Craig T. Owens

So Send I You is a collection of lectures Oswald Chambers delivered to students who felt a call to missions work. But Chambers made clear that every Christian is a missionary—“A missionary and a Christian ought to be one and the same.” Here are a few more quotes from this challenging book.

“It is God who saves men; we have to do the discipling after they are saved.”

“Our Lord calls to no special work; He calls to Himself. Pray to the Lord of the harvest, and He will engineer your circumstances and send you out.”

“Our Lord’s word ‘go’ simply means ‘live,’ and Acts 1:8 describes the ‘going.’ Jesus did not say to the disciples—‘Go into Jerusalem, go into Judea, go into Samaria, go into the uttermost part of the earth’; but—‘You shall be My witnesses’ in all these places: He undertakes to establish the goings. So many people are obsessed with this idea—‘What are you going to do?’ I hope none of us are going to do anything: I hope we are going to be what He wants us to be.”

“We adapt the New Testament to suit our own ideas; consequently we look on Jesus Christ as One Who assists us in our enterprises. The New Testament idea is that Jesus Christ is the absolute Lord over His disciples.”

“One way in which satan comes as an angel of light to Christians today is by telling them there is no need to use their minds. We must use our minds; we must keep the full power of our intellect ablaze for God on any subject that awakens us in our study of His Word.”

“Unless the missionary knows God and trusts in Him entirely, he will step down to a lower level and compromise, and tell the people they need not do certain things in exactly the way that Jesus indicates. But if he stands true to God, he will preach the truth, at whatever cost to the converts. No nervous system can stand that strain, no sensitiveness of mind can stand that test, nothing but the Holy Ghost can stand it, because He has the mind of God.”

“Loyalty to the commission [see Matthew 28:19-20] means, first of all, that the missionary sets himself to find out all that his Lord taught. There is not a greater test for loyal concentration than that. Jesus did not say—‘Teach salvation,’ or ‘teach sanctification,’ or ‘teach divine healing,’ but—‘Teach whatsoever I have commanded you.’ … A missionary is not sent by Jesus Christ to do medical work, educational work, industrial work; all that is part of the ordinary duty of life, and a missionary ought to be so equipped that he does these things naturally. But Jesus Christ never sends His disciples to do these things; He sends His disciples to teach, to ‘make disciples of all the nations.’”

“God does not do anything with us, only through us; consequently the one thing God estimates in His servants is the work of the Holy Spirit.”

“The real center of the disciple’s devotion is watching with Jesus [see Matthew 26:38]. When once we have learned to watch with Him, the thought of self is not kept down because it is not there to keep down; self-effacement is complete. Self has been effaced by the deliberate giving up to another self in sovereign preference, and the manifestation of the life in the actual world of things is—‘I am not my own, but His.’”

My full book review of So Send I You is here, and you can check out the first set of quotes I shared from So Send I You by clicking here. And be sure to check out my weekly series “Thursdays With Oswald” where I share longer passages from his book I am currently reading.