Oswald chambers quotes

Spiritual maturity is not reached by the passing of the years, but by obedience to the will of God. Some people mature into an understanding of God’s will more quickly than others because they obey more readily; they more readily sacrifice the life of nature to the will of God.

We have the idea that God is going to do some exceptional thing- that He is preparing and equipping us for some extraordinary work in the future. But as we grow in His grace we find that God is glorifying Himself here and now, at this very moment. If we have God’s assurance behind us, the most amazing strength becomes ours, and we learn to sing, glorifying Him even in the ordinary days and ways of life.

The way to grow strong in Christ is to become weak in yourself.

You must learn to wrestle against the things that hinder your communication with God.

The real test of a saint is not one's willingness to preach the gospel, but one's willingness to do something like washing the disciples' feet - that is, being willing to do those things that seem unimportant in human estimation but count as everything to God.

There is nothing attractive about the gospel to the natural man; the only man who finds the gospel attractive is the man who is convicted of sin.

Self pity is of the devil, and if I wallow in it, I cannot be used by God for his purpose in the world.

It is not what a man does that is of final importance, but what he is in what he does. The atmosphere produced by a man, much more than his activities, has the lasting influence.

The truth is we have nothing to fear and nothing to overcome because He is all in all and we are more than conquerors through Him.

Don't read to remember; read to realize.

If you are going to be used by God, He will take you through a number of experiences that are not meant for you personally at all. They are designed to make you useful in His hands, and to enable you to understand what takes place in the lives of others.

We pray when there's nothing else we can do; Jesus wants us to pray before we do anything at all.

Get into the habit of dealing with God about everything. Unless in the first waking moment of the day you learn to fling the door wide back and let God in, you will work on a wrong level all day; but swing the door wide open and pray to your Father in secret, and every public thing will be stamped with the presence of God.

Adam was created to be the friend and companion of God, he was to have dominion over all the life in the air and earth and sea, but one thing he was not to have dominion over, and that was himself.

When God gets us alone through suffering, heartbreak, temptation, disappointment, sickness, or by thwarted friendship - when He gets us absolutely alone, and we are totally speechless, unable to ask even one question, then He begins to teach us.

God places His saints where they will bring the most glory to Him, and we are totally incapable of judging where that may be.

Obey God in the things he shows you, and instantly the next thing is opened up. God will never reveal more truth about himself until you have obeyed what you know already...this chapter brings out the delight of real friendship with God.

If sin rules in me, God's life in me will be killed; if God rules in me, sin in me will be killed.

Remember Whose you are and Whom you serve.

Get to the end of yourself where you can do nothing, but where He does everything.

Spiritual maturity is not reached by the passing of the years, but by obedience to the will of God.

We must never put our dreams of success as God's purpose for us; His purpose may be exactly the opposite. His purpose is that I depend on HIM and in HIS power NOW. His end is the process. It is the process, not the end, which is glorifying to God....His purpose is for this minute, not for something in the future. We have nothing to do with the 'afterwards' of obedience. If we have a further end in view, we do not pay sufficient attention to the immediate present; if we realize that obedience is the end, then each moment as it comes is precious.

Every time we pray our horizon is altered, our attitude to things is altered, not sometimes but every time, and the amazing thing is that we don't pray more.

The prayer of the feeblest saint who lives in the Spirit and keeps right with God is a terror to Satan. The very powers of darkness are paralyzed by prayer; no spiritualistic seance can succeed in the presence of a humble praying saint. No wonder Satan tries to keep our minds fussy in active work till we cannot think in prayer.

The only way we can be of use to God is to let Him take us through the crooks and crannies of our own characters.

The busyness of things obscures our concentration on God ... Never let a hurried lifestyle disturb the relationship of abiding in Him. This is an easy thing to allow, but we must guard against it.

Faith is not intelligent understanding, faith is deliberate commitment to a Person where I see no way.

Solitude with God repairs the damage done by the fret and noise and clamour of the world.

The Bible talks plentifully about joy, but it nowhere talks about a 'happy Christian.' Happiness depends on what happens; joy does not. Remember, Jesus Christ had joy, and He prayed 'that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves.'

