Where to start? It’s always hard to share a few quotes from a book that is so rich, but I hope these fews quotes will not diminish the depth of Oswald Chambers’ wisdom. These are just a very few of the outstanding quotes from God’s Workmanship (you can read my full book review by clicking here).
“Whenever I say, ‘I want to reason this thing out before I can trust,’ I will never trust. The reasoning out and the perfection of knowledge come after the response to God has been made.”
“We can never become God’s people by thinking, but we must think as God’s people. … Intellect is meant to be the handmaid of God, not the dictator to God. … We have to work out, not our redemption, but our human appreciation of our redemption. We owe it to God that we refuse to have rusty brains.”
“Separating myself from other people is the greatest means of producing deception because there is nothing to clash against me. Immediately people clash against me I know whether my beautiful thinking really expresses ‘me,’ or is a garment that disguises the real ‘me.’ If my actual life is not in agreement with my thinking the danger is that I exclude myself from actualities which bring home to me the knowledge of what I am, in spite of what I think. ‘I am a Christian worker and must put on this garb!’ That is sanctimonious jargon; the only thing that will hold me right is a personal relationship to Jesus, and that life is essentially simple, there is no break into secular and sacred, the one merges into the other, exactly as it did in the life of our Lord.”
“I want to ask a very personal question—How much do you want to be delivered from? You say, ‘I want to be delivered from wrong-doing’—then you don’t need to come to Jesus Christ. ‘I want to walk in the right way according to the judgment of men’—then you don’t need Jesus Christ. But some heart cries out—‘I want, God knows I want, that Jesus Christ should do in me all He said He would do.’ How many of us ‘want’ like that? God grant that this ‘want’ may increase until it swamps every other desire of heart and life.”
“When you are baptized with the Holy Ghost, there is only One you see, One you love, One you live for from early morning till late at night, One you die for. Every thought is gripped and held enthralled by the Master of human destiny, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the whole life is devoted to Him.”
“All that I want to possess without the power to give, is of the nature of sin. … I cannot rob God of anything, but I rob myself of God every time I stick to what I possess.”
“What kind of attitude have we got toward Jesus Christ? are we dictating to Him in pious phraseology what we intend to let Him do in us, or letting His life be manifested in our mortal flesh as we obey?”
“‘The Truth’ is our Lord Himself; ‘the whole truth’ is the inspired Scripture interpreting the Truth to us; and ‘nothing but the truth’ is the Holy Spirit, ‘the Spirit of truth,’ efficaciously regenerating and sanctifying us, and guiding us into ‘all the truth.’”
“When I am rightly related to God, the more I love the more blessing does He pour out on other lives. The reward of love is the capacity to pour out more love all the time. … I surrender myself—not because it is bad, self is the best thing I have got, and I give it to God; then self-realization is lost in God-realization.”
“Another demand God makes of His children is that they believe not only that He is not bewildered by the confused hubbub of the nations, but that He is the abiding Factor in the hubbub.”
“God never hears prayer because a man is in earnest; He hears and answers prayer that is on the right platform—we have ‘boldness to enter into the holy place by the blood of Jesus’ (rv), and by no other way. It is not our agony and our distress, but our childlike confidence in God.”
“The evidence of the new creation in me is that I submit to God more and more easily, surrender to Him more and more readily. …God does the supernatural re-creating and the setting free of the will, I have to do the doing.”
“You can only be made a Christian by a miracle, and you can stop at any point you like. ‘I don’t intend to go through this’—and you don’t need to; but it will be a terrific awakening when you see Jesus and realize that you prevented His getting glory in your life.”
“People say they are tired of life; no man was ever tired of life; the truth is that we are tired of being half dead while we are alive. What we need is to be transfigured by the incoming of a great and new life.”
“Resting in the Lord does not depend upon external circumstances, but on the relationship of the life of God in me to God Himself. Fussing generally ends in sin. We imagine that a little anxiety and worry is an indication of how wise we really are; it may be an indication of how wicked we really are. ‘Come unto Me,’ says Jesus, ‘and I will give you rest.’ Do Jesus Christ’s words apply to me? Does He really know my circumstances? Fretting is sinful if you are a child of God. Get back to God and tell Him with shame that you have been bolstering up that stupid soul of yours with the idea that your circumstances are too much for Him. Ask Him to forgive you and say, ‘Lord, I take Thee into my calculation as the biggest factor NOW!’”
“Have you ever realized that God challenges the saints to a tremendous conflict, the conflict of believing the Gospel in the face of an indifferent world? It is easy to say we believe in God as long as we remain in the little world we choose to live in; but get out into the great world of facts, the noisy world where people are absolutely indifferent to you, where your message is nothing more than a crazy tale belonging to a bygone age, can you believe God there?”
I think we in the church may have it backward. We are far too quick to judge the success of a church by how many people “came to church on Sunday.”
Craig T. Owens 