Oswald Chambers

I am not sure how long ago I received Oswald Chambers' devotional, My Utmost for His Highest, but I am guessing some time in Jr. high or High school.  I am pretty sure I received it at summer camp because  it was the only other option besides a Bible which I already had anyway. Even though it looked pretty boring I thought I could try it. I am so glad for my choice!

I can't begin to tell you of how this daily devotional book has changed my life and perspective on things about God.  I have read through the whole book but not at once everyday. I go through seasons where I read some of it here and there throughout the years. I always go back to it when I know I need a kick in the butt or just to read something that I know will make me think and challenge me. 

I haven't read his biography yet, something now I will probably do very soon.  All I know is he was a Scottish minister born in 1874. He traveled during the last years of his life teaching and preaching around the world.  He died at only 43 years in 1917.  He had a few books published before his death but his most famous, My Utmost for His Highest, is actually a compilation of his journal entries created into a daily devotional by his wife.

I appreciate so much the depth yet simplicity of his explanations and thoughts towards God's ways. It is so refreshing to read something and feel like the author knows exactly what I am thinking and exactly what situation I am in.  LOVE IT!   

You will have to read it for yourself but I wanted to give some excerpts for you here (these are from the month of January):

• "My utmost for His Highest. I am determined to be absolutely and entirely for Him and for Him alone."
• "If the crisis has come to you on any line, surrender your will to Him absolutely and irrevocably."
• "Guard jealously your relationship to God."
• "Am I so in love with Him that I take no account of where I go?"
• "If we have never had the experience of taking our commonplace religious shoes off our commonplace religious feet, and getting rid of all the undue familiarity with which we approach God, it is questionable whether we have ever stood in His presence."
• "Never run before God's guidance."
• "Worship is giving God the best that He has given you."
• "We receive His blessings and know His Word, but do we know Him?"
• "There are whole tracts of stubbornness and ignorance to be revealed by the Holy Spirit in each one of us, and it can only be done when Jesus gets us alone.  Are we alone with Him now, or are we taken up with little fussy notions, fussy comradeships in God's service, fussy ideas about our bodies? Jesus can expound nothing until we get through all the noisy questions of the head and are alone with Him." 
• "The one thing for which we are all being disciplined is to know that God is real."
• "Sometimes we are fresh for a prayer meeting but not fresh for cleaning boots!"
• "Being born again from above is a perennial, perpetual and eternal beginnings; a freshness all the time in the thinking and in talking and in living, the continual surprise of the life of God."
• "The outstanding characteristic of a Christian is this unveiled frankness before God so that the life becomes a mirror for other lives...You always know when a man has been beholding the glory of the Lord; you feel in your inner spirit that the is the mirror of the Lord's own character...The severest discipline of a Christian's life is to learn how to keep 'beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord.'"

I feel like I could write the whole book.  I hope you're inspired like me!

BJ