Elisabeth Elliot: What I'm dealing with here in this seminar, is marriage. And we need to be very clear about what our individual responsibilities are before God. And it is not the responsibility of the wife to be the moral custodian of her husband--and it will be very liberating if you once accept that fact.

Lisa Barry: With so many marriages breaking up these days, what can you do to make sure you're not a part of the divorce statistics? Elisabeth Elliot takes you to the Bible for the answer and the principle of sacrifice. Stay with us for the next quarter hour for a program that could help save your marriage, right here on Gateway To Joy. Here's Elisabeth.

Elisabeth Elliot: Love is the gold cord that binds us together. It's like the string on the beads. And it's the only thing--the love of which the Bible speaks--is absolutely the only thing, which can survive the tests that life together is going to dish out. It's the only thing that can withstand the strain--the love of which Christ speaks and the love which He demonstrated for us when He gave His life for us on the cross.

The word is sacrifice; and that is the way that we know what love is. As it says in 1 John 3:16, "Here is how we know what love is: Christ laid down His life for us."

And a man said to me this morning, "Is there another word that you might find besides this word sacrifice?" And I appreciate the desire, because we can distort and twist everything, can't we? And vocabulary gets ruined, very often, by popular use. If we are thinking of sacrifice always in terms of loss and deprivation, then we're forgetting what the original meaning of sacrifice was in the Old Testament, which was an offering--something that God has given to us to give back to Him.

Any Israelite who brought a sacrifice to the tabernacle had nothing to give to God but what God had already given to him. And as the old prayer says, "All things come of Thee, O Lord; and of Thine own have we given Thee." We have nothing else to offer.

And in marriage, God has given us this tremendous gift of another human being with whom to become one and to share our lives. It is our response to the love of God to offer ourselves back for the sake of this other person and for the glory of God. Most of us are preoccupied when we get married with what we've gotten, and we think we've gotten a prize package.

Now today we're going to think specifically about love's acceptance. What did you receive exactly when you got married? What sort of a person was he or she? My husband Addison Leitch used to say that if a woman is very generous, she may acknowledge that her husband lives up to perhaps 80% of her expectations--if she's very generous.

But, what are we going to do with the other 20%? Well, you have two choices. You can either decide to pick away at the 20% that you don't like...and if you do that, then I can guarantee that you will make your own life and that of your spouse miserable, and you will not reduce it by very much, that 20%. The other option is simply to accept all the 20% that you don't like.

Maybe your husband lives up to 95% of your expectations, or your wife lives up to 98%. But there's always that little pile of dust in the corner, isn't there, that little thing there or that picky peculiarity that you'd like to change. So, because you have married this person, you must regard this person as God's gift to you--never mind how you got into it.

Some of you may be thinking, Well, God didn't have anything to do with it back then. I wasn't thinking of the will of God. Perhaps you weren't Christians when you got married. Perhaps he was and you weren't or she was and you weren't. "So what am I supposed to do now?" I get lots of letters from people who say, "God really didn't have anything to do with my marriage, and God did not join us together. We never should have gotten married in the first place. So now we're going to split."

I really don't think that's the way to look at it. We are in this situation; we know that marriage is an institution far bigger than we as a particular couple are. And we find it very easy to forget that, don't we. In a wedding, the young people are thinking only of, her and me, forgetting that because we have all this ceremony with the music and the candles and the slow, measured tread down the aisle--this is a ceremony which signals tremendous verities vastly prior to our particular relationship.

It is a God-ordained institution. And if you're in it now, then thank God for it and accept this person. Accept him or her in the name of God and start loving him or her.

Now early love is one thing. First love we think of as very exciting and very thrilling, with lots of warm fuzzies and the birds singing and the rainbows and all of that. Then we move into the hard realities of daily living and we begin to have revealed to us the difficulties and the hard things about this partner. So we must move on from early love into what we might call "second love." And it takes a slow transfiguration to move into that deeper and much longer lasting second love.

