It's a great privilege for my husband and
me to be here, and we're just very
grateful.
I can't imagine how you come out on
a Friday night.
I hardly ever heard of such a thing,
but thank you for being here.
There have been very many blessings in my
life, and I'm sure that if we had
opportunity to hear the blessings of your life,
we would hear some wonderful things, but I
kind of imagine that my talk tonight would
not be at the top of most people's
lists.
I've entitled my talk, Blessed Discipline, and I
do recognize that discipline is a great blessing,
but we don't begin with that notion, do
we, especially when we're small?
The psalmist wrote in Psalm 94, verse 12,
Blessed is the man you discipline, O Lord.
And the word blessed means happy, doesn't it?
Happy is the man you discipline, the man
you teach from your law.
And then in verse 18, he says, When
I said, My foot is slipping, your love,
O Lord, supported me.
Discipline and love are closely linked in God's
word.
He disciplines us because he loves us.
I have four brothers, as was mentioned, and
one of them is named Tom.
We called him Tommy when he was little.
I'm number two of six children, so Tommy
was just a little boy, eight years younger
than I.
And when he was about two years old,
he had one favorite pastime.
He would love to take the paper bags
out of the drawer in the kitchen and
spread them around on the floor of the
kitchen.
Well, my mother allowed him to do that.
We used to tease our parents, we three
older ones, because we never got away with
some of the things that the younger three
got away with.
And I don't remember being allowed to spread
anything around on the kitchen floor, but Tommy
was allowed to do that on one condition,
that he put the paper bags back in
the drawer when he was finished playing.
Mother came into the kitchen one morning and
there were the paper bags all over the
floor, but Tommy was not to be found.
She discovered that he was in the living
room where my father was playing the piano.
And so she said, Tommy, I want you
to come and pick up the paper bags.
And he looked up with his beautiful blue
eyes, with long dark lashes and a charming
smile, and he said to my mother, but
I want to sing Jesus Loves Me.
My father took the occasion to press home
the lesson of 1 Samuel 15.22. Does
the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices
as much as in obeying the voice of
the Lord?
To obey is better than sacrifice.
I don't think my father gave Tommy the
whole verse, but I think he did make
very clear to this little boy that it
was no good singing the praises of Jesus
if you're being disobedient to your mother.
Blessed discipline.
So I'm very glad that I grew up
in a very disciplined family.
Both of my parents were godly people and
they were seven-day-a-week kind of
people.
There was no dichotomy between the way they
behaved on Sunday and the way they behaved
on Monday.
And we children knew that what our parents
said they meant.
And there was discipline when we were disobedient.
There were three things that I think are
absolutely fundamental in learning discipline.
And if we are in the position of
teachers or parents who are responsible to mete
out discipline to younger people, we certainly have
to start with authority.
The second thing, we must require obedience.
And the third thing, we must mete out
punishment if punishment is necessary.
Let's think about this business of authority.
To whom are we answerable all of our
lives?
If we call ourselves Christians, we must be
answerable to God, mustn't we?
Of course, all of us will be answerable
to God whether we are Christians or not
at some point.
But a true disciple of Jesus certainly wants
to accept his authority, to learn what it
means to put oneself under that authority.
But long before we understood discipleship and adult
responsibility, we understood that we had to be
subject to our parents' authority.
I have opportunity, my husband and I have
many opportunities to observe young parents with their
children, sometimes in Christian settings, very often in
airplanes and airports where it's just dreadfully appalling
to see the failure of authority, of young
parents accepting the position of authority over their
children.
It seems that the children more or less
rule the parents.
Whatever the kids want to do, the kids
get to do.
And you see a young father racing around
the airport following an 18-month-old child.
The child makes the decision where he wants
to go, and Papa trots along behind him.
Well, it wasn't like that in our home,
I can assure you.
We knew that our parents meant exactly what
they said.
And here's something very unusual in today's world.
They meant it the first time.
They didn't repeat commands.
And my mother made it very clear to
us that delayed obedience would be treated as
disobedience.
And disobedience was treated by an 18-inch
rod, about that long, that was picked off
the bush in the backyard.
And my mother kept one of those over
the door in every room in the house.
So we knew that the implement of torture
was available at all times.