Spiritual lust--'I must have it at once'--causes me to demand an answer from God, instead of seeking God himself who gives the answer. Is today 'the third day' and He has still not done what I expected? Whenever we insist that God should give us an answer to prayer we are off track. The purpose of prayer is that we get a hold of God, not of the answer.

Is the Son of God praying in me, or am I dictating to Him?... Prayer is not simply getting things from God, that is a most initial form of prayer; prayer is getting into perfect communion with God. If the Son of God is formed in us by regeneration, He will press forward in front of our common sense and change our attitude to the things about which we pray.

God will never reveal more truth about himself until you have obeyed what you know already

It is not true to say that God wants to teach us something in our trials. Through every cloud He brings our way, He wants us to unlearn something.

The greatest test of a man's character is his tongue.

To say that 'prayer changes things' is not as close to the truth as saying, 'prayer changes me and then I change things.' God has established things so that prayer, on the basis of redemption, changes the way a person looks at things.

The greatest competitor of devotion to Jesus is service to Him. It is never 'Do, do' with the Lord, but 'Be, be' and He will 'do' through you. The only way to keep true to God is by a steady persistent refusal to be interested in Christian work and to be interested alone in Jesus Christ.

God's purpose is not to perfect me to make me a trophy in His showcase; He is getting me to the place where He can use me. Let Him do what He wants.

God rarely allows a person to see how great a blessing he is to others.

Faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you cannot understand at the time.

We are uncertain of the next step, but we are certain of God. Immediately we abandon to God, and do the duty that lies nearest, and He packs our life with surprises all the time.... Leave the whole thing to Him, it is gloriously uncertain how He will come in, but He will come.

God never forces a person's will into surrender, and He never begs. He patiently waits until that person willingly yields to Him. True surrender is a matter of being 'united together [with Jesus] in the likeness of His death' (Romans 6:5) until nothing ever appeals to you that did not appeal to Him. And after you surrender--then what? Your entire life should be characterized by an eagerness to maintain unbroken fellowship and oneness with God.

Faith never knows where it is being led, but it loves and knows the One who is leading.

A saint realizes that it is God who engineers his circumstances; consequently there are no complaints, only unrestrained surrender to Jesus.

The best measure of a spiritual life is not its ecstasies but its obedience.

The greatest test of Christianity is the wear and tear of daily life; it is like the shining of silver: the more it is rubbed the brighter it grows.

When we preach the love of God there is a danger of forgetting that the Bible reveals not first the love of God but the intense, blazing holiness of God, with His love at the center of that holiness.

God does not exist to answer our prayers, but by our prayers we come to discern the mind of God.

Leave the Irreparable Past in His hands, and step out into the Irresistible Future with Him.

There is actually only one thing you can dedicate to God, and that is your right to yourself. If you will give God your right to yourself, He will make a holy experiment out of you - and His experiments always succeed.

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.

If God sees that my spiritual life will be furthered by giving the things for which I ask, then He will give them, but that is not the end of prayer. The end of prayer is that I come to know God Himself.

God is not saving the world; it is done. Our business is to get men and women to realize it.

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

Beware of harking back to what you once were when God wants you to be something you have never been.

All of God’s people are ordinary people who have been made extraordinary by the purpose He has given them.

To choose suffering makes no sense at all; to choose God's will in the midst of our suffering makes all the sense in the world.

We are only what we are in the dark; all the rest is reputation.

God can do nothing for me until I recognize the limits of what is humanly possible, allowing Him to do the impossible.

Measure your growth in grace by your sensitiveness to sin.

God is the Great Engineer, creating circumstances to bring about moments in our lives of divine importance, leading us to divine appointments

I must learn that the purpose of my life belongs to God, not me. God is using me from His great personal perspective, and all He asks of me is that I trust Him. ... When I stop telling God what I want, He can freely work His will in me without any hindrance. ... Self-pity is of the devil, and if I wallow in it I cannot be used by God for His purpose in the world.

I have to learn that the aim in life is God's, not mine.

