Foreword
Foreword
Oswald Chambers’ closest friends knew him as a person for whom prayer was a natural and joyful aspect of everyday life. In 1912, while serving as interim pastor for a church in Dunstable, England, Oswald would arrive on Saturday morning for his weekend of ministry. He began by taking several young men from the church for a hike. “Those walks!” wrote one of the participants. “Happy talk, jokes, tales, then—‘Off with your hats, it is good to pray everywhere,’ and there would follow brief prayer.”
A student at the Bible Training College in London, where Oswald was Principal, recalled walking with Chambers one evening through a little country village. “He just very naturally stopped and prayed, asking for God’s blessing on the village,” she said, “and it seemed so like what Our Lord would have done when He was on earth.”
In late October 1915, Oswald Chambers arrived in Egypt to serve as a Y.M.C.A. chaplain during World War I. A few days later he announced that there would be a week-night religious service in their camp just outside Cairo. Skeptics told him no one would come because the soldiers just wanted to write letters, smoke, play cards and enjoy refreshments from the canteen. Religion was for Sunday morning. But on November 4, 400 men packed the large hut to hear Chambers speak on the topic, “What Is the Good of Prayer?” That message is the first chapter in this book.
“It is only when a man flounders beyond any grip of himself and cannot understand things that he really prays,” he told the troops, many of whom had cried out to God for the first time during the war. “When a man is at his wits’ end, it is not a cowardly thing to pray, it is the only way to get in touch with Reality.”
Chambers has been called a mystic, but his words and actions reveal him as spiritual realist who believed that prayer was not a means of getting things from God, but a way of getting to know God Himself. In If You Will Ask he challenges us to enter a new dimension of communion with our Heavenly Father, and to discover that “the good of praying is that it gets us to know God and enables God to perform His order through us.”