And there were many occasions when we were
subjected to the very embarrassing position of having
to go back out in the yard and
pick another switch because she had broken one
of them on us.
But that little switch, believe it or not,
really didn't get used very much.
A few years ago, I wrote a book
about my parents, it's called The Shaping of
a Christian Family, because I wanted to just
describe the kind of a home in which
we grew up and which we feel very
grateful to God because of.
And I realized that there are a good
many young parents who are honestly and earnestly
seeking to raise Christian families, but they didn't
always come from one and they don't always
know where to start.
And so I thought, well, it might be
helpful to write a book which describes what
my parents did.
It's not a prescription of how all parents
ought to do it, it is a description
of how one set of parents did it.
And we six are very, very grateful that
they did that.
But when my mother told us to do
something, we knew that she meant it immediately.
And delayed obedience would be treated as disobedience.
Well, when I was writing that book, I
talked with my brothers and my sister, asking
for suggestions from them, things that I might
have forgotten to put in.
And we all agreed that we very seldom
remember receiving that switch.
Undoubtedly, we received it many times up until
the age of two or three, but our
memory doesn't go back that far.
And so by that time, we had already
learned that when mother spoke, mother meant what
she said.
And if we didn't, if we were not
immediately galvanized into action, then the switch would
come into play.
So it was very seldom.
I had told this story to an audience
many years ago, and a man came up
to me afterwards and said, boy, am I
glad I'm not your brother.
And I said, well, what do you mean
by that?
And he said, oh, I could never have
stood up to all that rigorous discipline that
you described in your house.
Well, of course, what I had forgotten to
mention was that we had a tremendously happy
family and lots of roaring good times with
a tremendous lot of laughter.
I hadn't put that in.
I had just talked about the discipline.
So of course, this man thought he would
never have survived.
But we had faithful parents and faithful Sunday
school teachers and faithful public school teachers.
I think of my sixth grade public school
teacher.
Her name was Miss Evanson.
She kept order with her eyes.
I read not long ago that in New
York City public schools, a teacher spends 80
percent of the classroom time saying, shut up
and sit down.
I cannot even imagine any of us getting
out of our seats in Miss Evanson's room
unless we had permission.
Certainly we never opened our mouths without first
putting up our hand and being acknowledged.
We understood authority.
And as Christians, we need to be reminding
ourselves again and again and reviewing the fact
that we are meant to be under the
authority of Jesus Christ.
And my parents were certainly under the authority
of God himself.
And my father had hung a little brass
plate over the doorbell on the front door,
which said, Christ is the head of this
house, the unseen guest at every meal, and
the silent listener to every conversation.
Anyone who came up on that porch to
push that doorbell had at least an inkling
of what kind of a home this was.
And as I grew older and began to
think about what the words meant, I was
sobered to realize that I was the silent
listener to every conversation.
I meant with all my heart to put
myself under the authority of Jesus Christ, and
I did that at the age of 12.
Obedience is the second thing.
Having recognized authority, then of course we must
be obedient.
And as in my brother Tommy's case, his
punishment had to be physical.
Obedience very often is either physical or verbal.
Now if verbal authority is not taught, then
physical action is necessary.
And I'll give you an illustration of that.
I was sitting in the Boston airport one
time waiting for my bags to come off
the carousel, and there was a young mother
sitting next to me with her daughter Jennifer.
Jennifer was about two years old.
And Jennifer went and climbed up on the
carousel, which fortunately had not started to move
yet.
But her mother said, Jennifer, would you get
back here?
Jennifer, did you hear what I said?
Jennifer, get off that thing.
That's a machine.
You're going to get hurt.
Would you come back here?
And of course the whole time Jennifer is
just having a good time and not paying
the least bit of attention.
And so finally the mother, in utter frustration
and by this time anger, gets up off
the bench, rushes over, grabs Jennifer, brings her
back, plunks her down next to me on
the bench and says, now Jennifer, sit still.
Now how long do you think it took
Jennifer to get back onto the carousel?
This happened two or three times, and I,
with great difficulty, did keep my mouth shut,
but perhaps I shouldn't have.
I think back on it, and I think
it probably would have been better if I
had spoken, but I didn't.
But what was happening?
Jennifer knew that she did not need to
come when Mama said come.
