Lisa Barry: I'm sure everyone listening to me today has gone through suffering of one kind or another. Some of it is tolerable, and some of it is almost unbearable. If you happen to be lugging the baggage of bitterness today, Elisabeth Elliot has a message for you.

Lay your trials down for a while and spend 15 minutes putting all your circumstances in the proper perspective. Then, I'll be back in just a few minutes with an idea for a great next step. Let's move now into the auditorium where Elisabeth is addressing a group from Houston, Texas. Here she is.

Elisabeth Elliot: "You are loved with an everlasting love." That's what the Bible says, "and underneath are the everlasting arms." This is your friend, Elisabeth Elliot. A man by the name of Walter Ciszek, in a book called He Leadeth Me, describes his life in a Soviet labor camp. Walter Ciszek said this (the Soviet interrogators were trying to persuade him to cooperate with them):

"I saw only my own weakness and helplessness to choose either position open to me-- cooperation or execution. I knew that I had gone beyond all bounds. I had crossed over the brink into a fit of blackness I had never known before. It was very real and I began to tremble. I had lost the last shreds of faith in God.

"Recognizing that, I turned immediately to prayer in fear and trembling. I knew I had to seek immediately the God I had forgotten. I knew immediately what I must do, what I would do, and somehow I knew that I could do it. I knew that I must abandon myself entirely to the will of the Father and live from now on in this spirit of self-abandonment to God, and I did it.

"God's will was not hidden somewhere out there in the situations in which I found myself. The situations themselves were His will for me. What He wanted was for me to accept these situations from His hands, to let go of the reins and place myself entirely at His disposal. It was the grace of God. It was the grace God had been offering me all my life, but which I had never really had the courage to accept in full."

Glenda Revell's story is another case in point--horrible sin against that child by both her mother and her stepfather. But she saw in it, as she became aware more and more of God in her life, that they meant it for evil; He meant it for good. That's a verse straight out of Genesis. You remember that's what Joseph said to his brothers, who had been horribly sinful against him. It's just as if he said to them, "Relax, boys. You meant it for evil," and that was certainly true, "God meant it for good." Joseph was in a position to save the lives of his brothers and his father, but it wouldn't have happened without the evils.

So, we're up against the great mystery of evil and the mystery of grace. We're not going to get those intellectually harmonized, are we? The gift of suffering. Point two in your outline: It is a gift from God Himself. This concept is anathema to the natural mind. It is an outrage. A gift from God? He is supposed to be a God of love! Why on earth would He give a loved child suffering?

Well we have a very simple illustration, don't we, in home life. When you give your child a spanking because that child has been deliberately disobedient, it doesn't do any good to say to the child, "You know, this hurts me worse than it hurts you." Is that child ever going to believe that? Of course not. I can remember my parents saying that, and I thought, "They don't know what they're talking about. This hurts."

Then the day came when I was a mother. Because I loved the child, I have to make the child suffer. Everything in our modern mind and attitude is that you don't want anything bad to happen to anybody, ever, for any reason--except the people you can't stand. But anybody you love, you certainly wouldn't make them suffer. It is a gift.

A loving God gives good gifts to His children, and what did He give His beloved Son? A cup of suffering. The cup that the Father gave Him. The contents of that cup you can read in Isaiah 53. He was despised, rejected, a man of sorrows. The punishment that brought us peace, fell on Him. All that was in that cup, and He prayed, "Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me."

But then His next prayer was, "If it is not possible, nevertheless, not My will, but Thine be done." It is human and right and neat and proper that we should pray for healing and deliverance from evil, for protection. But the bottom line should always be, "Not my will, but Thine be done." He wants to give us Himself.

The Bible tells us that we are fellow heirs with Him if we suffer. Romans 8:17: "If we suffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him." My first husband, Jim Elliot, had written in his diary when he was just a young man, "I shall not reign. I have not suffered." I supposed up to that point he felt that he never had. He certainly wasn't thinking about all the tiny little things, but he didn't really know much about suffering until the last few hours of his life, as far as I know. But the Bible clearly says, "If you suffer with Me."

