Biography
Elizabeth Elliot is best known for her many books which have their roots in her experiences as a Bible Translator in Ecuador. Her belief in following God no matter what the cost has led her into many powerful experiences with a perspective on the will of God in our lives that few of us have. A popular and articulate speaker, Ms. Elliot speaks openly with youth today about the Gospel [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"Being Upbeat in a Downbeat World" 
I've certainly had some experiences in my life when I was at the end of my rope. I felt as if I had nothing to offer to anyone, let alone to God. And yet, the older I grow the more I'm amazed at the grace that God has shown to us in letting us know that He not only loves us, but He actually needs us. I think there is a sense in which we can properly say that God needs us. But I have a sneaking suspicion that there are a lot of you out there who have a hard time believing that God even loves you let alone wants you or needs you. So in these few minutes I hope I can help you to see that He really loves you, He really wants you, and there is a sense in which He actually needs you.

Do you have many resources in yourself? Most of us would say that we are fairly poverty stricken when it comes to resources. I grew up in a family of pessimists, shall we say. I come from a long line of "champions" on both sides. I grew up believing that everybody else in the world knew exactly what they were doing and I didn't have any idea - I was the one who was going to flunk first grade. So that is really where I began. When I would get on a bus or a trolley car - which we had back in those days - I would feel that I was the only person on the trolley car or bus that had no idea where to get off or what I was doing.

Some of you may feel that you've lost your way. Maybe you have lost a mate, maybe you have lost a child, your job, your health, money, your self respect. If the last is the case then you are certainly saying, "What a strange title - 'God Needs You' - He doesn't need me, he doesn't want me." But oh yes, He does. I believe that God is asking you today to give Him something.

"Me give God something?" Yes, that's exactly what I believe. God is asking you to give Him something.

"Well," you say, "But I have nothing. I have nothing what so ever that I could possibly offer to God. I don't even have much that I could offer to other people, but what could I offer to God." The truth is that God wants you first of all.

The Apostle Paul said to the Roman Christians, "I beseech you, I beg you, brothers, that you present your bodies ..." In other words that you make a gift of what you are - of all that you are - and then of what you have and what you do and what you suffer.

You know, a Christian is not perfect. I don't have a whole lot of use for bumper stickers, but one of the bumper stickers that I do like is the one that says, "Christians are not perfect - they are just forgiven." Christians are people that know that they can't possibly make it on their own and so we have come to One who is far greater than we are. We have come to One who has promised not only to be our helper and our counselor and our friend, but our Savior - One who loved us and gave Himself for us.

Never underestimate the power of God to make something out of nothing. The story in I Kings 17 is one of my favorites because it proves exactly that. You may remember the background of the Prophet Elijah's going to Zarephath. He had been in the wilderness where God had commanded ravens to feed him. You know, God does know how to take care of our needs - even if it's necessary for Him to command birds to bring you bread - God knows how to command the birds. If it is necessary for God to make the sun stand still in order to give you enough time to get everything done that you need to do, God knows how to do that too.

Anyway, Elijah had been fed by birds, but God told him that he was to get up and leave that wilderness and to go to a place called Zarephath where, He said, He had commanded not birds but, of all people, a poor widow to feed him. Now think about that. Does it make any sense at all for God to command a poor widow to feed His prophet? If God could command birds to do it, why should he lay a burden like that on a poor widow?

We find her gathering a few sticks and the prophet comes along with this very strange request. He says, "Would you bring me a little water in a pitcher?" And so she gives him what she can give him, which is a little water. Then he says, "Bring me, please, a piece of bread as well."

But she said, "I don't even have enough food to sustain me. All I have is a handful of flour in a jar and a little oil in a flask and I'm gathering two or three sticks to cook something for my son and feed ourselves before we die." When Elijah said what he said next she must have been incredulous. He said, "Never fear. You go and do as you say, but first make me a small cake." I can imagine the widow thinking to herself, "You've got to be kidding. Me bake you a cake? Didn't I just tell you - I don't have anything left. Here I am gathering two sticks to make a teeny little fire to bake a teeny-tiny little cake out of this handful of flour and these few drops of oil and you ask me to bake you a cake!"

But she didn't argue. We don't know anything about this woman as far as her faith is concerned, but she recognized in the person of Elijah that it was God that was speaking to her, it was the voice of God coming to her. And so, what did she do? She obeyed. She listened to the voice of God, and she did the impossible thing. Now of course, it certainly looked to her as though she would be using up the flour and the oil and that would be the end of it - she would not even have that between her and starvation. But God worked a miracle. Because she was willing to give the last handful of flour and the last drops of oil, God provided not only enough for her and her son and His prophet, but enough for the rest of her family. And the cruze of oil was never emptied and the barrel of meal was never emptied either. God does know how to make something out of nothing.

