Elisabeth Elliot Quotes

“I have one desire now - to live a life of reckless abandon for the Lord, putting all my energy and strength into it.”

“Where does your security lie? Is God your refuge, your hiding place, your stronghold, your shepherd, your counselor, your friend, your redeemer, your saviour, your guide? If He is, you don't need to search any further for security.”

“Faith does not eliminate questions. But faith knows where to take them.”

“When obedience to God contradicts what I think will give me pleasure, let me ask myself if I love Him.”

“It is God to whom and with whom we travel, and while He is the end of our journey, He is also at every stopping place.”

“The life of faith is lived one day at a time, and it has to be lived - not always looked forward to as though the "real" living were around the next corner. It is today for which we are responsible. God still owns tomorrow.”

“The willingness to be and to have just what God wants us to be and have, nothing more, nothing less, and nothing else, would set our hearts at rest, and we would discover the simpler life,
the greater peace.”

“If my life is surrendered to God, all is well. Let me not grab it back, as though it were in peril in His hand but would be safer in mine!”

“Waiting silently is the hardest thing of all. I was dying to talk to Jim and about Jim. But the things that we feel most deeply we ought to learn to be silent about, at least until we have talked them over thoroughly with God.”

“God is God. Because he is God, He is worthy of my trust and obedience. I will find rest nowhere but in His holy will that is unspeakably beyond my largest notions of what he is up to.”

“We are not meant to die merely in order to be dead. God could not want that for the creatures to whom He has given the breath of life. We die in order to live.”

“To love God is to love His will. It is to wait quietly for life to be measured by One who knows us through and through. It is to be content with His timing and His wise appointment.”

“One does not surrender a life in an instant. That which is lifelong can only be surrendered in a lifetime.”

“Until the will and the affections are brought under the authority of Christ, we have not begun to understand, let alone accept, His Lordship. The Cross, as it enters the love life, will reveal the heart’s truth.”

“Of one thing I am perfectly sure: God's story never ends with 'ashes.”

“Leave it all in the Hands that were wounded for you”

“To be a follower of the Crucified means, sooner or later, a personal encounter with the cross. And the cross always entails loss. The great symbol of Christianity means sacrifice and no one who calls himself a Christian can evade this stark fact.”

“God never witholds from His child that which His love and wisdom call good. God's refusals are always merciful -- "severe mercies" at times but mercies all the same. God never denies us our hearts desire except to give us something better.”

“We are women, and my plea is Let me be a woman, holy through and through, asking for nothing but what God wants to give me, receiving with both hands and with all my heart whatever that is.”

“Waiting on God requires the willingness to bear uncertainty, to carry within oneself the unanswered question, lifting the heart to God about it whenever it intrudes upon one's thoughts.”

“Maturity starts with the willingness to give oneself.”

“Restlessness and impatience change nothing except our peace and joy. Peace does not dwell in outward things, but in the heart prepared to wait trustfully and quietly on Him who has all things safely in His hands.”

“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose." Jim Elliot, missionary to Auca indians in Ecuador”

“Choices will continually be necessary and -- let us not forget -- possible. Obedience to God is always possible. It is a deadly error to fall into the notion that when feelings are extremely strong we can do nothing but act on them.”

“Worship is not an experience. Worship is an act, and this takes discipline. We are to worship ''in spirit and in truth.'' Never mind about the feelings. We are to worship in spite of them.”

“Faith's most severe tests come not when we see nothing, but when we see a stunning array of evidence that seems to prove our faith vain.”

“The will of God is never exactly what you expect it to be. It may seem to be much worse, but in the end it's going to be a lot better and a lot bigger.”

“We never know what God has up His sleeve. You never know what might happen; you only know what you have to do now.”

“By trying to grab fulfillment everywhere, we find it nowhere.”

“The Word of God I think of as a straight edge, which shows up our own crookedness. We can't really tell how crooked our thinking is until we line it up with the straight edge of Scripture.”

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

“Experience had quickly taught her that she could not survive the storms without the anchor of the constraining love of Christ and what she called the "Rock-counsciousness" of the promise given her, "He goeth before.”

“Freedom begins way back. It begins not with doing what you want but with doing what you ought - that is, with discipline.”

“Don't dig up in doubt what you planted in faith.”

“When ours are interrupted, his are not. His plans are proceeding exactly as scheduled, moving us always (including those minutes or hours or years which seem most useless or wasted or unendurable).”

“If your goal is purity of heart, be prepared to be thought very odd.”

“It is in our acceptance of what is given that God gives Himself.”

“The world cries for men who are strong; strong in conviction, strong to lead, to stand, to suffer.”

“She is free not by disobeying the rules but by obeying them.”

“Women still dream and hope, pin their emotions on some man who doesn't reciprocate, and end up in confusion.”

“Jesus never pussyfooted”

“Of all things difficult to rule, none were more so than my will and affections.”

“Cruelty and wrong are not the greatest forces in the world. There is nothing eternal in them. Only love is eternal.”

“I believe a woman, in order to be a good wife, must be (among other things) both sensual and maternal.”

“The man whose eye is single for the glory of Another can be trusted.”

“The only basis of peace is the cessation of the conflict of two wills: my will vs God’s.”

“Today is mine. Tomorrow is none of my business. If I peer anxiously into the fog of the future, I will strain my spiritual eyes so that I will not see clearly what is required of me now.”

“Teach me to treat all that comes to me with peace of soul and with firm conviction that Your will governs all.”

“The devil has made it his business to monopolize on three elements: noise, hurry, crowds. He will not allow quietness.”

“He is always doing something--the very best thing, the thing we ourselves would certainly choose if we knew the end from the beginning. He is at work to bring us to our full glory.”

“You can never lose what you have offered to Christ.”

“Christ is sufficient. We do not need "support groups" for each and every separate tribulation. The most widely divergent sorrows may all be taken to the foot of the same old rugged cross and find there cleansing, peace, and joy.”

“God has promised to supply our needs. What we don’t have now we don’t need now.”