Telling the Truth for Women

Jill Briscoe: Now then, turn in your Bibles with me, if you would, to Isaiah chapter 50. Isaiah chapter 50. It might not look very interesting to you, this passage, but I tell you, it is going to be interesting to you. I just know it is. Many people say to me, "What is your favorite verse of scripture?" Of course, that's impossible, but this is one of my favorite passages of scripture, and I'll share before we're finished why.

But it is a servant song. We've been talking about the songs of the servant, the ultimate servant, Jesus Christ. This is a messianic passage. It looks forward to the servant of the Lord who is going to come and change things around this world for eternity. It is a marvelous passage of scripture because it speaks about the servant and his persistence in the task of teacher, counselor, and obedient disciple. There's a lot here about being a teacher. There's a lot here about being eloquent, and a lot of you are excusing yourself at this very point from my talk.

"I'm not a leader. I'm not a counselor. I'm not a teacher. I'm not eloquent. So I'll just sit and listen." But before we're finished, you're going to see you're all all these things. No, would you like to be? We are all all these things. It's a very challenging passage of scripture because, "As the Father has sent me," said Jesus, "so send I you." We are the servant's servants.

Now then, the ultimate leader who's called to be a servant has the tongue of a teacher. Let's read this verse four. "The Sovereign Lord has given me an instructed tongue, to know the word that sustains the weary. He wakens me morning by morning, he wakens my ear to listen like one being taught." We'll go down to there. The tongue of a teacher. The ultimate leader is the ultimate servant leader, which is all of us, servant leader who has the tongue of a teacher.

"The Sovereign Lord has given me his words of wisdom so that I may know what to say to all these weary ones." Now, Jesus, of course, was the ultimate servant. Before he sent us, God sent him, and God gave his servant, Christ, words of wisdom to use at teachable moments. Now, we all know about teachable moments, especially if we have kids. We have many teachable moments with our children.

I think I told you about the teachable moment I found myself in the middle of when putting my grandchildren to sleep. I was stripping off their clothes and going off and just about to put out the light, and Danny says, "I've been watching a funeral, and I want to know how long will I be in the box, in the coffin?" I put the light on again. This was indeed a teachable moment.

I came back, sat on the bed, and tried to answer the kids' questions about death and coffins and things like that. I said, "Danny, you want to know how long you'll be in the box? Not one moment. Absent from the body, present with the Lord. He that believes in Jesus will never die." Then, said Danny, "What goes in the box?" I looked on the ground, and there were these two little piles of clothes I'd stripped off the kids to bathe them.

I said, "Look, that's like your body, and when you die, your spirit immediately goes into God's presence, so you never die. You never die. But that's what goes in the box. That's what goes in the box." Michael, who's the pragmatist in the other bed, says, "Will we be naked then?" Good question. I said, "No, we'll have glory clothes." Then, of course, we had to get into what were glory clothes, and God was going to give raiment and all of this, and what did that mean? It was indeed a teachable moment.

What we have to be ready for if we're going to have the tongue of a teacher, whether it is to our grandchildren or our own children or someone else's children who happen to be with our children in our house playing with our children or whatever else, we have to be ready for those teachable moments. Jesus never missed a teachable moment. Never missed a teachable moment.

If he was sitting on the hillside and birds were flying over his head and something happened, he would use it. If an incident happened, if there was a fight, he would use it. He would use this teachable moment. When the woman came, he said, "Take heart, daughter, your faith has healed you." He used a healing of a woman as a teachable moment because somebody else came and had asked Jesus to go and heal his servant, but now his servant had died, or whatever it was. I can't remember the incident, but Jesus used that whole thing as a teachable moment. He used the man's comment as a teachable moment.

So in doing this, if we're going to have the tongue of a teacher, how can we use teachable moments? First of all, by using the wisdom that we have accumulated. Jesus was 33 years of age when he died, but he had accumulated a lifetime of wisdom. You don't have to wait until you're 60 or 70 to feel that you've accumulated life's wisdom, just lessons of life.

