Leave the broken, irreversible past in God’s hands, and step out into the invincible future with Him.
– Oswald Chambers
Faith | Brokenness | The Future
Faith never knows where it is being led, but it loves and knows the One who is leading.
– Oswald Chambers
Faith | Leadership | Obedience
When it is a question of God’s almighty Spirit, never say, “I can’t.”
– Oswald Chambers
The Holy Spirit | Achievement
All of God’s people are ordinary people who have been made extraordinary by the purpose he has given them.
– Oswald Chambers
Obedience
There is no need to get to a place of prayer; pray wherever you are.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
Prayer is not an exercise, it is the life.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
The man or woman who does not know God demands an infinite satisfaction from other human beings which they cannot give, and in the case of the man, he becomes tyrannical and cruel. It springs from this one thing, the human heart must have satisfaction, but there is only one Being who can satisfy the last abyss of the human heart, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ.
– Oswald Chambers
The Heart | Jesus | Satisfaction
One of the most subtle burdens God ever puts on us as saints is this burden of discernment concerning other souls. He reveals things in order that we may take the burden of these 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.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer | Intercession | Discernment
We look upon prayer as a means of getting things for ourselves; The Bible idea of prayer is that we may get to know God Himself.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer | The Bible
In the midst of the awesomeness, a touch comes, and you know it is the right hand of Jesus Christ. You know it is not the hand of restraint, correction, nor chastisement, but the right hand of the Everlasting Father. Whenever His hand is laid upon you, it gives inexpressible peace and comfort, and the sense that “underneath are the everlasting arms,” (Deuteronomy 33:27) full of support, provision, comfort and strength.
– Oswald Chambers
Peace | Comfort | Chastisement
The one marvelous secret of a holy life lies not in imitating Jesus, but in letting the perfections of Jesus manifest themselves in my mortal flesh. Sanctification is “Christ in you.”… Sanctification is not drawing from Jesus the power to be holy; it is drawing from Jesus the holiness that was manifested in Him, and He manifests it in me.
– Oswald Chambers
Sanctification
Wait on God and He will work, but don’t wait in spiritual sulks because you cannot see an inch in front of you! Are we detached enough from our spiritual hysterics to wait on God? To wait is not to sit with folded hands, but to learn to do what we are told.
– Oswald Chambers
Patience
Perseverance is more than endurance. It is endurance combined with absolute assurance and certainty that what we are looking for is going to happen.
– Oswald Chambers
Perseverance | Endurance
Human fellowship can go to great lengths, but not all the way. Fellowship with God can go to all lengths.
– Oswald Chambers
Fellowship | God
Every now and again, Our Lord lets us see what we would be like if it were not for Himself; it is a justification of what He said – “Without Me you can do nothing.” That is why the bedrock of Christianity is personal, passionate devotion to the Lord Jesus.
– Oswald Chambers
Humility
The dearest friend on earth is a mere shadow compared to Jesus Christ.
– Oswald Chambers
Friendship | Jesus
Whenever the insistence is on the point that God answers prayer, we are off the track. The meaning of prayer is that we get hold of God, not of the answer.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
We have to pray with our eyes on God, not on the difficulties.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
Holiness, not happiness, is the chief end of man.
– Oswald Chambers
Holiness
A saint’s life is in the hands of God as a bow and arrow in the hands of an archer. God is aiming at something the saint cannot see; He stretches and strains, and every now and again the saint says, I cannot stand any more. But God does not heed; He goes on stretching until His purpose is in sight, then He lets fly.
– Oswald Chambers
Holiness
Worship is giving God the best that He has given you. Be careful what you do with the best you have. Whenever you get a blessing from God, give it back to Him as a love gift. Take time to meditate before God and offer the blessing back to Him in a deliberate act of worship. If you hoard a thing for yourself, it will turn into spiritual dry rot, as the manna did when it was hoarded. God will never let you hold a spiritual thing for yourself; it has to be given back to Him that He may make it a blessing to others.
– Oswald Chambers
Worship | Blessings | Stewardship
To choose to suffer means that there is something wrong; to choose God’s will even if it means suffering is a very different thing. No healthy saint ever chooses suffering; he chooses God’s will, as Jesus did, whether it means suffering or not.
