Around 1960, I acquired a copy of My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers. Friends told me it was a challenging devotional book. As a young man of 17, wanting very much to live for Christ, I began to read the daily selections, underlining many sentences. Still, many mornings I closed the book with no understanding of what Chambers had written. I couldn’t seem to get into it.
In 1985, while I was preparing for a short-term missionary venture to Africa, My Utmost came alive. Perhaps it was my age (42 at the time) or the circumstances (uprooting our three children, none of whom was happy about moving to Kenya). Maybe it was the afternoon a month before our departure for Africa when my wife and I were stunned by the news that she was pregnant. Suddenly life felt out of control, and Oswald Chambers seemed to be reading my mail.
I felt that, many times, a sentence in My Utmost was written just for me: “Beware of harking back to what you were once when God wants you to be something you have never been” (June 8). “There is no condition of life in which we cannot abide in Jesus” (June 12). “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” (July 6).
My Utmost became for me what it has been for countless other Christians: a major source of encouragement and guidance for living life in the Spirit.
My appreciation for Chambers’s writing birthed in me a curiosity about the man himself. From where did his wisdom and insight spring? What circumstances molded such a man? The preface to My Utmost contained only cryptic references to a Bible College in London, YMCA huts in Egypt, and his sudden death in 1917. When I asked a friend if he knew anything about Chambers, he gave me a dusty volume from his father’s library: Oswald Chambers: His Life and Work, compiled by Chambers’s wife and first published in 1933.
Here I learned the outline of Chambers’s life: He was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1874 and educated at London’s Royal College of Art and the University of Edinburgh. Chambers was a gifted young man who sensed God leading him to Christian service in the arts. But at the age of 22 he felt God call him to turn his back on that vision and pursue training to become a minister.
After a decade of study and teaching in a small theological college in Dunoon, Scotland, he moved into a preaching ministry that spanned Britain, and even took him to America for eight months and on to Japan. He spent summers in 1908–10 in the U.S., speaking at holiness camp meetings along the eastern seaboard.
In 1910 he married Gertrude Hobbs, whom he affectionately called “Biddy.” They spent the next four years as Principal and Lady Superintendent of the Bible Training College in London. In 1915, they sailed for Egypt where Oswald served as a YMCA chaplain to British Commonwealth troops during World War I. He died in Cairo at the age of 43 of complications following an emergency appendectomy.
I devoured Mrs. Chambers’s book, amazed to learn that I was reading the most complete biography of Oswald ever written. It was now a rare book, out of print for 30 years. With all its rich insight and detail, the book was hard to follow chronologically and left me wondering about key areas: Who influenced and shaped his life? What were his spiritual turning points?
In February 1990, I was talking with a publisher to whom I had sent two book proposals. He had turned down both and I was wondering how gracefully to say good-bye. “It’s a shame no one has written a contemporary biography of Oswald Chambers,” I said.
“Funny you should mention Chambers,” Bob DeVries replied. “Discovery House has just acquired the rights to publish all his material in the U.S. We might be interested in something about him, but the decision will have to come from a committee in England.”
Initial reaction from across the Atlantic was measured and somewhat cool. There wasn’t much information available on Chambers. His diaries had disappeared, and only three or four of his letters remained. He had been dead for nearly 75 years, and everyone who knew him was probably gone as well. Mrs. Chambers had died in 1966. Their only child, Kathleen, was 77 years old and had only a few memories of her father, who died when she was four. Kathleen was willing to talk to me, but she had many reservations about the project. When the Oswald Chambers Publications Association invited me to make a survey trip to Britain, it seemed like a needle-in-a-haystack situation.
With no idea where to begin, I wrote John Pollock, a British writer I respected for his biographies of Billy Graham and D. L. Moody. Pollock’s reply set the stage for everything that followed. After some suggestions on where and how to initiate the search, he said: “One clue leads to another and that’s the thrill, especially when you have the Holy Spirit to guide you.”
In September 1991, I traveled to England and met Kathleen Chambers. She was gracious while retaining a healthy skepticism about a new book. I didn’t blame her. Why should she trust some unknown American who came barging into her life trying to unearth personal data about her mother and father?
Visits to the British Library and Cambridge University library yielded nothing. Apparently no one had ever written a thesis, dissertation, or even a scholarly paper about Chambers.
A Sunday afternoon in London’s Imperial War Museum gave me glimpses of World War I from the British perspective and an interesting exhibit on the soldier’s life in Egypt. Out of curiosity, I returned later in the week to visit the museum’s library and archives. After sifting through a stack of a hundred index cards, I requested a small personal memoir of a soldier whose card indicated an association with the YMCA in Egypt. On page ten, I was dumbfounded to find an arrow pointing to a photograph of the Reverend Oswald Chambers, and an account of how Chambers had brought this soldier to a personal faith in Christ. I gave the loudest inner shout possible in the dignified silence of the reading room and thanked God. In one of the biggest archival haystacks in Britain, he had given me a needle.
That was the first of many “haphazard” discoveries that I believe were engineered by the Holy Spirit. Each one involved finding key material that I didn’t know existed. With only a name and a 1968 address, for example, I sent a letter to two of Oswald’s close friends. The letter found its way to their daughter, now in her seventies, who replied that her parents were no longer living. “But,” she added, “I might have some of my mother’s notebooks from her years in Chambers’s Bible college.” During a visit to her home, she produced a box containing her mother’s notes from Chambers’s lectures, her personal diaries, photographs, typed fragments of Chambers’s Egypt diaries, and a book of his poems. “Help yourself,” she said, “to whatever you need.”
Halfway through my research, I had given up hope of finding anyone living who knew Chambers. Then, one afternoon in London, Kathleen Chambers casually told me, “There’s a woman still alive who would have known my father. Her name is Dorothy Docking, and she lives in Santa Barbara, California. Here’s her address.”
