Oswald Chambers was a brilliant, God-inspired man! In his book The Moral Foundations Of Life (you can read my book review by clicking here), he combines two of his favorite topics: Christianity and psychology. I shared some of his quotes in this book on the topic of thinking (you can read those by clicking here). Below are some additional quotes on the Christian life.
“You can never argue anyone into the Kingdom of Heaven, you cannot argue anyone anywhere. The only result of arguing is to prove to your own mind that you are right and the other fellow wrong. You cannot argue for truth; but immediately Incarnate Truth is presented, a want awakens in the soul which only God can meet.”
“When I see Jesus Christ I simply want to be what He wants me to be.”
“To tell a man who is down and out to get up and do the right thing can never help him; but when once Jesus Christ is presented to him there is a reflected wish to be what Jesus wants him to be.”
“Only a spiritually ignorant person tries to be a Christian. Study the life of Jesus Christ and see what Christianity means, and you will find you cannot be a Christian by trying; you must be born into the life before you can live it. There are a great many people trying to be Christians; they pray and long and fast and consecrate, but it is nothing but imitation, it has no life in it.”
“We are only free when the Son sets us free; but we are free to choose whether or not we will be made free.”
“The life of a saint reveals a quietness at the heart of things, there is something firm and dependable, because the Lord is the strength of the life.”
“The characteristic of a Christian is that he has the right not to insist on his rights.”
“The Holy Spirit does not become our spirit; He invades our spirit and lifts our personality into a right relationship with God, and that means we can begin now to work out what God has worked in. … Absolute almighty ability is packed into our spirit, and to say ‘can’t,’ if we have received the Holy Spirit, is unconscious blasphemy.”
“Salvation is sudden, but the working out of salvation in our life is never sudden. It is moment by moment, here are a little and there a little. The Holy Spirit educates us down to the scruple.”
“Our conduct with men is measured by the way God has dealt with us, not by what men think of us.”
“The majority of us waste time and want to encroach on eternity. … An hour, or half an hour, of daily attention to and meditation on our own spiritual life is the secret of progress.”
“‘But my difficulties are so enormous.’ Thank God they are! The bigger the difficulty, the more amazing is your profit to Jesus Christ as you draw on His supernatural grace.”
“Watch human nature; we are so built that if we do not get thrilled in the right way, we will get thrilled in the wrong. If we are without the thrill of communion with God, we will try to get thrilled by the devil, or by some concoction of human ingenuity.”
“Take any of the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount and you will find it is never put on the ground that because a man is right with me, therefore I will be the same to him, but always on the ground of a right relationship to Jesus Christ first, and then the showing of that same relationship to others.”
“When our eyes are fixed on Jesus Christ we begin to see qualities blossoming in the lives of others that we never saw there before.”
“We are not here to be specimens of what God can do, but to have our life so he hid with Christ in God that our Lord’s words will be true of us, that men beholding our good works will glorify our Father in Heaven. There was no ‘show business’ in the life of the Son of God, and there is to be no ‘show business’ in the life of the saint.”
I am just completing a series of messages at my church on the Ten Commandments. This was no small undertaking, and one that I undertook with great reverence. I knew I needed some scholarly resources to guide my study time, and there is none who fits the bill better than J.I. Packer and his work Keeping The Ten Commandments.
Craig T. Owens 