Being Elisabeth Elliot Quotes

“Whatever befalls us . . . however it befalls us, we must receive as the Will of God. If it befalls us through man’s negligence, or ill will, or anger, still it is, in even the least circumstance, to us the will of God for if the least thing could happen to us without God’s permission, it would be something out of His control. His providence or His love would not be what they are. Almighty God Himself would not be the same God; not the God whom we believe, adore, and love.” —E. B. Pusey, noted in Elisabeth’s leather notebook of favorite quotes”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“The cruel chisel destroys a stone with each cut. But what the stone suffers by repeated blows is no less than the shape the mason is making of it. And should a poor stone be asked, ‘What is happening to you?’ it might reply, ‘Don’t ask me. All I know is that for my part there is nothing for me to know or do, only to remain steady under the hand of my master and to love him and suffer him to work out my destiny. It is for him to know how to achieve this. I know neither what he is doing nor why. I only know that he is doing what is best and most perfect, and I suffer each cut of the chisel as though it were the best thing for me, even though, to tell the truth, each one is my idea of ruin, destruction and defacement. But, ignoring all this, I rest contented with the present moment. Thinking only of my duty to it, I submit to the work of this skillful master without caring to know what it is.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“Few loved the Bible more than Elisabeth Elliot. But she was appalled when Christians used it as a weapon to clobber or distance themselves from people who were different from them. Or to distance themselves from suffering, mysteries, and difficult questions. “Immaturity cannot tolerate ambiguity,” Elisabeth thought later. “It’s either black or white. And if you make your system your god, you’ll soon be telling lies in order to remain consistent.”⁠8 Such people were stuck. Static.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“Always nice to have something immediate that one simply has to do. Anything rather than think!”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“How can I write? (Shut up—God has given a gift.) How shall I pay the bills? (They’re paid, aren’t they, for a year or so?) Yes—but what then? (Don’t fret about the future. Be thankful for the present.) But I’m not producing anything. (But gestation is prerequisite.)”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“We presume to speak for God, the god we assume shares not only our political and social views, but our taste.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“As Tim Keller has said, “Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws. Truth without love is harshness; it gives us information but in such a way that we cannot really hear it.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“President Dwight Eisenhower once said, “If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking . . . is freedom.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“To Elisabeth’s delight, Corrie invited Elisabeth and Val to tea. They talked about suffering. Elisabeth had been intrigued by Corrie’s book and the movie, The Hiding Place. Corrie told her that the film showed .01 percent of the cruelties and hardships of the concentration camp.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“He told her he had never understood prevenient grace until the Philippines trip—at each point God met us in some way.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“On the most basic question of all, “who is a Jew?” Elisabeth could find no solid answers. Many of her interviewees simply shrugged: “Ask three Jews, get five opinions.” In a later Christianity Today article, Elisabeth summarized her search for answers. “It is not, Israel officially proclaims, a racial question. There are Jews in every anthropologically-defined “race”—from the black Ethiopian to the Chinese orthodox Jew. “It is not a religious question. Probably fewer than ten percent of Israelis are orthodox Jews, and many are not only not religious, but are militantly anti-God. “To be Jewish is not a linguistic question. Over seventy languages are spoken in Israel, even though Hebrew is the official language and strong efforts are made to encourage everybody to learn it. “It is not a cultural question. Some Jews, desperately casting about for a definition that would satisfy me, said that Jewishness is a “cultural consciousness.” But what culture? Elisabeth had seen keening eastern Jewish women in Arab dress, Jews from New York’s East Side, Russian Jews, and Israeli natives born on kibbitzes. There were clearly no common denominators in terms of rituals, speech, dress, or outlook. “Is Jewishness then a political category?” Elisabeth continued. “Israel is a political state, but there are millions of Jews who are not Israelis. There are thousands of “Israelis” who are not Jews—every Arab now “assimilated” into the nation of Israel by conquest is officially an Israeli . . .” At the time the Israeli government defined Jews genetically, which to Elisabeth seemed a strange contradiction when they so vehemently deny that Jewishness has anything to do with race. But the determining question is, “‘Who is your mother?’ Anyone born of a Jewish mother is Jewish. The question as to what makes her Jewish has no answer. If your father is Jewish, if he is even a rabbi, it will not help you at all.”⁠3 “I have come to the conclusion that it remains for Israel; alone to execute justice for those who are its responsibility. If its highways must cut through the Arabs’ desert, if it claims ‘eminent domain,’ it must justly compensate those who have been displaced, those whose empty houses and lands Israel is now determined to fill with its own immigrants.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“All the dancing and feasting and processing and singing and building and sculpting and baking and merrymaking that belong to us, and that were stolen away into the service of false gods, are returned to us in the gospel.” —Thomas Howard”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“The priest had told Elisabeth how much that moment in Scripture moved his soul. “. . . we are human, as Peter was, and apt to make mistakes. But there is that look, that hope. Could you take away with you from Jerusalem any better souvenir than to know that here Jesus had turned and looked upon you?”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“Forcible shakings. Elisabeth had experienced many. She viewed them as earthquakes designed to topple the idols we so habitually construct, whether they are false gods of stone, substances, self, bogus beliefs about God, or whitewashed religion itself.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“Why is it that Christians find it so easy to define worldliness in terms of amusements only? It must be because that sort of thing can be cured by an edict rather than by a fundamental shaking.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“How could God let this happen to her? How could he allow the death of this Indian to whom she had come to minister? And the answer emerges: Men cannot tell God how to act; he works sovereignly. We are to worship and serve. Results belong to him, not to us.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“But, like Mena, she was repelled by Christians who blandly articulated His deep mysteries, as if they needed to defend God and could do so with a proof text or a catchphrase.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“When Job’s poor friends equated Job’s suffering with God’s judgment of sin in his life, they “were up against something far too big for them, something their categories did not cover. So, rather than admit to ignorance, they resort to oversimplifications, snap judgments, easy cliches—which amount to lying.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years

“We presume to speak for God, the god we assume shares not only our political and social views, but our taste. The god of the bumper sticker, the hashtag, the slogan.”
― Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years