Lisa Barry: It?s funny to look back on our early days of marriage to see how opposite my husband and I really were. I remember one day when Ken asked me to have the oil changed in my car and said it would cost about $12.50. When I picked up the car, the bill came to over $100. Apparently I had asked for a tune-up instead of an oil change. Thankfully we can look back on situations like this and laugh. Today we?re going to continue listening to what Elisabeth Elliot had to say to an audience about relationships. I?m glad you?ve joined us for this edition of Gateway to Joy. And now here?s Elisabeth.

Elisabeth Elliot: In 1 Corinthians 13, you have a picture of what God?s love is like and what our love for one another is supposed to be. It says, "This love of which I speak is slow to lose patience. It looks for a way of being constructive. It is not possessive. It is neither anxious to impress nor does it cherish inflated ideas of its own importance."

A young woman came to me just the other day and told me that she had an insanely possessive husband. She is 20 years old and he is 18. I?m sure that he must have many insecurities and he?s probably scared to death that he is going to lose her, and he will hardly let her out of his sight. She wanted me to give her some neat little formula for changing him.

I couldn?t give her a formula. I said, "There is nothing you can do about this, except to accept graciously and quietly that peculiarity, that failing, in your husband. You should be glad that he wants to possess you. You should be flattered by the fact that he doesn?t want anybody else to have you. He wants you for himself. Yet at the same time, God has to work in that man?s life. So your job is to pray for him. That?s by far the most important thing. The next thing you can do is to make it as pleasant as you possibly can for him to live with you and for him to realize that you do love him; that he can trust you. You must show him in every way how much you love him and how worthy of his trust you can be."

C. S. Lewis wrote in A GRIEF OBSERVED, which is his description of his loss of his wife, "One thing marriage has done for me is that I can never again believe that religion is manufactured out of our unconscious, starved desires and is a substitute for sex. For those few years that H. and I feasted on love, every mode of it?solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes as comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers?no cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied."

You may recall that Lewis was not married until he was 60 years old, and he married a dying woman by her hospital bed. Then she had a remission and they lived together very happily for I think it was something like two years.

"If God were a substitute for love, we ought to have lost all interest in Him. Who would bother about substitutes when he has the thing itself? But that isn?t what happens. We both knew we wanted something besides one another?quite a different kind of something, a quite different kind of want. You might as well say that when lovers have one another, they will never want to read or eat or breathe. The most precious gift that marriage gave me was this constant impact of something very close and intimate, yet all the time that unmistakable ?other,? resistant; in a word, real."

Are you aware of that unmistakably "other" being there? Resistant, and yet real? The revelation of two selves. Much of what this means I didn?t understand myself until after my second husband died. He died in September of 1973. In December, I wrote in my journal, "This revelation of self is a fire, a purging fire."

I suppose most widows do what I?ve done on both occasions?gone back again and again over the course of my brief time with this man and thought of all the things that I should have done which I left undone, and all the things which I should not have done which I did. It was a purging fire to see myself revealed in all my frailties and failures.

I remember my dear friend?she was one of my spiritual mothers, Mom Cunningham, up in Canada. When she was widowed, it was just a couple of years after my husband Jim died. The two of us got together and discussed widowhood. She was a beautiful, radiant-faced, white-haired old lady. She had a wonderful Scottish accent, which I can?t really imitate very accurately. But she said, "When I thought of all the things I should have done, I said to the Lord, ?Why didn?t You show me?? And He said, ?Because you weren?t ready to be shown.?" Are you ready to be shown today that revelation?

Ann Kimmel. Some of you know Ann Kimmel and have heard her speak and have read her books. When Ann got married, she said to me, "Elisabeth, nobody has ever made me as angry as Will Anderson." She put this in a book, so I?m not giving away any secrets. She did not know that she could be so angry. It was a revelation of two selves. Not only did she discover in Will things that she had no idea were there before she married him?things which made her furious?but she discovered this capacity for anger that she had no idea about before.

Lars mentioned last night that we had a revelation of one another?s sinfulness. Very shortly after we married?he thought it was the next day. It wasn?t quite that bad. I think we made it through about ten days. But when we were married, we were moving from Massachusetts. Lars had been down in Atlanta, finishing up a hospital chaplaincy training program. So he came up to Massachusetts to marry me.

