Laying Down Our Rights
In society today, it’s natural for people to demand their rights. But followers of Jesus surrender their rights to Him, enjoying only the privileges He, in loving sovereignty, allows. What are some of the rights Jesus’ disciples must surrender?
• the right to take revenge (Romans 12:19-20)
• the right to have a comfortable, secure home (Luke 9:57-58)
• the right to a good reputation (Matthew 5:11)
• the right to spend money however we please (Matthew 6:19-21)
• the right to hate an enemy (Matthew 5:43-47)
• the right to be honored and served (Mark 10:42-47)
• the right to understand God’s plan before we obey (Hebrews 11:8)
• the right to live by our own rules (John 14:23-24)
• the right to hold a grudge (Colossians 3:13)
• the right to “fit into” society (Romans 12:2; Galatians 1:10)
• the right to do whatever feels good (Galatians 5:16-17; 1 Peter 4:2)
• the right to complain (Philippians 2:14; 1 Thessalonians 5:18)
• the right to put self first (Philippians 2:3-4)
• the right to express one’s sexuality freely (1 Corinthians 6:18-20)
• the right to rebel against authority (1 Peter 2:13-15)
• the right to sue another believer (1 Corinthians 6:1-8)
• the right to end a disappointing marriage (Matthew 5:31-32)

~Elisabeth Elliot, The Elisabeth Elliot Newsletter, July/August 2002

Distractions in Prayer

No one who has tried to pray for more than a few seconds at a time would claim that he is never distracted. It is astonishing to note how insistently and immediately irrelevant matters come to mind, noises occur, things to be attended to are remembered, people interrupt, and even physical discomforts or pains bother us which we had not noticed until we tried to pray. These things are, of course, the work of the master saboteur of souls, who knows how to render our spiritual machinery useless, by the loosening of the tiniest screw or the loss of the smallest nut. 

Distractions can be useful. They provide constant reminders of our human weakness. We recognize in them how earthbound we are, and then how completely we must depend on the help of the Holy Spirit to pray in and through us. We are shown, by a thousand trivialities, how trivial are our concerns. The very effort to focus, even for a minute, on higher things, is foiled, and we see that prayer--the prerequisite for doing anything for God--cannot be done without Him. We are not, however, left to fend for ourselves. 

"The Spirit too comes to help us in our weakness. For when we cannot choose words in order to pray properly, the Spirit himself expresses our plea in a way that could never be put into words, and God who knows everything in our hearts knows perfectly well what he means, and that the pleas of the saints expressed by the Spirit are according to the mind of God" (Romans 8:26-27 JB). ~Elisabeth Elliot, “A Lamp For My Feet”

The Lust for Security - Elisabeth Elliot

The Lust for Security

Once we have set ourselves to be pilgrims and strangers on the earth, which is what Christians are meant to be, it is incongruous for us to continue to insist upon the sort of security the world tries to guarantee. Our security lies not in protecting ourselves from suffering, but in putting ourselves fully into the hands of God. The desire for physical and material security makes us sly and hard. No. We must be like little children. The child in its father's arms is not worried. It lies quietly at rest because it trusts its father. 

We disobey sometimes because we say it is impossible to do what God asks. Impossible? Perhaps what we mean is impossible to do that and keep our security, impossible to obey without tremendous cost, or at least tremendous risk. Where, then, will we find safety? Is it likely that we will find it elsewhere than in the arms of the Father? 

Teach me to rest in your everlasting arms. Make me know that all other security is illusion. ~Elisabeth Elliot, A Lamp for my Feet

A beginner's prayers are generally an attempt to get God to pay attention to his wants. As we grow in grace, prayer becomes an attempt to turn our attention to God. His kingdom becomes our reference point for every matter that concerns us. Will this thing further or hinder the working of the will of God in me, in those I pray for, in these situations? What is on my mind today? Let me bring it at once into the light of God's countenance, refer it to his scrutiny, lay it (and my heart with it) open before Him. If I am not prepared to submit something, I am interested in myself, not in the kingdom. "Set your mind on God's kingdom and His justice before everything else, and all the rest will come to you as well.'' (Mt 6:33 NEB). ~Elisabeth Elliot, “A Lamp For My Feet”

Joy in the Resurrection

If resurrection is a fact--and there would be no Easter if it were not--then there is no situation so hopeless, no horizon so black, that God cannot there "find His glory." The truth is that without those ruined hopes, without that death, without the suffering that He called inevitable, the glory itself would be impossible. Why the universe is so arranged we must leave to the One who arranged it, but that it is so we are bound to believe. 

And when we find ourselves most hopeless, the road most taxing, we may also find that it is then that the Risen Christ catches up to us on the way, better than our dreams, beyond all our hopes. For it is He--not His gifts, not His power, not what He can do for us, but He Himself--who comes and makes Himself known to us. And this is the one pure joy for those who sorrow. 

