Words of Wisdom

Words of Wisdom from Oswald Chambers

I came across these selections from the devotional My Utmost for His Highest. I had gathered them together to use at a retreat I held at my home in Vermont. The Lord brought 13 women together for a weekend of fellowship and rest. And even though there was only one bathroom for all of us, we managed to meet with God beside the Roaring Branch, as we sat in the warm October sun, amidst the changing fall landscape. I will never forget the peace and hope that came out of that time.

Spend a while with each section and consider how God might be calling you to a deeper peace. I will do the same as I spend time away with friends. This time the small, brisk current of the Branch and the carpeted landscape will be replaced with the rolling, ocean waves and the soft, warm sand.

Take your time - there are a lot of them. I can’t wait to hear what God has shown you.

1. His purpose is that I depend on Him and on His power now. If I can stay in the middle of the turmoil calm and unperplexed, that is the end of the purpose of God. God is not working towards a particular finish; His end is the process - that I see Him walking on the waves, no shore in sight, no success, no goal, just the absolute certainty that it is all right because I see Him walking on the sea. It is the process, not the end, which is glorifying to God.

2. It is not true to say that God wants to teach us something in our trials: through every cloud He brings, He wants us to unlearn something. His purpose in the cloud is to simplify our belief until our relationship to Him is exactly that of a child - God and my own soul, other people are shadows.

3. God does not give us overcoming life: He gives us life as we overcome. The strain is the strength. If there is no strain, there is no strength. Are you asking God to give you life and liberty and joy? He cannot, unless you will accept the strain. Immediately you face the strain, you will get the strength. Overcome your own timidity and take the step, and God will give you to eat of the tree of life and you will get nourishment. If you spend yourself out physically, you become exhausted; but spend yourself spiritually, and you get more strength. The saint is hilarious when he is crushed with difficulties because the thing is so ludicrously impossible to anyone but God.

4. God called Jesus Christ to what seemed unmitigated disaster. Jesus Christ called His disciples to see Him put to death; He led every one of them to the place where their hearts were broken. Jesus Christ’s life was an absolute failure from every standpoint but God’s. There comes the baffling call of God in our lives also. The call of God can never be stated explicitly; it is implicit. The call of God is like the call of the sea, no one hears it but the one who has the nature of the sea in him. His call is to be in comradeship with Himself for His own purposes, and the test is to believe that God knows what He is after.

5. We are too much given to thinking of the Cross as something we have to get through; we get through it only in order to get into it. The Cross stands for one thing only for us - a complete and entire and absolute identification with the Lord Jesus Christ, and there is nothing in which this identification is realized more than in prayer. The idea of prayer is not in order to get answers from God; prayer is perfect and complete oneness with god. We are not here to prove God answers prayer; we are here to be living monuments of God’s grace.

6. “Sell all that thou hast,” undress yourself morally before God of everything that might be a possession until you are a mere conscious human being, and then give God that. That is where the battle is fought - in that domain of the will before God. Are you more devoted to your idea of what Jesus wants than to Himself?

7. Never allow the dividing up of your life in Christ to remain without facing it. Beware of leakage, of the dividing up of your life by the influence of friends or of circumstances; beware of anything that is going to split up your oneness with Him and make you see yourself separately. Nothing is so important as to keep right spiritually. The great solution is the simple one - “Come unto Me.” The depth of our reality, intellectually, morally and spiritually, is tested by these words.

8. Whenever anything begins to disintegrate your life with Jesus Christ, turn to Him at once and ask Him to establish rest. Never allow anything to remain which is making the dis-peace. The complete life is the life of a child. The child of God is not conscious of the will of God because he is the will of God.

9. The phrase we hear so often, Decide for Christ, is an emphasis on something Our Lord never trusted. He never asks us to decide for Him, but to yield to Him - a very different thing. At the basis of Jesus Christ’s Kingdom is the unaffected loveliness of the commonplace. The thing I am blessed in is my poverty. If I know I have no strength of will, no nobility of disposition, then Jesus says - Blessed are you, because it is through this poverty that I enter His Kingdom. Which are the people who have influenced us most? Not the ones who thought they did, but those who had not the remotest notion that they were influencing us. We always know when Jesus is at work because He produces in the commonplace something that is inspiring.

10. Prayer is an effort of will. A secret silence means to shut the door deliberately on emotions and remember God. God is in secret, and He sees us from the secret place; He does not see us as other people see us, or as we see ourselves. When we live in the secret place it becomes impossible for us to doubt God, we become more sure of Him than of anything else. Enter the secret place, and right in the center of the common round you find God there all the time. 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.

11. There are times when our peace is based upon ignorance, but when we awaken to the facts of life, inner peace is impossible unless it is received from Jesus. When our Lord speaks peace, He makes peace, His words are ever “spirit and life.” “My peace I give unto you” - it is a peace which comes from looking into His face and realizing His undisturbedness. Are you painfully disturbed just now, distracted by the waves and billows of God’s providential permission, and having, as it were, turned over the boulders of your belief, are you still finding no well of peace or joy or comfort? Then look up and receive the undisturbedness of the Lord Jesus. Reflected peace is the proof that you are right with God because you are at liberty to turn your mind to Him. Lay it all out before Him, and in the face of difficulty, bereavement and sorrow, hear Him say, “Let not your heart be troubled.”

12. Prayer is the way the life of God is nourished. Our ordinary views of prayer are not found in the New Testament. We look upon prayer as a means of getting things for ourselves; the Bible idea of prayer is that we may get to know God Himself. Be yourself before God and present your problems, the things you know you have come to your wits’ end over. It is not true that “prayer changes things” as that prayer changes me and I change things. Prayer is not a question of altering things externally, but of working wonders in a man’s disposition.

13. Jesus Christ says, in effect, Don’t rejoice in successful service, but rejoice because you are rightly related to Me. The snare in Christian work is to rejoice in successful service, to rejoice in the fact that God has used you. When once you are rightly related to God by salvation and sanctification, remember that wherever you are, you are put there by God; and by the reaction of your life on the circumstances around you, you will fulfill God’s purpose, as long as you keep in the light as God is in the light. The lodestar of the saint is God Himself, not estimated usefulness. It is the work that God does through us that counts, not what we do for Him.

14. The joy of Jesus was the absolute self-surrender and self-sacrifice of Himself to His Father, the joy of doing that which the Father sent Him to do. Have I allowed Jesus Christ to introduce His joy to me? The full flood of my life is not in bodily health, not in external happenings, not in seeing God’s work succeed, but in perfect understanding of God, and in the communion with him that Jesus Himself had.