I'm learning that young women are looking around for some life's wisdom. Yes, it's nice if it's spiritual, but I tell you, these young mothers who are probably far away from their own moms in this scattered community that's called America, and far away from their grandmothers, or perhaps there's been divorce in their own parents' family, they don't have a woman with life's wisdom.

Now, she doesn't need to be ancient. She can be in her 40s, but maybe she's been through it, and she's got some life's wisdom to share. I remember when I was having David in this hospital, and it was a big ward of people that looked like beached whales lying on beds, ready to produce, and they're all in various stages. You didn't have your own little room in our hospital, anyway. Everyone was in various stages of "ooh" and "ah," "noo" and "noo," and then somebody was obviously ready, and somebody whipped her into the room, and off she went.

It was a horrible sort of situation, and I was very scared. This was my first baby, and I didn't know what was going to happen here. There was a cleaning lady who was brushing around the beds during all of this, and she sort of came to me and, just to get my mind off what was happening internally and the pains that were coming more and more frequently, I just started to talk to her. She said, "It's all right, love, it's going to be all right. Yes."

She said, "I've had 10, 10." I said, "Oh, you have, tell me about it." So she started to tell me about it. This was accumulated wisdom. She had had 10. I hadn't had one yet, but I was about to produce one, and I tell you, I hung on every word. She was brushing, and every time she started to brush the next bed, I leaped out of hand and pulled her back to me. I said, "Don't you go to the next bed. I need you, I need you."

Well, then, of course, my time came for me to be wheeled out of the ward, and the nurse came and, yes, yes, it was time, and she got the bed and she started to wheel it. I just grabbed this cleaning lady by her wrist with an iron grip, and she was running along the side, sort of waving her brush as they were whipping me. The nurse was saying, "Leave her alone, leave her alone, leave her alone." I said, "No, no, I need her." Why? Because she had this accumulated life's wisdom.

You don't realize, folks, that you can have the tongue of a teacher in all sorts of ways. You can get over principles of scripture, you can get over comforts, you can get over things God wants you to do for another human being simply by drawing on what you have learned, what you have learned. As I raised my teenagers, I remember having a fight about my daughter and whether she could wear jeans in church and my husband coming in and saying, "Well, don't sweat the small stuff, Jill. If you're going to have a war, have it over something that's important."

I remember the wisdom that I learned of what to fight about. Am I going to fight about jeans, or am I going to fight about a moral issue that really matters? So that little bit of wisdom I learned the hard way as a teenager, I have shared some of those stories all around the world. I've put them in my books. I've talked to women. In fact, I had a woman down in Raleigh come to me and say, "I came here, I haven't been back to this conference for 10 years."

She said, "It was just as I was raising my children," and she said, "You were just in that age where the kids were coming out of their teens into college age, and you shared all that stuff about Judy and David and Peter." She said, "I went home, and this is what you said," and she got out her Bible and she gave me some of these little headlines, which was really not a spiritual verse or anything. It was accumulated wisdom. It was hard lessons in the school of hard knocks.

Jesus used his own life's hard knocks to teach, to have the tongue of a teacher. So what happens to us, life's wisdom and life's wounds can be used. When Jesus's mother came and his brothers to take him home because they thought he was out of his mind when he first began his ministry, it said they came to take him by force, the word is, drag him home because they said he must be out of his mind to be doing this. He didn't even have time to eat, it says in the scriptures.

Mark's gospel chapter four tells you about this, and the mother and the disciples came, and Jesus said, "Who is my mother and my sisters?" in the hearing of his own mother. This was very difficult. This became a rift between him and his family, and they went home without him. They went home without him.

