Oswald Chambers Quotes

Be careful that you don't become a hypocrite by spending all your time trying to get others right with God before you worship Him yourself.

Do not have as your motive the desire to be known as a praying man. Get an inner chamber in which to pray where no one knows you are praying shut the door and talk to God in secret.

God did not direct His call to Isaiah— Isaiah overheard God saying, ". . . who will go for Us?" The call of God is not just for a select few but for everyone. Whether I hear God’s call or not depends on the condition of my ears, and exactly what I hear depends upon my spiritual attitude.

We have to take the first step as though there were no God. It is no use to wait for God to help us, He will not: but immediately we arise we find He is there.

Pray because you have a Father not because it quietens you and give Him time to answer.

You cannot have a moral holiday and remain moral, nor can you have a spiritual holiday and remain spiritual. God wants you to be entirely his, and this means that you have to watch to keep yourself fit. It takes a tremendous amount of time. Some of us expect to “clear the numberless ascensions”* in about two minutes.

The Christian who is truly intimate with Jesus will never draw attention to himself but will only show the evidence of a life where Jesus is completely in control.

Prayer is not only asking it is an attitude of heart that produces an atmosphere in which asking is perfectly natural and Jesus says "every one that asketh receiveth."

Tolerating a wrong attitude toward another person causes you to follow the spirit of the devil, no matter how saintly you are.

If sympathy is all that human beings need, then the Cross of Christ is an absurdity and there is absolutely no need for it. What the world needs is not "a little bit of love," but major surgery. If you think you are helping lost people with your sympathy and understanding, you are a traitor to Jesus Christ. You must have a right-standing relationship with Him yourself, and pour your life out in helping others in His way— not in a human way that ignores God.

The call of God is a call according to the nature of God; where we go in obedience to that call depends entirely on the providential circumstances which God engineers, and is not of any moment. The danger is to fit the call of God into the idea of our own discernment and say, “God called me there.” If we say so and stick to it, then it is good-bye to the development of the life of God in us.

At heart men are antagonistic to the lordship of Jesus Christ. It is not antagonism to creeds or points of view, but antagonism encountered for My sake. Many of us awaken antagonism by our way of stating things; we have to distinguish between being persecuted for some notion of our own and being persecuted “for My sake.

Our ordinary and reasonable service to God may actually compete against our total surrender to Him.

We are not built for mountains and dawns and artistic affinities; they are for moments of inspiration, that is all. We are built for the valley, for the ordinary stuff of life, and this is where we have to prove our mettle. A false Christianity takes us up on the mount and we want to stay there. But what about the devil-possessed world? Oh, let it go to hell! We are having a great time up here.

The best measure of a spiritual life is not its ecstasies but its obedience.

The deadliest Pharisaism today is not hypocrisy, but unconscious unreality.

We become side-tracked if we make physical health our aim and imagine that because we are children of God we shall always be perfectly well.

God's "nothings" are His most positive answers. We have to stay on God and wait. Never try to help God to fulfill His word.

As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.

God does not exist to answer our prayers but by our prayers we come to discern the mind of God.

Intercessory prayer for one who is sinning prevails. God says so! The will of the man prayed for does not come into question at all he is connected with God by prayer and prayer on the basis of the Redemption sets the connection working and God gives life.

We have to pray with our eyes on God not on the difficulties.

Don't forget to pray today because God did not forget to wake you up this morning.

It is by no haphazard chance that in every age men have risen early to pray. The first thing that marks decline in spiritual life is our relationship to the early morning.

Our Lord never referred to unanswered prayer he taught that prayers are always answered. He ever implied that prayers were answered rightly because of the Heavenly Father's wisdom.

To say that 'prayer changes things' is not as close to the truth as saying, 'prayer changes me and then I change things.' God has established things so that prayer, on the basis of redemption, changes the way a person looks at things.

your god may be your little Christian habit - the habit of prayer or Bible reading at certain times of your day. Watch how your Father will upset your schedule if you begin to worship your habit instead of what the habit symbolizes. We say, 'I can't do that right now; this is my time alone with God.' No, this is your time alone with your habit.

Never allow anything to divert you from your insight into Jesus Christ. It is the true test of whether you are spiritual or not. To be unspiritual means that other things have a growing fascination for you. Since mine eyes have looked on Jesus, I’ve lost sight of all beside, So enchained my spirit’s vision, Gazing on the Crucified.

The purpose of prayer is to reveal the presence of God equally present all the time in every condition.