– Oswald Chambers
Suffering
Prayer is not logical; it is a mysterious moral working of the Holy Spirit.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer | The Holy Spirit
The real test of a saint is not one’s willingness to preach the gospel, but one’s willingness to do something like washing the disciples’ feet – that is, being willing to do those things that seem unimportant in human estimation but count as everything to God.
– Oswald Chambers
Service | The Gospel
If in preaching the gospel you substitute your knowledge of the way of salvation for confidence in the power of the gospel, you hinder people from getting to reality.
– Oswald Chambers
Salvation | The Gospel
If you have ever prayed in the dawn you will ask yourself why you were so foolish as not to do it always: it is difficult to get into communion with God in the midst of the hurly-burly of the day.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer | Foolishness
The inattentive, slovenly way we drift into the presence of God is an indication that we are not bothering to think about Him. Whenever our Lord spoke of prayer, He said, “Ask.” It is impossible to ask if you do not concentrate.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
The battle of prayer is against two things in the earthlies: wandering thoughts and lack of intimacy with God’s character as revealed in His word. Neither can be cured at once, but they can be cured by discipline.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer | Discipline
All heaven is interested in the cross of Christ, all hell terribly afraid of it, while men are the only beings who more or less ignore its meaning.
– Oswald Chambers
The Cross
Prayer is not only asking, it is an attitude of heart that produces an atmosphere in which asking is perfectly natural, and Jesus says, “every one that asketh receiveth.”
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer | Attitude | The Heart
God does not exist to answer our prayers, but by our prayers we come to discern the mind of God.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer | Discernment
Have you ever realized that you can give things to God that are of value to Him? Or are you just sitting around daydreaming about the greatness of His redemption, while neglecting all the things you could be doing for Him? I’m not referring to works which could be regarded as divine and miraculous, but ordinary, simple human things – things which would be evidence to God that you are totally surrendered to Him.
– Oswald Chambers
Redemption | Service | Surrender
Never say you will pray about a thing; pray about it.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
Prayer does not equip us for greater works – prayer is the greater work.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
Suffering is the heritage of the bad, of the penitent, and of the Son of God. Each one ends in the cross. The bad thief is crucified, the penitent thief is crucified, and the Son of God is crucified. By these signs we know the widespread heritage of suffering.
– Oswald Chambers
Suffering | The Cross
Do not have as your motive the desire to be known as a praying man. Get an inner chamber in which to pray where no one knows you are praying, shut the door, and talk to God in secret.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
Never make the blunder of trying to forecast the way God is going to answer your prayer.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
We impoverish God in our minds when we say there must be answers to our prayers on the material plane; the biggest answers to our prayers are in the realm of the unseen.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
Get into the habit of dealing with God about everything. Unless in the first waking moment of the day you learn to fling the door wide back and let God in, you will work on a wrong level all day; but swing the door wide open and pray to your Father in secret, and every public thing will be stamped with the presence of God.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
Have you been asking God what He is going to do? He will never tell you. God does not tell you what He is going to do He reveals to you who He is. Do you believe in a miracle working God, and will you “go out” in complete surrender to Him until you are not surprised one iota by anything He does?
– Oswald Chambers
Surrender
God’s “nothings” are His most positive answers. We have to stay on God and wait. Never try to help God to fulfill His word.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer | Scripture
Prayer is simple, prayer is supernatural, and to anyone not related to our Lord Jesus Christ, prayer is apt to look stupid.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
Watch your motive before God; have no other motive in prayer than to know Him.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
One great effect of prayer is that it enables the soul to command the body. By obedience I make my body submissive to my soul, but prayer puts my soul in command of my body.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer | Obedience
The thing that makes a missionary is the sight of what Jesus did on the cross and to have heard Him say, “Go.”;
– Oswald Chambers
Missions
Sum up the life of Jesus by any other standard than God’s, and it is an anticlimax of failure.
