Quotes from Oswald Chambers

Once you have the right relationship with God through salvation and sanctification, remember that whatever your circumstances may be, you have been placed in them by God. And God uses the reaction of your life to your circumstances to fulfill His purpose, as long as you continue to "walk in the light as He is in the light" (1 John 1:7).

Whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two." Matthew 5:41     Our Lord's teaching can be summed up in this: the relationship that He demands for us is an impossible one unless He has done a supernatural work in us. Jesus Christ demands that His disciple does not allow even the slightest trace of resentment in his heart when faced with tyranny and injustice.

One of the most subtle burdens God ever put on us as saints is the burden of discernment concerning other souls. He reveals things in order that we may take the burden of the souls before Him and form the mind of Christ about them. It is not that we bring God into touch with our minds, but that we rouse ourselves until God is able to convey His mind to us about the one for whom we intercede.

I do not pray that You should take them out of the world, but that You should keep them from the evil one" (John 17:15). We are to be in the world but not of it—to be separated internally, not externally (see John 17:16).

Jealously guard your relationship with God. Jesus prayed "that they may be one just as We are one"—with nothing in between (John 17:22). Keep your whole life continually open to Jesus Christ. Don't pretend to be open with Him. Are you drawing your life from any source other than God Himself? If you are depending on something else as your source of freshness and strength, you will not realize when His power is gone.

One of the penalties of sin is our acceptance of it. It is not only God who punishes for sin, but sin establishes itself in the sinner and takes its toll.

O Lord, I have no inkling of Thy ways in external details, but I have the expectancy of Thy wonders soon to be. made visible. Lord, I look to Thee, how completely at rest I am, yet how free from seeing Thy way. Thou art God and I trust in Thee.

And if we make our own inability a stumbling block or an excuse not to be obedient, it means that we are telling God that there is something which He has not yet taken into account.

We seem to think that God wants us to give up things! God purified Abraham from this error, and the same process is at work in our lives. God never tells us to give up things just for the sake of giving them up, but He tells us to give them up for the sake of the only thing worth having, namely, life with Himself. It is a matter of loosening the bands that hold back our lives.

Paul was not given a message or a doctrine to proclaim. He was brought into a vivid, personal, overpowering relationship with Jesus Christ. Acts 26:16 is tremendously compelling "to make you a minister and a witness." There would be nothing there without a personal relationship. Paul was devoted to a Person, not to a cause. He was absolutely Jesus Christ's.

Ask God for what you want and do not be concerned about asking for the wrong thing, because as you draw ever closer to Him, you will cease asking for things altogether. "Your Father knows the things you have need of before you ask Him" (Matthew 6:8). Then why should you ask? So that you may get to know Him.

If you want to be of use to God, get rightly related to Jesus Christ and He will make you of use unconsciously every minute you live.