Later, when Peter said, "We've left everything to follow you," Jesus was able to use it as a teachable moment and say, "I know what you're feeling, Peter, because I have a family that doesn't understand as well. Let me tell you, in the world to come, you're going to have houses and mothers and fathers and sisters and anybody that's left mother or father or wife or child for my sake and the kingdom's will in the world to come have that made up to them." He used his own life's wisdom and he used his own life's wounds to talk to people.

We can do the same because life words can be couched in the principles of scripture or in the wisdom that we have learned. "The Sovereign Lord has given me an instructed tongue." He's given me a special ability to speak eloquently and encouragingly, that verse could be interpreted. He's given each servant of the Lord Jesus the tongue of a teacher. "As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you."

Let me give you another translation. "He has given us the ability to succor by words in their season of need, that I may know how to sustain the words of he that is weary." Let me give you a little phrase. He's given us the know-how to know what to say. He's given us the know-how to know what to say. That's literally what it says here. "He's given me the instructed tongue to know the word that sustains the weary." The know-how to know what to say.

Calvin says the know-how includes wisdom and skill. Listen to John 3:34, "The one whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for God gives the Spirit without measure or limit." God has given us the Spirit without limit. He is the teacher. The scriptures tell us the Holy Spirit is our teacher. Within every single one of you, you have the Holy Spirit who knows what to say.

So he has given you the know-how in giving you the person of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit's the one that searches the deep things of God. He knows the mind of God. He understands what goes on, what makes God tick because he is God. We have received the Holy Spirit. In fact, the New Testament says we have the wisdom of Christ because we have Christ. Now, it's a question of appropriating that, of learning to appropriate the power that we have to know what to say.

The Spirit who is our teacher will use our tongue to teach. Well, to teach who? The weary. Those overwhelmed by problems, those overwhelmed by many afflictions. Let me give you an Old Testament example of all of this. What about the slaves in Egypt? Now, there were a people that were weary. They were a people with problems that you would not believe. The whole nation is in slavery.

God reaches down to a guy who has been living in the backside of the desert, a man called Moses. He says to him in Exodus—you don't need to turn to it, you know the story—"I've heard the cry of my people, so I've come down to deliver them. So now I'm sending you to bring them out." Now, remember, he's a fugitive. Remember, he has been 40 years as somebody that murdered somebody and ran away before they could catch him and put him to death.

Here he is in the backside of a desert with a few scraggy sheep, and God appears to him in a burning bush, and the angel of the Lord says, "I'm going to send you." His response to this is, "What if they don't believe me or listen? Oh Lord, listen to this. I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you've spoken to me. So now I've met you in the burning bush, and I don't feel any different. I've never been eloquent. I am slow of speech and tongue. I can never find the words." That means.

The Lord said to him, "Who gave man his mouth? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go. I will help you speak and will teach you what to say." But Moses said, "Oh Lord, please send someone else to do it." Have you ever said that? I have. "Here am I, send Aaron." I wrote a book called that once, "Here am I, send my brother." So God's got mad with him. He got angry with him, and he said, "All right, I will. I know he can speak well. He is eloquent. He is naturally talented with a gift of the gab. I know that about Aaron because that's what I made him."

"So I know he can do it. You go. You tell Aaron what you want to say, and Aaron will say it for you. Do it together." Verse 14, and then in 18, they go back, and Aaron begins to listen to Moses. He whispers in his ear. He tells Pharaoh the message. That goes on for one short chapter. The next chapter, it says, "Moses said." He soon took over. It's interesting to me.

However, God got him to do what he wanted. He said, "Okay, go with someone else. We'll play this game, and we'll encourage you along." So they go, and of course, things get worse. Do you remember? Pharaoh gets absolutely mad, and he says, "Well, okay, if you're trying to work up trouble among my slaves, they can make bricks without straw." The leaders of Israel come to Moses and say, "What are you doing? You say God has sent you to bring us out, and now we're in a worse state than before."

