Oswald Chambers ~ Run Today's Race

~ The one great enemy of discipleship is obstinacy, spiritual obstinacy. We deify independence and wilfulness and call them by the wrong name.

~ Pride, disdain for the people you talk to, will shut your mouth quicker than anything. When you speak, see that behind your voice is the life of God.

~ We would never know that our spirit was wrong unless Jesus rebuked it, because it is so emphatically right according to our reason (Luke 9:55). The one thing to mark is the effect on our conscience—does my spirit bear the mark of native self-assertiveness or of disciplined self-conquest?

~ It is possible for practical Christian work to be active disobedience to God. We would rather work for God than sit for one moment before Him and let the Spirit riddle us through with His light.

~ The cross of discipleship is that I daily and hourly delight to tell my human nature that I am not my own, I no longer claim my right to myself.

~ Watch spiritual hardness, if ever you have the tiniest trace of it, haul up everything else till you get back your softness to the Spirit of God.

~ There was nothing secular in our Lord’s life and in the saint the sacred and the secular must be all His, the one must express the other. If I have to turn consciously from the shallow to the profound, there is something radically wrong, not in the shallow, but in the profound.

~ In every place you are in, insist on taking the initiative for God. Every time you pray your horizon is altered, your disposition and relationship to things is altered, and you wonder why it is you don’t pray more.

~ If there is the tiniest grudge in your mind against any one, from that second, your spiritual penetration into the knowledge of God stops.

~ Humility is not an ideal, it is the unconscious result of the life being rightly related to God.

~ If you cannot express yourself on any subject, struggle ‘till you can. You must struggle to get expression experimentally, then there will come a time when that expression will become the very wine of strengthening to someone else. Try to re-state to yourself what you implicitly feel to be God’s truth, and you give God a chance to pass it on to someone else through you.

~ We have judged our fellow men as sinners. If God should judge us like that we would be in hell. God judges us through the marvellous Atonement of Jesus Christ.

~ “It is good that man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord”—quietly wait, submit to the yoke, sit silent. All these are characteristics the world ridicules. There is nothing that so quickly reveals whether we are one with Jesus as derision. If we are not one with Him, we always want to explain ourselves.

~ Beware every time you notice yourself doing a good thing, because you ruin it by the notice. Matthew 6:2

~ God comes in where my helplessness begins, that is the bedrock of entering the kingdom of heaven. “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”

~ Never blink facts because they don’t agree with your theory.

~ “Why not rather be defrauded?” asks Paul. Who can be defrauded better than a Christian? Yet we take our standards from the world and insist on our rights.

~ Identification with the death of Jesus Christmeans identification with Him to the death of everything that never was in Him.

~ Intercession leaves you neither time nor inclination to pray for your own “sad sweet self.” The thought of yourself is not kept out because it is not there to keep out, you are completely and entirely identified with God’s interest in other lives.

~ There are certain tempers of mind in which we never dare indulge. If we find they have distracted us from faith in God, then until we get back to the quiet mood before God, our faith in Him is nil, and our confidence in the flesh and human ingenuity is the thing that rules.

~ Never run away with the idea that it doesn’t matter much what we believe or think; it does. What we believe and think, we are; not what we say we believe and think, but what we really do believe and think, we are; there is no divorce at all.

~ My worth to God in public is what I am in private. Is my master ambition to please Him and be acceptable to Him, or is it something else, no matter how noble?

~ God holds us responsible for what we won’t look at. We are nowhere judged by the light we have, but by the light we have refused (John 3:19).

~ Jesus said, “Go . . . and make disciples” (rv), not converts to your opinions.

~ Are we detached enough from our own spiritual hysterics to wait on God? To wait is not to sit with folded hands, but to learn to do what we are told. These are phases of His ways we rarely recognise.

~ God has loved me to the end of all my sinfulness, of all my self-will, all my stiff-neckedness, all my pride, all my self-interest; now He says—“love one another, as I have loved you.” I am to show to my fellow men the same love that God showed me. That is Christianity in practical working order.