Acceptance. As Ciszek found in that horrible labor camp, acceptance that this situation for me at this moment is the will of God. It is a gift from God Himself. God is saying to you and me, "Will you accept this?" I thank God for Amy Carmichael, one of my great spiritual tutors whom I never met, an Irish missionary to India. She wrote a poem, "In Acceptance Lieth Peace."

Those were the words that God brought to me when Jim died. I couldn't change it. I couldn't change the fact that I was a widow and that Jim was dead and that my daughter was fatherless. There wasn't a thing I could do to change that, was there? But there was one thing I could do. I could accept it. So we can lift up empty hands and we say to the Lord, "Lord, I don't understand this. I would never have asked for it. I don't know the whys, but You've taught me much in Your Word. So by Your grace, yes, I will receive it" and open your hands and make that a transaction with God.

There may be someone here this morning that needs to do exactly that. In the quietness of your home, just get down on your knees and say, "Well, Lord, I never saw it as a gift. Never wanted it. I've never accepted it. I have been bitter. I have been lugging this baggage around. I am miserable." The little girl was miserable because she couldn't watch the video. A tiny thing, but a great lesson that she learned. Happiness out of obedience.

You know Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the psychiatrist who drew up the five stages of grief, hadn't written those words back in 1956 when my first husband was killed. So I didn't know that I was supposed to go through five stages of grief; therefore, I didn't go through them all. Now please, don't imagine that the woman you're looking at up here is made of concrete. I grieved, of course, as anyone else would grieve. I had waited 5 1/2 years for this man before the Lord brought us together as husband and wife, and we had 27 months of marriage.

But I realized that God had assigned me my portion and my cup. It was something I could not change, and so I took Amy Carmichael's words, "In Acceptance Lieth Peace." I know that's true. Many of you know that, too. Because instead of lugging the baggage of bitterness and resentment and absolute fury against God or against whoever it was that might have perpetrated that thing that's made you suffer, God gave it to you and God knew exactly what He was doing.

He is asking you, "Will you accept this gift or do you refuse to be a partaker of the divine nature?" We cannot be partakers of His divine nature without acceptance. So it is a choice. It is a willed, voluntary choice. You can refuse or you can say "yes." Jesus received the cup.

John the Baptist was imprisoned because of a wicked king, an adulterous king, a wicked woman and a silly dancing girl. Does that make any sense that God would allow this most faithful servant, who came to prepare the way for Jesus, to be put into prison because of his own obedience?

Remember that it was John the Baptist's obedience to God in facing that king with his sin that got him put into prison. It was that adulterous woman who thought up the punishment. The king told her daughter, this silly dancing girl, that he would give her anything she asked for. And so the girl asked her mother, "What shall I ask for?" The mother said, "Why don't you just ask for the head of John the Baptist?" It was brought in on a platter.

Does God have anything to do with things like that? But you remember that when the disciples had come to Jesus and told Him that John the Baptist was in prison, we suppose that Jesus could have gone and gotten him out. But the truth is, He didn't even go. He did not go to see John in prison. He sent a message, what we might consider a rather strange message, "Tell him, 'Blessed is he who is not offended in Me.'" I think Jesus knew his man. He knew that John the Baptist would trust Him, and his head was chopped off.

Lisa Barry: Maybe you've been asking a lot of questions lately. It's a natural response, but not very comforting. On the other hand, hearing about how others made it through their trials is comforting--especially when the help they found was supernatural, and that same help is available to you. The book Elisabeth has written called These Strange Ashes is a miraculous testimony of how God can take a seemingly impossible situation and work every detail out for his glory. We'd like to make a copy of the book available to you for a suggested donation of $10.00. Just send that along with your letter to:

Gateway To Joy, Box 82500, Lincoln, NE 68501. That's Gateway To Joy, Box 82500, Lincoln, NE 68501. Or, call toll free 1-800-759-4JOY. That's 1-800-759-4569. On the Web you'll find us at gatewaytojoy.org. Gateway To Joy has been a production of Back to the Bible.

I know you'll want to be back tomorrow, when Elisabeth offers a suggestion on what we can do with the heartache that never seems to fade. That's next time on Gateway To Joy.