– Oswald Chambers
Jesus | Failure
Every time we pray our horizon is altered, our attitude to things is altered, not sometimes but every time, and the amazing thing is that we don’t pray more.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer | Attitude
Prayer is often a temptation to bank on a miracle of God instead of on a moral issue, i.e., it is much easier to ask God to do my work than it is to do it myself. Until we are disciplined properly, we will always be inclined to bank on God’s miracles and refuse to do the moral thing ourselves. It is our job, and it will never be done unless we do it.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer | Miracles | Morality
It is not so true that “prayer changes things” as that prayer changes me and I change things. God has so constituted things that prayer on the basis of Redemption alters the way in which a man looks at things. Prayer is not a question of altering things externally, but of working wonders in a man’s disposition.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer | Redemption | Change
Jesus Christ became Incarnate for one purpose, to make a way back to God that man might stand before Him as He was created to do, the friend and lover of God Himself.
– Oswald Chambers
Jesus | Restoration
The whole point of getting things done is knowing what to leave undone.
– Oswald Chambers
Achievement
When a man is at his wits’ end it is not a cowardly thing to pray, it is the only way he can get in touch with Reality.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
You say, “But He has not answered.” He has, He is so near to you that His silence is the answer. His silence is big with terrific meaning that you cannot understand yet, but presently you will.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
God does not have to come and tell me what I must do for Him, He brings me into a relationship with Himself where I hear His call and understand what He wants me to do, and I do it out of sheer love to Him. When people say they have had a call to foreign service, or to any particular sphere of work, they mean that their relationship to God has enabled them to realize what they can do for God.
– Oswald Chambers
Service
It is the unseen and the spiritual in people that determines the outward and the actual.
– Oswald Chambers
Character
We are not built for ourselves, but for God. Not for service for God, but for God.
– Oswald Chambers
God
Jesus Christ carries on intercession for us in heaven; the Holy Ghost carries on intercession in us on earth; and we the saints have to carry on intercession for all men.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer | Intercession
We all know people who have been made much meaner and more irritable and more intolerable to live with by suffering: it is not right to say that all suffering perfects. It only perfects one type of person – the one who accepts the call of God in Christ Jesus.
– Oswald Chambers
Suffering
There is nothing to be valued more highly than to have people praying for us; God links up His power in answer to their prayers.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
When we pray “in the Name of Jesus” the answers are in accordance with His nature, and if we think our prayers are unanswered it is because we are not interpreting the answer along this line.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
Our Lord never referred to unanswered prayer; he taught that prayers are always answered. He ever implied that prayers were answered rightly because of the Heavenly Father’s wisdom.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
We lean to our own understanding, or we bank on service and do away with prayer, and consequently by succeeding in the external we fail in the eternal, because in the eternal we succeed only by prevailing prayer.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.
– Oswald Chambers
Books
If we think of prayer as the breath of our lungs and the blood from our hearts, we think rightly. The blood flows and the breathing continues – we are not conscious of it but it is always going on.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
Many of us suffer from temptations from which we have no business to suffer.
– Oswald Chambers
Temptation
Pray because you have a Father, not because it quietness you, and give Him time to answer.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
Prayer is the evidence that I am spiritually concentrated on God.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
Prayer is God’s answer to our poverty, not a power we exercise to obtain an answer.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
Until we know Jesus, God is merely a concept, and we can’t have faith in Him. But once we hear Jesus say, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9) we immediately have something that is real, and our faith is limitless.
– Oswald Chambers
Faith
Our understanding of God is the answer to prayer; getting things from God is God’s indulgence of us. When God stops giving us things, He brings us into the place where we can begin to understand Him.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
Our prayers are heard, not because we are in earnest, not because we suffer, but because Jesus suffered.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer | Suffering
The agony of man’s affliction is often necessary to put him into the right mood to face the fundamental things of life. The Psalmist says. Before I was afflicted I went astray; but now I have kept Thy Word.
– Oswald Chambers
Obedience | Affliction
It is impossible to live the life of a disciple without definite times of secret prayer. You will find that the place to enter in is in your business, as you walk along the streets, in the ordinary ways of life, when no one dreams you are praying, and the reward comes openly, a revival here, a blessing there.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer | Business | Discipleship
I have learnt that I am me, that I can do the things that, as one might put it, me can do, but I cannot do the things that me would like to do.
– Oswald Chambers
Obedience
I have to get to the point of the absolute and unquestionable relationship that takes everything exactly as it comes from Him. God never guides us at some time in the future, but always here and now. Realize that the Lord is here now, and the freedom you receive is immediate.
