43. Oswald Chambers (1874–1917)
I feel I shall be buried for a time, hidden away in obscurity; then suddenly I shall flame out, do my work, and be gone.”
Those words were spoken by Oswald Chambers, author of My Utmost for His Highest and more than thirty other books that never seem to grow old. His statement was prophetic—except that the flame God lit is still burning brightly, thanks to the printed page.
When you review the life of Oswald Chambers, you can well understand why a friend once introduced him as “the apostle of the haphazard.” Like the wind Jesus spoke of in John 3:8, Chambers came and went in a seemingly erratic fashion; yet there was a definite plan in his life, and he was greatly used of God. He is a good reminder to boxed-in Christians that God sometimes bypasses our date-books and management-by-objectives and does the surprising, even the unexpected, in our lives.
Oswald Chambers was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, on July 24, 1874. His parents had been baptized by Charles Spurgeon, who had also ordained Chambers’ father into Baptist ministry. While the family was living in London, teenage Oswald gave his heart to Christ.
He and his father were walking home from a meeting conducted by Spurgeon, and Oswald admitted that he would have given himself to the Lord had the opportunity been given. “You can do it now, my boy!” said his father, and right there, the boy trusted Christ and was born again. He was baptized by Rev. J. T. Briscoe and became a member of the Rye Lane Baptist Church in London.
A gifted artist, Chambers entered art school in 1892 and three years later went to Edinburgh to continue his studies. In 1896, he felt a definite call to the ministry, and the following year he entered the Dunoon Training College in Scotland. Not only did he have an outstanding record as a student, but he remained after graduation to teach. He had a special interest in philosophy and psychology, and taught those courses.
But in November 1901, Chambers had a deep experience with the Lord that transformed his life. He called it a baptism of the Holy Spirit, a term I prefer to apply only to the believer’s experience at conversion (see 1 Cor. 12:13). This special filling of the Spirit gave him new insights into both the Christian life and the courses he was then teaching. In his ministry of the Word, he reveals both the philosopher and the psychologist.
He left school in 1905 and began an itinerant ministry in Britain, the United States, and Japan. He taught at the Oriental Missionary Society Bible School in Tokyo, and then he became a “missioner” for the League of Prayer that had been founded by Reader Harris. He was married on May 25, 1910, to Gertrude Hobbs, a devoted woman who was also an expert stenographer, a fact that would mean much in the years to come.
Chambers felt there was a need for a Bible college in Britain that would emphasize personal Christian living and not just education and practical training. With the help of some friends, he founded the Bible Training College at Clapham. The school operated on faith and prayer. When a friend offered to endow the school, Chambers refused the offer saying, “No, if you do that it will probably go on longer than God means it to.”
He felt led to offer himself as a military chaplain during World War I, and on October 9, 1915, he sailed with the troops for Zeitoun, Egypt, where he ministered until his untimely death on November 15, 1917. He had appendicitis and did not know it; peritonitis set in and his life could not be saved.
At this point his wife Gertrude (whom everybody called Biddy) and his daughter Kathleen enter the picture and become very important. Biddy remained at their home in Zeitoun and ministered for about a year. Then she and her daughter returned to England. Over the years, she had taken stenographic reports of her husband’s messages and, at the request of many friends, began to edit and publish them. Oswald Chambers never actually wrote any of his books, although his name is on them. He spoke every word, but it was his wife, and later his daughter, who prepared the manuscripts and mothered each book through the presses. How grateful we are to God that Chambers married an expert stenographer!
His most famous book is My Utmost for His Highest, a daily devotional book that not every Christian can immediately appreciate. I recall telling a mature Christian friend many years ago that I was getting nothing out of the book. “Set it aside for a time,” she counseled. “It’s something you have to grow into.” She was right: the problem was not the complexity of the book but the spiritual immaturity of the reader. In later years, I have come to appreciate this classic devotional book, and I learn more from it as the years go by.
Too many devotional books are finished with one reading, because they do not get down to the fundamental truths that keep expanding into more truth. A good book is like a seed: it produces fruit that has in it seed for more fruit. It is not a picture on the wall; it is a window that invites us to wider horizons.
Each time I read a page from My Utmost for His Highest, I am reminded of a forgotten nugget, or I see something new that previously had eluded me. It is a book to grow with and, as such, it is unique.
All the writings of Oswald Chambers have their value. I must confess that I get a bit tired of his alliteration, some of which seems forced, but I have learned to look beyond it. I have especially appreciated his book on Abraham, Not Knowing Whither. The Philosophy of Sin has some penetrating insights in it. Chambers was similar to F. B. Meyer in his ability to diagnose spiritual problems and give biblical solutions. Biblical Psychology reveals Chambers the amateur psychologist, but the emphasis is on the Bible and not the psychology. His studies in Job, Baffled to Fight Better, are brief but rich, and very rewarding.
The official biography, Oswald Chambers: His Life and Work, was compiled and edited by his wife. She quoted from his journals, added her own comments, and quoted from material given her by his many friends and associates in ministry. Like Chambers himself, this book is a bit haphazard, and the reader can easily lose the chronological trail. But the many quotations from Chambers, and the revelation of his personality, make its reading worthwhile. It was published in London in 1933 by Simpkin Marshall, Ltd.
