Lessons from Elisabeth ElliotSample

DAY 2: A Sacrifice on the Altar

The key fact, and the great transferrable truth that comes from these sometimes maddening people, is this: Betty and Jim were determined to obey God’s leading as they discerned it, whatever the cost. —from Becoming Elisabeth Elliot

As 1948 began, Jim Elliot began to spend more and more time studying Greek with Betty Howard, as Elisabeth Elliot was known to friends and family before marriage. Perhaps this was because she was picking up Greek more readily than he was. Perhaps this was because his interest, kindled during a Christmas visit in New Jersey, was growing.

During that Christmas break, Betty had glumly written in her journal, “Here I am, 21, and no prospect of marriage.” 

Like few 21-year-olds, however, she thought in drastically biblical terms. She saw her life as a sacrifice to be put on God’s altar, consumed for His purposes. “My life is on Thy Altar, Lord—for Thee to consume. Set the fire, Father! Bind me with cords of love to the Altar. Hold me there. Let me remember the Cross.”

At the early spring wedding of two close friends, she felt “a calm assurance that I am not to be married. I am grateful to my Lord for winning the victory in that realm.” 

In March she clarified, “I do not mean to say that I see the whole plan of my life. God may change it all. I only thank Him for the joy of resting in Him, and trusting Him for every step.” 

A few weeks after Betty wrote that, on April 30, 1948, she and Jim actually had a conventional date . . . though of course it was to attend a large Christian conference in downtown Chicago. They were both thrilled by the reports and challenges of a variety of missionaries from around the world. “It was a blessed, encouraging meeting,” Betty wrote. She was moved by two strong, but very different emotions: a deep concern for those who never had a chance to hear the Gospel, and deep respect for her fine companion (as her jumbled journal entry makes clear). 

“But O, those 100,000 souls who perished in ‘blackness of darkness forever’ today! What am I doing about it? God give me love! Jim is without exception the finest fellow I have ever met.”

Since Jim and Betty were both prolific writers, their developing feelings for one another—and more important to them, their convictions about God— have been well documented in Elisabeth’s books Shadow of the Almighty and Passion and Purity, as well as their daughter Valerie Shepard’s skillful compilation of her parents’ journals and love letters, Devotedly. 

Suffice it to say, two very different, yet strikingly similar, souls had come together. Two intense, articulate, unconventional people who saw themselves as perpetually single, serving God on the mission field, found themselves simmering and sleepless, surging with a love they had thought they’d never know. Their individual torrents of prose and poetry brim with the same biblical imagery—altars, crosses, sacrifices for the glory of God. They were strong, stubborn people who shared a radical, intentional submission to Christ. Stunned by love, they were both determined, if God so willed, to sacrifice it for Him. 

Certainly other Christian couples they knew were willing to sacrifice anything for Christ, like the other missionaries with whom Jim and Betty would later serve in Ecuador. But few—aside from the 17th century mystics they both loved—articulated their sacrificial mindset with as much detail, passion, intensity, and struggle as did Jim and Betty. We can all be glad they found each other.