Tuesday 16 June 2015

Elisabeth Elliott

Inspiring woman: quotes here:

On Sunday, Elisabeth Elliot passed away. Elliot was a living testimony to the power of God’s grace, forgiveness, and unconditional love. As a young missionary, Elisabeth traveled to Ecuador where she soon married fellow missionary Jim Elliot. Sensing the call to share the gospel with an unreached people group, Jim and four other missionaries made contact with the Aucas, a tribe living in the Ecuadorian jungles. Due to a tragic misunderstanding, all five were speared to death. Elisabeth and the other widows remained in Ecuador where they continued the work of their husbands, sharing the gospel with the very people who were involved in their husbands’ murders. The martyrdom of these men, and the remarkable story of the village’s transformation, led to a an influx of young Christians entering missionary service in the middle of the twentieth century. Elisabeth went on to write numerous influential books on her husband’s life, her own ministry, and the Christian life. She died at the age of 88.

In remembrance, we’ve gathered 30 of her most inspiring quotes. Share your favorites to celebrate the life and legacy of a woman who made an incalculable impact on Christianity around the world.

The fact that I am a woman does not make me a different kind of Christian, but the fact that I am a Christian makes me a different kind of woman.
Faith does not eliminate questions. But faith knows where to take them.

“I have one desire now – to live a life of reckless abandon for the Lord, putting all my energy and strength into it.

God never withholds from His child that which His love and wisdom call good. God’s refusals are always merciful—‘severe mercies’ at times, but mercies all the same. God never denies us our hearts’ desire except to give us something better.

Waiting on God requires the willingness to bear uncertainty, to carry within oneself the unanswered question, lifting the heart to God about it whenever it intrudes upon one’s thoughts.



Restlessness and impatience change nothing except our peace and joy. Peace does not dwell in outward things, but in the heart prepared to wait trustfully and quietly on Him who has all things safely in His hands.

There is nothing worth living for, unless it is worth dying for.

I do know that waiting on God requires the willingness to bear uncertainty, to carry within oneself the unanswered question, lifting the heart to God about it whenever it intrudes upon one’s thoughts. Its easy to talk oneself into a decision that has no permanence—easier sometimes than to wait patiently.

The will of God is not something you add to your life. It’s a course you choose. You either line yourself up with the Son of God . . . or you capitulate to the principle which governs the rest of the world.

To be a follower of the Crucified means, sooner or later, a personal encounter with the cross. And the cross always entails loss.

Leave it all in the Hands that were wounded for you.

One does not surrender a life in an instant. That which is lifelong can only be surrendered in a lifetime.

Worship is not an experience. Worship is an act, and this takes discipline. We are to worship ‘in spirit and in truth.’ Never mind about the feelings. We are to worship in spite of them.

When obedience to God contradicts what I think will give me pleasure, let me ask myself if I love him.

The will of God is never exactly what you expect it to be. It may seem to be much worse, but in the end it’s going to be a lot better and a lot bigger.

The life of faith is lived one day at a time, and it has to be lived—not always looked forward to as though the ‘real’ living were around the next corner. It is today for which we are responsible. God still owns tomorrow.




We never know what God has up His sleeve. You never know what might happen; you only know what you have to do now.

By trying to grab fulfillment everywhere, we find it nowhere.

It is God to whom and with whom we travel, and while He is the end of our journey, he is also at every stopping place.

The Word of God I think of as a straight edge, which shows up our own crookedness. We can’t really tell how crooked our thinking is until we line it up with the straight edge of Scripture.

It is in our acceptance of what is given that God gives Himself.

Our vision is so limited we can hardly imagine a love that does not show itself in protection from suffering. The love of God is of a different nature altogether. It does not hate tragedy. It never denies reality. It stands in the very teeth of suffering.


The secret is Christ in me, not me in a different set of circumstances.

Until the will and the affections are brought under the authority of Christ, we have not begun to understand, let alone to accept, his lordship.

If your goal is purity of heart, be prepared to be thought very odd.