So Moses goes back to God and says, "Look what's happened. I told you this would happen. I told you I'm no good at persuading people." God simply says, "Go and tell Pharaoh the next bit." Moses says, "If Israel won't listen to me, why should Pharaoh, since I speak with faltering lips?" In other words, in another translation is, "I'm no orator."

You know what dawned on me as I looked at all of this? Of course, he did go in obedience, and he did speak, and he did find the words, and he did have the know-how to know what to say because God gave it him. That you and I can speak with spiritual eloquence with faltering lips. You and I, every person in this place, can speak with spiritual eloquence when you haven't got the gift of the gab naturally.

To me, that is the most exciting thing you can ever discover. Some of us are gifted teachers. Some of us are gifted as orators, and some of us aren't. Makes absolutely no difference. God doesn't say, "Well, all the orators and all the teachers and all the people that are poets and can speak with the tongues of angels, go do it, and the rest of you just do something else you feel you're gifted for." He says, "Every one of my servants has the tongue of a teacher."

If you do it clumsy, it doesn't matter because there will be a spiritual truth, the truth-telling you will do as a servant of the Lord will have a spiritual impact because you will be speaking with spiritual eloquence, even if you're clumsy with words. That should set us on our toes dancing. So as we speak badly, it doesn't really matter because the Spirit's going to do his thing goodly through us.

Our accumulated experience of life, sharing our life's wounds and hurts, which will really be terrific because we will be writing down the comfort that we will have received from God to pass on to someone else. That's what the Bible says. God's going to comfort you so you can go and comfort someone else, to have the know-how to know what to say to those that are weary in their season of need. Know anyone in a season of need? Can you think of anyone? See their face? A little boy, a little girl, an older person, somebody that belongs to you, somebody that doesn't. Can you see them? Now, can't you get excited with the fact that God is going to give you the tongue of a teacher?

Then he's going to give you the skill of a counselor, number two. Now Jesus, of course, as the servant of the Lord, was the wonderful counselor, Isaiah 9 tells us that. God says, "My ear is not heavy that it cannot hear." He is telling us that he loves to listen. If you have a concordance, look up the word "listen," and you'll find hundreds of references in the Old Testament to how God listens to his people. He's not always talking; he's listening.

When Hagar ran away into the desert because Sarah wasn't treating her very well, she was pregnant, ends up in the middle of a desert, probably going to die. Can't survive as a pregnant woman in that world in the middle of a desert. She couldn't go back; she couldn't go forward. Only a matter of time till somebody found her and did her in. God meets her. He says, "Hagar, Hagar, I have heard your cries. I've seen your tears. Now, what's the matter?"

Hagar starts to realize that God sees her. First of all, "You are the God that sees me, Beer-lahai-roi." She named the well where she met God. Then he says, "Well, you're going to have a baby. You will have a baby. You will go back to Sarah, submit yourself to her. This is my choice to look after you. I know it's not ideal. You need to go back, and you will have the baby, and I want you to call him Ishmael."

It's interesting to me that when Hagar, the servant of Sarah, who had run away, went back, she must have told her story of meeting a God who heard her because Abraham named his son Ishmael. When she told Abraham and Sarah what had happened, Abraham, at least, believed her and said, "Then this child's name shall be Ishmael." What does Ishmael mean? God hears.

For the next 14 years, when Hagar submitted herself to Sarah and brought up her own child for Sarah, that was tough. Every time she called him in for a meal, "Ishmael, Ishmael, God hears, God hears, God hears, time for supper, God hears, time for breakfast, God hears, time to get up." God gave him a name that reminded Hagar that God hears, that God is a wonderful, wonderful listener.

The thing we have to do, of course, is listen to God first. We are Jesus's servants. He is sending us as God sent him. We have to get up and listen to God, and I have put in my Bible, "Get up and listen to me so you can go out and listen to them." That's the verse that struck me years ago, that if I get up and listen to him, then I can go out and listen to the person who's weary and then match their need with the scripture that's going to help them that I've been learning for myself.