~ The suffering which springs from being “a meddler in other men’s matters” (a busy-body) is humiliating to the last degree. A free translation of 1 Thessalonians 4:11 might well read, “Study to shut up and mind your own business” and among all the texts we hang on our wall let this be one.

~ In order to be able to wield the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God†, we must obey, and it takes a courageous heart to obey.

~ A self indwelt by Jesus becomes like Him. “Walk in love, even as Christ also loved you.” Jesus has loved me to the end of all my meanness and selfishness and sin; now, He says, show that same love to others.

~ It is never “Do, do” with the Lord, but “Be, be” and He will “do” through you.

~ We have to form the mind of Christ until we are absorbed with Him and take no account of the evil done to us. No love on earth can do this but only the love of God.

~ Let memory have its way. It is a minister of God with its rebuke and chastisement and sorrow. God will turn the “might have been" into a wonderful culture for the future.

~ “I will give you rest”—not a reasonable explanation, but the staying power of knowing that I am unperplexed.

~ The new life will manifest itself in conscious repentance and unconscious holiness, never the other way about. The bedrock of Christianity is repentance. If ever you cease to know the virtue of repentance, you are in darkness.

~ Lack of hospitality and disbelief in holiness go together. God’s Home is so sacred that He gave His only begotten Son to make it hospitable to us.

~ It is one thing to go through a crisis grandly, and another thing to go through every day glorifying God when nobody is paying any attention to you.

~ When I want to debate about doing what I know to be supremely right I am not in touch with God.

~ Don’t put things down to the devil, but to your own undisciplined nervous system.

~ We have to love where we cannot respect and where we must not respect, and this can only be done on the basis of God’s love for us. “This is My commandment, that ye love one another, as I have loved you.”

~ God engineers our circumstances and He brings across our paths some extraordinary people, viz., embodiments of ourselves in so many forms, and it is part of the humour of the situation that we recognise ourselves.

~ “Except your righteousness shall exceed”—not be different from but “exceed” that is, we have to be all they are and infinitely more! We have to be right in our external behaviour, but we have to be as right, and “righter” in our internal behaviour. We have to be right in our words and actions but we have to be right in our thoughts and feelings.

~ Jesus Christ never says that a man is damned because he is a sinner; the condemnation is when a man sees what Jesus Christ came to do and will not let Him do it.

~ Undisciplined imagination is the greatest disturber not only of growth in grace, but of spiritual sanity.

~ The reason we know so little about God’s wisdom is that we will only trust Him as far as we can work things out according to our own reasonable common sense.

~ Mental wool-gathering can be stopped immediately the will is roused. Prayer is an effort of will, and the great battle in prayer is the overcoming of mental wool-gathering. We put things down to our own inability to concentrate. “My soul, wait thou only upon God,” i.e. pull yourself together and be silent unto God.

~ Every time you venture out in the life of faith you will find something in your common sense cares that flatly contradicts your faith. Can you trust Jesus Christ where your common sense cannot trust Him?

~ We can choke God’s word with a yawn; we can hinder the time that should be spent with God by remembering we have other things to do. “I haven’t time!” Of course you have time! Take time, strangle some other interests and make time to realise that the centre of power in your life is the Lord Jesus Christ and His Atonement.

Mike,

If I could come up with one sentence like this I would be happy. It amazes me and humbles me to read things like this.

Murray

Thank you sooo much. Oh for more and more of Jesus all the time !!!

~ The ideal is not that we do work for God, but that we are so loyal to Him that He can do His work through us—“I reckon on you for extreme service, with no complaining on your part and no explanation on Mine.” God wants to use us as He used His own Son.

~ In tribulation, misunderstanding, slander, in the midst of all these things, if our life is hid with Christ in God, He will keep us at ease. We rob ourselves of the marvellous revelation of this abiding companionship of God. “God is our refuge”—nothing can come through that shelter.