My sister was going to move into my house and I was going to move to Atlanta with Lars, where we were renting a house. So it was a very complicated bit of logistics for me to pack up everything I owned and empty every drawer and every closet so that my sister and her family of three children and her husband could live in my house, and pack all those things up and get the bed unmade and then made up fresh and the car packed and all of these things done in one morning, because we were leaving that afternoon right after lunch. So it had taken a lot of planning on my part, and I had done it all.

On that morning I was breathing a great sigh of relief, because all I had to do was fix lunch for my sister and her family and put the last few things in the suitcase and we were going to get into the car and head for Atlanta. Lars informed me that morning that he really didn?t feel like going to Atlanta quite yet. I said, "You what?" He said, "What?s the big rush? You?ve always got to work on this schedule. Everything?s got to go exactly the way you want it to go, and you go by the clock and you go by the calendar. What?s the use of leaving this afternoon? We don?t need to leave until at least tomorrow morning."

I said, "The suitcase is packed. We changed the sheets this morning. I washed the sheets this morning. My sister is coming this afternoon." He said, "You?ve got a lot of rooms in this house. There is plenty of room for everybody. There is no problem."

I said, "Make up the bed again? Unmake the bed?" Well, you can imagine that I was furious. Lars was furious because I had won the argument. What do we do?

Well, a whole year ago now I was preparing for these talks. It happened to be at about 2:00 in the morning. I wrote in my journal some things which it just seemed as though God was speaking to me and convicting me of things myself. I put them down on paper. If I hadn?t put them down on paper, I wouldn?t remember them to this day. I strongly recommend that you keep spiritual journals, because it is a great lesson and it?s a wonderful way to see the faithfulness of God.

So very quickly, I?m going to try to get through this page, because it was a revelation to me, and I hope that it will be of some help to you. "Like discipleship, marriage is an all-out revolution. It attacks me and I jump to my self?s defense, put up my shield and draw my sword. But it is love that invades my world; that hitherto unknown, strange, not recognized intruder against which my practiced defenses have no power. The mystery of this man confounds me, infuriates me and defeats me. I am humiliated when I should be humbled. Humiliation and humble are two different things.

In other words, Lars is God?s Trojan horse, moved in to capture me in ways least imagined. Did I pray for humility? Here then is my opportunity?the revelation of my pride. Did I ask for Calvary love? Test the quality of your love, God says, by the cross. Did I imagine I was ready for sacrifice? Ah, yes, but on my terms. Was I willing to receive the peace that the world knows nothing about? ?Have turmoil, then. I give you the need for My peace,? God says.

Lord, make me holy. ?Then behold your abject need. Look at the heart this man has opened to your gaze; your own heart, so dimly perceived before. Was it really open to My gift? He is the instrument of My peace. Not what you thought the instrument would look like? Of course not, dear child. Holiness demands a heavy, concentrated barrage on all that wars against it.?"

I hope you understand why I use these military terms. We are in a battle, a spiritual battle, against the headquarters of evil. I am convinced?and all you need to do is look around. The evidence is around us all the time. Satan?s primary target every day of the world is unity?the unity of a husband and wife, the unity of the family, the unity of the church. He can?t stand it. So is there a more relentless barrage on selfishness than the daily intimacy with one person, the same person, the one you cannot avoid or control or change or understand?

"He is My envoy," God says. "He bears my message." And you gentlemen, please put the pronoun "she" in there. "She is My envoy. She bears My message. She is the agent of holiness. Receive her then, and you receive Me."

Lisa Barry: I'm amazed at how God can take the idiosyncrasies of our spouses and consider them to be the best tools for rounding off our rough edges. I liked Elisabeth's comment of how she always intended to be sacrificial in marriage, but only when she could decide on the how and the when. Isn't that true of all of us? We can imagine ourselves in so many noble acts of sacrifice, but in real life the time to sacrifice is usually at an unexpected time when it's least

convenient.

I'd like to recommend a great little book if sacrificing is a difficult thing for you. It's by Amy Carmichael and it's called IF. You'll appreciate her straightforward approach to true service and motivation. We also have this one-week series available, and it's called LOVE ACCEPTS.

To purchase either the book IF or this week?s tape, you can call us toll-free at 1-800-759-4JOY. Or write to Gateway to Joy, Box 82500, Lincoln, Nebraska, 68501. If you haven't seen our Web site lately, check out what's new at gatewaytojoy.org. Gateway to Joy is a listener-supported ministry of Back to the Bible.

I hope you can be with us tomorrow when Elisabeth talks about the things that can destroy good relationships. That's right here on Gateway to Joy.