The word here is, or the picture is of a scholar awakening his pupils early in the morning. "First of all, Savior, let me hear Thy call, make me ready to obey Thy commands throughout the day." I've said that prayer every day since I was converted. "In the morning, first of all, Savior, let me hear Thy call, make me ready to obey Thy commands throughout the day." A little chorus I learned at the beginning of my Christian life, and I've never forgotten it.

I have this idea of the scholar, the godly, divine scholar waking me early. If I do not, as it says here, let him wake me "morning by morning, wake my ear to listen like a disciple," is the word, "like one being taught," I might miss the word that is going to sustain the weary one that he will match me up with wherever I am in my sphere of influence that day. What a sad thing that would be.

You can't just bring out the same little canned things and, "Oh, they need this, and this worked for the last one." Because God wants to give you the fresh word that's going to be absolutely the thing that is right. Now, the first thing you've got to do is listen to God for yourself before you can take this stuff for other people.

I love Patsy Clairmont. I was with her not too long ago when she said, "What we want to do is say to God, 'Fix me while I'm sleeping so I can rise up righteous in the morning.'" God does not fix us when we're sleeping. Wouldn't that be easy? Then we wake up and we can go straight out into the day and start to minister. He wants us to cooperate.

So he wakes us up. We get up, we get on our face before him, we do our devotions or however we want to do them, but we meet with God, and we meet with him for ourselves first, and he speaks to us, and we listen to God. As we do that, then we will go out into the day to have a ministry of listening. Quite quickly, I want to talk about three things that every single one of us can do.

First of all, we can have a ministry of presence as we listen to people. In my book, "It Had to be a Monday," I don't really deal thoroughly with this, but I touch on Job's friends and the things that they did right. At the end of chapter two, when Job's three friends heard about this terrible Monday he'd had in his life and his whole world had collapsed, they got up and they traveled a considerable distance to go and be with him.

When they saw him from a distance, they could hardly recognize him, and they began to weep aloud. They tore their robes and they sprinkled dust on their heads in their fashion. Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights, and no one said a word to him because they saw how great his suffering was. In those little few verses, you and I can learn how to listen or how to have a ministry that is very easy to have.

The first thing is a ministry of presence, a ministry of presence. All of us can do this. When I took some women over to Croatia and Bosnia, I took them to have a ministry of presence. I remember getting there with these 10 women in Zagreb, and we were undergoing a whole day of orientation by people that had lived there, people that were there, people that were Croatians, people that knew what was going on.

Also trying to tell us where we were going, down to the war border, down to where the refugees were coming over at 1,000 a day at that point. Then they would tell us that I would be speaking in this church and I would be speaking to the refugees here, and then we'd go to the boxcars and we'd have some personal talk to the refugees that had been there for a whole year and nobody had done anything about them, just sitting in these boxcars.

At the end of this orientation, I looked around this group of very mature women from all walks of Christendom. There was the head of the Lutheran Social Service that I had with me and a young pediatrician who had had extensive experience with refugee work and medical field and all of these people. We looked at each other, and the women started to say, "Well, what are we going to do?" Now, that's so American. We've got to go and do something. We've got to fix this.

I said, "I don't think we're going to do too much." They said, "Then why are we here?" Then another one said, "Well, what are we going to say?" I said, "I don't think we're going to say much. We're going to have a ministry, first of all, of presence. What we're going to do is we're going to go and we're going to say one thing: if we say anything, we just had to come. Say it after me." We all said, "We just had to come."

So in fear and trembling, we went down. One of them said to me, "Well, what do you think they'll say?" I said, "I've no idea. But that's something you can say. I don't know, God's going to give you something else, the know-how to know what, but that's what we're going to do. We're just going to go." That's the reason we did go. We just had to come. Women were in desperate need in another country. Women needed the sort of help we could match them with, the resources we could match them with in America. We knew that we could help if we could just go. We just had to come.

