• “Our one great hindrance to fuller blessing is something along with God in our heart” (A. Bonar). Remove every idol from my heart.” – Nancy Leigh DeMoss

Moonless Trust by Elisabeth Elliott

Some of you are perhaps feeling that you are voyaging just now on a moonless sea. Uncertainty surrounds you. There seem to be no signs to follow. Perhaps you feel about to be engulfed by loneliness. There is no one to whom you can speak of your need.

Amy Carmichael wrote of such a feeling when, as a missionary of twenty six, she had to leave Japan because of poor health, then travel to China for recuperation, but then realized God was telling her to go to Ceylon. (All this preceded her going to India, where she stayed for fifty-three years.)

I have on my desk her original handwritten letter of August 25, 1894, as she was en route to Colombo:

“All along, let us remember, we are not asked to understand, but to obey….On July 28, Saturday, I sailed. We had to come on board on Friday night, and just as the tender ( a small boat ) where were the dear friends who had come to say goodbye was moving off, and the chill of loneliness shivered through me, like a warm love-clasp came the long-loved lines- “And only Heaven is better than to walk with Christ at midnight, over moon-less seas.” I couldn’t feel frightened then. Praise Him for the moon-less seas – all the better for the opportunity for proving Him to be indeed the EL Shaddai, “the God who is enough.”

Let me add my own word of witness to hers and to that of the tens of thousands who have learned that He is indeed Enough. He is not all we would ask for (if we were honest ), but it is precisely when we do not have what we would ask for, and only then, that we can clearly perceive His all-sufficiency. It is when the sea is moonless that the Lord has become my Light!

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  • “O beloved friends, there is a life on wings. I feel the streams of His life fill me and permeate my mortal frame from my head to my feet, until no words are adequate to describe it. I can only make a few bungling attempts to tell you what it is like and ask the Lord to reveal to you the rest. May He reveal to you your inheritance in Christ Jesus so that you will press on and get all that He has for you.” – Carrie Judd Montgomery

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Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen. — Ephesians 3:20-21 (NKJV)

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