Elisabeth Elliot famous quotes

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.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Children #Heart #Giving

Virginity is something that can be offered to God.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Virginity

Cruelty and wrong are not the greatest forces in the world. There is nothing eternal in them. Only love is eternal.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Inspiring #Love Is #World

The husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the Head of the Church. And the wife is there to bless and support and help him.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Husband #Wife #Support

Faith does not eliminate questions. But faith knows where to take them.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Inspiring #Christian #Inspiration

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

#Inspiring #Desire #Energy

The God who created, names, and numbers the stars in the heavens also numbers the hairs of my head..He pays attention to very big things and to very small ones. What matters to me matters to Him, and that changes my life.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Stars #What Matters #Hair

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.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Inspirational #Life #Peace

This job has been given to me to do. Therefore, it is a gift. Therefore, it is a privilege. Therefore, it is an offering I may make to God. Therefore, it is to be done gladly, if it is done for Him. Here, not somewhere else, I may learn God’s way. In this job, not in some other, God looks for faithfulness.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Jobs #Offering #Looks

The fact that I am a woman does not make me a different kind of Christian, but the fact that I am a Christian makes me a different kind of woman.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Inspiring #Christian #Doe

Faith is not an instinct. It certainly is not a feeling - feelings don't help much when you're in the lions' den or hanging on a wooden Cross. Faith is not inferred from the happy way things work. It is an act of will, a choice, based on the unbreakable Word of a God who cannot lie, and who showed us what love and obedience and sacrifice mean, in the person of Jesus Christ
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Jesus #Lying #Mean

To me, a lady is not frilly, flouncy, flippant, frivolous and fluff-brained, but she is gentle, she is gracious, she is godly and she is giving. You and I have the gift of femininity... the more womanly we are, the more manly men will be and the more God is glorified. Be women, be only women, be real women in obedience to God.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Real #Godly #Men

God's command 'Go ye, and preach the gospel to every creature' was the categorical imperative. The question of personal safety was wholly irrelevant.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Safety #Categorical Imperative #Command

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.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Obedience #Holy #Worthy

Does it make sense to pray for guidance about the future if we are not obeying in the thing that lies before us today? How many momentous events in Scripture depended on one person's seemingly small act of obedience! Rest assured: Do what God tells you to do now, and, depend upon it, you will be shown what to do next.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Lying #Events #Doe

God will never disappoint us… If deep in our hearts we suspect that God does not love us and cannot manage our affairs as well as we can, we certainly will not submit to His discipline. …To the unbeliever the fact of suffering only convinces him that God is not to be trusted, does not love us. To the believer, the opposite is true.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Heart #Opposites #Discipline

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.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Lying #Shepherds #Doe

The secret is Christ in me, not me in a different set of circumstances.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Inspiring #Secret #Different

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.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Inspiring #Discipline #Feelings

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.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Inspiring #Journey #Stopping

One does not surrender a life in an instant. That which is lifelong can only be surrendered in a lifetime.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Inspiring #Doe #Surrender

Do you often feel like parched ground, unable to produce anything worthwhile? I do. When I am in need of refreshment, it isn't easy to think of the needs of others. But I have found that if, instead of praying for my own comfort and satisfaction, I ask the Lord to enable me to give to others, an amazing thing often happens - I find my own needs wonderfully met. Refreshment comes in ways I would never have thought of, both for others, and then, incidentally, for myself.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Prayer #Thinking #Giving

Things happen which would not happen without prayer. Let us not forget that.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Inspiring #Prayer #Forget

Everything if given to God can become your gateway to joy.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Inspiring #Joy #Gateways

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!
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Hands #Would Be #Life Is

I realized that the deepest spiritual lessons are not learned by His letting us have our way in the end, but by His making us wait, bearing with us in love and patience until we are able to honestly to pray what He taught His disciples to pray: Thy will be done.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Inspiring #Patience #Spiritual

