Lisa Barry: It's easy for most of us to pray about a problem in our lives, and it's even easy to admit that we have little or no control over a situation. But what is most difficult is turning our whole lives over to God, letting Him have the final say on every choice we face, and that's what He wants. Elisabeth Elliot offers some help on that difficult task of handing ourselves over to God. That's coming up next on Gateway To Joy.

Elisabeth Elliot: To wait on the Lord means, for one thing, to give up a lot of our own notions about how things ought to turn out. And we just almost always have to start with getting rid of ourselves. Any spiritual exercise at all needs to begin with surrendering ourselves, relinquishment of all that we imagine God ought to do. That doesn't mean we have to get rid of it, get it completely out of our minds, but just a total handing over to God of what we think needs to happen and waiting on Him because we are servants.

Servants are those who simply wait on, wait for orders, wait in readiness to do whatever the Master asks us to do. And the need to wait requires that we get rid of ourselves. How many of you have read Hannah Whitall Smith's THE CHRISTIAN'S SECRET OF A HAPPY LIFE? Wonderful. Those of you that haven't read it, I recommend it. It's a little book that was written more than a hundred years ago. It has never been out of print. There are very few books of which that can be said.

She was a Philadelphia Quaker, and she had some wonderful down-to-earth common sense. And one of the things that she says about this business of the self, and you can put down number one, the self--that's what we're talking about right now. She says, "The greatest burden we have to carry in life is self. The most difficult thing we have to manaqe is self. Our own daily living, our frames and feelings"--and I keep coming across that word "frames" in books that were written about a hundred years ago. We don't use it this way anymore, but I think what they mean is "moods."

You know that hymn you've probably been singing for years, "I dare not trust the sweetest frame, but wholly lean on Jesus' name." Well, it took me a long time to figure out what they were talking about, and as I've come across it in old writings, I think that's what it is.

"So our own daily living," says Hannah, "our frames and feelings, our especial weaknesses and temptations, and our peculiar temperaments, our inward affairs of every kind--these are the things that perplex and worry us more than anything else, and that bring us oftenest into bondage and darkness. In laying off your burdens, therefore, the first one you must get rid of is yourself. You must hand yourself and all your inward experiences, your temptations, your temperament, your frames and feelings, all over into the care and keeping of your God, and leave them there."

I remember an old Gospe! song that said, "Take your burdens to the cross and leave them there." And how often we take our burdens to the cross and carry them away again. So the great thing is to leave your temptations, your experiences, your temperament, your frames, your feelings, all into the care and keeping of your God and leave them there. He made you, and therefore He understands you and knows how to manage you. You must trust Him to do it.

Isn't it absurd of us to doubt that the One who made us does, in fact, know how to manage us. He knows exactly what is called for, given our peculiar temperaments. He knows what we need. He knows how to get it to us in His time. But we have so many of our own notions of what we need and what God ought to do and what this situation ought to--how this situation ought to be changed. And this is what waiting on God is all about.

So the first step in waiting on Him is getting rid of ourselves--that terrible, really unbearable burden of the self--the most difficult thing we have to manage. All my own plans and purposes, all my own desires and hopes--these are surrendered to God's disposal, not because He wants to crush all our dreams.

I think people often get a very distorted view of what surrender means. Do I have to give up all my dreams? Well, you know, there's a difference, in my mind, between giving up in the sense of just expecting that they're gone forever and giving over. And the relinquishment is putting these dreams and plans and hopes, many of which God may want to fulfill--but I just put them consciously and deliberately into His hands and say, "Lord, You know much better than I do whether I'm asking for bread or a stone, an egg or a scorpion, a fish or a snake."

And you remember that Jesus said that the father will not give a snake if the child asks for a fish. But some of the things that we ask for really are snakes. And God knows that they will destroy us. Think of the simple illustration of a loving parent. A little child doesn't know that the third ice cream cone will make him sick. But the loving parent is going to say no to such a request--not because he hates the child but because he loves the child, and for the very simple reason that he loves the child.

