344. Elisabeth Elliot

After her missionary husband was martyred, she returned to serve the tribe that had killed him. Today on our journey back through the archives, Dr. Stephen Nichols recalls the extraordinary life of Elisabeth Elliot.

Hello, thanks for tuning in to 5 Minutes in Church History. We’re taking a break from releasing new episodes on the podcast, but what you’re about to hear is one of my favorite episodes from the archives. We’ll be back with new episodes in the new year, but until then we hope you enjoy this episode of 5 Minutes in Church History. 

On this episode of 5 Minutes in Church History let's travel a little closer in time and look at the life of Elisabeth Elliott. She was born in 1926 in Brussels, Belgium, and she died in 2015 in Magnolia, Mississippi. She was the daughter of missionaries. She was a missionary wife to a missionary husband, and she herself was a missionary. She was an author and a speaker, and that is the life of Elisabeth Elliott. Well, as a young lady, Elisabeth Howard went off to Wheaton College and there she studied the classics. She studied classics because she believed it would best help her for her life's calling to be a missionary and translator of the New Testament. And while at Wheaton she met Jim Elliott. Jim Elliot thought God wanted him to be a bachelor, but five years later he changed his mind. Initially, they both went to Ecuador single, she went as Elisabeth Howard and he went as Jim Elliott. But shortly after they arrived in 1953 in Quito, Ecuador, they were married.

Not too far from the site where they were working there in Ecuador, Nate Saint noticed a settlement on one of his flights and after a few months of airdropping packages and sending messages, they decided they would go and visit the village in person. Jim Elliot and Pete Fleming, Ed McCully, Roger Youderian, and the pilot, Nate Saint, all went to visit along the river there in the Amazon jungle. Well, back at the missionary station, no word was received and people begin to wonder about them. And so they started to search. After a long series of time, and by this point become national news and even international news, their bodies were discovered and it was realized that all five of them were killed, speared to death there in the Amazon jungle.

Life magazine ran a 10-page article to chronicle this sacrifice of these missionaries, and many people wondered and scratched their head at the seemingly senseless sacrifice of these young men so far away from home in the Amazon jungle. Well, the next year, Elisabeth Elliot wrote one of her bestselling books Through Gates of Splendor. And in there she quotes a line, a line from one of her husband's journals. It simply says, "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to get what he cannot lose." And she clearly presented the idea this was no senseless sacrifice.

Well, 1958, Elisabeth and Rachel Saint, the sister of the slain pilot, Nate Saint made contact with the very tribe that had killed her husband. And shortly after that, she went and served among them for two years as a missionary. And she had with her, her young daughter, Valerie. She was only 10 months old at the time of her father's death. Well, in 1963 Elisabeth and Valerie returned to the United States. She would go on to be an author and speaker and over five decades emerge as a leader in evangelicalism.

In 1969, she married Addison Leitch. He was a professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. After just a few years, he died in 1973 of cancer. Four years later, she married Lars Gran. He would go on to be her agent and she, as I mentioned, was an author and wrote well over 20 books. In addition to her book, she also hosted a radio program, a daily radio program that ran for a dozen years called Gateway to Joy. She was also known as a leader in evangelicalism and stood up not only for the gospel but for other issues as they were raised in the end of the 20th century.

But it was largely through the sacrifice of her husband and then her desire to return to those same people who took his life that she is known and has a place in church history. Well, that's the life of Elisabeth Elliot who once said, "Faith does not eliminate questions but faith knows where to take questions." That's Elisabeth Elliot, and I'm Steve Nichols, and thanks for listening to 5 Minutes in Church History.