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Obedience to the call of God must be wholehearted.  That is, we can lay down no conditions, withhold no part of ourselves from Him.  “Show me the way that I must take; to thee I offer all my heart” (Ps. 143:8). It is right and proper to ask for the Lord’s clear direction about what to do, but it does not make sense to ask it if we offer only some of our heart.  God will open a way for us when we open our hearts to Him. **Excerpt originally published in Guided by God’s Promises, p. 154.

Psychologists chart stress factors related to various kinds of emotional trauma and the response of different people to those factors—death, divorce, job loss, illness and such, which threaten the very foundations of people’s lives.  What can hold us at such times?   In a simple story Jesus showed the secret of stability.  One man comes to Jesus, hears Him and acts on what he hears.  He is like the man who builds a house on solid rock.  Another man hears (is exposed to the same truth, given equal opportunity) but does not act (does not choose to act) on the...

These strong, simple words can be spiritual adrenaline for us when we need them.  They were written by a man who knew what he was talking about, as he himself was in prison.  He was writing to a young minister who was also suffering and evidently tempted by doubt, fear, even uncertainty of his call.  The older man admonished him very lovingly to take his share of suffering, take his share of hardship like a good soldier and to “take strength from the grace of God” (2 Tim. 2:1).   Where shall I ever find the strength I need to...

In order to get to a place called Laity Lodge in Texas you have to drive into a riverbed.  The road takes you down a steep, rocky hill into a canyon and straight into the water. There is a sign at the water’s edge which says, “Yes.  You drive in the river.” One who has made up his mind to go to the uttermost with God will come to a place as unexpected and perhaps looking as impossible to travel as that riverbed looks. He may glance around for an alternative route, but if he wants what God promises His...

We are prone to consider ourselves too busy (with important things, of course), too qualified (we have gifts, training, experience, responsibilities that few others have), too intelligent, to bother with small things.  We exercise ourselves in matters too high for us, thus missing some of the “low” things God would teach us.  Who are we anyway?  What is this pride of ours?  Consider Him, “who sets his throne so high but deigns to look down so low” (Ps. 113:6). He who is truly great is never too great to give attention to the lowly.  He “lifts the weak out of the...

Norbert Selking, of Hebron, Illinois, who writes to me and prays for me, wrote, "I am reminded of our young family as they were growing up. As a farmer working out in the fields of my dad's Indiana farm, quite often I would be out all day cultivating the corn or taking care of new litters of pigs. Then there would be those evenings I'd come into the house and my wife would tell me that the children had been particularly cantankerous, fussing and fuming all day. She had tried everything to quiet those little ones. Then, under some special inspiration, I would...

In honor of Father’s Day this weekend, we share as a Devotional this special reflection from Elisabeth… “When I was seven Father taught me to fish for bass in a beautiful lake in Maine. He gave me a hand line, and when I hooked a fish I got so excited that I tangled the line as I pulled it in. Finally, I handed it over to Father and he managed, as always, to straighten it out. Often since I have been reminded that, if I will only turn over my problems to my heavenly Father and trust Him fully, He...

Has it ever happened with you that you have asked God to show you what He wants done about a certain matter, and His answer seems to be, “I am concerned now with something much smaller”?  He sometimes shows me that the thing that looms large in importance to me is not nearly so important to God just now.  He would rather I please Him in some “minor” thing.  This is the thing that matters at the moment.   A husband or wife may be thinking of some special occasion when he or she can demonstrate love, but what the other...

We have promised the Lord our loyalty and lifelong obedience, “at any cost.”  We imagine perhaps having to pay the high price of death itself—losing our loved ones, or losing our own lives in the line of service.  We are not prepared for the “low” costs of the spiritual life, the petty sacrifices we must make daily (according to the wish of another in some simple thing, saying no to ourselves about a piece of cake, for example), if we are to follow faithfully.  We keep the small change in our pockets, as it were, instead of gladly turning it over...

Suddenly it happens that a source of life or joy or refreshment is cut off?  The supply dries up and we panic—‘’What shall I do now?”  The panic results from our habit of expecting people and circumstances to operate according to our wishes. When they change, the heat is turned on, drought is imminent, and unless we remember the single unfailing Source of Life, we shrivel. The father of a young family, for example, faces the loss of his job; a woman long active in serving other for the Lord has to learn to be served; a girl is abandoned by the man who...

"I must admit I feel a lot of pressure with two children under two years of age. I am committed to do it until they are in school, however, and feel it is God's will. At times like this — when I wonder if I will even be able to finish this letter with both of them screaming for something— or when I miss going to lunch or getting dressed up, everyday life seems a drudgery. I worked hard to get through college — to be a scrubwoman, ha!"  I understand this mother's cry. So does the Lord. He has given...

Few women today are concerned about ironing sheets, but it is still possible to let many other things take precedence over the primary task. It is sobering to contemplate that day when we must answer to a holy God for the things done and not done. Hear the concerns of an unidentified writer of another era:  I am sadly concerned that thousands of mothers are so over-burdened that the actual demands of life from day to day consume all their time and strength. But of two evils, choose the lesser: which would you call the lesser — an unpolished stove...

