form of human limitation He knew, and out of that utter poverty we have been made strong. Yet, again and again, in the life of each disciple, comes the experience of weakness in order that we may live His life for others.

"We who share His weakness shall by the power of God live with Him in your service" (2 Cor 13:4 NEB).

This sharing of His weakness is one aspect of the death of the cross, one of the conditions of our discipleship, and hence cause for joy rather than bitterness. For we walk the road, not alone, but with Christ, "well content to be weak at any time if only you are strong" (2 Cor 13:9 NEB). The mystery is constantly being worked out--strength out of weakness, life out of death

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