The words of the Lord hurt and offend until there is nothing left to be hurt or offended. Jesus has no tenderness whatsoever toward anything that is ultimately going to ruin a person in his service to God. If the Spirit of God brings to your mind a word of the Lord that hurts you, you may be sure that there is something He wants to hurt to death.
– Oswald Chambers –
All my devotion is an insult to God unless every bit of my practical life squares with Jesus Christ’s demands.
– Oswald Chambers –
Conviction of sin is one of the rarest things that ever strikes a man. It is the threshold of an understanding of God. Jesus Christ said that when the Holy Spirit came He would convict of sin, and when the Holy Spirit rouses a man’s conscience and brings him into the presence of God, it is not his relationship with men that bothers him, but his relationship with God – against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Thy sight. Conviction of sin, the marvel of forgiveness, and holiness are so interwoven that it is only the forgiven man who is the holy man, he proves he is forgiven by being the opposite to what he was, by God’s grace. Repentance always brings a man to this point: I have sinned. The surest sign that God is at work is when a man says that and means it. Anything less than this is remorse for having made blunders, the reflex action of disgust at himself.
The entrance into the Kingdom is through the panging pains of repentance crashing into a man’s respectable goodness; then the Holy Ghost, Who produces these agonies, begins the formation of the Son of God in the life. The new life will manifest itself in conscious repentance and unconscious holiness, never the other way about. The bedrock of Christianity is repentance. Strictly speaking, a man cannot repent when he chooses; repentance is a gift of God. The old Puritans used to pray for the gift of tears. If ever you cease to know the virtue of repentance, you are in darkness. Examine yourself and see if you have forgotten how to be sorry.
– Oswald Chambers –
My Utmost For His Highest, December 7th
In our abandonment we give ourselves over to God just as God gave Himself for us, without any calculation. The consequences of abandonment never enter into our outlook because our life is taken up with Him.
– Oswald Chambers –
from My Utmost for His Highest
The reason some of us are such poor specimens of Christianity is because we have no Almighty Christ. We have Christian attributes and experiences, but there is no abandonment to Jesus Christ.
– Oswald Chambers –
from My Utmost for His Highest
Tell God you are ready to be offered, and God will prove Himself to be all you ever dreamed He would be.
– Oswald Chambers –
from My Utmost for His Highest
Prayer does not fit us for the greater work; prayer is the greater work.
– Oswald Chambers –
It is impossible to live the life of a disciple without definite times of secret prayer. You will find that the place to enter in is in your business, as you walk along the streets, in the ordinary ways of life, when no one dreams you are praying, and the reward comes openly, a revival here, a blessing there.
– Oswald Chambers –
“It is perilously easy to have amazing sympathy with God’s truth and remain in sin.”
– Oswald Chambers –