Why does a loving parent spank a child? Not because he hates him but because he wants to deliver that little child from himself so that he doesn't go through life bearing that intolerable burden. We are given little barbarians, aren't we, to civilize. That's the job of parents under God. And God is in the business of transforming you and me, His wayward and recalcitrant children, into the image of Christ, the image of His Son. And that's what our lives are about.

We're here to learn to know Him, to be conformed to the image of Christ. And that is an impossibility without the relinquishment of that self. And when I surrender it to His disposal--there's another word that has been very greatly narrowed down in its meaning. We think of disposal systems and garbage and all of that sort of thing. "Disposal" simply means "to set in place, to dispose, to put." The last part, "pose," comes from the Latin word "to put, to set in place, to set in order, to arrange, to assign to use." It's only God that can set our wayward wills and our sometimes foolish plans and dreams in order. So I relinquish them to Him that He may dispose of them wisely as only God can.

Secondly, we need to relinquish our own judgment. Again, that doesn't mean that we scrap it or discard it. We know that our judgment is finite. It's limited. We are nearsighted. When we say "I need this or that," which we don't have, we are assuming that this is an absolute necessity now. But if we don't have it, then what do we do with that verse that says, "My God shall supply all your need"?

I saw a wonderful article in a magazine some, several years ago, of a family that had adopted, I've forgotten how many children, I think it was something like 19 children in addition to their own seven or eight. And of these 19 children, I think 11 were handicapped. The father was a janitor in a school, so you know he was not a man that had a lot of money. The article was entitled "The Family That Needs Nothing." And the reason they gave it that title was they believe that God supplies all their needs. And so, if there's something that they think they need that they don't have, they trust God's judgment and not theirs. So, in effect, they needed nothing.

You may need something tomorrow, and tomorrow you will have it, if God knows that you need it, because we have that promise. So I relinquish to God my judgment. Do I imagine that mine is wiser than God's? If God has not given me this thing that I think I've got to have, I am in effect saying to God, "I know better than You do. You're not really paying attention. This is what I've got to have. This is what I need."

I was speaking with a young mother one time who had just described to me a very, very difficult living situation. They were living with several children in the basement of another missionary's home. These people were missionaries. And she came to me to ask me if I would pray that the Lord would provide another kind of housing for them. And she said, "We need a different living situation."

Well, as we talked about it, I said, "Yes, of course, I would be glad to pray." But I said, "You don't need a different kind of housing today." And she looked at me in astonishment. And I said, "Because if you did, then you would have it, because my God shall supply all your need."

God knows how much we can take, you know. It says "there hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man, and God is faithful, who will never allow you to be tempted beyond your ability to bear, above what you are able, but He will with the temptation make a way of escape so that you will be able to endure it, to bear it." Different translations put it that way. And she got the point. Her face just lit up. She said, "We don't need another house. We don't need a different place, do we?" She said, "Oh, I'm going to go and call my husband."

So she did. She went to the phone and she said, "Honey, we don't need another place to live." And he thought she'd lost her mind, you know. And then she explained to him, she said, "When we need it, God will give it to us." We have to leave the judgment up to Him.

Lisa Barry: It's a little easier to let God take control of the situation if we know there is nothing we can do about it anyway. But the real challenge is letting God do things in His own time and in His own way, even when they seem contrary to what we think is best. So the next step we need to take is to become certain that God can be trusted with the small and the big decisions in our lives.

Maybe this is an area that you've been struggling with lately. Possibly you're at a place in your life where you're not sure what the next step should be. I'd like to recommend a book by Elisabeth Elliot that takes an honest, forthright approach to God's guidance. It's something we all need every day. The book is called GOD'S GUIDANCE: A SLOW AND CERTAIN LIGHT. In it you'll learn to detect God working in your life in ways you may have missed before.

The cost of the book is $11.00 You can send that, along with your request, to Gateway To Joy, Box 82500, Lincoln, Nebraska, 68501. Or call toll-free 1-800-759-4JOY. That's 1-800-759-4569. Our Internet ministry address is gatewaytojoy.org. Our devotional feature this week is taken from the book ON ASKING GOD WHY. Take a look on-line, if you can. Gateway To Joy has been a production of Back to the Bible.

Tomorrow Elisabeth assures us that God has the answers that we are seeking, so be sure and join us then for another Gateway To Joy.