I remember the pediatrician that went with me was in this conference at FCA, and I told this story, and she just bawled. She just sat there and cried because she remembered, like I did, at the end of a refugee meeting down on the border, and we heard bombs going off, and they blew up the church behind us while we were having this refugee meeting and trying to do things. At the end of the meeting, we went out and I looked around the courtyard in the seminary where we'd had this refugee meeting to find the women I'd taken. Where were they? What were they doing?

I couldn't find them, and then I began to see them, and they were so buried under groups of Croatian refugees, it was unbelievable. All women, because refugees are women while their men are dead or fighting or prisoners. Their arms were around those women. They grabbed them. They grabbed their necks. They put their heads down. I said to my interpreter, "What are they saying?" The interpreter said, "They're saying, 'Thank you for coming.'"

I started walking around in that crowd, and I heard my women saying in a language they didn't know if the folks could understand, "We just had to come. We just had to come." "Thank you for coming." "We just had to come." "Thank you for coming." We were the first women's delegation in the whole of that war. Only men had gone down there, and men can't get hold of women like women can get hold of women. Men can't have a ministry of presence like women can with other women. It's like the woman in the hospital that helped me, who was my cleaner. There's something that we know that nobody else knows. There's a feeling that we know when something happens to our child that a man cannot link into. We just had to come. Can you do that? Of course you can.

How many people do not go when they know something's happened because they don't know what to say? You can say, "I just had to come." Then, secondly, you can have a ministry of silence. Everybody can do that. I remember watching the moving van come up next door when I lived down in Brookfield years ago. The neighbors know what's happening, and we knew there was trouble in the house next to me. I didn't know this woman; I'd only talked to her over the garden fence a couple of times. She'd been very private in that house.

Suddenly, here's the moving van, and suddenly here's the husband, and he's directing the furniture out of the house and into the van, so we all know what's happening here. Off the furniture van goes, and I sat in my kitchen window looking at that empty street and wondering what was happening in that house next to me. I didn't want to go next door. That was the last thing I wanted to do. I began going through this whole thing, "Well, what do I say? What can I do?"

I thought, "Well, I suppose I could just go." So I just went. With my heart pounding, because it's not the sort of thing that comes easily to me—I'm a very private person, I'm English, I don't want to intrude on people's privacy—I knocked on the door. The lady in question opened the door, and I said something like, "I just had to come. I saw the van. I just had to come." She put out her hand and grabbed me and pulled me inside the house and shut the door.

Sat me down, "Oh, please let me make you a cup of tea." I said, "Well, thank you, that would be lovely." She busied herself. That's a wonderful thing to let people make you a cup of tea because that's the thing you do in times of crisis, don't forget. She made me a cup of tea, and we sat down, and for the next two hours, I never said a thing. I had a ministry of silence. I left that day without her having said anything.

I had two ministries, actually. I had a ministry of silence and I had a ministry of tears. That's the other thing you can do, a ministry of tears. Can you do that? I can do that. I'm good at crying. I think women are great with tears. That's one of our things. Some of us are more wet than others, but I can cry, can't you cry?

I remember coming home from a doctor's appointment and being given some rather frightening news. The doctor had said, "I want you in the operating theater in two days." Coming home, telling my family. We didn't quite know, but it didn't look very nice or very good. I remember, when the world falls out from you like that under your feet, you're trying to regroup. It was not on your agenda that something like this might happen, and you get very panicked and in denial for a bit and then you think, "Goodness, this is real. I mean, this is it, maybe."

As I got undressed that night, I looked at my husband, who was lying in bed with his book open in front of him. He was crying. Here's my husband, who is very eloquent. Here's my husband, who's a Bible teacher. Here's my husband, who could have turned anywhere in the Bible and given me a little lecture, and he didn't. He had a ministry of tears. It was what I needed. All I needed. There is power in weeping with those that weep. Can you do that? I can.