She knew that Mama would come and get
her.
So verbal authority meant absolutely nothing.
It was physical authority when Mama went and
grabbed her and put her back on the
bench, which obviously didn't last very long.
As obedient children of God, do we listen
to his word?
Do we accept his authority in our lives?
Does he have to at times physically punish
us?
And you know there were many times in
the Old Testament where God did give physical
punishment to his children, and they suffered as
a result because they had not been obedient
to his verbal authority.
So authority and obedience now bring us to
punishment, and punishment is done because of love.
You fathers and mothers and grandparents know that
if you said to your child, I must
spank you because I love you, the child
would never believe that, would he?
My mother would say, this hurts me worse
than it hurts you, and of course we
didn't believe a word of that when we
were children, but when you become a parent
then you do know that that's the truth.
It does hurt you more than it hurts
the child.
And surely it hurts God when he has
to punish us.
It is because we have a loving Heavenly
Father.
And if any of you listen to my
radio program, you have heard me say, you
are loved with an everlasting love.
That's what the Bible says.
And underneath are the everlasting arms.
But God has to discipline us, and the
sooner we accept that discipline, the sooner we
will be at peace with our Heavenly Father.
The Bible says, as a man disciplines his
son, so the Lord your God disciplines you.
My father told us a story many times
which illustrates this point, the difference between physical
and verbal obedience and punishment.
His father, my grandfather, had forbidden his sons
to have firecrackers for Fourth of July because
firecrackers can be very dangerous.
But when my father was 12 years old,
he decided that he'd had enough of that,
and so he went out, sneaked out of
the house at about 5 o'clock in
the morning of Fourth of July, and managed
to get his buddy next door, and they
got a hold of some dynamite caps.
And they took the dynamite caps over to
a farm, and they got the farmer to
help them light them, and they did so,
and ran as far as they could run,
waiting for the big bang.
But nothing happened.
So they finally closed in again, and the
farmer kicked the pile of dynamite caps with
his shoe, and there was an explosion.
A piece of copper went into my father's
left eye, and my father was blind in
that eye for the rest of his life.
We thought it was wonderful to have a
father who had a glass eye, because we
could bring our friends in to see my
father take his eye out.
Of course, he took it out every night.
But you can imagine we heard that story
a few times.
Physical punishment because of verbal disobedience.
His father had told him, and he went
against his father's word, refusing his father's authority.
And I want to ask you tonight, who
is your master?
Under whose authority do you live, and why?
Is it yourself, or is it Jesus Christ?
Is he Lord of your life?
A great prison reformer of the 19th century
said, Oh God, make us masters of ourselves,
that we may be the servants of others.
And as we grow up, of course, we
have to accept authority.
And for the rest of our lives, we
have to be obedient to certain authorities.
We have many passages in Scripture about discipline
and the great lessons that go throughout our
lives.
Let me read to you from Hebrews 12,
verses 5 to 11.
My son, do not make light of the
Lord's discipline, and do not lose heart when
he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines those
he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts
as a son.
Endure hardship as discipline.
God is treating you as sons.
Sometimes we wail and cry and blubber over
the fact that God is treating us in
a way that we don't understand and we
don't like.
Why is God doing this to me?
Here's the answer.
He is treating you as sons.
For what son is not disciplined by his
father?
If you are not disciplined and everyone undergoes
discipline, then you are illegitimate children and not
sons.
Moreover, we have all had human fathers who
disciplined us.
That may have been true back then, but
it certainly isn't true anymore.
We don't all have human fathers who discipline
us.
And we respected them for it.
I certainly had to respect my father for
that.
How much more, says the writer, should we
submit to the Father of our spirits and
live?
Our fathers disciplined us for a little while
as they thought best.
But God disciplines us for our good, that
we may share his holiness.
Next time something unexpected and unpleasant happens to
you, do you immediately say, Why God?
What are you doing to me?
If that's your first reaction, check Hebrews 12
.10. He disciplines us for our good, that
we may share his holiness.
Why should the God of the universe want
us sinful creatures to share his holiness?
He loves us.
He created us with the ability to disobey.
Isn't that incredible?
God's omnipotence is crowned in his creating creatures
capable of defying him.
He did allow us to say no to
him, didn't he?
The winds don't say no to God.
