Acceptance and Offering

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. ROMANS 12:1

If suffering is never for nothing, what is the believer to do with it? Elisabeth Elliot’s answer had two movements, and she returned to them so often that they form the practical core of her teaching. The first is acceptance: receiving what God has given, including what we would never have chosen, as from His hand. The second is offering: giving it back to Him as a sacrifice, to be used as He pleases. Between them, she believed, lies the transformation of suffering. What is merely endured remains a loss. What is accepted and offered becomes a gift.

Receiving from His hand

Acceptance, in her teaching, did not mean pretending. It did not mean saying that a loss did not hurt, or that it was good in itself, or that we ought to feel happy about it. It meant something both simpler and harder: acknowledging that this, too, has come through the hands of a loving and sovereign God, and refusing to fight Him over it.

And said, Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD. JOB 1:21

Job’s words were among her touchstones. He did not say that Satan had taken away, or the Sabeans, or the wind. He said the Lord had taken away, and he blessed Him. That is not resignation to fate; it is worship in the dark. And Job’s next response, to his wife, put the matter even more sharply.

But he said unto her, Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? In all this did not Job sin with his lips. JOB 2:10

She often noted, in substance, that we are glad to accept God’s sovereignty when it brings us what we want. The test of faith is whether we accept it when it does not. Acceptance is the refusal to divide our lives into the parts God has arranged and the parts that have escaped Him.

Amy Carmichael, whose life Elisabeth Elliot wrote in A Chance to Die, gave this a phrase in the title of one of her poems: “In Acceptance Lieth Peace.” It names exactly what Elisabeth Elliot found. Peace does not come when the circumstances change. It comes when the will stops fighting the God who allowed them.

Offering it back

But acceptance alone could become passive, even stoical. What made her teaching distinctively Christian was the second movement. Having received what God gave, the believer is to offer it back to Him. The widowhood, the singleness, the illness, the disappointment, the loneliness — all of it is to be laid on the altar as a living sacrifice.

The feeding of the five thousand gives a picture of it in the boy with his lunch. He had five barley loaves and two small fishes, absurdly little for such a crowd. The disciples could see only the inadequacy. But when the little was given to Jesus, He blessed it, broke it, and fed thousands with it.

There is a lad here, which hath five barley loaves, and two small fishes: but what are they among so many? JOHN 6:9

Her point was that our losses, like the boy’s lunch, are worth nothing much in our own hands. In Christ’s hands they become bread for others. A woman who has accepted her singleness and offered it to God may find it becomes a means of service no married woman could give. A widow who has offered her grief may find it becomes the ground of comfort for a hundred other widows. That, in her teaching, is the transformation of suffering: not that the loss stops being a loss, but that it becomes an offering, and God accepts offerings and uses them.

She was clear that a real offering costs something. David refused to offer the Lord what had cost him nothing, and she believed the same principle applied to the sacrifices of the heart. It is easy to offer God what we do not want. The offering that transforms is the offering of what we did want — the hope, the person, the plan — given up because He asked.

And the king said unto Araunah, Nay; but I will surely buy it of thee at a price: neither will I offer burnt offerings unto the LORD my God of that which doth cost me nothing. So David bought the threshingfloor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver. 2 SAMUEL 24:24

This is why her teaching on acceptance was never cheap. She was not asking people to make the best of things. She was asking them to make a sacrifice of things, and to trust God with the result. The model, as always for her, was Christ in Gethsemane, who asked that the cup might pass from Him and then took it from His Father’s hand.

And he went a little further, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt. MATTHEW 26:39

Loneliness and widowhood

She applied this teaching most directly to the losses she knew best. She was widowed twice, and she lived long seasons alone. She did not romanticise either. But she taught that loneliness, like any other suffering, can be accepted and offered, and that when it is, God meets the lonely person in it. Her book Loneliness, written after both her widowhoods, works this out at length, and chapter ten of this companion looks at it more closely.

What she wanted the bereaved and the lonely to know was that their state, however painful, was not a waste of their lives. It was material for an offering. The question was not whether they would suffer — they already were — but what they would do with it. They could clutch it and resent it, or they could open their hands and give it to God. The first leaves us alone with our loss. The second, she believed, brings us into fellowship with Him.

Weighing it

This is, perhaps, the most characteristic thing she taught, and it is thoroughly scriptural. Paul calls the whole of the believer’s life a living sacrifice; the writer to the Hebrews speaks of the sacrifice of praise; and the Lord Himself prayed, not my will but Thine. Two cautions are worth noting.

The first is that acceptance of what God permits is not the same as acceptance of injustice that ought to be resisted. A Christian may accept from God’s hand an illness that cannot be cured; she is not thereby required to accept abuse that can be stopped. Elisabeth Elliot’s teaching concerned the things God sends that we cannot change, and it should not be stretched to cover the things we can and should change.

The second is that acceptance is usually not a single act. Most people who lose something precious have to give it back to God again and again, sometimes every morning. That is not failure. It is the shape of the offering in a fallen world, and God is patient with those who must lay the same sacrifice on the altar many times.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. PSALM 51:17

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Name one thing in your life that you have not yet accepted from God’s hand. Tell Him honestly why you are fighting it.

2. Read Job 1 and 2. Notice where Job locates the source of his losses, and how he responds.

3. Take the loss or limitation you named, and in a deliberate prayer offer it to God as a living sacrifice. Write down the date.

4. Think of someone who is lonely or bereaved. Ask how your own experience of loss, offered to God, might become bread for them this week.

5. If you have offered something to God before and taken it back, offer it again today without shame.

A PRAYER

Father, You gave and You have taken away. Blessed be Your name.

I confess that I have received Your good gifts gladly and fought You over the hard ones. Teach me to receive everything from Your hand.

Here is what I have lost and what I lack. It is small in my hands. I give it to You as a living sacrifice; bless it, break it, and use it as You will.

Not my will but Yours be done, as it was in Gethsemane, for the sake of Jesus Christ my Lord. Amen.