"Whatever My Lot."
"You are loved with an everlasting love," that's what the Bible says, "and underneath are the everlasting arms."
This is your friend, Elisabeth Elliot, beginning a series today called "Whatever My Lot."
Some of you will recognize that as a phrase from a very wonderful, and familiar to many of us, hymn "It Is Well With My Soul." I want to tell you a little bit about the story behind that hymn.
Probably many of you know the story, but I had a visit with a Mrs. Vester in Jerusalem in 1967.
Mrs. Vester was the daughter of one Horatio Spafford.
A man who was a very successful businessman in Chicago; and when the great Chicago fire took place in the 1800's, it was a tremendous disaster and many of his friends lost everything they possessed in that fire.
Many lost all their businesses.
At that point, Horatio Spafford took stock of his life, and he decided that he did not want to live for the things that he had been living for.
He wanted to get to know Jesus, and so he felt that one way that he could facilitate getting to know Jesus without all the distractions of his job and his business in a big city like Chicago would be to move to Jerusalem. So, he decided that he was going to move his entire family to Jerusalem. At the last minute when he thought that all was arranged for the sale of his property, he discovered just before the ship was to sail with him and his children aboard that one of the deals had fallen through.
So he took his wife and his four daughters to New York to put them on the ship with the understanding that he would meet them later in France, I believe it was.
Well, for reasons that he could not explain, he decided to change the cabin that he had booked for them on the ship and put them further up in the bow.
The cabin in which he had originally booked them was amid ships, and he changed them to a cabin in the bow. Well, most of you will remember the rest of the story.
His wife and four children were on that ship when it was struck amid ships by another vessel and sank very quickly.
Horatio Spafford received a telegram with two words, "Saved Alone."
It was signed by his wife. He learned that all four of his little girls had drowned.
Now, the Mrs. Vester that I had tea with in 1967 in Jerusalem was
daughter number five born to Horatio Spafford and his wife sometime after that disaster at sea, and she told me this story herself adding many details that I haven't got time to tell you today.
One of the things that I hadn't heard was when Mr. Spafford took ship later on to meet his wife in France, as had been originally planned, and to go on to Jerusalem, now completely bereft of all their children, the captain called him to the bridge midway across the Atlantic.
Showing him the charts he pointed out that they were at that very moment, he reckoned, just over the spot where the other ship had gone down with his four little girls.
It was then that Spafford wrote that beautiful hymn, "When peace, like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll.
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say, It is well, it is well with my soul," a hymn that has meant so much to so many of us.
One stanza says, "Tho Satan should buffet, tho trials should come, let this blest assurance control, that Christ hath regarded my helpless estate, and hath shed His own blood for my soul."
Now what do we mean by "whatever my lot?" What is "my lot?" Well, it's anything that comes by the powers that rule my destiny.
Whatever happens to me in other words--whatever befalls.
But to a Christian, my lot is a divine assignment. Where would I get that idea? From Psalms 16:5, it says, "Lord you have assigned me my portion and my cup and have made my lot secure."
In other words, that nothing happens to me by chance or by accident.
There are no chances and no accidents to a child of God.
It is assigned that which befalls, that which happens, that which comes by the powers that rule my destiny, a share, a portion, an assignment divinely allotted.
Elisabeth Elliot
www.backtothebible.org/gateway/
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