So there's all sorts of things we can do to be a servant of the Lord. When and if the time comes to say something, then your life words will come from your accumulated wisdom as a person, your wounds that God has allowed in your life. Life words will come out of that. You can become a wounded healer.

Henri Nouwen is a name that you might know or might not. He was a Roman Catholic priest. He's written a book called "The Wounded Healer." Might be a little bit difficult for some of you, but I would suggest that you read that, specifically the last chapter. His whole premise is that the wounds that we received can be a healing for other people if we share the comfort that God has given us as he's mended our wounds.

He himself was a professor at Harvard and Yale, a very, very prominent Roman Catholic theologian. Had a marvelous ministry, and then God began to deal with him very definitely in his life. He gave up that incredible worldwide ministry that he had at the top of the hierarchy of the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, and he went to live in Canada in community with a community of people who were incredibly handicapped.

The bulk of his life, he lived in community with these people. He still went out of that community to preach and to teach and to make movies and films, which are absolutely wonderful. He finished one as he'd had a heart attack and died as he was making that movie in Russia. He would go back to his community, and he would always take one of the people from his community with him. Some of the stories he tells are funny, they'll make you laugh, they'll make you cry. But he always took a brother or a sister from his community to be a wounded healer themselves.

He tells stories of how these handicapped people who didn't have all their faculties with them, but God had healed them—I remember Corrie ten Boom's book, she had a little book called "Common Sense Not Needed"—because spiritual insight has nothing to do with intellectual prowess or intelligence or IQ. The wounded healer of these people that God had allowed to be so physically or mentally, psychologically wounded and had made them as whole as they would be in this world turned out to speak to groups of people that Henri Nouwen was speaking to, of the world's top people, and would have words of comfort and consolation to say.

It is incredible how our wounds can be used to bless other people and then to link the scripture with them. That's a wonderful, wonderful thing. So when it's time to speak, the skill to console, matching the words with the worries or whatever, the consolation must be rooted in scripture principles. I don't mean just scripture; I don't mean rubbing a verse of scripture on somebody's wound. But the principles of scripture must be applied.

For this, of course, we will need to have the ear of a disciple. We must be an obedient disciple. Do you see that it says here that the servant of the Lord was obedient? He did not draw back. "I've not been rebellious. I haven't drawn back." For Jesus, it meant pain and wounds himself. "He offers his back to those who beat him, his cheeks to those who pulled out his beard. He didn't hide his face from mocking and from spitting. But because the Sovereign Lord helps me, I will not be disgraced. Therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know I will not be put to shame. He who vindicates me is near; he will hold my hand," etc., etc.

So what we find is that the ultimate leader, who is the ultimate servant, will have the tongue of a teacher, the skill of a counselor, but he'll have to be an obedient disciple because he will send you places that perhaps you didn't want to go and he'll ask you to say things you didn't want to say. Tell you what to say, you want to say it. To be spiritually eloquent with clumsy lips or whatever it takes, and do it anyway.

An obedient disciple. That persistence will have the sense that somebody is leading you. There will be that "Yes!" This verse, of course, reminds me of my friend Elisabeth Elliot. This is her life's verse: "I set my face like a flint, I have not turned back." She received that verse from God from this passage of scripture when she had to decide what to do when her husband lay face down in a river with an arrow out of his back, dead, gone to heaven.

Here she was with a six-year-old child. She had to decide what to do. God had called her to the Indians. God had called them to the Auca Indians. Now they had murdered her husband. What was she going to do? Was she going to come home to the United States and find another ministry? Was she going to stay where she was in a safe little town and just do translation, or was she going to walk back into the jungle and find those men and finish the work that her husband had not been allowed to finish?

Of course, we know the story of that. She did go back in the jungle. The reason she went was this verse: "I have set my face like a flint, I have not turned back." Whether, as I offer my back to those who might beat me, my cheeks to those who pull out my beard, etc., etc. For her, in her context, she said, "Because the Sovereign Lord helps me, I will not be disgraced. Therefore have I set my face like a flint."

