Oswald Chambers

“Take yourself by the scruff of the neck and shake off your incarnate laziness.”

“He can crumple me up or exalt me, He can do anything He chooses.”

“We are not made for the mountains, for sunrises, or for the other beautiful attractions in life - those are simply intended to be moments of inspiration. We are made for the valley and the ordinary things of life and that is where we have to prove our stamina and strength.”

“If we are abandoned to Jesus we have no ends of our own to serve.”

“Tolerating a wrong attitude toward another person causes you to follow the spirit of the devil, no matter how saintly you are.”

“God’s training is for now, not presently. His purpose is for this minute, not for something in the future. we have nothing to do with the afterwards of obedience; we can get it wrong when we think of the afterwards. what men call training and preparation, God calls the end… if we realize that obedience is the end, then each moment is precious.”

“God always ignores the present perfection for the ultimate perfection.”

“Never look for justice in this world, never cease to give it.”

“God's end is to enable me to see that he can walk on the chaos of my life just now.”

“God gives us the vision, then he takes us down to the valley to batter us into the shape of the vision, and it is in the valley that so many of us faint and give way. Every vision will be made real if we will have patience.”

“We should always choose our books as God chooses our friends, just a bit beyond us, so that we have to do our level best to keep up with them.”

“The degree of panic activity in my life is equal to the degree of my lack of personal spiritual experience.”

“Don't forget to pray today because God did not forget to wake you up this morning.”

“Never sympathize with the thing that is stabbing God all the time. God has to hurt the thing that must go.”

“The voice of the Spirit is as gentle as a zephyr, so gentle that unless you are living in perfect communion with God, you never hear it.”

“God plants His saints in the most useless places. We say, 'God intends me to be here because I am so useful.' Jesus never estimated His life along the line of the greatest use. God puts His saints where they will glorify Him, and we are no judge at all of where that is.”

“The saint who satisfies the heart of Jesus will make other saints strong and mature for God.”

“No healthy Christian ever chooses suffering; he chooses God's will, as Jesus did, whether it means suffering or not.”

“We always know when Jesus is at work because He produces in the commonplace something that is inspiring.”

“Beware of being obsessed with consistency to your own convictions instead of being devoted to God. The important consistency in a saint is not to a principle but to the divine life. It is easier to be an excessive fanatic than it is to be consistently faithful, because God causes an amazing humbling of our religious conceit when we are faithful to Him.”

“Naturally, we are inclined to be so mathematical and calculating that we look upon uncertainty as a bad thing...Certainty is the mark of the common-sense life. To be certain of God means that we are uncertain in all our ways, we do not know what a day may bring forth. This is generally said with a sigh of sadness; it should rather be an expression of breathless expectation.”

“What a blessed habit I have found my prayer list, morning by morning, it takes me via the Throne of all Grace straight to the intimate personal heart of each one mentioned here, and I know that He Who is not prescribed by time and geography answers immediately.”

“I want to tell you a growing conviction with me, and that is that as we obey the leadings of the Spirit of God, we enable God to answer the prayers of other people. I mean that our lives, my life, is the answer to someone’s prayer, prayed perhaps centuries ago.It is more and more impossible to me to have programmes and plans because God alone has the plan, and our plans are only apt to hinder Him, and make it necessary for Him to break them up. I have the unspeakable knowledge that my life is the answer to prayers, and that God is blessing me and making me a blessing entirely of His sovereign grace and nothing to do with my merits, saving as I am bold enough to trust His leading and not the dictates of my own wisdom and common sense.”

“We have to pray with our eyes on God, not on the difficulties.”

“God never gives us discernment in order that we may criticize, but that we may intercede.”

“Prayer is the exercise of drawing on the grace of God.”

“When you are in the dark, listen, and God will give you a very precious message.”

“One of the greatest strains in life is the strain of waiting for God.”

“The institutions of Churchianity are not Christianity. An institution is a good thing if it is second; immediately an institution recognizes itself it becomes the dominating factor.”

“Let the consequences of your obedience be left up to God.”

“When obedience is in the ascendant, He will tax the remotest star and the last grain of sand to assist you with all His Almighty power.”

“The life of faith is not a life of mounting up with wings, but a life of walking and not fainting.”

“It is possible to know all about doctrine and yet not know Jesus. The soul is in danger when knowledge of doctrine outsteps intimate touch with Jesus. ....Have I a personal history with Jesus Christ? The one sign of discipleship is intimate connection with Him, a knowledge of Jesus Christ nothing can shake.”

“The sympathy which is reverent with what it cannot understand is worth its weight in gold. 69 L”

“The deadliest Pharisaism today is not hypocrisy, but unconscious unreality.”

“The teaching of the Sermon on the Mount is not--Do your duty, but--Do what is not your duty. It is not your duty to go the second mile, to turn the other cheek, but Jesus says if we are His disciples we shall always do these things. There will be no spirit of--"Oh, well, I cannot do any more, I have been so misrepresented and misunderstood". . . Never look for right in the other man, but never cease to be right yourself. We are always looking for justice; the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount is--Never look for justice, but never cease to live it.”

“We have to take the first step as though there were no God. It is no use to wait for God to help us, He will not: but immediately we arise we find He is there.”

“If we were never depressed we should not be alive; it is the nature of a crystal never to be depressed.”

“God does not give us overcoming life; He gives us life as we overcome.”

“Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.”

“Faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you may not understand at the time.”

“We tend to use prayer as a last resort, but God wants it to be our first line of defense. We pray when there's nothing else we can do, but God wants us to pray before we do anything at all.Most of us would prefer, however, to spend our time doing something that will get immediate results. We don't want to wait for God to resolve matters in His good time because His idea of 'good time' is seldom in sync with ours.”

“At times God puts us through the discipline of darkness to teach us to heed Him. Song birds are taught to sing in the dark, and we are put into the shadow of God's hand until we learn to hear Him...Watch where God puts you into darkness, and when you are there keep your mouth shut. Are you in the dark just now in your circumstances, or in your life with God? Then remain quiet...When you are in the dark, listen, and God will give you a very precious message for someone else when you get into the light.”

“Never become attached to anything that continues to hurt God. For you to be free of it, God must be allowed to hurt whatever it may be.”

“The most important aspect of Christianity is not the work we do, but the relationship we maintain and the surrounding influence and qualities produced by that relationship. That is all God asks us to give our attention to, and it is the one thing that is continually under attack.”

“There are certain things we must not pray about - moods, for instance. Moods never go by praying, moods go by kicking.”

“The people who influence us most are not those who buttonhole us and talk to us, but those who live their lives like the stars in heaven and the lilies in the field, perfectly simply and unaffectedly. Those are the lives that mould”

“The golden rule for understanding spiritually is not intellect, but obedience. If a man wants scientific knowledge, intellectual curiosity is his guide; but if he wants insight into what Jesus Christ teaches, he can only get it by obedience.”

“The whole point of getting things done is knowing what to leave undone”

“Beware of any work for God that causes or allows you to avoid concentrating on Him. A great number of Christian workers worship their work. The only concern of Christian workers should be their concentration on God. This will mean that all the other boundaries of life, whether they are mental, moral, or spiritual limits, are completely free with the freedom God gives His child; that is, a worshiping child, not a wayward one. A worker who lacks this serious controlling emphasis of concentration on God is apt to become overly burdened by his work. He is a slave to his own limits, having no freedom of his body, mind, or spirit. Consequently, he becomes burned out and defeated. There is no freedom and no delight in life at all. His nerves, mind, and heart are so overwhelmed that God’s blessing cannot rest on him.”