She was Kath to her close friends, Dearie to my father, and always Mother (never Mom) to her six children.  She held us on her lap when we were small and rocked us, sang to us, and told us stories. We begged for the ones about "when you were a little girl."  Katharine Gillingham was born June 21, 1899 in Philadelphia. We loved hearing about the butler who did tricks for her behind her parents' backs and about the alarmed postman who rushed to rescue the screaming child with her arm down a dog's throat until he heard what she...

Katherine Morgan has been a missionary in Pasto, Colombia, for fifty years. She has been a friend of mine for thirty-four of those years and has done for me what Paul said Onesiphorus did for him: refreshed me often. Katherine's husband died when they had been married only six years, but she carried on their missionary work and reared their four little girls. To Katherine I owe more than I can ever tell. She more or less booted me to Ecuador. I was a missionary candidate without a field, didn't know quite how to find one, talked to her, and within months...

Being very much of the earth—earthy—we always want tangible, visible things:  proofs, demonstrations, something to latch on to.  If we always have them, of course faith would be “struck blind.”  When Jesus hung on a cross, the challenge was flung at Him:  Come down!  He stayed nailed, not so that spectators would be satisfied (that miracle, His coming down, would have been a great crowd-pleaser), but that the world might be saved.   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...

To be transformed into the image of Christ, we must know His character, love His obedience to the will of the Father, and begin, step by step, day by day, to walk the same pathway. A very big order, we say.  How shall we even begin?  The answer is that we must begin where He began—with self-emptying.  And how can we possibly do that?  Why, at the Cross.  There we are crucified—with Christ—and the sinful self is destroyed (see Rom. 6:6).  What happens next? If we. . . died with Christ, we believe that we shall also come to life with him, (Rom. 6:8). Help...

Matthew tells us in the last chapter of his Gospel that the two Marys came early in the morning, “to look at the grave.”  We can picture the sorrowful scene—two women in the gray dawn standing helplessly, contemplating the tomb.  There was nothing left to hope for, nothing left to see but a rock.  We can see their drawn faces, bowed heads, the sag of their shoulders.  Can we possibly picture those faces when there came a sudden earthquake, the descent of an angel, and the stone was rolled away from the grave?  The angel was so dazzling, the guards (tough men, surly,...

The power of the Resurrection is a power that vanquishes every other power in heaven or Earth.  The battle was the bitterest ever fought, but death was the loser; Jesus, the victor.  Because “the tomb could not hold Him; snapped like a straw death’s omnipotent bars,”1 sin and death and sorrow need not hold us either.  The same power is available to us if we will take it by faith. There are many tombs in which we may be held if we succumb to the powers of sin and death.  Hatred, self-pity, bitterness, resentment—these are tombs.  By the power that raised...

A pastor's wife asked, "When one witnesses a work he has poured his life into 'go up in flames' (especially if he is not culpable), is it the work of Satan or the hand of God?"  Often it is the former, always it is under the control of the latter. In the biographies of the Bible we find men whose work for God seemed to be a flop at the time -- Moses' repeated efforts to persuade Pharaoh, Jeremiah's pleas for repentance, the good king Josiah's reforms, rewarded in the end by his being slain by a pagan king. Sin had...

Although it barely feels like spring in New England at present, in honor of the First Day of Spring we bring you, in the midst of Lent, a taste of the promise of a glorious spring from the pen of Elisabeth Elliot . . .  Springtime in New England is unrecognizable most of the time. Year after year we look forward to it, long for it, and when March and April arrive feel we have a right to it. It gives us a little nod once in a while. The peepers, I have to admit, never fail us. No matter what else refuses to budge, those tiny...

Last October I received a copy of the Auca (now known as Waorani) translation of the New Testament. The orthography has been greatly altered since my day, so I can't read much of it now, but leafing through the pages I thought long, long thoughts. I had had nothing to do with the translation. I was with the Aucas only two years, during which Rachel Saint and I worked on reducing the language to writing, but we had barely begun to translate a few Bible stories when my daughter Valerie and I returned to Quichua work.  Sometimes I am asked to speak to young people who...

“I waited patiently for the Lord; he turned to me and heard my cry” (Ps 40:1, NIV). The tests of our willingness to wait patiently for the Lord comes almost daily for most of us, I suppose. Probably I am among the Lord's most impatient servants, so the lesson has to be reviewed again and again. A tough test came when my daughter's family (of ten) was searching for a house.  Southern California is not a place where one would wish to conduct that search. It's a long story, but at last, all other possibilities having been exhausted, a house...

Shortly before my daughter Valerie, my only child, went off to college as a freshman, a “sudden tide” came over me one morning as I was working in the kitchen. She had been the great joy of my life for seventeen years. When she was about eleven or twelve, friends heard me speak of what seemed to me a near-perfect mother-daughter relationship. “Oh, but wait till she’s a teenager!” they warned, “then you’ll have some rough times.” I was still waiting. I could not conceive of life without her.  “She has grown up,” I told myself. “My job is finished,...