I practically wear out my highlighter when I am reading Oswald Chambers, as there is so much rich content! I have already shared some quotes from his book The Love Of God (which you can read by clicking here). Here are a few more quotes…
“Do get out of your ears the noisy cries of the Christian world we are in—‘Do this and do that.’ Never! ‘Be this and that, then I will do through you,’ says Jesus.”
“In the natural world everything depends upon our taking the initiative, but if we are followers of God, we cannot take the initiative, we cannot choose our own work or say what we will do; we have not to find out at all, we have just to follow. … Everything Our Lord asks us to do is naturally frankly impossible to us. It is impossible for us to be the children of God naturally, to love our enemies, to forgive, to be holy, to be pure, and it is certainly impossible to us to follow God naturally; consequently the fundamental fact to recognize is that we must be born again.”
“Suppose Our Lord had measured His life by whether or not He was a blessing to others! Why, He was a ‘stone of stumbling’ to thousands, actually to His own neighbors, to His own nation, because through Him they blasphemed the Holy Ghost, and in His own country ‘He did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief’ (Matthew 13:58). If Our Lord had measured His life by its actual results, He would have been full of misery.”
“We get switched off when instead of following God we follow Christian work and workers.”
“God engineers our circumstances as He did those of His Son; all we have to do is to follow where He places us.”
“The way God’s life manifests itself in joy is in a peace which has no desire for praise. When a man delivers a message which he knows is the message of God, the witness to the fulfillment of the created purpose is given instantly, the peace of God settles down, and the man cares for neither praise nor blame from anyone.”
“If we make sin a theological question and not a question of actual deliverance, we become adherents to doctrine, and if we put doctrine first, we shall be hoodwinked before we know where we are.”
“The freedom of Jesus is never license, it is always liberty, and liberty means ability to fulfill the law of God. … If I am following God’s love as exhibited in the Lord Jesus Christ and He has made me free from within, I am so taken up with following Him that I will never take advantage of another child of God.”
“God does not give us the mind of Christ, He gives us the Spirit of Christ, and we have to see that the Spirit of Christ in us works through our brains in contact with actual life and that we form His mind. Jesus Christ did not become humbled—‘He humbled Himself’ [Philippians 2:5].”
“We are only what we are in the dark; all the rest is reputation. What God looks at is what we are in the dark—the imaginations of our minds; the thoughts of our heart; the habits of our bodies; these are the things that mark us in God’s sight.”
“The strain on a violin string when stretched to the uttermost gives it its strength; and the stronger the strain, the finer is the sound of our life for God, and He never strains more than we are able to bear. We say, ‘sorrow, disaster, calamity’; God says, ‘chastening,’ and it sounds sweet to Him though it is a discord in our ears.”
“Some of us are so amazingly lazy, so comfortably placed in life, that we get no inner winging. … If we put the body and the concerns of the body before the eternal weight of glory, we will never have any inner winging at all, we will always be asking God to patch up this old tabernacle and keep it in repair. But when the heart sees what God wants, and knows that the body must be willing to spend and be spent for that cause and that causes alone then the inner man gets wings.”
“If you think of suffering affliction you will begin to write your own epitaph, begin to dream of the kind of tombstone you would like. That is the wrong standpoint. Have your standpoint in the heavenlies, and you will not think of the afflictions but only of the marvelous way, God is working out the inner weight of glory all the time, and you will hail with delight the afflictions which our Lord tells us to expect (John 16:33), the afflictions of which James writes (James 1:2), and of which Peter writes (1 Peter 4:12).”
You can read my review of The Love Of God by clicking here.
I was asked the age-old question: Why is there suffering and pain? This is usually accompanied by the other often-pondered question: Why do bad things happen to good people?
Craig T. Owens 