It is through the tender austerity of our troubles that the Son of Man comes knocking. In every event He seeks an entrance to my heart, yes, even in my most helpless, futile, fruitless moments. The very cracks and empty crannies of my life, my perplexities and hurts and botched-up jobs, He wants to fill with Himself, His joy, His life...He urges me to learn of Him: 'I am gentle and humble in heart.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Hurt #Jobs #Heart

It seems disrespectful to me to see ladies in church in very short skirts or skimpy, sleeveless tops. I would imagine that it could be distracting to men who are trying to keep their minds on God.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Men #Mind #Church

Does God ask us to do what is beneath us? This question will never trouble us again if we consider the Lord of heaven taking a towel and washing feet.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Feet #Heaven #Doe

Stand true to your calling to be a man. Real women will always be relieved and grateful when men are willing to be men
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Real #Grateful #Men

The process of shaping the child, shapes also the mother herself.  Reverence for her sacred burden calls her to all that is pure and good, that she may teach primarily by her own humble, daily example.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Mother #Children #Humble

Lonely? Give it to Jesus. The loneliness itself is material for sacrifice.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Lonely #Jesus #Loneliness

If God gave it to me," we say "it's mine. I can do what I want with it." No. The truth is that it is ours to thank Him for and ours to offer back to Him, ours to relinquish, ours to lose, ours to let go of - if we want to find our true selves, if we want real Life, if our hearts are set on glory.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Letting Go #Real #Heart

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.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Strong #Fall #Errors

The world cries for men who are strong; strong in conviction, strong to lead, to stand, to suffer.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Inspiring #Strong #Men

But the question to precede all others, which finally determines the course of our lives is What do I really want? Was it to love what God commands, in the words of the collect, and to desire what He promises? Did I want what I wanted, or did I want what He wanted, no matter what it might cost?
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Promise #Desire #Cost

Silence, as someone has said, is the mother of prayer and the nurse of holy thoughts. Silence cuts down on our sins, doesn't it? We can't be sinning in so many different ways if we are being quiet before God. Silence nourishes patience, charity, discretion.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Mother #Prayer #Cutting

It is always possible to be thankful for what is given rather than to complain about what is not given. One or the other becomes a habit of life.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Being Thankful #Complaining #Habit

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.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Heart #Waiting #Unanswered Questions

We want to avoid suffering, death, sin, ashes. But we live in a world crushed and broken and torn, a world God Himself visited to redeem. We receive his poured-out life, and being allowed the high privilege of suffering with Him, may then pour ourselves out for others.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Broken #Suffering #May

Work is a blessing. God has so arranged the world that work is necessary, and He gives us hands and strength to do it. The enjoyment of leisure would be nothing if we had only leisure. It is the joy of work well done that enables us to enjoy rest, just as it is the experiences of hunger and thirst that make food and drink such pleasures.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Blessing #Hands #Giving

We have ample evidence that the Lord is able to guide. The promises cover every imaginable situation. All we need to do is to take the hand he stretches out.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Hands #Promise #Able

God will not protect you from anything that will make you more like Jesus.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Jesus #Protect #Gods Will

It is when we come to the Lord in our nothingness, our powerlessness and our helplessness that He then enables us to love in a way which, without Him, would be absolutely impossible.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Would Be #Way #Impossible

Until the will and the affections are brought under the authority of Christ, we have not begun to understand, let alone to accept, His lordship.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Affection #Christ #Authority

The world is full of noise. Might we not set ourselves to learn silence, stillness solitude?
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Christian #Silence #Solitude

The disciplined Christian will be very careful what sort of counsel he seeks from others. Counsel that contradicts the written Word is ungodly counsel. Blessed is the man that walketh not in that.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Christian #Blessed #Men

The way we live ought to manifest the truth of what we believe. A messy life speaks of a messy and incoherent faith.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Believe #Way #Speak

For one who has made thanksgiving the habit of his life, the morning prayer will be, 'Lord, what will you give me today to offer back to you?'
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Christian #Morning #Prayer

Holiness has never been the driving force of the majority. It is, however, mandatory for anyone who wants to enter the kingdom.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Majority #Holiness #Want