Now, what motivated her? Simply she was an obedient disciple, and that's what she believed God was telling her to do. As it turned out, it was right, of course. Now the men that murdered those men are the leaders of the church in that tribe, which is totally Christian. That's the story of the Auca Indian martyrdoms.

But I think just as I finish this, I want to read to you Jim Elliot's diary, the last entry in his diary before he was martyred. He goes out to spend time with God on a hill overlooking the little airport where they'll get in that plane and off they go, not knowing what's ahead. This is what he said:

"I walked out to the hill just now. It's exalting, delicious, to stand embraced by the shadows of a friendly tree with the wind tugging at your coat tail and the heavens hailing your heart, to gaze and glory and give oneself. What more could a man ask? Oh, the fullness, pleasure, sheer excitement of knowing God on earth. I cannot, if I never raise my voice again for him, if only I may love him, please him, mayhap in mercy he shall give me a host of children that I may lead them through the vast star-fields to explore his delicacies, whose finger-ends set them to burning." This man is a poet. I love that.

"Maybe he'll give me a host of children," he's talking about the Indians he's hoping to bring into the kingdom of God, "that I may lead them through the vast star-fields to explore his delicacies whose finger-ends set them to burning. But if not, if only I may see him, touch his garments, smile into his eyes, ah, then not stars nor children shall matter, only himself.

"Oh, Jesus, Master and center and end of all. How long before Thy glory is Thine, which has so long waited Thee? Now there is no thought of Thee among men, then there shall be thought for nothing else. Now other men are praised, then none shall care for any other's merits. Hasten, hasten, glory of heaven, take Thy crown, subdue Thy kingdom, enthrall Thy creatures."

Jim Elliot set his face like a flint and went to heaven in a fiery chariot the next day. Elisabeth Elliot took the baton, and she and her daughter finished the job. Why? Because we are ultimate leaders, which means we're ultimate servants, and he has given us the tongue of a teacher and the skill of a counselor, but it's not going to work unless we're an obedient disciple.

I found a verse the other day that said, "I will go where you tell me to go," and I underlined that. As I sat even among wonderful opportunities where, as far as I know, I'm not in any danger, looking at them for the next three years ahead of myself. As I looked at that verse, "I will go where you tell me to go," I asked myself, "Am I still on target? Am I still focused?" That's been a principle of my life. I want you to know I am. I'm going to go where he tells me to go. I'm going to do what he tells me to do because someone's leading me, someone's helping me, and somebody's praying for me. Can't fail. It's a win-win situation.

So if you came in here thinking, "I'm not a leader, and I'm not a teacher, and I'm not a counselor," I don't want you to go out there if you're unconvinced. This is a huge challenge, folks, and at least you can start by having a ministry of presence and a ministry of silence and a ministry of tears. See if that opens up to you the opportunity to match with a word from the Lord one who's weary in the season of their lives. Pray with me.

Heavenly Father, thank you for this passage of scripture, and we think of Jesus, who came and had a ministry of presence among us, the incarnation. Incredible. What a miracle. He had a ministry of silence because he opened not his mouth when he was reviled and beaten and crucified. He had a ministry of tears. He wept at Lazarus's tomb, and he wept for Jerusalem, and he wept for us.

And now we, who are the servant's servant, we are sent out by Jesus to do the same. Lord, I thank you for the eye-opening things I have found in this passage myself, that when I just don't know what to say, you already know what needs to be said and you are living within me. You are my wisdom. You are my words. God, out of the accumulated wisdom of life, much more than that of wounds, you will give me life words. You will give us all life words, words of life, to know how to know what to say to the one who is weary. And that is exciting, Lord.

So let's do it. Let's go. Let's set our faces like a flint so that Thy kingdom will come and we may all join Jim Elliot in heaven with the children you have given us that may explore all those wonderful things in heaven that await them. We ask it for Christ's sake, and in his name we pray. Amen.