Oswald Chambers: Total Surrender (Part 1)
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Oswald Chambers died one hundred years ago. He was only 43.
Despite his age, Chambers writings resonate with the insight of spiritual experience. My Utmost for His Highest is a sample of the deep and costly wisdom this man procured.
Chambers learned and lived total surrender. He allowed God’s refining fires to do their purposeful and holy work.
God Uniquely Prepares Each of His Servants
As a teenager, Chambers was on his way home one evening from hearing Spurgeon preach at the Metropolitan Tabernacle. There in the street he gave himself to the Lord. He was quick to take seriously the Christian walk.
“In a Bible class for young men, Chambers delved into the Scriptures, always focusing on the application of the truth in daily life…He participated in evangelistic meetings in local lodging houses where the very poorest people of London found a temporary home.”
A lover of art, music and literature, it wasn’t long before Chambers was putting pen to paper, expressing his inward spiritual discoveries through poetry. He initially felt called to minister the Gospel through art. This led him to receive an Art Masters Certificate, and then on to the University of Edinburgh where he enrolled in another two-year course.
It was in Edinburgh that Chambers sat under some of the most reputable lecturers of the times, studying philosophy, history and even archaeology. In the late 19th century the art world had yet to descend into some of the absurd and decadent depths that sectors of it have today. Yet it was still largely an environment that represented the world’s priorities and values.
Chambers wrote in a letter during this time, “The kingdom of the aesthetics lies in a groveling quagmire, half fine, half impure; there is a crying need for a fearless preacher of Christ in the midst of that kingdom…that artists, poets and musicians be good and fearless Christians.”
In this educational atmosphere Chambers was immersed in the writings of classic and modern thinkers. Always a keen observer of human nature, this intellectual foundation served him well in later years of ministry.
The following conversation is worth relating in this regard. Skidmore, a friend of Chamber’s, found himself in need of mental invigoration, “emptied by his role of continually giving the truth out to others.”
“What do you read?” Oswald asked.
“Only the Bible and books directly associated with it,” Skidmore told him.
“That’s the trouble,” Chambers replied. “You have allowed part of your brain to stagnate for want of use.”
Within a few minutes, Oswald had scribbled out a list of more than fifty books–philosophical, psychological, and theological, dealing with every phase of current thought…” It is ignorance of these subjects [wrote Chambers] on the part of ministers and workers that has brought our evangelical theology to such a sorry plight.”
No Shortcuts to Spiritual Usefulness
During his last year at the university Chambers explored extensively future job prospects. As one door closed after another, he couldn’t escape the haunting notion that maybe God was calling him to be a minister.
After a night of anguished prayer, he felt that the Lord had clearly spoken on the matter. Returning home, Chambers found that his mail included an unsolicited report from a small theological training school near Glasgow. By his second term he was confident that Dunoon College was where God was leading him to attend.
Chambers spent the next four years in focused academic preparation for the ministry. These were the hidden years. This was the season in which he honed his intellect while gaining more experience in practical preaching pursuits.
It was also a long winter of spiritual agony. Outwardly, Chambers was friendly, charming and carefree. But within, the Lord was doing a work that would ultimately bring him to the very end of himself. “Then a journey began with the spark of consecration and ended in the ashes of self-despair.”
Chambers rarely spoke of this time, but in one letter referencing it he wrote, “…for four years, nothing but the overruling grace of God and the kindness of friends kept me out of the asylum. God used me during those years for the conversion of souls, but I had no conscious communion with Him. The Bible was the dullest, most uninteresting book in existence, and the sense of depravity, the vileness and bad-motiveness of my nature was terrific.”
It seems the Lord was wresting from his heart everything that Chambers held dear. He “continued his cheerful outward appearance while one by one his hopes and dreams were being put to death. Some he laid willingly on the altar while others seemed to be snatched from him by the hand of God. In either case, the pain of heartbreak and loss felt the same.”
Chambers was discovering the cost of consecration.
All quotes are taken from David McCasland’s biography, Abandoned to God, which traces the powerful story of Chamber’s spiritual development.
