My Utmost for His Highest: Classic Language

by Oswald Chambers

An overweening consideration for ourselves is the thing that keeps us from that decision, though we put it that we are considering others. When we consider what it wil cost others if we obey the cal of Jesus, we tel God He does not know what our obedience wil mean. Keep to the point; He does know. Shut out every other consideration and keep yourself before God for this one thing only - My Utmost for His Highest.

One of the difficulties in Christian work is this question - "What do you expect to do?" You do not know what you are going to do; the only thing you know is that God knows what He is doing. Continual y revise your attitude towards God and see if it is a going out of everything, trusting in God entirely. It is this attitude that keeps you in perpetual wonder - you do not know what God is going to do next.

God does not tel you what He is going to do; He reveals to you Who He is.

"going out" in dependence upon God, and your life wil have an ineffable charm about it which is a satisfaction to Jesus. You have to learn to go out of convictions, out of creeds, out of experiences, until so far as your faith is concerned, there is nothing between yourself and God.

"Clouds and darkness are round about Him." Psalm 97:2 A man who has not been born of the Spirit of God Wil tel you that the teachings of Jesus are simple. But when

you are baptized with the Holy Ghost, you find "clouds and darkness are round about Him." When we come into close contact with the teachings of Jesus Christ we have our first insight into this aspect of things.

The only possibility of understanding the teaching of Jesus is by the light of the Spirit of God on the inside. If we have never had the experience of taking our commonplace religious shoes off our commonplace religious feet, and getting rid of al the undue familiarity with which we a...

The people who are flippant and familiar are those who have never yet been introduced to Jesus Christ. After the amazing delight and liberty of realizing what Jesus Christ does, comes...

Jesus said: "The words that I speak unto you," not the words I have spoken, "they are spirit, and they are life." The Bible has been so many words to us - clouds and darkness - then al of a sudden the words become spirit and life because Jesus re-speaks them to us in a particular condition. That is the way God speaks to us, not by vision...

There are times when you cannot understand why you cannot do what you want to do. When God brings the blank space, see that you do not fil it in, but wait. The blank space

may come in order to teach you what sanctification means, or it may come after sanctification to teach you what service means.

Never run before God's guidance. If there is the slightest doubt, then He is not guiding. When...

In the beginning you may see clearly what God's wil is - the severance of a friendship, the breaking off of a business relationship, something you feel distinctly before God is His wil for you to do, never do it on the impulse of that feeling. If you do, you wil end in making difficulties that wil take years of time to put right. Wait for God's time to bring it round and He wil do it without any h...

Natural devotion may be al very wel to attract us to Jesus, to make us feel His fascination, but it wil never make us disciples. Natural devotion wil always deny Jesus somewhere or other.

Three years before, Jesus had said - "Fol ow Me," and Peter had fol owed easily, the fascination of Jesus was upon him, he did not need the Holy Spirit to help him to do it. Then he came to the place where he denied Jesus, and his heart broke. Then he received the Holy Spirit, and now Jesus says again - "Fol ow Me." There is no figure in front now saving the Lord Jesus Christ. The first "Fol ow Me" had nothing mystical in it, it was an external fol owing; now it is a fol owing in internal martyrdom (cf. John 21:18).

Al our vows and resolutions end in denial because we have no power to carry them out. When we have come to the end of ourselves, not in imagination but real y, we are able to receive the Holy Spirit. "Receive ye the Holy Ghost" - the idea is that of invasion. There is only one lodestar in the life now, the Lord Jesus Christ.

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.

If you hoard a thing for yourself, it wil turn into spiritual dry rot, as the manna did when it was hoarded. God wil 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.

The measure of the worth of our public activity for God is the private profound communion we have with Him. Rush is wrong every time, there is always plenty of time to worship God.

Quiet days with God may be a snare. We have to pitch our tents where we shal always have quiet times with God, however noisy our times with the world may be.

There are not three stages in spiritual life - worship, waiting and work. Some of us go in jumps like spiritual frogs, we jump from worship to waiting, and from waiting to work. God's idea is that the three should go together. They were always together in the life of Our Lord. He was un...

Friendship is rare on earth. It means identity in thought and heart and spirit. The whole discipline of life is to enable us to enter into this closest relationship with Jesus Christ. We receive His blessings and know His word, but do we know Him?

When once we get intimate with Jesus we are never lonely, we never need sympathy, we can pour out al the time without being pathetic. The saint who is intimate with Jesus wil never leave impressions of himself, but only the impression that Jesus is having unhindered way, because the last abyss of his nature has been satisfied by Jesus.

This incident is a picture of the blunder we make in thinking that the final thing God wants of us is the sacrifice of death. What God wants is the sacrifice through death which enables us to do what Jesus did, viz., sacrifice our lives. Not - I am wil ing to go to death with Thee, but - I am wil ing to be identified with Thy death so that I may sacrifice my life to God.

God nowhere tel s us to give up things for the sake of giving them up. He tel s us to give them up for the sake of the only thing worth having - viz., life with Himself. It is a question of loosening the bands that hinder the life, and immediately those bands are loosened by identification with the death of Jesus, we enter into a relationship with God whereby we can sacrifice our lives to Him.

It is of no value to God to give Him your life for death. He wants you to be a "living sacrifice," to let Him have al your powers that have been saved and sanctified through Jesus. This is the thing that is acceptable to God.