I couldn’t believe it. Two weeks from then, my wife and I were scheduled to be in Los Angeles. Weeks before, when we purchased plane tickets, we had decided to rent a car and drive to Santa Barbara to visit our daughter.
On a beautiful Sunday in April, Dorothy Docking, 92 years old and brimming with enthusiasm, welcomed me to her apartment. We talked for nearly two hours.
“Oh yes,” she beamed, “from the time I was eight until he went off to the First World War when I was 15, Oswald Chambers spent one week every year in our home in Blackpool.”
When I asked her to describe Chambers’s preaching, she smiled and said, “I never went to any of his meetings. In fact, at first I didn’t even know he was a minister. From the day we met, he was just a friend to me; someone who asked about the things I was interested in. When he died and I found out he was nearly as old as my parents, I was staggered. He seemed eternally young.”
In another surprising turn of events, a former YMCA secretary in London apologized for their lack of World War I records, then said, “Did you know that the most complete YMCA archive in the world is at the University of Minnesota?” A visit there yielded records of Chambers’s supervisor in Cairo. Chambers himself rarely mentioned the living conditions in Egypt, but the records set them forth in stark detail: Summer temperatures of 120 degrees Fahrenheit, hordes of insatiable flies and mosquitoes, and a manpower shortage that taxed many chaplains beyond their mental and physical limits.
The Oswald Chambers who emerged from these varied sources was striking in many ways:
Although the Scottish people are known for their thrift, Chambers (a Scot) was often criticized by his family and friends for being too generous. One evening, he was accosted by a drunken man asking for money. Chambers listened intently, then told him, “Man, I believe your story is all lies, but my Master tells me to give to everyone that asks, so here is my last shilling.” Chambers was also known and loved for his rollicking sense of humor. After meeting Oswald for the first time, one serious young man said, “I was shocked at what I then considered his undue levity. He was the most irreverent Reverend I had ever met!”
Chambers loved God’s creation and found physical and spiritual renewal in it. He especially loved the Yorkshire Dales where he could step out of the pace of city life for a summer holiday in the windswept quiet of the moors.
We know the area today as James Herriot country and the setting for All Creatures Great and Small. With baby Kathleen in a homemade canvas backpack, and a contingent of his Bible college students along, Chambers led daily hikes, picnics, and fishing expeditions into the countryside he called “my Heavenly Father’s Dining Room.” After building a fire and boiling potatoes, without which no picnic was considered complete, Chambers led a prayer of thanks for all God’s gifts, especially “the leagues of pure air.” Following the meal, while others napped or searched for violets and wild orchids, Oswald fished the clear waters for trout.
Those holidays ended forever in 1915 when Chambers went to Egypt as a chaplain to the troops. Incredibly, he was able to take Biddy and two-year-old Kathleen with him, and their home and YMCA huts outside Cairo became an oasis of hospitality to soldiers.
One British soldier described Chambers as “the personification of the Sherlock Holmes of fiction, tall, erect, virile, with clean-cut face, framing a pair of piercing bright eyes … a detective of the soul.”
When a disillusioned young trooper told Chambers, “I hate religious people,” Oswald replied, “So do I.” With that issue settled, Oswald listened to the young man’s heartbreaking story and gently led him to faith in Christ.
Perhaps my most surprising discovery was that the man known today for his many books did not “write” them. After his death, his wife compiled all but three from her verbatim shorthand notes of his lectures taken during their seven years of marriage.
Biddy’s role in Chambers’s writings has remained virtually unknown because of her own modesty. But after his death in Egypt, she labored for the next 50 years, under very difficult conditions, to give his words to the world. Oswald’s life story is also hers, one that could best be described as “their utmost for his highest.”
The man I discovered transcended narrow theological or denominational niches. He could speak relevantly to a group of Christian workers in Britain, for instance, warning them, “Dealing with souls is tenfold more dangerous than dealing with bodies. Unless you are in a healthy, vigorous condition with God, you will catch the disease of the soul you are dealing with instead of helping to cure it.”
Or he could talk gently to war-sick soldiers, evacuated from the murderous Gallipoli Peninsula to Egypt: “No man is the same after an agony. He is either better or worse, and the agony of a man’s experience is nearly always the first thing that opens his mind to understand the need of Redemption worked out by Jesus Christ.”
Chambers was not widely known during his lifetime. Yet his themes speak to a worldwide audience today as clearly as they did to his listeners in the Bible Training College and the YMCA huts on the desert outside Cairo when this century was young.
On March 3, 1917, Chambers wrote in his Egypt diary: “Yesterday in introducing me to a missionary from India, Mr. Swan called me ‘the apostle of the haphazard,’ and I do not know but what it is an apt tag for me. God’s order does seem to me to come in the haphazard, and we partake of His order as we discern Him in the common ‘bread and wine’ of ordinary experience.”
At the time, he had no idea that his own life would end suddenly in a few months. Nor could he know the extent to which God would exponentially increase the scope of his spoken words after his death.
Chambers once said: “Many of us are serving our own ends and Jesus Christ cannot help Himself to our lives; if I am abandoned to Jesus, I have no ends of my own to serve. Paul said, ‘I know how to be abased’ … because the mainspring of his life was devotion to Jesus.”
The same could be said of Chambers himself. It was not his natural winsomeness or gifts, but a deeper, spiritual quality that has enabled him to speak forcefully to this century.
Who was Oswald Chambers? In my search I found he was many things to people—artist, teacher, husband, father, friend. But above all, in solitude or service, he was someone wholly and joyfully abandoned to God.
David C. McCasland is a free-lance writer and the author of Oswald Chambers: Abandoned to God (Discovery House).
