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In 1958, less than three years after her husband had been killed in an attempt to preach the gospel in the rainforest of Ecuador, Elisabeth Elliot went to live with the Huaorani people (whom her husband was attempting to reach) with her three-year-old daughter.

In 1968 she published a short book of reflections on her couple of years with the Huaorani entitled The Liberty of Obedience. I read through this fascinating book again when I was studying for our recent series on finding the will of God for our lives.

Over the next week I’m going to post a series of thoughts on the Christian life from the book. Her time with the Huaorani (whom she refers to as the Aucas)gave her a unique perspective, especially as it bears on the Christian life we’re all called to live, which was hammered out as a 20-something American among people from a very different context.

To start, here’s a few excerpts from her preface:

Many people, in their late twenties and early thirties, discover that life is getting more and more complicated.

For me it was getting simpler and simpler.

I was living with Indians in the forest of Ecuador, and was trying very hard to get down to the root of things because it seemed to me that that was where Indians lived. This process had of course its own complications for me–‘simple’ cooking over a ‘simple’ wood fire can sometimes be more difficult than fancy cooking on an electric stove–but in matters of importance the direction of my thinking was toward the bare or simple truth. I was for some years almost wholly out of touch with all that had been familiar, and I had therefore a chance to look at it from a long way off, to question and compare.

The tribe that gave me the best chance to do this had been called ‘savage.’ They were the Aucas, who by reputation were also ‘primitive,’ godless,’ ‘Stone Age’ people. They themselves gave me excellent reason to question the accuracy of these terms. They were wonderful people–generous and kind from the very first night of our arrival; capable and intelligent when you saw them in their jungle environment (where white men looked anything but capable and intelligent); amenable (almost touchingly so) to any suggestion from us; eagerly interested in all that we did or said; a people who shared lavishly all they had and were, a people who laughed uproariously most of the time when they were together, and who worked hard when they were apart (for they did their hunting and planting usually alone).

I found them easy to love.

It was these very qualities that nettled me. They simply did not fit my idea of savagery. What, then, did civilization mean? Was it merely an efficient method of complicating things?”…

Of changes among these people which could be directly attributed to the power of the Word of Christ I could not honestly say that I knew very much. It seemed to me that this must be a hidden matter of the heart which God alone could rightly assess. I wondered, of course, what sort of visible change I might look for if the Word were being spoken (as, in the last analysis, it can only be spoken) by the Spirit of God. Jesus had said that men can be known by their fruits. I knew the fruits commonly expected by those who had never tried what I was doing. But I could not be satisfied that the changes I was seeing were true fruits. Oddly enough, they were too ‘simple.’

Then I began to ask if I were making things complicated.

My confusion drove me to the admission that I had not as many answers as I had thought. God kept back some of the ones I wanted, and had other things to say to me. I listened. I studied the Bible, prayed, and thought…Why was I here? To ‘serve the Lord,’ of course. But what a reply! What an awesome task I had assumed. How was I to do it? What did it mean?”…

I saw the Indians live in a harmony which far surpassed anything I had seen among those who call themselves Christians. I found that even their killing had at least as valid reasons as the wars in which my people engaged. ‘By their fruits…’

Could I really offer them a better way? Jesus said, ‘I am the Way.’ He, therefore, was the one responsible to show what it was for them. I was merely His representative, and I had better be very sure I knew what He did actually say about the questions of conduct and service, for it was to Him above all others that I must give account.

In an attempt to find out, and to sort out my own convictions and give clear expression to them, I studied the New Testament and especially the Epistles of Paul. What I found seemed to me to be important not only for me in that unusual place, but for Christians everywhere, so I wrote for The Sunday School Times the series of brief articles which is reprinted here. In the six years since I left that particular thatched house, I have been questioned and sometimes challenged on these matters. Each time my answer has been along the lines written during those days in Tewaenon.

But it was my husband who first taught me to question and examine, and then to act on what one believes. He first showed me what liberty in Christ means. Perhaps now, many years after his death, I am beginning to grasp things he understood. He glimpsed, I think, something of the largeness of God’s heart and wanted to show it to others.

If you’ve never read A.W. Tozer’s book The Knowledge of the Holy, you really should. It’s one of the deepest (about) 100-page books you’ll ever pick up. In 23 short chapters (perfect for morning devotions) Tozer unpacks God’s attributes, to help us “think rightly” about God. I kept thinking about the first chapter when I was preparing for Monday night’s study. So I found it online (you can get it, and the whole book, for free, online here.) Enjoy…

Why We Must Think Rightly About God

What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.

The history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man’s spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God. Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God.

For this reason the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God. This is true not only of the individual Christian, but of the company of Christians that composes the Church. Always the most revealing thing about the Church is her idea of God, just as her most significant message is what she says about Him or leaves unsaid, for her silence is often more eloquent than her speech. She can never escape the self-disclosure of her witness concerning God.

