Quotes from Elisabeth Elliot

This is the context in which the story must be understood—as one incident in human history, an incident in certain ways and to certain people important, but only one incident. God is the God of human history, and He is at work continuously, mysteriously, accomplishing His eternal purposes in us, through us, for us, and in spite of us.

A wedding is a celebration of marriage, of an institution ordained by God at the creation of man, to be entered into with solemnity as well as with joy.

Eve's daughters are as flowers and none can ever say they are through unfolding. And what man can predict the consummate end of such a life when its ultimate center is Sharon's Rose?

Jim practiced what he preached when he wrote in his diary: 'Wherever you are, be all here. Live to the hilt every situation you believe to be the will of God.

No woman who has not learned to master herself can be trusted to submit willingly to her husband. And that word willingly means that she does not merely resign herself to something she cannot avoid. It means that by an act of her own will she gives herself.

We fundamentalists are a pack of mood-loving showoffs. I'm sure the Minor Prophets would have found subject for correction.

Whatever dark tunnel we may be called upon to travel through, God has been there.

As a bird easily comes to terms with the necessity of bearing wings when it finds that it is, in fact, the wings that bear up the bird--up, away from the world, into the sky, into freedom--so the woman who accepts the limitations of womanhood finds in those very limitations her gifts, her special calling--wings, in fact, which bear her up into perfect freedom, into the will of God.

Faith is not a feeling. Faith is willed obedience in action.

It is altogether fitting and proper that we should enjoy things made for us to enjoy. What is not at all fitting or proper is that we should set our hearts on them. Temporal things must be treated as temporal things - received, given thanks for, offered back, but enjoyed. They must not be treated like eternal things.

St. Augustine said, The very pleasures of human life men acquire by difficulties. There are times when the entire arrangement of our existence is disrupted and we long then for just one ordinary day - seeing our ordinary life as greatly desirable, even wonderful, in the light of the terrible disruption that has taken place. Difficulty opens our eyes to pleasures we had taken for granted.

The love of God is not a sentiment. It is a willed and inexorable love that will command nothing less than the very best for us. The love of God wills our joy. I think of the love of God as being synonymous with the will of God.

Missionary work in a place where Christ has never been named is sometimes less arduous than in places where, though named, He has not been honored by lives of holy obedience.

the God who controls the wheeling galaxies and who spoke before the foundation of the world must be the God who holds the smallest circumstance of your life in His hands.

What we don't have now we don't need now. Possibly His very withholding is in order that the boy may learn, at this crucial juncture in his life, to turn to God in prayer for a deeply felt need.

But, in the words of a Portuguese proverb, "God writes straight with crooked lines", and He is far more interested in getting us where He wants us to be than we are in getting there. He does not discuss things with us. He leads us faithfully and plainly as we trust Him and simply do the next thing.

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

If we love someone more than we love God, it is worse than inordinate - it is idolatry. When God is first in our hearts, all other loves are in order and find their rightful place.

A willing acceptance of all that God assigns and a glad surrender of all that I am and have constitute the key to receiving the gift of a quiet heart. Whenever I have balked, the quietness goes. It is restored, and life immeasurably simplified, when I have trusted and obeyed.

You yourself will be given light in exchange for pouring yourself out for the hungry; you yourself will get guidance, the satisfaction of your longings, and strength, when you pour yourself out, when you make the satisfaction of somebody else's desire your own concern;

I have found, to depression as well. You yourself will be given light in exchange for pouring yourself out for the hungry; you yourself will get guidance, the satisfaction of your longings, and strength, when you "pour yourself out," when you make the satisfaction of somebody else's desire your own concern; you yourself will be a source of refreshment, a builder, a leader into healing and rest at a time when things around you seem to have crumbled.

It is a merciful Father who strips us when we need to be stripped, as the tree needs to be stripped of its blossoms. He is not finished with us yet, whatever the loss we suffer, for as we loose our hold on visible things, the invisible become more precious—where our treasure is, there will our hearts be.

When the will of God crosses the will of man, somebody has to die.

Matters of the heart still can never put us beyond His love and redemption.