– Oswald Chambers
Peace | Freedom | The Future
Our true character comes out in the way we pray.
– Oswald Chambers
Character | Prayer
Prayer is the supreme activity of all that is noblest in our personality, and the essential nature of prayer is faith.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer | Faith
Is the Son of God praying in me, or am I dictating to Him? Prayer is not simply getting things from God, that is a most initial form of prayer; prayer is getting into perfect communion with God. If the Son of God is formed in us by regeneration, He will press forward in front of our common sense and change our attitude to the things about which we pray.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
Human nature, if it is healthy, demands excitement; and if it does not obtain its thrilling excitement in the right way, it will seek it in the wrong. God never makes bloodless stoics; He makes no passionless saints.
– Oswald Chambers
Obedience | Passion
God never gives strength for tomorrow, or for the next hour, but only for the strain of the minute.
– Oswald Chambers
Grace | Strength
The greatest answer to prayer is that I am brought into a perfect understanding with God, and that alters my view of actual things.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
Some prayers are followed by silence (from God) because they are wrong, others because they are bigger than one can understand. It will be a wonderful moment for some of us when we stand before God and find that the prayers we clamored for in early days and imagined were never answered have been answered in the most amazing way, and that God’s silence has been the sign of the answer.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
God’s silences are His answers. If we only take as answers those that are visible to our senses, we are in a very elementary condition of grace.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer | Grace
The only right a Christian has is the right to give up his rights.
– Oswald Chambers
Christians
The golden rule for understanding in spiritual matters is not intellect, but obedience.
– Oswald Chambers
Obedience
Character in a saint means the disposition of Jesus Christ persistently manifested.
– Oswald Chambers
Character
Our yesterdays present irreparable things to us; it is true that we have lost opportunities which will never return, but God can transform this destructive anxiety into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future. Let the past sleep, but let it sleep on the bosom of Christ. Leave the Irreparable Past in His hands, and step out into the Irresistible Future with Him.
– Oswald Chambers
Anxiety
We pray pious blether, our will is not in it, and then we say God does not answer; we never asked Him for anything. Asking means that our wills are in what we ask.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
Intercessory prayer for one who is sinning prevails. God says so! The will of the man prayed for does not come into question at all, he is connected with God by prayer, and prayer on the basis of the Redemption sets the connection working and God gives life.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer | Intercession | Redemption
A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.
– Oswald Chambers
Books
It is by no haphazard chance that in every age men have risen early to pray. The first thing that marks decline in spiritual life is our relationship to the early morning.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
The purpose of prayer is to reveal the presence of God equally present, all the time, in every condition.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer
You will never cease to be the most amazed person on earth at what God has done for you on the inside.
– Oswald Chambers
Holiness
If we rely on the Holy Spirit, we shall find that our prayers become more and more inarticulate; and when they are inarticulate, reverence grows deeper and deeper.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer | The Holy Spirit
The “words” of God and the “Word” of God stand together; to separate them is to render both powerless. Any expounder of the words of God is liable to go off on a tangent if he or she does not remember this stern, undeviating standard of exposition, namely, that no individual experience is of the remotest value unless it is up to the standard of the Word of God. The Bible not only tests experience, it tests truth. The Bible tests all experience, all truth, all authority by our Lord Himself and our relationship to Him personally.
– Oswald Chambers
The Bible | Authority
We look upon the enemy of our souls as a conquered foe, so he is, but only to God, not to us.
– Oswald Chambers
Satan
Sin is not weakness, it is a disease; it is red-handed rebellion against God and the magnitude of that rebellion is expressed by Calvary’s cross.
– Oswald Chambers
Sin | Rebellion
Obedience to the call of Christ nearly always costs everything to two people – the one who is called, and the one who loves that one.
– Oswald Chambers
Obedience
God has one destined end for mankind – holiness! His one aim is the production of saints. God is not an eternal blessing-machine for men. He did not come to save men out of pity. He came to save men because He had created them to be holy.
– Oswald Chambers
Holiness
Prayer is the vital breath of the Christian; not the thing that makes him alive, but the evidence that he is alive.
– Oswald Chambers
Prayer | Life