Every time we pray our horizon is altered our attitude to things is altered not sometimes but every time and the amazing thing is that we don't pray more.

My worth to God publicly is measured by what I really am in my private life.” Oswald Chambers

Paul was devoted to a Person, not a cause.

Let the attitude of your life be a continual willingness to "go out" in dependence upon God, and your life will have a sacred and inexpressible charm about it that is very satisfying to Jesus. You must learn to "go out" through your convictions, creeds, or experiences until you come to the point in your faith where there is nothing between yourself and God.

... God loved me not because I was lovable, but because it was His nature to do so.

Discouragement is disillusioned self-love, and self-love may be love for my devotion to Jesus— not love for Jesus Himself.

I want to tell you a growing conviction with me, and that is that as we obey the leadings of the Spirit of God, we enable God to answer the prayers of other people. I mean that our lives, my life, is the answer to someone’s prayer, prayed perhaps centuries ago.It is more and more impossible to me to have programmes and plans because God alone has the plan, and our plans are only apt to hinder Him, and make it necessary for Him to break them up. I have the unspeakable knowledge that my life is the answer to prayers, and that God is blessing me and making me a blessing entirely of His sovereign grace and nothing to do with my merits, saving as I am bold enough to trust His leading and not the dictates of my own wisdom and common sense.

What hinders me from hearing is that I am taken up with other things. It is not that I will not hear God, but I am not devoted in the right place. I am devoted to things, to service, to convictions, and God may say what He likes but I do not hear Him.

We tend to use prayer as a last resort, but God wants it to be our first line of defense. We pray when there's nothing else we can do, but God wants us to pray before we do anything at all.Most of us would prefer, however, to spend our time doing something that will get immediate results. We don't want to wait for God to resolve matters in His good time because His idea of 'good time' is seldom in sync with ours.

Never look for justice in this world, but never cease to give it.

There is no need to get to a place of prayer pray wherever you are.

The proof that our relationship is right with God is that we do our best whether we feel inspired or not.

Jesus doesn't bring anything up from the wells of human nature--He brings them down from above.

When you are in the dark, listen, and God will give you a very precious message for someone else once you are back in the light.

Worship is giving God the best that He has given you. Be careful what you do with the best you have, Whenever you get a blessing from God, give it back to Him as a love gift. Take time to meditate before God and offer the blessing back to Him in a deliberate act of worship.

No man by mere high human wisdom would dare undertake a step for Jesus’ sake unless he knows that the Holy Spirit has directly spoken to him; and until He comes, I shall not go.

One great effect of prayer is that it enables the soul to command the body. By obedience I make my body submissive to my soul but prayer puts my soul in command of my body.

There is no joy in the soul that has forgotten what God prizes.

There are vast areas of stubbornness and ignorance the Holy Spirit has to reveal in each of us, but it can only be done when Jesus gets us alone...Jesus cannot teach us anything until we quiet all our intellectual questions and get alone with Him.

If through a broken heart God can bring His purposes to pass in the world, then thank Him for breaking your heart.

It is a solemn thing, and no small scandal in the Kingdom, to see God's children starving while actually seated at the Father's table.

You may often have to watch Jesus Christ wreck a life before He saves it.

We must continually maintain an adventurous attitude toward Him, despite any potential personal risk.

What a blessed habit I have found my prayer list, morning by morning, it takes me via the Throne of all Grace straight to the intimate personal heart of each one mentioned here, and I know that He Who is not prescribed by time and geography answers immediately.

If we rely on the Holy Spirit we shall find that our prayers become more and more inarticulate and when they are inarticulate reverence grows deeper and deeper.

If you open your mouth in the dark, you will speak while in the wrong mood--darkness is the time to listen.

When we pray "in the Name of Jesus" the answers are in accordance with His nature and if we think our prayers are unanswered it is because we are not interpreting the answer along this line.

To follow Jesus today is to follow a madman according to the ideals of present day civilization. We have the idea that our civilization is God-ordained, whereas it has been built up by ourselves. We have made a thousand and one necessities until our system of civilized life is as cast iron, and then we apologize to the Lord for not following Him.

Spiritual maturity is not reached by the passing of the years, but by obedience to the will of God. Some people mature into an understanding of God’s will more quickly than others because they obey more readily; they more readily sacrifice the life of nature to the will of God.

Some saints cannot do menial work while maintaining a saintly attitude because they feel such service is beneath their dignity.

You say "But He has not answered." He has He is so near to you that His silence is the answer. His silence is big with terrific meaning that you cannot understand yet but presently you will.