A Chance to Die

Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. JOHN 12:24

Of all the Christians who shaped Elisabeth Elliot, none mattered more to her than Amy Carmichael. She had read her since she was young, absorbed her poems and her prose, and spoke of her for the rest of her life as one of her chief teachers in the way of the cross. In 1987 she paid the debt in a full-length biography, A Chance to Die: The Life and Legacy of Amy Carmichael. It is one of her best books, and it is as much a book about discipleship as a biography. To understand what Elisabeth Elliot taught about the death of self, it is the place to go.

The woman she wrote about

Amy Carmichael was born in 1867 in the village of Millisle, in the north of Ireland. As a young woman she came under the influence of the Keswick movement, with its call to a life wholly surrendered to Christ, and she felt called to missionary work. After a brief and difficult time in Japan she went to South India in 1895, and she never came home. In the Tinnevelly district she gathered a band of Indian women who travelled with her through the villages, and she began to learn of the children, especially girls, who were given to the temples. She gave the rest of her life to rescuing such children and to raising them in Christ. The community that grew up around her became known as the Dohnavur Fellowship. In 1931 a fall left her injured, and for the last twenty years of her life she was largely confined to her room, from which she wrote many of the books that are still read today. She died in 1951.

Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. MARK 10:14

The cross at the centre

What drew Elisabeth Elliot to her was not chiefly the romance of her work, though it was romantic enough. It was her understanding of the Christian life as a life laid down. Amy Carmichael believed that the call of Christ is a call to die — to one’s own preferences, one’s own reputation, one’s own comfort and one’s own plans — so that the life of Jesus may be seen in the believer. The title of the biography is said to come from her own description of missionary life as, in effect, a chance to die. Elisabeth Elliot made that the key to the whole story.

And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. LUKE 9:23

This is not a morbid idea, though it can sound like one. It is the teaching of the Lord Himself, who said that the grain of wheat must fall into the ground and die if it is to bear fruit. The death in question is not of the body, but of the self that wants its own way. And the purpose is not loss but life: the fruit that comes only from a life given away.

Amy Carmichael put this into a small book of searching sentences, If, which is in the Ochorus library. Each sentence describes a failure of love and ends with the confession that one who fails in this way knows nothing of Calvary love. One of them, in the library’s text, reads: “If I cling to choices simply because they are my choices; if I give any room to personal likes and dislikes, then I know nothing of Calvary love.” It is the kind of mirror in which no one looks comfortably.

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. GALATIANS 2:20

Honesty about the work

There was a second reason for her admiration. Amy Carmichael told the truth about missionary work. Her early book Things as They Are, also in the Ochorus library, described the spiritual darkness of the villages and the slow, often discouraging labour of the missionaries without the cheerful gloss that supporters at home expected. Some at home did not want to hear it. Elisabeth Elliot, who had made the same refusal in her own telling of Ecuador, saw in Amy a fellow witness to the truth that God’s work is done through weakness, failure and long waiting, and not only through visible success.

For we which live are alway delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh. 2 CORINTHIANS 4:11

Not a plaster saint

A Chance to Die is not hagiography, and that is part of its value. Elisabeth Elliot admired Amy Carmichael more than almost anyone, but she did not hide her strong will, her decided opinions, the severity of some of her standards or the frictions that some of her decisions caused with others. She showed a woman who had to die to herself daily precisely because her self was so strong. That honesty makes the book more useful, not less. The way of the cross is not for people who have no self to lose. It is for people like us.

The last twenty years of Amy Carmichael’s life also mattered to her. A woman who had been constantly active was laid aside, unable to travel or to work as she had, and she had to learn a different kind of death: the surrender of usefulness itself. Out of that confinement came much of her best writing. Elisabeth Elliot, who would herself be laid aside in her last years, saw in it the truth that God’s strength is made perfect in weakness, and that a life can bear fruit long after it has stopped being busy.

And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. 2 CORINTHIANS 12:9

Weighing it

The teaching on the death of self needs one guard. It can be heard as a call to self-hatred, or to a grim suppression of every desire, or to a kind of spiritual performance in which the believer measures his holiness by how much he has given up. That is not what Scripture means, and not what either woman meant at her best. The self that dies is the self that sets itself against God. What rises in its place is not a blank but a person made new, free to love because no longer bound to self. The cross is always followed by the resurrection.

Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. ROMANS 6:4

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Read Luke 9:23–25. What in your life would it mean to take up your cross today, specifically?

2. Name one preference, one plan or one part of your reputation that you are clinging to. Lay it down before God.

3. Read Amy Carmichael’s If in the Ochorus library, a few sentences at a time. Stop at the one that troubles you most and pray over it.

4. If you have been laid aside by illness or age, ask God what fruit He may intend from this season, and offer it to Him.

5. Obtain A Chance to Die and read the life for yourself, watching for the moments when Amy chose the way of the cross.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You fell into the ground and died, that You might bring forth much fruit.

I confess how tightly I hold my own choices, my own comfort and my own good name.

Teach me to take up my cross daily and follow You. Let the self that sets itself against You die, and let Your life be seen in me.

Make me fruitful in action or in weakness, as You choose, and let me walk in newness of life. Amen.