The tides go up when they're supposed to
go up and down when they're supposed to
go down.
And the birds do what the birds are
supposed to do.
And the giraffes and the clams do what
giraffes and clams are supposed to do.
They glorify God by being giraffes and clams.
But God has created us, human beings, capable
of doing our own thing.
And you know what happened back in the
Garden of Eden.
The writer goes on to say in verse
11, No discipline seems pleasant at the time,
but painful.
Later on, however, it produces a harvest of
righteousness and peace for those who have been
trained by it.
I'd like you to think just for a
moment now.
In what way is God training you for
that harvest of righteousness?
What is the discipline that he is meeting
out to you at this juncture in your
life?
I look back over a very long life
and I realize that there have been many,
many kinds of discipline that God has had
to administer to me.
Over and over and over again, lessons I
should have learned.
But as the Bible says about the discipline
of little children, it's line upon line, line
upon line, precept upon precept, precept upon precept,
here a little and there a little.
And it's the same story with us old
children of his.
It produces a harvest of righteousness and peace
for those who have been trained by it.
Are you willing to be trained?
I went to a boarding school when I
was 14 years old.
I had been there just about two weeks
when I was called into the office, the
most terrifying moment of my life up to
that point.
And there sat the headmaster and his wife,
the headmistress.
And mind you, I was 14 years old,
just as tall as I am now, skinny,
scared to death, shy.
And they started in on me immediately on
the fact that I was shy.
And Mrs. DuBose, the headmistress, calling me by
what my name was in those days, Betty
Howard, she pointed her bony finger at me
and she said, Betty Howard, you are shy
because you are selfish and you are selfish
because you are thinking about yourself.
And she said, we do not need you
in this school.
If you don't snap out of this, we
will help you pack your bags.
We will give you a free trip down
to the train station and you can go
home.
We can do without you.
That was discipline.
I was trembling literally from head to foot.
I knew I was shy, but I didn't
know that shyness was selfishness.
But of course, it is, isn't it?
Because we're thinking about ourselves.
We're thinking, what are these people thinking of
me?
Do these people like me?
I don't know what to say to these
people.
It may be my temperament.
I don't suppose I will be able to
slough that off in all the rest of
my life.
But that is a description, but that is
not an excuse.
And I think she was right.
I know she was right.
She was pretty tough, I have to say.
I don't think she was that tough on
anybody else in that whole school.
And I'm not sure whether I was the
worst student.
But at any rate, it was a severe
discipline.
But I can look back now and I
call it a blessed discipline.
And I can call my parents' disciplines blessed
as well, which, of course, I couldn't do
when I was in the middle of it.
But God is constantly dealing with us through
other people very often.
One of the things that Mrs. DuBose used
to tell us in the evening vespers that
she always spoke in, we had morning chapel
and Dr. DuBose spoke in morning chapel, and
in the evening Mrs. DuBose spoke.
And one of the things that she would
say to us over and over again was
don't go around with a Bible under your
arm if you didn't sweep under the bed.
Now what in the world has sweeping under
the bed got to do with carrying a
Bible under your arm?
Well, she made it very clear to us.
In those days, we lived in a dormitory.
We didn't have wall-to-wall carpeting.
We had rugs, throw rugs.
We did not have a vacuum cleaner.
We had brooms.
But every single morning we had to sweep
those rugs, roll them up, then sweep the
floor, put the rugs back down, make our
beds exactly the way they were supposed to
be made, hang up our clothes before breakfast.
And while breakfast was in process, one of
the teachers would be going around to all
the rooms inspecting, and if anyone failed the
inspection, their names would be read out at
lunchtime that day.
So what Mrs. DuBose was saying was it's
no good talking about spiritual things when you're
being disobedient to the rules.
Don't go around with a Bible under your
arm if you didn't sweep under the bed.
Now young people often wonder what in the
world has sweeping under the bed or housework
or anything like that, what's that got to
do with this book?
What's it got to do with spirituality?
Ladies and gentlemen, it's got everything to do
with spirituality, hasn't it?
Jesus learned obedience by the things that he
suffered.
And I think he went through some severe
disciplines before he was 30 years old.
We know nothing about what happened between his
12th year, just that one little incident in
the temple when he confounded the teachers of
the law in answering their questions.