Were we able to extract from any man a complete answer to the question, “What comes into your mind when you think about God?” we might predict with certainty the spiritual future of that man. Were we able to know exactly what our most influential religious leaders think of God today, we might be able with some precision to foretell where the Church will stand tomorrow. Without doubt, the mightiest thought the mind can entertain is the thought of God, and the weightiest word in any language is its word for God. Thought and speech are God’s gifts to creatures made in His image; these are intimately associated with Him and impossible apart from Him. It is highly significant that the first word was the Word: “And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” We may speak because God spoke. In Him word and idea are indivisible.

That our idea of God corresponds as nearly as possible to the true being of God is of immense importance to us. Compared with our actual thoughts about Him, our creedal statements are of little consequence. Our real idea of God may lie buried under the rubbish of conventional religious notions and may require an intelligent and vigorous search before it is finally unearthed and exposed for what it is. Only after an ordeal of painful self-probing are we likely to discover what we actually believe about God. A right conception of God is basic not only to systematic theology but to practical Christian living as well. It is to worship what the foundation is to the temple; where it is inadequate or out of plumb the whole structure must sooner or later collapse. I believe there is scarcely an error in doctrine or a failure in applying Christian ethics that cannot be traced finally to imperfect and ignoble thoughts about God.

It is my opinion that the Christian conception of God current in these middle years of the twentieth century is so decadent as to be utterly beneath the dignity of the Most High God and actually to constitute for professed believers something amounting to a moral calamity.

All the problems of heaven and earth, though they were to confront us together and at once, would be nothing compared with the overwhelming problem of God: That He is; what He is like; and what we as moral beings must do about Him.

The man who comes to a right belief about God is relieved of ten thousand temporal problems, for he sees at once that these have to do with matters which at the most cannot concern him for very long; but even if the multiple burdens of time may be lifted from him, the one mighty single burden of eternity begins to press down upon him with a weight more crushing than all the woes of the world piled one upon another. That mighty burden is his obligation to God. It includes an instant and lifelong duty to love God with every power of mind and soul, to obey Him perfectly, and to worship Him acceptably. And when the man’s laboring conscience tells him that he has done none of these things, but has from childhood been guilty of foul revolt against the Majesty in the heavens, the inner pressure of self-accusation may become too heavy to bear.

The gospel can lift this destroying burden from the mind, give beauty for ashes, and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. But unless the weight of the burden is felt the gospel can mean nothing to the man; and until he sees a vision of God high and lifted up, there will be no woe and no burden. Low views of God destroy the gospel for all who hold them.

Among the sins to which the human heart is prone, hardly any other is more hateful to God than idolatry, for idolatry is at bottom a libel on His character. The idolatrous heart assumes that God is other than He is – in itself a monstrous sin – and substitutes for the true God one made after its own likeness. Always this God will conform to the image of the one who created it and will be base or pure, cruel or kind, according to the moral state of the mind from which it emerges.

A god begotten in the shadows of a fallen heart will quite naturally be no true likeness of the true God. “Thou thoughtest,” said the Lord to the wicked man in the psalm, “that I was altogether such as one as thyself.” Surely this must be a serious affront to the Most High God before whom cherubim and seraphim continually do cry, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth.”

Let us beware lest we in our pride accept the erroneous notion that idolatry consists only in kneeling before visible objects of adoration, and that civilized peoples are therefore free from it. The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him. It begins in the mind and may be present where no overt act of worship has taken place.

”When they knew God,” wrote Paul, “they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.” Then followed the worship of idols fashioned after the likeness of men and birds and beasts and creeping things. But this series of degrading acts began in the mind. Wrong ideas about God are not only the fountain from which the polluted waters of idolatry flow; they are themselves idolatrous. The idolater simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true.

Perverted notions about God soon rot the religion in which they appear. The long career of Israel demonstrates this clearly enough, and the history of the Church confirms it. So necessary to the Church is a lofty concept of God that when that concept in any measure declines, the Church with her worship and her moral standards declines along with it.

The first step down for any church is taken when it surrenders its high opinion of God. Before the Christian Church goes into eclipse anywhere there must first be a corrupting of her simple basic theology. She simply gets a wrong answer to the question, “What is God like?” and goes on from there. Though she may continue to cling to a sound nominal creed, her practical working creed has become false. The masses of her adherents come to believe that God is different from what He actually is; and that is heresy of the most insidious and deadly kind.

The heaviest obligation lying upon the Christian Church today is to purify and elevate her concept of God until it is once more worthy of Him – and of her. In all her prayers and labors this should have first place. We do the greatest service to the next generation of Christians by passing on to them undimmed and undiminished that noble concept of God which we received from our Hebrew and Christian fathers of generations past. This will prove of greater value to them than anything that art or science can devise.