Quotes from Oswald Chambers

Our Lord mentions may be a competitive relationship. I may prefer to belong to my mother, or to my wife, or to myself; then says Jesus, you cannot be My disciple. This does not mean I will not be saved, but it does mean that I cannot be "His.

As a saint, my life's spiritual honor and duty is to fulfill my debt to Christ in relation to these lost souls.

One individual life may be of priceless value to God's purpose, and yours may be that life.

It is not the baptism of the Holy Spirit that changes people, but the power of the ascended Christ coming into their lives through the Holy Spirit. We all too often separate things that the New Testament never separates. The baptism of the Holy Spirit is not an experience apart from Jesus Christ—it is the evidence of the ascended Christ.

There are not three stages in spiritual life—worship, waiting and work. Some of us go in jumps like spiritual frogs, we jump from worship to waiting, and from waiting to work. God's idea is that the three should go together. They were always together in the life of Our Lord. He was unhasting and unresting. It is a discipline, we cannot get into it all at once.

The central thing about the kingdom of Jesus Christ is a personal relationship to Himself, not public usefulness to men.

Genuine total surrender is a personal sovereign preference for Jesus Christ Himself.     Where does

The only way is by allowing nothing of the old life to remain, and by having only simple, perfect trust in God—such a trust that we no longer want God's blessings, but only want God Himself.

When we pray, asking God to sanctify us, are we prepared to measure up to what that really means?

Beware of anything that competes with your loyalty to Jesus Christ. The greatest competitor of true devotion to Jesus is the service we do for Him. It is easier to serve than to pour out our lives completely for Him. The goal of the call of God is His satisfaction, not simply that we should do something for Him. We are not sent to do battle for God, but to be used by God in His battles. Are we more devoted to service than we are to Jesus Christ Himself?

We have to WORK OUT in the mechanical [physical] realm what Gods WORKS IN [us] in the mysterious [spiritual] realm. Beware of any spiritual emotion that you do not work out mechanically...

a full and overflowing life does not rest in bodily health, in circumstances, nor even in seeing God's work succeed, but in the perfect understanding of God, and in the same fellowship and oneness with Him that Jesus Himself enjoyed.

If you believe in Jesus, you will find that God has nourished in you mighty torrents of blessing for others.

If you are going through a time of discouragement, there is a time of great personal growth ahead.

Being a disciple means deliberately identifying yourself with God's interests in other people. Jesus says, "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another" (John 13:34–35). The true expression of Christian character is not in good- doing, but in God-likeness.

You can never be the same after the unveiling of a truth.

We need to rely on the resurrection life of Jesus on a much deeper level than we do now.

O could I tell, you surely would believe it! O could I only say what I have seen! How should I tell or how can you receive it, How, till He bringeth you where I have been?

Jesus is saying that the greatest concern of life is to place our relationship with God first, and everything else second. It is one of the most difficult, yet critical, disciplines of the Christian life to allow the Holy Spirit to bring us into absolute harmony with the teaching of Jesus in these verses.

The most important rule for us is to concentrate on keeping our lives open to God. Let everything else including work, clothes, and food be set aside.

God reveals in John 17 that His purpose is not just to answer our prayers, but that through prayer we might come to discern His mind.

Worrying always results in sin. We tend to think that a little anxiety and worry are simply an indication of how wise we really are, yet it is actually a much better indication of just how wicked we are. Fretting rises from our determination to have our own way. Our Lord never worried and was never anxious, because His purpose was never to accomplish His own plans but to fulfill God's plans.

Prayer is not an exercise, it is the life of the saint. Beware of anything that stops the offering up of prayer. "Pray without ceasing"—maintain the childlike habit of offering up prayer in your heart to God all the time.

When we are in an unhealthy condition either physically or emotionally, we always look for thrills in life. In our physical life this leads to our efforts to counterfeit the work of the Holy Spirit; in our emotional life it leads to obsessions and to the destruction of our morality; and in our spiritual life, if we insist on pursuing only thrills, on mounting up "with wings like eagles" (Isaiah 40:31), it will result in the destruction of our spirituality.