Too Proud For the Low Gate

If it is our habit to demand of God answers, solutions, explanations, we may find ourselves traveling a broad intellectual highway that leads to destruction.  If it is really life we want, we must accept the narrow way and the very low gate.  The questions, the problems not solved, the mystery not explained will be for the one who would press on to know the Lord.  He is called by a still, small voice to humility and poverty of spirit --- only by that road will he be allowed to see God.  He must believe Him even when carrying in his heart the unanswered question.  The problem he desperately wants solved is God’s means of getting his attention –not necessarily that He may reveal its solutions but most certainly that He may reveal Himself to him.  But let him not forget – it is the pure in heart who see God (see Matt. 5:8).

The Music of His Promises by Elisabeth Elliot

Too Busy to Be Quiet

If we are bent on a mad tear through life, God will allow us that liberty, but He was not tear madly about with us.  He will wait for us until we quiet down and wait on Him.  Sometimes we are not interested in quietness until things have suddenly fallen apart or come to a screeching halt, and then, in the ensuing silence we know that we cannot cure our evils and neither is God going to cure them.  What He has been waiting for is our attention, our eyes turned to Him who is the very Life of All the Ages, the Light that our darkness can never overcome, Christ Himself, with us, in us, suffering, loving, and transforming us into the same image.

The Music of His Promises by Elisabeth Elliot

The Way Appointed

It was at the supper with Jesus’ disciples, on the night before He was crucified, that He told them He was going “the way appointed.”  That meant betrayal, by one of the very men sharing the same meal with Him, and crucifixion, at the hands of others who had arranged to pay this man.  Yet in and through those terrible things that were to happen to Him, Jesus never for a moment thought of Himself as solely in their hands, at their mercy.  He was held in the will of the Father.  There was sovereign purpose in it all; the way He must travel was no accident of fate.  It was appointed, assigned, a date with destiny.  He accepted it as such.

             
What agonies we would spare ourselves if we would remember that ours, too, is a way appointed.  We need not ever imagine that our circumstances are in any other hands than those that held the beloved Son obedient unto death.

The Music of His Promises by Elisabeth Elliot

The Same Old Routine

It is sometimes supposed that the Holy Spirit is stifled by order, planning, or routine, and can work only in the context of spontaneity, and the “unstructured.”

The story of the birth of John the Baptist is an important one in the New Testament.  It is worth noting that God’s preparations for this event embraced a strictly ordered set of religious routines.  The priest Zechariah, to whom this unusual child was to be given, was doing what the rules prescribed.  It was the turn of his division to take part (a clearly defined part) in divine service.  There was nothing “unstructured” here.  “It fell to his lot by priestly custom to enter the sanctuary of the Lord and offer the incense” (Luke 1:9).

It is not unlikely that Zechariah, like the rest of us, sometimes felt wearied by the sameness of his duties and wondered if the ritual was not perhaps empty and meaningless.  Was it really worthwhile to go through the routine in the same way, day after day?  But this time an angel was waiting for him at the altar!  Suppose he had not shown up for his part?

So the Lord meets us ---not by our going out of our way and neglecting the usual responsibilities laid upon us, but in the middle of our most repetitive task.  There He is, expecting us to come as faithfully as ever, waiting to give us something. 

 

Make me faithful, Lord. Make me humble enough to keep on doing what I know I’m supposed to be doing, and joyfully expectant of finding You close by while I work. 

The Music of His Promises by Elisabeth Elliot 

The Rejection of Sacrifice

Obedience to God very often appears to us, at first glance, to mean sacrifice.  We shrink from it.  Sacrifice always involves death, and we reject death.  But the divine paradox, the one we find running throughout all of Scripture, is that this sacrifice ---the offering of ourselves in obedience to God--- always means life.  It is life, nothing less than life, that God offers us, so when we disobey, what we are actually doing is choosing death.

“The Lord commanded us to observe all these statutes and to fear the Lord our God; it will be for our own good at all times, and he will continue to preserve our lives”  (Deut 6:24).

We balk at something our conscience tells us we must do--- “I don’t see how that could be for my ‘good’” ---but God does not discuss with us the how or the why.  He simply makes clear what it is we must do.  Then we must take His word for it that it will mean life to us.  Every day He sets two things before us –life and death.  Every day we choose sacrifice, which leads to life, or selfishness, the rejection of sacrifice, which leads to death.  We can count on it, for we have the Word of the Lord that it is so.

The Music of His Promises by Elisabeth Elliot

The Price of Life

“He saved others, but he cannot save Himself” (Matt. 27:42).  This was a joke among the chief priests and lawyers.  If they had comprehended the profound truth of their jest it would have died on their lips.  If He had saved Himself He would have saved no one else.  The principle is true for us as well:  self-giving is the price of Life ---of eternal life, of course, for it was Christ who first gave His life, and if we want eternal life we must give ourselves to Him completely.  But if we would help another toward finding real Life, we must lay down our lives.  If we ourselves want to live, let us “lose” it all ---and then, miraculously, find.

Help me, Lord, to bring this principle down to where I live today.  Is there some fear of loss?  Some unwillingness to relinquish?  Some determination to have it my way?  Some insistence on what I “deserve”?   May I, by Your strength, let it go, and thus find a greater freedom and a more fulfilling life.

The Music of His Promises by Elisabeth Elliot

The Prerequisite for Discernment

It is not reasonable to talk of wanting to know God’s will unless we have first offered ourselves to Him.  Why should He show us what to do if we have not yet made up our minds as to whose we are?  The will of God is for those who trust Him ---those, that is, who commit themselves totally, who offer their “very selves to Him as a living sacrifice, dedicated and fit for His acceptance” (Rom.12:1).  This must always be the first step, followed by the refusal to allow the world to dictate thought patterns.  The mind must be “remade” ---shaped according to a radically different pattern.   Then and only then can we discern the will of God.  Then we will understand that it is, contrary to the view that comes naturally, “good, acceptable, and perfect.”

The Music of His Promises by Elisabeth Elliot