~ You have no right to say, because you realise a need “I must go;” if you are sanctified you cannot go unless you are sent.

~ “Won’t you yield to Jesus? He has done so much for you”—to talk in that way is an insult to God and a crime against human nature. It is the presentation of an overplus of human sentiment smeared over with religious jargon.

~ Don’t put prayer and obedience in the place of the Cross of Christ—“Because I have obeyed, Christ will do this, or that”; He won’t. The only way we are saved and sanctified is by the free grace of God.

~ Anything that obtrudes itself into my consciousness can very easily shut God out. It is not the big things that keep us from being settled in God, but the tiny things.

~ Just as Jesus Christ and His Gospel are inseparable, so the disciples were inseparable from their message. When the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost He made these men the living epistles of the teachings of Jesus, not human gramophones, recording the facts of His life; they became part and parcel of their message.

~ Whenever you come in contact with the great destructive sins in other lives, be reverent with what you don’t understand. There are facts in each life you know nothing about and God says: “Leave him to Me.”

~ It is easier to stand true to a testimony which is mouldy with age because it has the dogmatic ring about it that people agree with, than to talk from your last moment of contact with God.

~ If I am a Christian, to whom is my appeal? To none but to those God sends you to. You can’t get men to come; nobody could get you to come till you came. “The wind bloweth where it listeth: . . . so is every one that is born of the Spirit.”

~ To trust in the Lord is to be foolish enough to know that if we fulfil God’s commands, He will look after everything.

~ If there is to be another revival, it will be through the readjustment of those of us on the inside who call ourselves Christians.

~ For one man who can introduce another to Jesus Christ by the way he lives and by the atmosphere of his life, there are a thousand who can only talk jargon about Him.

~ “Labour.” It is the one thing we will not do. We will take open-air meetings, we will preach—but labour at prayer! There is nothing thrilling about a labouring man’s work, but it is the labouring man who makes the conceptions of the genius possible; and it is the labouring saint who makes the conceptions of his Master possible.

~ A man can never be the same again, I don’t care who he is, after having heard Jesus Christ preached. He may say he pays no attention to it; he may appear to have forgotten all about it, but he is never quite the same, and at any moment truths may spring up into his consciousness that will destroy all his peace and happiness.

~ Am I going to live a sequestered life on the mount and never come down into the demon-possessed valley, never prove that what I saw on the mount is sufficient to enable me to face what I find in the valley?

~ It is one of the most flattering things to go and rescue the degraded, one of the social passions of mankind, but it is not the most Christian. It is quite another thing to proclaim to men who are among the best, that they have to give up their right to themselves to Jesus Christ.

~ If we do only what we are inclined to do, some of us would do nothing for ever and ever! There are unemployables in the spiritual domain, spiritually decrepit people, who refuse to do anything unless they are supernaturally inspired. The proof that we are rightly related to God is that we do our best whether we feel inspired or not.

~ God will put you through many mills that are not meant for you, mills you would not be put through but that He wants to make you good bread for His little ones to eat. You can see now the meaning of that hard place you have been in.

~ A good way to measure our spiritual life is to ask ourselves—What is it that produces the greatest perturbation in me? Is it the sins of men against men, or is it the sins of spiritual pride against God?

~ Our attitude to the Bible is a stupid one, we come to the Bible for proof of God’s existence: the Bible has no meaning for us unless we know that God does exist. The Bible states and affirms facts for the benefit of those who believe in God, those who don’t believe in God can tear it to bits if they like.

~ Always remain alert to the fact that where one man has gone back is exactly where anyone may go back (1 Corinthians 10:13). You have gone through the big crisis, now be alert over the least things. . . . Do not forecast where the temptation will come; it is the least likely thing that is the peril.

~ By surrendering ourselves to quiet communion with God, by resting for a while from all our thinking and acting and serving, by leaving all things for once in our Heavenly father’s hands, secret wounds are healed, gathering unbelief is dispelled, and displaced armour refixed.