And yet... and yet we sorrow. The glorious fact of the resurrection is the very heart of our faith. We believe it. We bank all our hopes on it. And yet we sorrow. It is still appointed unto man once to die, and those who are left must grieve--not as those without hope, for the beloved will be resurrected. The "ultimate contradiction," however, seems very far in the future. There is no incongruity in the human tears and the pure joy of the presence of Christ, for He wept human tears too.  ~Elisabeth Elliot, “Keep a Quiet Heart”

Two from Elisabeth Elliot

When we are puzzled by delays and detours, let us think about the great purpose of life: to glorify God. The lessons He wants to teach us "in the wilderness" are priceless means of providing us with a song we could not otherwise have sung: "In Thy constant love Thou hast led the people!" (Ex 15:13). ~Elisabeth Elliot, "A Light for My Feet" 

Our own  difficulties often appear to be random. Our tragedies look wildly uncontrolled. They are not. They are subject. Limits are set. God is quietly at work, standing in the shadows, ceaselessly watching over His children.  ~Elisabeth Elliot, “A Lamp for my Feet”

Many of our prayers are directed toward the quick and easy solution. Long-suffering is sometimes the only means by which the greater glory of God will be served, and this is, for the moment, invisible. We must persist in faith. God has a splendid purpose. Believe in order to see it. ~Elisabeth Elliot, "A Light for My Feet" 2 Cor 4:17, 18

Elisabeth Elliot

The work of heavy highway equipment is to smooth the way for travelers by exalting valleys, making low the mountains and hills, straightening the crooked. Obstacles--trees, rocks, houses, even mountains themselves--are put out of the way. This is what the Lord can do for his travelers (it is promised by the prophet Isaiah), but He does it without fuss, and in response to the one who simply thinks of Him: "Think of Him in all your ways, and He will smooth your path" (Prov. 3:6 NEB). 

The mind can build barriers, produce huge obstacles, collide with boulders of impossibility. Strangely and wonderfully, when we turn our thoughts to Him with whom nothing is an impossibility (and to turn thoughts takes an act of will), He smoothes the path for us. We find it possible, maybe even easy, to move forward. 

Don't waste time, energy, perhaps sleep-time, thinking of all those rocks in the way. Think of Him. Think of Him! You may find your path suddenly smoothed. ~Elisabeth Elliot, “A Lamp for my Feet”

Several Ways to Make Yourself Miserable

Several Ways to Make Yourself Miserable

*Count your troubles, name them one by one--at the breakfast table, if anybody will listen, or as soon as possible thereafter.

*Worry every day about something. Don't let yourself get out of practice. It won't add a cubit to your stature but it might burn a few calories.

*Pity yourself. If you do enough of this, nobody else will have to do it for you.

*Devise clever but decent ways to serve God and mammon. After all, a man's gotta live. Make it your business to find out what the Joneses are buying this year and where they're going. Try to do them at least one better even if you have to take out another loan to do it.

*Stay away from absolutes. It's what's right for you that matters. Be your own person and don't allow yourself to get hung up on what others expect of you.

*Make sure you get your rights. Never mind other people's. You have your life to live, they have theirs.

*Don't fall into any compassion traps--the sort of situation where people can walk all over you. If you get too involved in other people's troubles, you may neglect your own.

*Don't let Bible reading and prayer get in the way of what's really relevant--things like TV and newspapers. Invisible things are eternal. You want to stick with the visible ones--they're where it's at now.

~Elisabeth Elliot, Keep A Quiet Heart

Faith

Faith is a decision. It is not a deduction from the facts around us. We would not look at the world of today and logically conclude that God loves us. It doesn’t always look as though He does. Faith is not an instinct. It certainly is not a feeling—feelings don’t help much when you’re in the lions’ den or hanging on a wooden Cross. Faith is not inferred from the happy way things always work. It is an act of the will, a choice based on the unbreakable Word of a God who cannot lie, and who showed us what love and obedience and sacrifice mean, in the person of Jesus Christ. ~Elisabeth Elliot, “Secure in the Everlasting Arms”, p 94

The God who determined the measurements of the foundations of the earth sets limitations to the scope of our work. It is always tempting to measure ourselves by one another, but this easily leads to boasting or despair. It is our business to find the sphere of service allotted to us, and do all that He has appointed us to do within that sphere, not "commending ourselves." ~Elisabeth Elliot, “A Lamp For My Feet”

The Narrow Gate

There is no way to Life except through the narrow gate, but this narrow gate opens out into unimagined largeness and fullness of being. But if we choose the broad way and the wide gate which makes room for our selfish wants, we will find someday that the lane ends, as on a modern highway, we have no place to “squeeze” left or right, and there will be leanness and finally destruction. ~Elisabeth Elliot, “God’s Guidance”

The heart that is reluctant to receive joyfully of all God’s good gifts is also reluctant to part with any of them. ~Elisabeth Elliot, “Discipline the Glad Surrender”

The Bondage to Self

To hold onto something with a desperate grip is not the way to die. Death is a painful process, and restoratives offered to the dying wretch bound to his wheel only prolong his agony. There are times when the thing to do is simply to die. I am thinking, of course, of dying to the self. We clutch so tenaciously to our rights, hopes, ambitions, something to which God has perhaps said a plain no. If would-be comforters offer us consolation and sympathy, if they assist us to strengthen our grasp when it should be loosened, they do not love us as God loves us. The way into life is death, and if we refuse it we are refusing Him who showed us that way and no other. The love which is strong as death is not only willing to save the beloved, it is willing to seem, if necessary, pitiless, insensitive, unloving, if that is what will help the beloved to die--that is, to be released from the bondage of self, which is death, and thus enter the gateway of life.   ~Elisabeth Elliot, “A Lamp For My Feet”