Appendix A: Lessons from the Life of Elisabeth Elliot

“For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope.”

— Romans 15:4, KJV

The lessons below are not a summary of Elisabeth Elliot’s teaching, which is set out in the companion volume. They are lessons drawn from her life, the things her story suggests to anyone trying to follow Christ. Each is set beside a passage of Scripture, because her life is worth learning from only in so far as it points back to the Word she trusted.

1. Obedience Comes Before Understanding

Again and again she had to act without knowing how things would turn out: going to Ecuador single, marrying a man who had made her wait for years, going into the forest with a small child. She did not wait for explanations before she obeyed. “Jesus answered and said unto him, What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter” (John 13:7, KJV).

2. Waiting Is Not Wasted

Her courtship with Jim Elliot lasted five years, most of them spent apart and in uncertainty. She learned to entrust her longings to God rather than to seize them. The waiting shaped her as much as the having did. “Wait on the LORD: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the LORD” (Psalm 27:14, KJV).

3. Loss Can Be Offered to God

A murdered helper, a stolen suitcase of language work, a husband speared on a sandbar: she did not pretend these losses were small. She learned to offer them to God as she would have offered a gift, and to trust that nothing so offered is wasted. “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28, KJV).

4. Love Your Enemies, Literally

Within three years of Jim’s death she was living among the men who had killed him, sharing their food and learning their language. Some of them became her brothers in Christ. Forgiveness for her was not a feeling but a place to live. “But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matthew 5:44, KJV).

5. Tell the Truth, Even About Heroes

She would not let the story of 1956 harden into a legend. She told the truth about missionary failures, including her own, and she added an epilogue to her most famous book to do it. Christians do not need flattering stories to sustain their faith. “Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members one of another” (Ephesians 4:25, KJV).

6. God Is Not Our Tool

In No Graven Image she exposed the habit of treating God as a means to the results we want. She learned in Ecuador that he will not be managed, and that his purposes are larger than our plans. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD” (Isaiah 55:8, KJV).

7. Questions Belong in Prayer

She did not hide her doubts, either from God or from her readers. She brought them to him. Honest lament is not the opposite of faith but one of its forms. “Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us” (Psalm 62:8, KJV).

8. Do the Next Thing

When the whole road was hidden, she did the duty in front of her. Her watchword, borrowed from an old poem, is a cure for the anxiety that tries to live tomorrow today. “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” (Matthew 6:34, KJV).

9. Small Duties Are Holy

For thirteen years she spoke on the radio about washing dishes, keeping promises and answering letters as well as about prayer and suffering. She believed that God is served in ordinary things as truly as in dramatic ones. “He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much” (Luke 16:10, KJV).

10. Grief Is Real, and So Is Hope

Widowed twice, she grieved in earnest, and she would not hurry others through their grief. But she grieved as one who believed in the resurrection. “But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13, KJV).

11. Saints Are Sinners Being Made Holy

Her biographers have shown her pride, her severity and the difficulties of her home life. None of that makes her less worth learning from. It shows that God works through flawed people, and that the faith we follow is finally Christ’s, not theirs. “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help” (Psalm 146:3, KJV).

12. God Carries Us to the End

In her last years she could neither teach nor write nor remember. She was carried, by her husband and by her God. Faithfulness in old age is sometimes simply a matter of being held. “Now also when I am old and greyheaded, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to come” (Psalm 71:18, KJV).