What kind of a man was Oswald Chambers? For one thing, he was not a brittle and pious “saint” who lived aloof from the world and the people around him. He was very much alive, and he had a marvelous sense of humor. One man wrote to Mrs. Chambers that he had been “shocked at what I then considered his undue levity. He was the most irreverent Reverend I had ever met!”
But Chambers gave himself totally to the Lord, and this included his sense of humor. He once wrote in his journal, “Lord, keep me radiantly and joyously Thine.” En route to Egypt, he conducted services on the ship and brought his humor into the messages.
“Ah, I see,” said one of the men, “your jokes and lightheartedness plough the land, then you put in the seed.” You could not find a better philosophy of humor in the pulpit than that.
Chambers emphasized holy living, but he did not divorce it from the practical affairs of life. “I am realizing more and more the futility of separating a life into secular and sacred. It is all His.” Those words summarize his position perfectly. He wrote to a friend, “You can be much more for Him than ever you know by just being yourself and relying on Him. . . . Keep praying and playing and being yourself.” He felt that his own greatest ministry was that of intercessory prayer.
A gifted teacher, he was careful that the truths he taught were meaningful in his own life. “Views from propagandist teaching are borrowed plumes,” he said. “Teaching is meant to stir up thinking, not to store with goods from the outside.” That is good counsel in this age when many teachers and preachers manufacture their lessons and sermons out of borrowed nuggets instead of mining their own gold and refining it in experience.
Chambers sought to present truth in ways that would excite new interest in his listeners. One listener said, “I wondered, as I drank in his message, whether I had the same Bible as he had. The written Word became a Living Word, and as I obeyed it my whole life was altered.”
He would have agreed with A. W. Tozer that the only real world is the world of truth found in the Bible. He wrote: “The Actual world of things and the Real world of Truth have to be made into one in personal experience.” Too many Christians try to avoid this creative tension by going either to extreme isolation from the world or to extreme preoccupation with the world.
Oswald Chambers loved books and read widely. The biography contains references to many authors of different theological positions, from Alexander Maclaren and John Henry Jowett to Emmanuel Swedenborg and Ralph Waldo Emerson. “My books!” he wrote to a friend. “I cannot tell you what they are to me—silent, wealthy, loyal lovers. . . . I do thank God for my books with every fiber of my being. Friends that are ever true and ever your own.” He always integrated his wide reading with the Word of God, which he considered the only test for spiritual truth.
In many respects, Chambers was not in tune with the general spirit of evangelical Christianity in his day. On his way to Egypt, he wrote in his journal: “How unproselytizing God is! I feel the ‘soul winning campaign’ is often at heart the apotheosis [glorification] of commercialism, the desire to see so much result from so much expenditure. The ordinary evangelical spirit is less and less congenial to my own soul.” His writings are a good antidote to the success philosophy that has invaded the church in our own day. He said that “the ‘soul saving passion’ as an aim must cease and merge into the passion for Christ, revealing itself in holiness in all human relationships.” In other words, soul-winning is not something we do, it is something we are, twenty-four hours a day, and we live for souls because we love Christ. No counting trophies in his ministry.
He was not afraid to accept truth no matter what channel God might use to give it to him. He told students to “soak, soak, soak in philosophy and psychology. . . . It is ignorance of the subjects on the part of ministers and workers that has brought our evangelical theology to such a sorry plight.”1 Both in the pulpit and classroom, and as a personal counselor, Chambers revealed his keen understanding of the Bible, the human heart and mind, and the world of thought. He was able to blend these disciplines into a total ministry that God greatly used.
Let me share a few quotations from Oswald Chambers that, I trust, will whet your appetite for more.
You can never give another person that which you have found, but you can make him homesick for what you have.
If we are saved and sanctified, God guides us by our ordinary choices, and if we are going to choose what He does not want, He will check, and we must heed.
Every doctrine that is not imbedded in the Cross of Jesus will lead astray.
Stop having a measuring rod for other people. There is always one fact more in every man’s case about which we know nothing.
It takes a long time to realize the danger of being an amateur providence, that is, interfering with God’s order for others.
Our Lord’s first obedience was to the will of His Father, not to the needs of men; the saving of men was the natural outcome of His obedience to the Father.2
One of his sayings that is underlined in my copy of My Utmost for His Highest has been especially meaningful to me.
The snare in Christian work is to rejoice in successful service, to rejoice in the fact that God has used you. . . . If you make usefulness the test, then Jesus Christ was the greatest failure that ever lived. The lodestar of the saint is God Himself, not estimated usefulness. It is the work that God does through us that counts, not what we do for Him.3
Mrs. Chambers died in 1966, just after she had begun to prepare the thirty-second volume for the publishers, and her daughter completed the book. How grateful to God we should be for Biddy and Kathleen’s unselfish labor of love over the years, in sharing the ministry of Oswald Chambers with us. His body is buried in the cemetery in Old Cairo, his spirit is rejoicing in the presence of God, and his ministry goes on triumphantly.
Perhaps one final quotation will sum up his philosophy of the Christian life. “Never make a principle out of your own experience; let God be as original with other people as He is with you.”
He may have been the apostle of the haphazard, but Oswald Chambers can assist any sincere Christian in ordering his life according to the will of God.