I want to tell you just one incident out of many in my life to illustrate what I want to say. It was way back when I was a missionary. My very first year as a missionary I went to work with a small tribe of Indians in western jungle of Ecuador called the "Colorados." Now these were a people who had contact with the white man, but they had never had their language reduced to writing so they had no scriptures in their language. I had been prepared to do linguistic work. I had been praying for years that God would send me to a tribe whose language had never been reduced to writing and that He would enable me to translate the Bible for these people. And so, it was with a great deal of joy and anticipation that I went to San Miguel de los Colorados in the western jungle of Ecuador.

Well, the first thing that I had to do was to find somebody to help me to reduce this language to writing - somebody who could simply repeat and repeat and repeat what, for him, was the easiest language in the world - so that I could write it down. Obviously there were no text books, there were no interpreters, there were no tapes, there were no helps of any kind. I had to try to learn this language just the way a child learns a language. And so, God answered my prayer for such a helper and he sent me a man by the name of Macario. To my utter astonishment, after Macario and I had been working together very happily for a few weeks, Macario was murdered. Now, I don't know whether that fits in with your idea of how God does things, but it really didn't fit my categories. It was not my idea of how God helps a missionary.

One of the verses that God had given to me before I went to Ecuador to become a missionary was Isaiah 50:7, "For the Lord God will help me, therefore shall I not be confounded, therefore have I set my face like a flint and I know that I shall not be ashamed." Now, the Lord allowed this informant to be murdered. I had to look into this abyss of incomprehensibility, of mystery, of the ways in which God does something.

I have to skip over many months to another part of the story. I moved from the western jungle of Ecuador over into the eastern jungle because a missionary in the eastern jungle by the name of Jim Elliot had asked me to marry him. He had appended a very stringent condition to his proposal which was, "I will not marry you unless and until you learn Quichua." Well, Quichua is another Indian language no more related to Colorado than Chinese is to English. But I was delighted. I had a very powerful motivation for wanting to learn Quichua.

And so I moved to the eastern jungle, leaving my materials behind with two other missionaries who were going to carry on where I had left off. A few weeks later, I found out that all of those language materials had been stolen. They were all in a suitcase back in the days before there were copies. There were no xeroxes, there were no tape recordings. Everything was in one suitcase - all the charts, all the 3x5's, all the notebooks and everything that had gone into the reduction to writing of the Colorado language. We prayed that God would get that suitcase back. If God can make the oil and the flour last forever and He can make birds feed a prophet, He can certainly get a suitcase back. Guess what? We didn't get it back. If ever a missionary felt that she was on a dead-end street, it was I.

And yet, I thought of a verse in the first chapter of Revelations where God gave a wonderful vision of Himself to His faithful servant, John. When John threw himself at His feet, dazzled by the vision of who Christ was, the words that came to him then were, "Do not be afraid, I am the First and the Last. I died, I am alive, I am the Keys." Those words have been a watchword in my life. If God is the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last letters of the Greek alphabet, then He is the God of blind alleys, He is the God of dead-end streets, He is the God of mystery. You know, the Christian faith is founded on mystery. I can never explain to you the Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ, I can't explain to you what happened on that cross except that a man was nailed to it, I can't explain to you how my salvation and my redemption came because He died for me, I can't explain for you the resurrection, I can't explain His ascension into Heaven. I believe them and I believe that word, "The Lord God will help me."

Now, maybe you'd like me to give you examples one through ten as to why God allowed these strange things to happen. Wouldn't you like to know why God allowed Macario to be murdered? Wouldn't you like to know why God allowed the whole of a missionary's first year of work to be swept clean off the board by robbery. I don't have even the first reason let alone the tenth. As far as the "big picture" - I don't know all the things that the God of the universe is engineering in order to work out His will.

But a little bit more than 12 years before that, when I was about 12 years old, I had prayed, "Lord, work out your whole will in my life at any cost, now and forever." You know, we often pray, maybe glibly sometimes, "Thy will be done." And when God starts doing it we get terribly surprised and we look up and say, "Why Lord, what are you doing? Why did you allow this to happen?" So I can only say that God was teaching me some things. He was teaching me that His ways are not my ways. I am His child, He is my Father and I do not understand any more what He is up to than a little infant whose father is sitting at a computer. That child hasn't the slightest idea what her father is up to. I don't know all the things that my Father is up to, but I do know for sure that God knows exactly what He is doing and I do believe that God is going to work out a purpose far more glorious than I can ever imagine.

Well, years later, I had written a book about that first year on the mission field. It's called, These Strange Ashes. I took my title from a poem by Amy Carmichael, a missionary to India, in which she speaks of all the various trials and tribulations that one might go through. And then she puts these words, "But these strange ashes, Lord, this nothingness, this baffling sense of loss." And the Lord's answer is, "Son, was the anguish of my stripping less upon the torturing cross?" We follow One who was crucified and so we have to encounter a cross in some way, shape or form at some point. Years after that book was published, I was having dinner with a young woman and her husband and children. She began to tell me what that book had done for her. She said, "Elizabeth, I was at the end of my rope." And she told me a story of great sorrow and loss that she had gone through. "And somebody gave me that book. It changed my life."