I must choose to accept this wife or this husband, and that is a daily choice, in a sense. You did it once for all in your marriage ceremony, but now each day is another choice. I must accept the fact that Lars doesn't keep his office the way I'd like it to be. And between you and me, I made his life miserable, I'm sure. I don't think I was nasty about it, but just those little needling remarks about:

"Well, when are you going to pick that stuff up off the floor so you can get in the door? When are you going to clean off the top of that desk so you have a place to put down one piece of paper?" And on the counter where he packages the books and the tapes--where all the work gets done--"Why don't you clean off the counter? It would make it so much easier for you and you could work so much more efficiently."

The Lord quietly but steadily kept saying to me, "That is not your business." I argued with God. I said, "But Lord, it is my business. It's my books and my tapes that he is dealing with there. He's got customers that are waiting for their orders, and I don't see how in the world he can do it efficiently and get them out on time. He is going to be losing people's checks and everything else." And the Lord said, "Leave him to Me. You must choose to accept this man."

Now that is not to say that Lars himself doesn't have a responsibility before God. But what I'm dealing with here in this seminar is marriage. We need to be very clear what our individual responsibilities are before God. It is not the responsibility of the wife to be the moral custodian of her husband. And it will be very liberating if you once accept that fact.

So the time came when I said, "Okay, Lord, I will let go of that and I'm going to leave it." And I try not to even think of the fact that that room exists in our house. Because Lars has said to me, "You don't have to clean this room. You don't have to do anything to it. Don't touch it." So that's where it is.

But God has joined us together. Therefore, it is God who has invaded my life. I spoke of marriage being a revolution--it is an invasion. God has invaded my life in the form of this particular man, and I must relinquish my pride of independence and start taking into consideration who he is and who he and I are supposed to be together.

God brought to my attention the verse in 1 Corinthians 12, that magnificent chapter on the differences between the parts of the body, and this hit me right between the eyes. Men have different gifts, but it is the same Lord who accomplishes His purposes through them all.

Then Paul goes on to use that physical analogy. A body is not a single organ. "Suppose the foot should say, 'Because I'm not a hand, I do not belong to the body.' It does belong to the body, nonetheless." If the whole were one single organ, there would not be a body at all.

This brings up the question of our differences as husband and wife. We are very much alike in being human; we are very different in being male and female. It is not equality that God aims at--it's unity and harmony. There is no unity if there is equality.

I think of the glorious differences between men and women. We'll get into that perhaps in a later talk. But Jesus said, "He that receives you receives Me" (Matt. 10:40). Have you ever thought of applying that verse to marriage?

We are all incompatible, but you must walk with this woman or this man before God. Who married her? You did. You made that decision, and so this is what it entails. It's no good sitting around for the rest of your life thinking, I wish I had a different set of peculiarities to live with. What sort of a set of peculiarities would you choose? You can look at somebody else longingly and think, Now why didn't I get somebody like her? And of course, what you don't know is what her husband does know about her.

So just remember that in receiving this man or this woman, you actually receive Christ. God's gift is this person, chosen by His magnificently varied grace--that's what Paul says. "The gifts of God are chosen by His magnificently varied grace" (Rom. 12:6).

There's a sense in which, although this person that you're married to is a sinner and imperfect and fallible, he or she is a perfect gift that comes from the Father of lights.

Lisa Barry: And that's a great place to end today's program. Elisabeth Elliot has never been one to mince words, or water down the truth. And that is what has made this program life changing! Marriage is a call to commitment. Our Christian faith is a call to commitment. And no one has sounded that call more clearly than Elisabeth Elliot.

Today's program is a part of a two-week series called "The Best of Gateway To Joy" and it's a slice of history that you will delight in for years to come. For information on how to get that for yourself, get in touch with us right away, 1-800-759-4JOY. We're also making the original series available today called "Making Your Marriage Work." Ask about it when you call 1-800-759-4569. Or, you can write to us at:

Gateway To Joy, Box 82500, Lincoln, NE 68501. Our Web address is gatewaytojoy.org. Today's program has been a production of Back to the Bible.

This is Lisa Barry. Thanks for listening and be sure to join us the next time when "The Best of Gateway To Joy" features some classic literature. That's next time on Gateway To Joy.