Elisabeth Elliot - The Mark of a Man: Following Christs Example of Masculinity

Also by Elisabeth Elliot

Through Gates of Splendor

Shadow of the Almighty

Let Me Be a Woman

A Chance to Die

Discipline: The Glad Surrender

Gods Guidance

The Shaping of a Christian Family

Keep a Quiet Heart

The Mark of a Man

Faith That Does Not Falter

Passion and Purity

Quest for Love

Be Still My Soul

The Journals of Jim Elliot

The Music of His Promises

No Graven Image

The Path of Loneliness

Secure in the Everlasting Arms

1981 by Elisabeth Elliot

Published by Revell

a division of Baker Publishing Group

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.revellbooks.com

New paperback edition published 2006

Ebook edition created 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meansfor example, electronic, photocopy, recordingwithout the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-3448-0

Scripture marked RSV is taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture marked NEB is taken from The New English Bible. Copyright 1961 and 1970 by The Delegates of Oxford University Press and The Syndics of the Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission.

Scripture marked PHILLIPS is taken from The New Testament in Modern English, revised editionJ. B. Phillips, translator. J. B. Phillips 1958, 1960, 1972. Used by permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.

Scripture marked YOUNG CHURCHES are from LETTERS TO YOUNG CHURCHES by J. B. Phillips. Copyright 1968 by J. B. Phillips. Used by permission.

Quotations from Im an Ordinary Man, 1956 by Alan J. Lerner & Frederick Loewe Chappell & Co., Inc., owner of publication and allied rights throughout the world. International Copyright Secured. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Used by permission.

In this book, Elisabeth Elliot brings into focus the separate functions that God assigned to Adam and Eve, which show that the sexes are gloriously and radically unequal. Written as personal advice to her nephew Pete, her convictions on manliness will help you to see the glory and purpose of true masculinityand reassure you as you shape your own Christian sexual identity.

Elisabeth Elliot is one of the most loved and respected Christian communicators of our day and is the author of more than twenty books, including The Journals of Jim Elliot, Through Gates of Splendor, Shadow of the Almighty, The Path of Loneliness, Passion and Purity, and A Path through Suffering.

After eleven years of missionary work in Ecuador, South America, she returned to the United States and continued writing and speaking. Elliot was adjunct professor at Gordon-Conwell Seminary for four years and writer-in-residence at Gordon College for another four years. She and her husband, Lars Gren, live in Magnolia, Massachusetts.

For Peter Henry deVries

You would be surprised, Pete, at how often you are in my thoughts. And as often as you are in my thoughts, you are in my prayersyou and my other two highly marriageable nephews, Gene and Steve. I pray that God will make you real men and give you for wivesif He wants you to marryreal women.

You are in my thoughts on this dark, winter afternoon. The sea, on which I look out through the window near my typewriter, is battleship gray, running in long swells before a northeast wind. Three little coots ride the swells, vanishing altogether beneath the surface, from time to time, only to pop up again, like corks. The waves churn and foam and slap against the great rocks below the bluff, praising God. Let them praise the name of the Lord! For he commanded and they were created. And he established them for ever and ever; he fixed their bounds which cannot be passed. Praise the Lord... you sea monster and all deeps.

It was just over a week ago that you drove Lars and me to the airport, in the little black car that needs new seats so badlythe car that gave you what you called a Saab story when you first bought it, thinking you were getting a bargain. I remember your troubles that school yearjust the sort of troubles one would expect a young man to have: your car, your grades at the university, your girl friend(s!). And, when you called to ask advice, I said, You know what Im going to say, dont you, Pete?

Yup. thats why I called. I needed to hear it again.

So we talked about learning to know God. Faith has to be exercised in the midst of ordinary, down-to-earth living. Ordinary living includes trouble. When things are going as we would like, faith doesnt often seem necessary. Its when things get messed up that we look around for answers or for help. Where, exactly would you expect the tests for a young mans faith to come, if not in the three areas where you were having trouble?

Right! you said.

Then there was the question about participating in a campus Christian group. Not many of us are much good at being Christians all by ourselveswere supposed to be a flock or a body. Weve got to have help: somebody to study the Bible with, somebody to pray with, somebody to lift us up when were down. You promised to look for a Christian friend.

Of course my prayers were intensified for you after each phone call or letter.

Last week I thought of you again, at a student convention where I was speaking onamong other thingsthe married woman on the mission field. I was surprised to find in my audience, besides married women, several hundred men and single women. I realized how badly things have gotten twisted in the past decade or so, whenapropos of my thesis that there is a difference between men and women, that theyre not interchangeableI called for a show of hands of the men who would like to be asked for a date. I was quite unprepared for the response. Hundreds of hands went up. I should have asked then to see the hands of those who would not want to be asked (I wonder if there would have been any), but I was too startled and confused. When I suggested that we post a sign-up sheet at the back of the auditorium, the clapping, cheering, and shrieking (loudest, I suppose, from the single women) was tumultuous. Everybody but me was amused. Children of their time, so accustomed to hearing about equality and rights and personhood, they no longer know what the difference is between the sexes. They even wonder whether it is legitimate to notice any difference or whether it might not be better to pretend there is none.

Well, Pete, there is one.

Come off it! I hear you saying, Think I dont know?

Of course you know. Everybody knows. The biological difference isso far, at leastan undeniable datum. There is a certain unbudgeableness about simple facts. They wont go away. But science is working hard to change all that. God help us if it succeeds!

But in this era of ERA weve been trying our best to erase, ignore, overcome, or at least smudge the physical facts. Sometimes we hope that if we become truly civilized and freed up, well be above all that and that perhaps, if we get terribly spiritual, well manage to transcend it. The transcendence, however, is not that of real Christian vision at all, but rather of a thoroughly worldly compulsion to rearrange things to fit our humanism. Feminists are busy rewriting all of history, psychology, mythology, sociology, and even theology to suit the spirit of the age, and, if you dare say, Hey, wait a second! you know what youll be called.