All those silent years from 12 to 30,
he was being disciplined, we suppose, in the
carpenter shop under the tutelage of his earthly
father Joseph, learning obedience, learning faithfulness.
But he was the spotless lamb of God.
But that's what the Bible says, Jesus learned
obedience by the things which he suffered.
He had to go through all the lessons
that you and I have to go through.
Well, I've told you just one little incident
from my high school days, the age of
14, and of course I went to college.
And in my junior year in college, I
took Greek.
That was a severe discipline, and I was
trembling in my boots as I went into
that class.
It turned out that there were 42 boys
in the class and two girls.
And I was literally shaking, thinking I won't
even be able to learn the Greek alphabet,
let alone anything else.
Our professor was 21 years old, and she
had just graduated three months before that.
I will never forget her opening lines.
She stood up there.
She was just the sweetest, most petite, feminine
little lady, just a year or two older
than most of us in the class.
And I thought, this is our professor.
And the first thing she said was, Anybody
can learn Greek.
And it was absolutely the most thrilling year
of my college years because that woman so
loved Greek that she instilled a love for
Greek in all of us, making it that
much easier.
It was a discipline, of course.
It was a severe discipline, but it was
a blessed discipline.
And I thank God for the privilege of
having her for my first year.
Then I took second and third year.
Now, I took second year Greek in summer
school and third and fourth year in my
senior year and loved it because of the
foundation that she had laid.
Well, then, when I was just about to
graduate, some of you, I presume, I hope
that there are one or two people here,
perhaps young people, that have read my book
called Passion and Purity.
So you know the story that I'm about
to tell.
It was just shortly before I graduated, about
two or three weeks before I graduated from
Wheaton College in Illinois, that a young man
who had caught my eye during that senior
year, his name was Jim Elliott.
He asked me to go for a walk.
Well, I almost died of the shock.
Everybody knew that Jim Elliott was a non
-dater, and he was a good-looking guy
and a very well-known leader on the
campus and a champion wrestler and the president
of the Foreign Missions Fellowship and a great
guy, a clown that could be called upon
to do stand-up comedy at a moment's
notice in front of any group, just a
very popular one of those BMOCs, as we
called them back then, Big Man on Campus,
or BTO, Big Time Operator.
I was just a TWO, Teeny Weeny Operator,
and it didn't appear to me that there
was any chance at all that this young
man would ever look twice at me.
But my brother Dave had called my attention
to him because they both happened to be
on the same wrestling team.
And Dave kept saying to me, You need
to get to know Jim Elliott.
You'd like him.
Well, I wasn't interested in my younger brother's
friends, but I became interested during that last
semester of my senior year.
So when Jim said, Will you go for
a walk with me one sunny May morning?
I said, Yes.
Just ecstatic at the thought, but trying very
hard to do just as my mother told
me years before, Don't give them anything to
work on.
Always keep them at arm's length.
And never chase boys.
Now, my mother gave me those rules when
I was about 13.
I never forgot them, and they do work.
Anyway, we were walking down the sidewalk, not
more than a block or two, when Jim
said, I think we need to get squared
away how we feel about each other.
And I thought, Well, of all the cheek,
what in the world makes him think that
I have any feelings for him?
The arrogance of the man.
But of course, I was thrilled to think
that he had some feelings for me.
But remembering my mother's words, I said, Well,
what do you mean?
And he said, What do you mean?
What do I mean?
You know what I mean.
I'm in love with you, and I've been
in love with you for months.
Didn't you know that?
And I said, No, I didn't know that.
Well, he said, You must be deaf, dumb,
and blind, because, he said, I've been trying
to show you in every way except verbal,
but now, he said, I'm telling you, I
love you.
But, then he followed that stunning announcement with
a more stunning one, which was, I think
maybe God is asking me to remain single,
perhaps for the rest of my life, because
I'm going to be a jungle missionary in
South America, and I have been told by
older missionaries that there are great areas where
single men are needed, people who will not
be encumbered with wives and children.
So he said, I have given myself to
God for that kind of work, if that's
what God wants me to do.
So he said, Let's go and sit down
in the park and talk about this thing.
So we went and sat down on the
grass in a park, at least more than
arm's length apart, I'm sure.
