Oswald Chambers: Total Surrender (Final Part)
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Chambers’s crisis of surrender ended in 1901.
Referencing it in a letter to a friend, he wrote, “You ask if I got there all at once, or easily? No, I did not. Pride and the possession of the high esteem of my many Christian friends kept me out for long enough. But immediately I was willing to sacrifice all and put myself on the Altar, which is Jesus Himself, all was begun and done.”
The changes in Chambers were immediately evident. He spent the next five years in Dunoon, developing “into a powerful and much sought after preacher. To his gift of unique and forceful expression he added tact and compassion, qualities evidently lacking in his earlier years.”
His ministry was as unique and multifarious as Chambers himself. The League of Prayer, an interdenominational organization, served as the main vehicle through which Chambers connected with the wider evangelical church. He traveled across the UK preaching and teaching, encouraging believers to pursue biblical holiness.
Chambers as a Missionary Advocate
Chambers was passionately devoted to the worldwide missionary cause. He traveled extensively in America and spent a month in Japan. Whether in the UK or abroad, he viewed the call “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations…” applicable to every Christian.
His various speaking engagements brought Chambers into contact with many missionary candidates as well as missionaries on furlough. Through conversation and observation, he developed a deep concern for the need for missionaries to be adequately prepared for long-term service. He discerned that “many [missionaries] had returned broken and discouraged simply because they had not been prepared mentally or spiritually to live in a radically different culture.”
“Unless the life of a missionary is hid with Christ in God before he begins his work, that life will become exclusive and narrow. It will never become the servant of all men, it will never wash the feet of others.”
Always concerned that Christians put too little emphasis on the intellect as a gift from God, Chambers lamented the lack of basic study missionaries-to-be invested in the countries and cultures they would enter. In an article entitled “Missionary Ignorance,” he wrote, “To ignore the vast and competent literature relative to every country under Heaven today and to go to work for God, living more or less a hand-to-mouth spiritual life is to be utterly unfitted and unable to rightly divide the word of truth.”
This was in 1907! How much less excuse do missionaries and ministers of today have to remain in ignorance? The information available on the internet and in print is absolutely staggering compared to a century ago.
Chambers was never guilty of discerning a need and merely voicing concern. He took action. From 1911-1915, he and his new wife, Biddy, began the Bible Training College in London. An incredible story of God’s leading and provision, the college’s purpose can be summed up in the following words of Chambers to his students:
“…You have no idea of where God is going to engineer your circumstances, no knowledge of what strain is going to be put on you either at home or abroad, and if you waste your time in overactive energies instead of getting into soak on the great fundamental truths of God’s Redemption, you will snap when the strain comes; but if this time [at the college] of soaking before God is being spent in getting rooted and grounded in God on the unpractical line, you will remain true to Him whatever happens.”
Unless a Grain of Wheat…
The effects of World War I brought an end to the Bible college. Chambers felt strongly that he needed to do his part in Britain’s war effort. After much seeking of the Lord’s will, he was accepted by the Y.M.C.A as a chaplain in Egypt. This position brought him into contact with thousands of British and Commonwealth soldiers. And as an added touch of God’s grace, Biddy and their young daughter, Kathleen, were allowed to join him.
It was in Egypt after a year and a half of ministry that Chambers came down with appendicitis. His appendix was successfully removed. But complications developed from an infection following the surgery. This surrendered man of God was called to His Savior at 43 years of age.
It would be Biddy who picked up his mantle. For years she had taken shorthand notes from her husband’s teaching, both at the college and from the pulpit. Her subsequent laborious transcriptions and time-consuming arrangements would eventually result in My Utmost For His Highest.
As is often the case with God’s choicest saints, Chambers’s posthumous ministry touched countless more lives than he ever did in his lifetime. Reading Chambers is to plunge into the spiritual depths of one who walked in constant fellowship with the Lord. Such experiences and the ability to effectively convey them are no accidents.
There are no shortcuts or secrets—simply total surrender.
“Have you deliberately committed your will to Jesus Christ? It is a transaction of the will, not of emotion…Do not ask God what the transaction is to be, but make the determination to surrender your will regarding whatever you see, whether it is in the shallow or the deep, profound places internally.”
Biographical information on Oswald Chambers is largely gleaned from David McCasland’s Abandoned to God.
