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“Prayer does not fit us for the greater work; prayer is the greater work.”
― Oswald Chambers

“If through a broken heart God can bring His purposes to pass in the world, then thank Him for breaking your heart.”
― Oswald Chambers

“We tend to use prayer as a last resort, but God wants it to be our first line of defense. We pray when there's nothing else we can do, but God wants us to pray before we do anything at all.

Most of us would prefer, however, to spend our time doing something that will get immediate results. We don't want to wait for God to resolve matters in His good time because His idea of 'good time' is seldom in sync with ours.”
― Oswald Chambers

“True intercession involves bringing the person, or the circumstance that seems to be crashing in on you, before God, until you are changed by His attitude toward that person or circumstance. People describe intercession by saying, "It is putting yourself in someone else’s place." That is not true! Intercession is putting yourself in God’s place; it is having His mind and His perspective.”
― Oswald Chambers

“God did not direct His call to Isaiah— Isaiah overheard God saying, ". . . who will go for Us?" The call of God is not just for a select few but for everyone. Whether I hear God’s call or not depends on the condition of my ears, and exactly what I hear depends upon my spiritual attitude.”
― Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest

“We are built for the valley, for the ordinary stuff we are in, and that is where we have to prove our mettle. ”
― Oswald Chambers

“Naturally, we are inclined to be so mathematical and calculating that we look upon uncertainty as a bad thing...Certainty is the mark of the common-sense life. To be certain of God means that we are uncertain in all our ways, we do not know what a day may bring forth. This is generally said with a sigh of sadness; it should rather be an expression of breathless expectation.”
― Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, Updated Edition

“The life of faith is not a life of mounting up with wings, but a life of walking and not fainting.”
― Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest: Selections for Everyday

“The great enemy of the life of faith in God is not sin, but the good which is not good enough. The good is always the enemy of the best.”
― Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, Updated Edition

“The "show business," which is so incorporated into our view of Christian work today, has caused us to drift far from Our Lord's conception of discipleship. It is instilled in us to think that we have to do exceptional things for God; we have not. We have to be exceptional in ordinary things, to be holy in mean streets, among mean people, surrounded by sordid sinners. That is not learned in five minutes.”
― Oswald Chambersd Chambers

“Suppose God wants to teach you to say, "I know how to be abased"--are you ready to be offered up like that? Are you ready to be not so much as a drop in a bucket--to be so hopelessly insignificant that you are never thought of again in connection with the life you served? Are you willing to spend and be spent; not seeking to be ministered unto, but to minister?”
― Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest: Selections for Everyday

“Beware of being obsessed with consistency to your own convictions instead of being devoted to God. The important consistency in a saint is not to a principle but to the divine life. It is easier to be an excessive fanatic than it is to be consistently faithful, because God causes an amazing humbling of our religious conceit when we are faithful to Him.”
― Oswald Chambers

“We always know when Jesus is at work because He produces in the commonplace something that is inspiring.”
― Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest: Selections for Everyday

“Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.”
― Oswald Chambers

“God gives us the vision, then he takes us down to the valley to batter us into the shape of the vision, and it is in the valley that so many of us faint and give way. Every vision will be made real if we will have patience.”
― Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest

“Tolerating a wrong attitude toward another person causes you to follow the spirit of the devil, no matter how saintly you are.”
― Oswald Chambers

“Never become attached to anything that continues to hurt God. For you to be free of it, God must be allowed to hurt whatever it may be.”
― Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest: Page-a-Day Edition

“God plants His saints in the most useless places. We say, 'God intends me to be here because I am so useful.' Jesus never estimated His life along the line of the greatest use. God puts His saints where they will glorify Him, and we are no judge at all of where that is.”
― Oswald Chambers

“Never look for justice in this world, never cease to give it.”
― Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest

“If we were never depressed we should not be alive; it is the nature of a crystal never to be depressed.”
― Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest

“The institutions of Churchianity are not Christianity. An institution is a good thing if it is second; immediately an institution recognizes itself it becomes the dominating factor.”
― Oswald Chambers

“God always ignores the present perfection for the ultimate perfection.”
― Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest

“What a blessed habit I have found my prayer list, morning by morning, it takes me via the Throne of all Grace straight to the intimate personal heart of each one mentioned here, and I know that He Who is not prescribed by time and geography answers immediately.”
― Oswald Chambers

“In Him we have . . . the forgiveness of sins . . . —Ephesians 1:7

Beware of the pleasant view of the fatherhood of God: God is so kind and loving that of course He will forgive us. That thought, based solely on emotion, cannot be found anywhere in the New Testament. The only basis on which God can forgive us is the tremendous tragedy of the Cross of Christ. To base our forgiveness on any other ground is unconscious blasphemy. The only ground on which God can forgive our sin and reinstate us to His favor is through the Cross of Christ. There is no other way! Forgiveness, which is so easy for us to accept, cost the agony at Calvary. We should never take the forgiveness of sin, the gift of the Holy Spirit, and our sanctification in simple faith, and then forget the enormous cost to God that made all of this ours.

Forgiveness is the divine miracle of grace. The cost to God was the Cross of Christ. To forgive sin, while remaining a holy God, this price had to be paid. Never accept a view of the fatherhood of God if it blots out the atonement. The revealed truth of God is that without the atonement He cannot forgive— He would contradict His nature if He did. The only way we can be forgiven is by being brought back to God through the atonement of the Cross. God’s forgiveness is possible only in the supernatural realm.

Compared with the miracle of the forgiveness of sin, the experience of sanctification is small. Sanctification is simply the wonderful expression or evidence of the forgiveness of sins in a human life. But the thing that awakens the deepest fountain of gratitude in a human being is that God has forgiven his sin. Paul never got away from this. Once you realize all that it cost God to forgive you, you will be held as in a vise, constrained by the love of God.”
― Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest

“The best measure of a spiritual life is not its ecstasies but its obedience.”
― Oswald Chambers

“We look upon prayer simply as a means of getting things for ourselves, but the biblical purpose of prayer is that we may get to know God Himself.”
― Oswald Chambers

“The degree of panic activity in my life is equal to the degree of my lack of personal spiritual experience.”
― Oswald Chambers

“When God gets us alone through suffering, heartbreak, temptation, disappointment, sickness, or by thwarted friendship - when He gets us absolutely alone, and we are totally speechless, unable to ask even one question, then He begins to teach us.”
― Oswald Chambers

“God's end is to enable me to see that he can walk on the chaos of my life just now.”
― Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest

“God’s training is for now, not presently. His purpose is for this minute, not for something in the future. we have nothing to do with the afterwards of obedience; we can get it wrong when we think of the afterwards. what men call training and preparation, God calls the end… if we realize that obedience is the end, then each moment is precious.”
― Oswald Chambers