We were sitting facing each other.
I was keeping my mother's rule there.
And he said, I'm not going to lay
a finger on you, because, he said, I
have no rights over you.
He said, You go ahead and go to
Africa, which is where I thought I was
going.
He said, I'm going to South America.
If God wants to bring us together, he
knows how to do it.
I lived in New Jersey.
Jim lived in Oregon.
I was graduating.
He had another year of college.
I was going to Africa.
He was going to South America.
How in the world would God ever bring
us together?
But you know, one of the things that
really blew my mind in those seven hours
that we sat in the park was not
only discovering Jim's feelings for me, but the
fact that through that whole school year, God
had been disciplining both of us by certain
scriptures, by certain incidents, by certain difficulties that
we were having in our studies, and by
the use of certain hymns, and to my
utter amazement, through the poems of Amy Carmichael,
the great Irish missionary to India.
Now I could not imagine that there was
a man in the world that ever heard
of Amy Carmichael, let alone read her books
and memorized her poetry.
And one of the poems says this in
the first stanza.
From prayer that asks that I may be
sheltered from winds that beat on thee, from
fearing when I should aspire, from faltering when
I should climb higher, from silken self, O
Captain, free thy soldier who would follow thee.
And that absolutely blew my mind to realize
that Jim Elliott had also memorized that poem.
And so we talked and we talked and
we talked.
We realized that God had taken us through
these scriptures, hymns, poetry, the whole year before
either one of us was interested in the
other one.
It had begun.
Anyway, a few nights later we went for
another walk.
I had about two weeks left, I think,
before my graduation.
And one evening we walked without really noticing
where we were going.
We wandered into a cemetery and found ourselves
seated on a stone slab.
And we began to discuss the things that
God had been teaching us since that day
in the park.
And Jim said, well, I said to Jim
first, I said, now, if we're really serious
about what we said to each other then,
and Jim had said, I'm not asking you
to marry me.
I'm not asking you to wait for me.
You go ahead and do what God wants
you to do and I'm going to do
what God wants me to do.
But I thought over a few days, I
thought, now, does it really make sense?
Are we being honest with God if we
carry on a correspondence, which Jim had suggested
we could do after graduation?
I thought, if we are absolutely sure that
we have got to leave this whole thing
with God, probably it would be best if
we did not correspond.
And so I suggested this to Jim.
And there was a long silence, a thunderous
silence.
And finally he said, yes, that, he said,
I think you're right.
I know you're right, because this morning when
I was reading my Bible, it was in
the story of Abraham and Isaac.
God asked Abraham for the sacrifice of the
most precious thing in his life, his son.
And I realized that God was asking me
for the sacrifice of the most precious thing
in my life, which is you.
So he said, I put you on the
altar this morning and you're going to stay
there unless God has an alternative, which of
course he did in Abraham's case.
So we sat in silence again for a
long time and then realized, just gradually it
dawned on us that the moon was rising
behind us and it was casting the shadow
of a stone cross on that slab between
us.
A very important message from God.
Will you remain in the shadow of the
cross?
Will you take up the cross, which is
the second condition of discipleship?
Jesus said, if you want to be my
disciple, you must give up your right to
yourself.
The word disciple comes from the same root
as discipline, doesn't it?
It means learner.
Do you want to learn from Jesus Christ?
First condition, give up your right to yourself.
That was what Gemini meant before God.
We would give up all our rights and
we would take up the cross.
What is the taking up of the cross
if not suffering?
Suffering is mentioned about 80 times in the
New Testament.
People say to me, why do you talk
so much about suffering?
Well, because I find it in this book,
that's why.
And because we cannot be sanctified without it.
And so God was disciplining us.
I graduated and in the graduation ceremony, to
my absolute delight and astonishment, the president of
Wheaton College, Dr. Edmund, read that poem by
Amy Carmichael that I quoted a minute ago.
And the last stanza of that poem says,
give me the love that leads the way,
the faith that nothing can dismay, the hope
no disappointments tire, the passion that will burn
like fire.
Let me not sink to be a clod.
Make me thy fuel, flame of God.
Jim Elliot wrote in his journal, let me
burn out for you, Lord.
Light these idle sticks of my life and
let me burn out for you.