We must quit bending the Word to suit our situation. It is we who must be bent to that Word, our necks that must bow under the yoke.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Bows #Suits #Necks

Unless a man is prepared to ask a woman to be his wife, what right has he to claim her exclusive attention? Unless she has been asked to marry him, why would a sensible woman promise any man her exclusive attention? If, when the time has come for a commitment, he is not man enough to ask her to marry him, she should give him no reason to presume that she belongs to him.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Commitment #Giving #Wife

Failure means nothing now, only that it taught me life.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Inspiring #Mean #Taught

A man must at times be hard as nails: willing to face up to the truth about himself, and about the woman he loves, refusing compromise when compromise is wrong. But he must also be tender. No weapon will breach the armor of a woman's resentment like tenderness.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Men #Nails #Armor

In order to learn what it means to be a woman we must start with the One who made her.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Mean #Order #Made

Sometimes we want things we were not meant to have. Because he loves us, the Father says no. Faith trusts that no. Faith is willing not to have what God is not willing to give. Furthermore, faith does not insist upon an explanation. It is enough to know His promises to give what is good-he knows so much more about us than we do.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Faith #Father #Giving

The principles of gain through loss, of joy through sorrow, of getting by giving, of fulfillment by laying down, of life out of death is what the Bible teaches, and the people who have believed it enough to live it out in simple, humble, day-by-day practice are people who have found the gain, the joy, the getting, the fulfillment, the life.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Humble #Loss #Simple

What God gives in answer to our prayers will always be the thing we most urgently need, and it will always be sufficient.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Prayer #Giving #Needs

New Year's Day is a good time to fix one's eyes on the only One who knows what the year is to hold.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#New Year #Eye #Years

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.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Inspiration #Rocks #Anchors

It is in our acceptance of what is given that God gives Himself.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Acceptance #Giving #Given

Is the distinction between living for Christ and dying for Him so great? Is not the second the logical conclusion of the first?
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Dying #Firsts #Christ

A Christian woman's true freedom lies on the other side of a very small gate...humble obedience...but that gate leads out into a largeness of life undreamed of by the liberators of the world, to a place where the God-given differentiation between the sexes is not obfuscated but celebrated, where our inequalities are seen as essential to the image of God, for it is in male and female, in male as male and female as female, not as two identical and interchangeable halves, that the image is manifested.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Christian #Sex #Lying

Jesus never pussyfooted
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Jesus

Leave it all in the Hands that were wounded for you
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Inspiring #Hands #Wounded

If your goal is purity of heart, be prepared to be thought very odd.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Heart #Goal #Odd

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

#Inspiring #I Love Him #Thinking

Worry is the antithesis of trust. You simply cannot do both. They are mutually exclusive.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Worry #Antithesis

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.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Wise #Waiting #Timing

To be a follower of the Crucified means, sooner or later, a personal encounter with the cross. And the cross always entails loss.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Inspiring #Mean #Loss

The will of God is not something you add to your life. It’s a course you choose. You either line yourself up with the Son of God…or you capitulate to the principle which governs the rest of the world.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Son #Principles #Add

If we hold tightly to anything given to us unwilling to allow it to be used as the Giver means it to be used we stunt the growth of the soul. What God gives us is not necessarily "ours" but only ours to offer back to him, ours to relinguish, ours to lose, ours to let go of, if we want to be our true selves. Many deaths must go into reaching our maturity in Christ, many letting goes.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Letting Go #Mean #Maturity

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.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Heart #Hands #Giving

The way you keep your house, the way you organize your time, the care you take in your personal appearance, the things you spend your money on, all speak loudly about what you believe. The beauty of thy peace shines forth in an ordered life. A disordered life speaks loudly of disorder in the soul.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Believe #House #Shining

Maturity starts with the willingness to give oneself.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Maturity #Giving #Oneself

Our vision is so limited we can hardly imagine a love that does not show itself in protection from suffering.... The love of God did not protect His own Son.... He will not necessarily protect us - not from anything it takes to make us like His Son. A lot of hammering and chiseling and purifying by fire will have to go into the process.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Son #Hard Times #Fire

