Oswald Chambers is best known for My Utmost for His Highness. Those daily devotionals, though, are a small portion of Chambers’ sayings, teachings, and sermons that his wife recorded: shorthand, verbatim, and published. The Complete Works of Oswald Chambers fill almost 1500 double-column pages of an 8 x 10 ½ book. Included in those writings are short sentences or daily thoughts that he posted on a notice board for soldiers who camped in the desert outside Cairo, Egypt. Although written and posted 100 years ago (1915-1917) many of those sayings and other Chambers quotations are still relevant today.

• Don’t let the sense of failure corrupt your new action.
• Measure your growth in grace by your sensitiveness to sin.
• There is a purpose in every life that is in God’s keeping of which we know little, but which He will fulfil if we let Him rightly relate us to Himself.
• Worry is nothing in the world but personal irritation with God because I cannot see what He is after—only I don’t call it that, I talk about “an overwhelming burden of care.”
• We can choke God’s word with a yawn; we can hinder the time that should be spent with God by remembering we have other things to do. “I haven’t time!” Of course you have time! Take time, strangle some other interests and make time to realize that the center of power in your life is the Lord Jesus Christ and His Atonement.
• God rarely rebukes us for our impulsive plans because those plans work their own distress.
• Whenever you come in contact with the great destructive sins in other lives, be reverent with what you don’t understand. There are facts in each life you know nothing about and God says: “Leave him to Me.”
• It is easier to stand true to a testimony which is moldy with age because it has the dogmatic ring about it that people agree with, than to talk from your last moment of contact with God.
• Our Lord was never impatient. He simply planted seed thoughts in the disciples’ minds and surrounded them with the atmosphere of His own life. We get impatient and take men by the scruff of the neck and say: “You must believe this and that.” You cannot make a man see moral truth by persuading his intellect. “When He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He shall guide you into all the truth.”
• Put all “supposing” on one side and dwell in the shadow of the Almighty . Deliberately tell God that you will not fret about that thing. All our fret and worry is caused by calculating without God.
• A river touches places of which its source knows nothing, and Jesus says if we have received of His fullness, however small the visible measure of our lives, out of us will flow the rivers that will bless to the uttermost parts of the earth. We have nothing to do with the out-flow— “This is the work of God that ye believe. . . .” God rarely allows a soul to see how great a blessing he is.^*

^*This material came from The Complete Works of Oswald Chambers (Oswald Chambers Publications Association, Limited; 2000.  Available at http://www.amazon.com/The-Complete-Works-Oswald-Chambers/dp/1572938412

Cover portrait and design by Jim Connelly Studios, ©2000.

Martha Hawn VanCise ©2015 www.signpostsonhightrails.com