Know-it-all prayers
The knowledge of where people are wrong is a hindrance to prayer, not an assistance. “I want to tell you of the difficulties so that you may pray intelligently.” The more you know the less intelligently you pray because you forget to believe that God can alter the difficulties.
—God’s Workmanship
Renunciation
Abandon to God is of more value than personal holiness.… When we are abandoned to God, He works through us all the time.
—My Utmost for His Highest
Sin’s root
The essence of sin is the refusal to recognise that we are accountable to God at all.
—The Moral Foundations of Life
Beyond me-ism
We are designed with a great capacity for God; and sin and our individuality are the things that keep us from getting at God. God delivers us from sin: we have to deliver ourselves from individuality; i.e., to present our natural life to God and sacrifice it until it is transformed into a spiritual life by obedience.
—My Utmost for His Highest
Only God satisfies
The man or woman who does not know God demands an infinite satisfaction from other human beings which they cannot give, and in the case of the man, he becomes tyrannical and cruel. It springs from this one thing, the human heart must have satisfaction, but there is only one Being Who can satisfy the last abyss of the human heart, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ.
—Shade of His Hand
Lost in drudgery
Most of us are spiritually inefficient because we cannot do certain things and remain spiritual. We can be spiritual in prayer meetings, in congenial spiritual society, in what is known as Christian work, but we cannot be spiritual in drudgery. We are all capable of being spiritual sluggards; if we live a sequestered life and continually don’t do what we ought to do, we can develop a spiritual life, but in actual things we are easily knocked out. We are trying to develop a life that is sanctified and holy but it is spiritually inefficient—it cannot wash feet, it cannot do secular things without being tainted.
—The Place of Help
No bill of rights
You will find nothing more searching than what the New Testament has to say with regard to the miserable, petty line of insisting on my rights. The Holy Ghost gives me power to forgo my rights.
—Run Today’s Race
Losing to win
The meaning of sacrifice is the deliberate giving of the best I have to God that He may make it His and mine for ever: if I cling to it, I lose it, and so does God.
—The Highest Good
Know your enemy
Knowledge of what sin is is in inverse ratio to its presence; only as sin goes do you realize what it is; when it is present you do not realize what it is because the nature of sin is that it destroys the capacity to know you sin.
—Biblical Ethics
Tough reading
If you are religious, it is easier to read some pious book than the Bible. The Bible treats you like human life does—roughly.
—Approved Unto God
God’s supreme love
In the Cross we may see the dimensions of Divine love. The Cross is not the cross of a man, but the exhibition of the heart of God. At the back of the wall of the world stands God with His arms outstretched, and every man driven there is driven into the arms of God. The Cross of Jesus is the supreme evidence of the love of God.
—The Place of Help
Denying the power
Beware of worshipping Jesus as the Son of God, and professing your faith in Him as the Saviour of the world, while you blaspheme Him by the complete evidence in your daily life that He is powerless to do anything in and through you.
—Disciples Indeed
Quotations were derived from the following collections: Oswald Chambers: The Best from All His Books, Vols. I and II, The Oswald Chambers Devotional Reader (Oliver Nelson, 1987, 1989, 1990), all chosen and edited by Harry Verploegh; and Prayer: A Holy Occupation, edited by Harry Verploegh (Discovery House, 1992).