Read the 139th Psalm; the Psalmist implies -

"Thou art the God of the early mornings, the God of the late at nights, the God of the mountain peaks, and the God of the sea; but, my God, my soul has further horizons than the early mornings, deeper darkness than the nights of earth, higher peaks than any mountain peaks, greater depths than any sea in nature - Thou Who art the God of al these, be my God. I cannot reach to the heights or to the depths; there are motives I cannot trace, dreams I cannot get at - my God, search me out."

Do we believe that God can garrison the imagination far beyond where we can go? "The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin" - if that means in conscious experience only, may God have mercy on us. The man who has been made obtuse by sin wil say he is not conscious of sin. Cleansing from sin is to the very heights and depths of our spirit if we wil keep in the light as God is ...

It is only when we are garrisoned by God with the stupendous sanctity of the Holy Spirit, that spirit, soul and body are preserved in unspotted integrity, undeserving of censure in God's sight, until Jesus comes. We do not al ow our min...

the majority of nominal Christians are of this order; their eyes are opened, but they have received nothing. Conversion is not regeneration. This is one of the neglected factors in our preaching today. When a man is born again, he knows that it is because he has received something as a gift from Almighty God and not because of his own decision.

If we obey God it is going to cost other people more than it costs us, and that is where the sting comes in. If we are in love with our Lord, obedience does not cost us anything, it is a delight, but it costs those who do not love Him a good deal.

If we obey God it wil mean that other people's plans are upset, and they wil gibe us with it - "You cal this Christianity?" We can prevent the suffering; but if we are going to obey God, we must not prevent it, we must let the cost be paid.

Our human pride entrenches itself on this point, and we say - I wil never accept anything from anyone. We shal have to, or disobey God. We have no right to expect to be in any other rela...

Stagnation in spiritual life comes when we say we wil bear the whole thing ourselves. We cannot. We are so involved in the universal purposes of God that immediately we obey God, others are affected. Are we going to remain loyal in our obedience to God and go through the humiliation of refusing to be independent, or ...

We can disobey God if we choose, and it wil bring immediate relief to the situation, but we shal be a grief to our Lord. Whereas if we obey God, He wil look after those who have been pressed into the consequences of our obedience. We have simply to obey and to leave al consequences with Him. Beware of the ...

Jesus does not take us alone and expound things to us al the time; He expounds things to us as we can understand them. Other lives are parables. God is making us spel out our own souls. It is slow work, so slow that it takes God al time and eternity to make a man and woman after His own purpose.

The only way we can be of use to God is to let Him take us through the crooks and crannies of our own characters. It is astounding how ignorant we are about ourselves! We do not know envy when we see it, or laziness, or pride. Jesus reveals to us al that this body has been harbouring before His grace began to work. How many of us have learned to look in with courage?

We have to get rid of the idea that we understand ourselves, it is the last conceit to go. The only One Who understands us is God. The greatest curse in spiritual life is conceit. If we have ever had a glimpse of what we are like in the sight of God, we shal never say - "Oh, I am so u...

As long as we are not quite sure that we are unworthy, God wil keep narrowing us in until He gets us alone. Wherever there is any element of pride or of conceit, Jesus cannot expound a thing. He wil take us through the disappointment of a wounded pride of intel ect, through disappointment of heart. He wil reveal inor...

We listen to many things in classes, but they are not an exposition to us yet. They wil be when ...

When God gets us alone by affliction, heartbreak, or temptation, by disappointment, sickness, or by thwarted affection, by a broken friendship, or by a new fnendship - when He gets us absolutely alone, and we are dumbfounded, and cannot ask one question, then He begins to expound.

If you are going on with God, the only thing that is clear to you, and the only thing God intends to be clear, is the way He deals with your own soul. Your brother's sorrows and perplexities are an absolute confusion to you. We imagine we understand where the other person is, until God gives us a dose of the plague of our own hearts.

There are whole tracts of stubbornness and ignorance to be revealed by the Holy Spirit in each one of us, and it can only be done when Jesus gets us alone. Are we alone with Him now, or are we taken up with little fussy notions, fussy comradeships in God's service, fussy ideas about our bodies? Jesus can expound nothing until we get through al the noisy questions of the head and are alone with Him.

God did not address the cal to Isaiah; Isaiah overheard God saying, "Who wil go for us?" The cal of God is not for the special few, it is for everyone.

Whether or not I hear God's cal depends upon the state of my ears; and what I hear depends upon my disposition. "Many are cal ed but few are chosen,"

few prove themselves the chosen ones. The chosen ones are those who have come into a relationship with God through Jesus Christ whereby their disposition has been altered and their ears unstopped, and they hear the stil smal voice questioning al the time, "Who wil go for us?" It is not a question of God singling out a man and saying, "Now, you go." God did not lay a strong compulsion on Isaiah; Isaiah was in the presence of God and he overhear...

Get out of your mind the idea of expecting God to come with compulsions and pleadings. When our Lord cal ed His disciples there was no irresistible compulsion from outside. The quiet passionate insistence of His "Fol ow Me" was spoken to men with every power wide awake. If we let the Spirit of God bring us face to face with God, we too shal hear something akin to wha...

No one enters into the experience of entire sanctification without going through a "white funeral" - the burial of the old life. If there has never been this crisis of death, sanctification is nothing more than a vision.

There must be a "white funeral," - a death that has only one resurrection - a resurrection into the life of Jesus Christ. Nothing can upset such a life, it is one with God for one purpose, to be a witness to Him.