Be rightly related to God, find your joy there, and out of you will flow rivers of living water.

Thoughts about myself hinder my usefulness to God.

It is easy to say we believe in God as long as we remain in the little world we choose to live in; but get out into the great world of facts, the noisy world where people are absolutely indifferent to you, where your message is nothing more than a crazy tale belonging to a bygone age, can you believe God there?

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.

Are you learning to say things after listening to God, or are you saying things and trying to make God's word fit in?

The great thing about faith in God is that it keeps a man undisturbed in the midst of disturbance.

Never focus your eyes on the obstacle or the difficulty. The obstacle will be a matter of total indifference to the river that will flow steadily through you if you will simply remember to stay focused on the Source.

We are not responsible for the circumstances we are in, but we are responsible for the way we allow those circumstances to affect us; we can either allow them to get on top of us or we can allow them to transform us into what God wants us to be.

We are not meant to be seen as God's perfect, bright-shining examples, but to be seen as the everyday essence of ordinary life exhibiting the miracle of His grace.

We look upon prayer simply as a means of getting things for ourselves, but the biblical purpose of prayer is that we may get to know God Himself.

If we pray only because we want answers, we will become irritated and angry with God. We receive an answer every time we pray, but it does not always come in the way we expect, and our spiritual irritation shows our refusal to identify ourselves truly with our Lord in prayer. We are not here to prove that God answers prayer, but to be living trophies of God’s grace.

Before God can use a man greatly he must wound him deeply.

God never fits His word to suit me; He fits me to suit His word.

Living a life of faith means never knowing where you are being led - but it does mean loving and knowing the One who is leading. It is literally a life of FAITH, not of understanding and reason- - a life of knowing Him who calls us to go.

Happiness is not a sign that we are right with God; happiness is a sign of satisfaction, that is all, and the majority of us can be satisfied on too low a level.

Don't plan without God. God seems to have a delightful way of upsetting the plans we have made, when we have not taken Him into account.

Sorrow burns up a great amount of shallowness.

Get into the habit of saying, ''Speak, Lord,'' and life will become a romance.

When Jesus Christ shed his blood on the cross, it was not the blood of a martyr; or the blood of one man for another; it was the life of God poured out to redeem the world.

Christianity is not devotion to work, or to a cause, or a doctrine, but devotion to a Person, the Lord Jesus Christ.

The remarkable thing about God is that when you fear God, you fear nothing else, whereas if you do not fear God, you fear everything else.

Sanctification is not my idea of what I want God to do for me; sanctification is God’s idea of what He wants to do for me.

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

'I have chosen you!' Keep that note of greatness in your creed. It is not that you have got God but that He has got you.

God speaks in the language you know best - not through your ears, but through your circumstances.

Beware of anything that competes with your loyalty to Jesus Christ.

Never believe that the so-called random events of life are anything less than God’s appointed order. Be ready to discover His divine designs anywhere and everywhere.

Am I prepared to let God grip me by His power and do a work in me that is worthy of Himself? Sanctification is not my idea of what I want God to do for me; sanctification is God's idea of what He wants to do for me, and He has to get me into the attitude of mind and spirit where at any cost I will let Him sanctify me wholly.

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.

Spend plenty of time with God; let other things go, but don't neglect Him. We are not here to do work for God, we are here to be workers with Him, those through whom He can do His work.

If ever we are going to be made into wine, we will have to be crushed; you cannot drink grapes. Grapes become wine only when they have been squeezed. I wonder what kind of finger and thumb God has been using to squeeze you, and you have been like a marble and escaped?

Never water down the Word of God, but preach it in its undiluted sternness. There must be unflinching faithfulness to the Word of God, but when you come to personal dealings with others, remember who you are- you are not some special being created in heaven, but a sinner saved by grace.

God is not concerned about our plans; He doesn’t ask, “Do you want to go through this loss of a loved one, this difficulty, or this defeat?” No, He allows these things for His own purpose. The things we are going through are either making us sweeter, better, and nobler men and women, or they are making us more critical and fault-finding, and more insistent on our own way. The things that happen either make us evil, or they make us more saintly, depending entirely on our relationship with God and its level of intimacy.