I think he got the idea from Amy
Carmichael.
Make me thy fuel, flame of God.
Lord, here I am, all of me for
you forever.
Do anything you want with me.
Is that the kind of a commitment you
have made?
Have you accepted the blessed discipline of this
blessed Lord and Savior?
Are you angry with him?
Bewildered?
Mystified?
Upset?
Bitter?
He loves you.
That's why he disciplines.
He loves you.
Well, from that night in the cemetery forward,
there were five and a half years of
separation, loneliness, longing, uncertainty.
Jim and I had no commitment of any
kind except to Jesus Christ.
As he said, I'm not asking you to
wait for me.
I'm not going to ask you to marry
me.
But God in his merciful kindness years later
did bring us together in Ecuador and we
were married in the capital city of Quito.
After we had been in separate sides of
the Andes, I was in the western jungle,
he was in the eastern jungle.
And he was working with the Quechua tribe
and I was working with the Colorado tribe.
But those were very, very severe spiritual disciplines.
Loneliness, longing, uncertainty.
Neither one of us had any certainty that
the other would be our mate.
And just a good many lessons in the
discipline of waiting.
And during that first year, when I was
a missionary with the Colorado Indians of the
western jungle, there were three major blows to
my faith.
God had given me some severe disciplines up
to that point.
I don't think any of them quite measured
up to the three things that happened during
that year.
I can't go into detail about all of
them, but I was working on the reduction
to writing of the Colorado language, which was
an unwritten language.
That was what I went to Ecuador to
do.
And I had to have an informant, somebody
who spoke the language and could work for
me and teach me, read or speak the
language over and over again.
Obviously, there's no alphabet in the language.
He only spoke it because he had grown
up with Colorado children.
He spoke Spanish and Colorado.
He was a wonderful helper.
Turned out to be a Christian.
He spoke Spanish and Colorado, which meant that
we could speak together in Spanish and he
could interpret into Colorado for me.
But we hadn't been working very long when
he was murdered.
And as I looked at that corpse with
a big hole in the head, he'd been
shot at point blank range.
You can guess the three-letter word that
I asked God, why?
Why would God take the only man in
the whole world that spoke both Spanish and
Colorado?
There was literally nobody else, bilingual.
Why would God allow him to be killed?
And God rarely answers our irritated questions.
He simply says, Will you trust me?
Then, before that year was over, the station
on which Jim Elliott had been working way
over on the eastern side of the Andes
was completely demolished in a flood.
All the buildings went down the Amazon in
one night.
And a few weeks after that, I had
by that time moved to the eastern jungle
because Jim had asked me to marry him
and said, I will not marry you until
you learn Quechua, so you better learn Quechua
in a hurry.
So I went to the eastern jungle to
start learning Quechua.
And while I was there, on a different
station, not on the same one where Jim
was, I heard Jim's voice on the shortwave
radio reporting that the entire station on which
he had been working, here I am repeating,
when people get as old as I am,
they repeat themselves.
They repeat themselves.
I already told you about the flood.
I got a letter from one of my
British colleagues in the western jungle, the ladies
that had been working with me on the
Colorado language, telling me that all of my
language work had been stolen.
Never recovered.
A murder, a flood, and a robbery.
Blessed disciplines.
Do you ask, did you ever find out
why God let those things happen?
Well, I would hope that the rest of
my life is testimony that every day, the
Lord is giving me lesson after lesson after
lesson.
He loves you with an everlasting love.
And he is asking us, will you trust
me?
Will you love me?
Will you praise me?
Even when something senseless seems to happen, such
as the robbery of my language material was
never going to do anybody else any good.
And God might have brought that suitcase full
of data back to us.
We prayed for that, of course.
We never saw it again.
Everything that I had done in one year
swept off the board.
Everything that Jim had done in rebuilding those
buildings and building three new ones all down
the Amazon River.
Remember, God moves in mysterious ways his wonders
to perform.
He plants his footsteps in the sea and
rides upon the storm.
Blind unbelief is sure to err and scan
his work in vain.
God is his own interpreter and he will
make it plain.
Do you understand why he's dealing with you
as he is?
Will you say, thank you, Lord?
Yes, Lord.
Thank you for loving me enough.
Thank you for these blessed disciplines.
God bless you.