Cruelty and wrong are not the greatest forces in the world. There is nothing eternal in them. Only love is eternal.

Don’t dig up in doubt what you planted in faith.

You can never lose what you have offered to Christ.

God has promised to supply our needs. What we don’t have now we don’t need now.

The work of God is done on God’s timetable. His answers to our prayers come always in time—his time. His thoughts are far higher than ours, his wisdom past understanding.

Grief. Loss.

This is how it feels when people ask: How are you doing?
What do you say, when someone tells you this? What do they WANT you to say?

Nothing. Because this is how it is. This is grief. We Christians live in parallel universes. We have wonderful hope in Jesus, hope that transcends reality, the grittiness and ugliness of a broken, damaged world. Hope that is real.

But we live - oh, how we live - in this broken, damaged world. We experience grief in all its nastiness and sorrow.

I thought of trying to untangle the threads for my friend. As if just concentrating on ONE of them - on anger, or abandonment, or even apathy - would make it more manageable, like an untangled ball of wool.

I thought of things I could say that could be helpful.

I thought...

But it wouldn't help.

In the end, I just said 'Yes'. I hear your sorrow and pain and grief. I hear that it is as messy as a tangle of threads. I hear that there seems to be no end to anything.

I listened. I gave. I gave the gift of Being Listened To.

I hope it helped.

Sunday 7 June 2015

The Meaning of Marriage: Tim and Kathy Keller

I wanted to review this book, but I can't. There's just too much in it to try to condense meaning, so I will just try and jot down some nuggets to remember. I'm in a hurry to pass it on to a young, unmarried-but-on-the-way-to-it friend.

The secret of marriage  is that Jesus gave himself up for us (p45)...he died to his own interests...marriage only 'works' to the degree that apporximates the patternof God's self-giving love in Christ...do for your spouse what God did for you in Jesus, and the rest will follow. (p47)...Marriage is a major vehicle for the gospel's remaking of your heart from the inside out and your life from the ground up.

The power for marriage if we look to our spouses to fill up our tanks in a way that only God can do, we are demanding an impossibility...we are not to live for ourselves, but for the other...all Christians who really understand the gospel undergo a radical change in the way they relate to people. (p53)

The Gospel: you are so lost and flawed, so sinful, that Jesus had to die for you, but you are also so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for you....freely give and freely receive...love is the opposite of self-seeking...
The Gospel can make you happy enough to be humble...Without the help of the Spirit, without a continual refilling of your soul's tank with the glory and love of the Lord, such submission to the interests of the other is virtually impossible to accomplish without becoming resentful.

Seek to serve one another rather than to be happy, and  you will find a new and deeper happiness...
CS Lewis: Give up yourself, and you will find your real self...(Mere Christianity) Wounded people...are so engrossed in their own pain and problems that they don't realize what they look like to others...The essence of sin...living for ourselves, rather than for God and the people around us. (p63)...see your own selfishness as a fundamental problem...

'Fear' means to be overwhelmed, to be controlled by something. To fear the Lord is to be overhwelved with wonder before the greatness of God and his love....We love - because he first loved us. 1 John 4:19

The essence of marriage Lewis Smedes - we are who we become by making wise promises and keeping them....to be fully known and truly loved is like being loved by God...it liberrates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.

The mission of marriage  - its purpose. Friendship....must be about something that both are committed to and passionate about...'those who are going nowhere can have no fellow travellers'. (CS Lewis, The Four Loves) (p114)

Christian friendship: spiritual transparency, spiritual constancy...deep oneness  develops as two people, speaking the truth in love, journey together...

Loving the stranger...We don't really know each other when we get married...character flaws cause problems..Marriage brings out the worst in you...Marriage has...'the power of truth'...which is a hard gift to receive...give each other the right to hold one another accountable...marriage has a power to heal us of hurts and convince us of our own distinctive beauty and worth...give your spouse love in the way he finds most emotionally valuable and powerful...give affection and friendship; reconcile; give forgiveness as Jesus did.

Embracing the other... recognising how different and unique we are.