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).
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Moving #Years #Useless

God has promised to supply all our needs. What we don't have now, we don't need now.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Needs

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.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Heart #Want #Willingness

We can't really tell how crooked our thinking is until we line it up with the straight edge of Scripture.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Inspirational #Thinking #Lines

I am convinced that the human heart hungers for constancy. In forfeiting the sanctity of sex by casual, nondiscriminato ry "making out" and "sleeping around," we forfeit something we cannot well do without. There is dullness, monotony, sheer boredom in all of life when virginity and purity are no longer protected and prized.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Sex #Heart #Sleep

I am not a theologian or a scholar, but I am very aware of the fact that pain is necessary to all of us. In my own life, I think I can honestly say that out of the deepest pain has come the strongest conviction of the presence of God and the love of God.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Pain #Women #Thinking

You can never lose what you have offered to Christ.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Inspiring #Christ

One reason we are so harried and hurried is that we make yesterday and tomorrow our business, when all that legitimately concerns us is today. If we really have too much to do, there are some items on the agenda which God did not put there. Let us submit the list to Him and ask Him to indicate which items we must delete. There is always time to do the will of God. If we are too busy to do that, we are too busy.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Yesterday #Today #Too Much

Teach me to treat all that comes to me with peace of soul and with firm conviction that Your will governs all.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Inspirational #Life #Religious

Loneliness comes over us sometimes as a sudden tide. It is one of the terms of our humanness, and, in a sense, therefore, incurable. Yet I have found peace in my loneliest times not only through acceptance of the situation, but through making it an offering to God, who can transfigure it into something for the good of others.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Loneliness #Acceptance #Offering

The one who loves knows better than anyone else how to conduct himself, how to serve the one he loves. Love prescribes an answer in a given situation as no mere rule can do.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Answers #Given #Situation

A prayerful heart and an obedient heart will learn, very slowly and not without sorrow, to stake everything on God Himself.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Heart #Sorrow #Stakes

Restlessness and impatience change nothing except our peace and joy.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Joy #Impatience #Peace And Joy

[Amy Carmichael's] great longing was to have a "single eye" for the glory of God. Whatever might blur the vision God had give her of His work, whatever could distract or deceive or tempt other to seek anything but the Lord Jesus Himself she tried to eliminate.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Jesus #Inspiration #Eye

There is nothing worth living for, unless it is worth dying for.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Life Changing #Dying

I believe with all my heart God's Story has a happy ending. . . But not yet, not necessarily yet. It takes faith to hold on to that in the face of the great burden of experience, which seems to prove otherwise.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Believe #Heart #Stories

Of one thing I am perfectly sure: God's story never ends with 'ashes.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Inspiring #Ashes #Stories

My most earnest of all pleas to singles is abandonment of the self, surrender to Christ of all unfulfilled longings, an unequivocal willingness to receive whatever God assigns, and a determination to practice the sacrificial principle of Isaiah 58:10-11. Life becomes not only far simpler, but surprisingly joyful and free.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Determination #Self #Practice

Prayer lays hold of God's plan and becomes the link between His will and its accomplishment on earth. Amazing things happen, and we are given the privilege of being the channels of the Holy Spirit's prayer.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Prayer #Accomplishment #Links

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.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Inspiring #Pain #Suffering

George Macdonald said, 'If you knew what God knows about death you would clap your listless hands', but instead I find old people in North America just buying this whole youth obsession. I think growing older is a wonderful privilege. I want to learn to glorify God in every stage of my life.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Thinking #America #Hands

This hard place in which you perhaps find yourself is the very place in which God is giving you opportunity to look only to Him, to spend time in prayer, and to learn long-suffering, gentleness, meekness - in short, to learn the depths of the love that Christ Himself has poured out on all of us.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Prayer #Opportunity #Long

If you believe in a God who controls the big things, you have to believe in a God who controls the little things. It is we, of course, to whom things look 'little' or 'big'.
-- Elisabeth Elliot

#Inspirational #Believe #Looks