There is only one relationship that matters, and that is your personal relationship to a personal Redeemer and Lord. Let everything else go, but maintain that at all cost, and God will fulfill His purpose through your life. (This includes meeting the needs of your heart.) One individual life may be of priceless value to God's purposes, and yours may be that life.

We are not sent to do battle for God, but to be used by God in His battles.

Worship is giving God the best that He has given you.

It is impossible to get exhausted in work for God. We get exhausted because we try to do God's work in our own way.

The proof that our relationship is right with God is that we do our best whether we feel inspired or not.

The path of peace for us is to hand ourselves over to God and ask Him to search us, not what we think we are, or what other people think we are, or what we persuade ourselves we are or would like to be, but 'Search me out, O God, explore me as I really am in Thy sight.'

If God has made your cup sweet, drink it with grace; if He has made it bitter, drink it in communion with Him.

So many of us limit our praying because we are not reckless in our confidence in God. In the eyes of those who do not know God, it is madness to trust Him, but when we pray in the Holy Spirit we begin to realize the resources of God, that He is our perfect heavenly Father, and we are His children.

We have become so self-centered that we go to God only for something from Him, and not for God Himself.

The root of all sin is the suspicion that God is not good.

It is a joy to Jesus when a person takes time to walk more intimately with Him. The bearing of fruit is always shown in scripture to be a visible result of an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ.

The expression of Christian character is not good doing, but God-likeness. If the Spirit of God has transformed you within, you will exhibit Divine characteristics in your life, not good human characteristics . God's life in us expresses itself as God's life, not as human life trying to be godly.

Trust God, and do the next thing.

We are apt to think that everything that happens to us is to be turned into useful teaching; it is to be turned into something better than teaching, into character. We shall find that the spheres God brings us into are not meant to teach us something but to make us something.

When a man gets to despair he knows that all his thinking will never get him out. He will only get out by the sheer creative effort of God. Consequently he is in the right attitude to receive from God that which he cannot gain for himself.

All our fret and worry is caused by calculating without God.

The heart of salvation is the Cross of Christ. The reason salvation is so easy to obtain is that it cost God so much. The Cross was the place where God and sinful man merged with a tremendous collision and where the way to life was opened. But all the cost and pain of the collision was absorbed by the heart of God.

Jesus Christ carries on intercession for us in heaven; the Holy Ghost carries on intercession in us on earth; and we the saints have to carry on intercession for all men.

A life of intimacy with God is characterized by joy.

God brings you to places, among people, and into certain conditions to accomplish a definite purpose through the intercession of the Spirit in you. Your part in intercessory prayer is not to agonize over how to intercede, but to use the everyday circumstances and people God puts around you by His providence to bring them before His throne, and to allow the Spirit in you the opportunity to intercede for them. In this way God is going to touch the whole world with His saints.

Am I getting nobler, better, more helpful, more humble, as I get older? Am I exhibiting the life that men take knowledge of as having been with Jesus, or am I getting more self-assertive, more deliberately determined to have my own way? It is a great thing to tell yourself the truth.

The Christian who is truly intimate with Jesus will never draw attention to himself but will only show the evidence of a life where Jesus is completely in control. This is the outcome of allowing Jesus to satisfy every area of life to its depth. The picture resulting from such a life is that of the strong, calm balance that our Lord gives to those who are intimate with Him.

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

If you want to be of use to God, maintain the proper relationship with Jesus Christ by staying focused on Him & He will make use of you every minute you live- yet you will be unaware, on the conscious level of your life, that you are being used of Him.

The true expression of Christian character is not in good-doing but in God-likeness.

Trust no one, not even the finest saint who ever walked this earth, ignore him, if he hinders your sight of Jesus Christ.

The more you fulfill yourself, the less you will seek God.

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

Never take your obedience as the reason God blesses you; obedience is the outcome of being rightly related to God.

The moment we recognize our complete weakness and our dependence upon Him will be the very moment that the Spirit of God will exhibit His power.