Oddly enough, the very next day I was speaking at a meeting on that subject and that young woman came to the meeting. Even though when I tell this story, I try to say as clearly as I can, "I don't know all the reasons why that happened. God never brought any evidence in terms of the Colorado language work or the Colorado missionary work to my vision which explained these things. But I still believe, even when God doesn't explain himself, He's my Father, I'm His child, He loves me." And so, even though I had tried to explain that as clearly as I could, this same young woman came to me after that meeting and she said, "Elizabeth, did God ever explain to you why He allowed those things to happen?"

I kind of smiled and I said, "Yes, he did. Last night."

"Oh," she said, "Tell me about it."

I said, "I was at your dinner table, remember?" Gradually, I could see that it was dawning on her that the very fact that God had used that story to teach her something had made a very significant difference. And if that was the only thing that God ever showed me as one of his many reasons for allowing a thing like that to happen, wouldn't that be enough?

After all, He is a God who knows how to make something out of nothing. Now I could not in my wildest dreams have imagined that because I lost my informant and all of a year's work that God was going to change the life of a young woman in New Jersey maybe 20 or 30 years later, anymore than that poor widow could have imagined what God was going to do with her.

Just think of these aspects of the story of the widow of Zarapheth - of all people to choose - a poor widow. She was faced with impossibilities. God met her at the last minute. She obeyed. She did the one thing that she could do. She was prepared to lose what she thought she needed. What God had up His sleeve was something unimaginable to her.

I want you to think of this. You have something to offer to God. "Me?" Yes, you. Maybe it's a handful of flour or a few drops of oil or something that looks much more useless to you. I don't know what it is, God knows what it is. I would ask you most earnestly to surrender yourself to Him - to give your life to Him. If you can't handle it, He can. He is the Beginning and the End, the First and the Last, the One who died, the One who is alive and the One who holds the keys. God loves you. God wants you. God needs you. Will you say, "Yes" to Him?

God bless you.

Interview with Elizabeth Elliot

Gunther Knoedler: There are those who feel that we have no right to impose the Christian message on other cultures because of the upset that it will cause. What is your response to that?

Elizabeth Elliot: That is a common challenge and question that I guess every Christian has to face. The answer that I would give to a non-believer, or someone who really thinks that we're out of order by what we are doing, is my reason for going is not going to make sense to you, but it makes a lot of sense to me. I am very sympathetic to the view that it would be very nice to leave the primitive peoples in their primitive state and not go messing around and trying to change their culture. The object that the missionary is there for is not primarily to change their culture, but we have to acknowledge that if the gospel of Jesus Christ goes to work on anybody's life, that life is going to be changed. And so, my reason for being there is not because I want to go around putting my nose in somebody else's business or changing people's culture but simply because there is a command given to us by the Lord Jesus, "Go into all the world and preach the gospel."

Another way that I look at it is I have something priceless to share which is going to be life changing for those people if they want it. I can't convert anybody. Sometimes people say to me, "How many Indians did you convert?" My answer is, "zero." Because I don't convert anybody. All I can do is simply present the gospel to them. God loves you. Jesus Christ died for you and He wants to forgive your sins and to give you a life of everlasting joy. They can take it or leave it.

Knoedler:  Thank you. Let's come back to this culture now. I am aware that in your particular ministry now, you do a lot of speaking to young people. What is the burden of your message to them today?

Elliot:  I think the burden of my message is "Trust and Obey." I am encouraging young people to believe that God really is trustworthy - that what He wants for them is not to ruin their fun, but to give them real joy which is much more everlasting than happiness. But that comes through obedience. There is the old gospel hymn, "Trust and Obey for there's no other way to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey." I've been amazed, really, to discover that young people are really desperately looking for somebody who will tell them, "this is wrong and this is right. There are standards of right and wrong which God has outlined for us." I offer to them the possibility of choosing Him.

Knoedler:   Along that line, Elizabeth, our society seems to be preoccupied with the goal of self-fulfillment - everything seems to be turned inward - and the only thing that seems to be important is what is self-fulfilling. What does the Christian faith have to say about this?

Elliot:  Jesus said, "If you want to be my disciple, you must give up your right to yourself." Now that's pretty tough. He actually said that to crowds of people. But then he goes on to say, "Because if you find your life, you are going to lose it, but if you lose your life for my sake you will find it." It's what I was trying to say a few minutes ago - that if we are willing to give up to God what looks like the last thing we have, He is going to make something beautiful out of it. Jesus made it very plain that out of our loss comes gain, just as out of His loss comes our gain. Because He was willing to give His life, I have life.