There is nothing worth living for unless it is worth dying for.

My grandmother lived a life devoted to Jesus, and today her talks have been made available in their original form.

So you too can be built up through the insights and mysteries God revealed to her throughout her ministry.

Now without further ado, here is Elizabeth Elliot.

You know what my topic is this morning, it's suffering is not for nothing.

And Sarah Hampson asked me this morning why the two negatives and I do know better than to put two negatives if I'm trying to emphasize the negative but in this case I'm trying to emphasize the positive

Sometimes people

that have happened in their lives or the lives of people they love.

And then they say it doesn't make any sense. What good could that possibly do? And I'm sure all of us have

been tempted to ask that question from time to time. What I'd like to try to point out from the scriptures

today is that suffering is never for nothing. God always has a purpose and God's purposes are always love because God is love and

he can have no purpose that does not spring from that great ocean of love which is his nature.

Let me give you what I think is about as comprehensive and simple a definition of suffering, as I can think of.

Suffering is having what you don't want or wanting what you don't have.

Now that covers every imaginable kind of trouble.

If you can think of some kind of trouble that doesn't fall under one of those two categories. Well please let me know, but I think that it

covers everything, everything in this world that about which our instant and automatic reaction would be, oh no.

There are a lot of things that happen that we would never really call suffering, and yet I really can't think of another word to replace it.

Trouble, tribulation, trials, adversity, difficulty, affliction.

I've put them all under the category of suffering,

and yet I want to try to show that absolutely anything

about which our immediate reaction is a negative one such as missing a plane or the washing machine quitting when you have a house full of guests or burning the roast when the boss is coming for dinner, anything about which you just say,

...