Introduction

As for God, his way is perfect: the word of the LORD is tried: he is a buckler to all those that trust in him. PSALM 18:30

Most people who know the name Elisabeth Elliot know it because of one week in January 1956. Her husband Jim and four other young missionaries were killed by Waorani men on a sandbar of the Curaray River in the forest of eastern Ecuador, and she was left a widow at twenty-nine with a daughter of ten months. The story went round the world. It was told in magazines, preached from pulpits and retold in books for half a century, and it sent a generation of young people into missionary service. She told it first herself, in Through Gates of Splendor, published the following year.

But if that week were all, there would be no reason for a book like this one. What makes Elisabeth Elliot a teacher, and not only a figure in someone else’s story, is what she did with the rest of her life. She stayed in Ecuador. She went to live among the people who had killed her husband. She came home, wrote, married again, was widowed again, married a third time, and for some forty years taught, in books, at conferences, in a newsletter and on daily radio, a small number of things she had learned at great cost. She said them plainly and she said them often. Many thousands of Christians, a great many of them women, have counted her the person who taught them how to suffer, how to wait, how to obey, and how to trust God when He made no sense.

The one thread

If there is a single thread running through everything she taught, it is this: God is sovereign, and God is love, and both are true at the same time. Nothing reaches the believer that has not first passed through the hands of a Father who knows what He is doing and who will not waste it. Because that is so, the Christian can do three things that would otherwise be impossible. She can accept what God gives, including what she would never have chosen. She can obey Him in the next small duty without waiting to understand the whole. And she can offer everything — her losses as well as her gifts — back to Him, to be used as He pleases.

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

Every chapter of this book is a variation on that theme. Her teaching on duty is that truth applied to the present hour. Her teaching on suffering is that truth applied to grief. Her teaching on obedience and discipline is that truth applied to the will, the body and the calendar. Her teaching on love and singleness is that truth applied to the heart’s strongest desire. Her teaching on the home is that truth applied to ordinary family life. And her teaching on mission is that truth applied to the work itself, which God does not need in order to be God, and which He may break when He chooses.

She did not arrive at this by speculation. She had been raised on it in a household that read the Bible at every meal, and then she had it tested beyond anything her upbringing could have imagined. What makes her worth hearing is not that she believed in the sovereignty of God, which many people do, but that she went on believing it when it had cost her almost everything, and that she was honest about how hard that was.

How this book is arranged

A chapter on her life comes first. Then fifteen short chapters set out her teaching. The first group lays the foundation: the God who is there, sovereign and loving; the old counsel to do the next thing; her conviction that suffering is never for nothing; and the movement from accepting what God gives to offering it back to Him. The second group follows that foundation into the shape of a Christian life: the liberty that is found in obedience, the disciplines of body, mind, time and feeling, love placed under the lordship of Christ, and loneliness. The third group takes up her teaching on womanhood, marriage and the home, the part of her work most often argued over. The fourth turns to mission and the cross: her honest questions about missionary work, and the way of dying to self that she learned from Amy Carmichael. The last group gathers her teaching on the inner life: the quiet heart, the questions we ask God, and thanksgiving in all things. A conclusion and a guide to her books close the volume.

Each chapter ends with points for reflection and action, and a prayer. She would have wanted that more than most. She had little patience with religion that stayed in the head, and she was fond of reminding her listeners that the point of knowing God’s will is to do it. Read a chapter at a time. Stop at the questions. Do one of the things they suggest before you go on.

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. JAMES 1:22

A word about her words

Elisabeth Elliot’s books remain in copyright, and many of them remain in print. This companion reproduces none of her words. Apart from the few-word watchwords by which she is remembered — to do the next thing, and that suffering is never for nothing — not a sentence of hers is quoted in these pages, not even the short sayings that circulate on cards and calendars. Every description of her teaching is a summary in our own language, and where her thought is set out it is set out as we understand it. Her books are named throughout so that the reader can go to the source, and the last chapter is a guide to them, with a suggestion of where to begin. Readers are warmly encouraged to buy them, borrow them and read them. Nothing here can replace the clarity and the dry, unsentimental warmth of her own voice.

The only words quoted are those of Scripture, in the Authorised Version on which she was raised; a few lines of an anonymous old poem, long in the public domain, from which she took her watchword; a line or two of old hymns of the kind her family sang; and one sentence of Amy Carmichael’s, from a book in the Ochorus library.

Where to read her with care

This is not a book of hero-worship, and she would have been the first to object if it were. She had a sharp eye for hagiography, and in later life she took pains to correct the more glowing versions of her own story. Four cautions should be carried through these pages.

The first concerns her teaching on women and men. She held that God has ordered the sexes differently, that a wife is called to submit to her husband and that leadership in the church belongs to men, and she taught it without apology. Many Christians have been grateful for that teaching; others, equally committed to Scripture, have read the same passages differently and have found her tone at times more severe than the texts require. Chapter eleven sets out her view as fairly as we can and notes where believers part company.

The second concerns her manner. She could be brisk and stern. She had little sympathy for self-pity, and some readers, coming to her in fresh grief, have felt that she moved too quickly to acceptance and left too little room for lament. The Psalms make room for both, and we will try to do the same.

The third concerns her questions about mission. In No Graven Image and elsewhere she raised hard questions about missionary work — about what missionaries think they are achieving, and about a God who does not always bless the work done in His name. Some evangelical readers found this unsettling, and some still do. Chapter thirteen takes it up.

The fourth concerns her story. The events of 1956 have been told so often, and so gloriously, that the plain facts are easily lost. She herself grew more careful over the years in telling them, and later editions of her own first book acknowledged that what followed among the Waorani had not unfolded as simply as the early accounts implied. This book tries to keep to what is known.

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:21

Where she is faithful to the Word — and she is faithful far more often than not — receive her gladly. Where she presses beyond what is written, weigh it. She would not have wanted you to follow Elisabeth Elliot. She would have wanted you to follow Christ, and to do the next thing He gives you to do.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Before reading further, write down the hardest thing God has allowed in your life so far. Keep the page, and return to it at the end of this book.

2. Ask yourself honestly whether you believe that God is both in control of your life and good. Tell Him plainly what you believe and what you do not.

3. If you know the story of 1956 only from sermons or films, note what you think you know. Hold it lightly as you read what follows.

4. Obtain one of her own books — Keep a Quiet Heart or Passion and Purity are good places to begin — and read it alongside these chapters.

5. Decide how you will read: one chapter a day or a week, with a Bible open and a few minutes of quiet after each prayer.

A PRAYER

Lord God, Your way is perfect, though I do not always understand it, and Your word has been tried in the fire and found true.

Thank You for the servants who have trusted You in the dark and told the rest of us what they found there.

As I read about one of them, keep me from admiring her and remaining unchanged. Turn my eyes from her courage to Your faithfulness.

Teach me to accept what You give, to obey You in the next thing, and to offer my whole life back to You, through Jesus Christ my Lord. Amen.