Quotes from Oswald Chambers

Jesus is saying that the greatest concern of life is to place our relationship with God first, and everything else second. It is one of the most difficult, yet critical, disciplines of the Christian life to allow the Holy Spirit to bring us into absolute harmony with the teaching of Jesus in these verses.

The most important rule for us is to concentrate on keeping our lives open to God. Let everything else including work, clothes, and food be set aside.

God reveals in John 17 that His purpose is not just to answer our prayers, but that through prayer we might come to discern His mind.

Worrying always results in sin. We tend to think that a little anxiety and worry are simply an indication of how wise we really are, yet it is actually a much better indication of just how wicked we are. Fretting rises from our determination to have our own way. Our Lord never worried and was never anxious, because His purpose was never to accomplish His own plans but to fulfill God's plans.

Prayer is not an exercise, it is the life of the saint. Beware of anything that stops the offering up of prayer. "Pray without ceasing"—maintain the childlike habit of offering up prayer in your heart to God all the time.

When we are in an unhealthy condition either physically or emotionally, we always look for thrills in life. In our physical life this leads to our efforts to counterfeit the work of the Holy Spirit; in our emotional life it leads to obsessions and to the destruction of our morality; and in our spiritual life, if we insist on pursuing only thrills, on mounting up "with wings like eagles" (Isaiah 40:31), it will result in the destruction of our spirituality.

It is much better to fulfill the purpose of God in your life by discerning His will than it is to perform great acts of self-sacrifice.

Faith based on experience is not faith; faith based on God's revealed truth is the only faith there is.

The fact that it doesn't matter much to you may mean that it matters a great deal to God. Nothing should be considered a trivial matter by a child of God. How much longer are we going to prevent God from teaching us even one thing? But He keeps trying to teach us and He never loses patience.

When we become certain that God is going to work in a particular way, He will never work in that way again.

the greatest dissipater of our relationship to God is personal sympathy and personal prejudice.

His agony is the basis of the simplicity of our salvation.