My Utmost for His Highest: Classic Language

by Oswald Chambers

If you have received a ministry from the Lord Jesus, you wil know that the need is never the cal : the need is the opportunity. The cal is loyalty to the ministry you received when you were in real touch with Him. This does not imply that there is a campaign of service marked out for you, but it d...

It takes Almighty grace to take the next step when there is no vision and no spectator - the next step in devotion, the next step in your study, in your reading, in your kitchen; the next step in your duty, when there is no vision from God, no enthusiasm and no spectator. It takes far more of the grace of God, far more conscious drawing upon God to take that step, than it does to preach the Gospel.

Every Christian has to partake of what was the essence of the Incarnation, he must bring the thing down into flesh and blood actualities and work it out through the finger tips.

We flag when there is no vision, no uplift, but just the common round, the trivial task. The thing that tel s in the long run for God and for men is the steady persevering work in the unseen, and the only w...

Ask God to keep the eyes of your spirit open to the Risen Christ, and it wil be impossible for drudgery to damp you. Continual y get away...

The bedrock of our Christian faith is the unmerited, fathomless marvel of the love of God exhibited on the Cross of Calvary, a love we never can and never shal merit.

The surf that distresses the ordinary swimmer produces in the surf-rider the super-joy of going clean through it. Apply that to our own circumstances, these very things - tribulation, distress, persecution, produce in us the super-joy; they are not things to fight. We are more than conquerors through Him in al these things, not in spite of them, but in the midst of them. The saint never knows the joy of the Lord in spite of tribulation, but because of it

Undaunted radiance is not built on anything passing, but on the love of God that nothing can alter. The experiences of life, terrible or monotonous, are impotent to touch the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

No one is ever united with Jesus Christ until he is wil ing to relinquish not sin only, but his whole way of looking at things.

To be born from above of the Spirit of God means that we must let go before we lay hold, and in the first stages it is the relinquishing of al pretence. What Our Lord wants us to present to Him is not goodness, nor honesty, nor endeavour, but real solid sin; that is al He can take from us.

the Spirit of God wil show us what further there is to relinquish. There wil have to be the relinquishing of my claim to my right to myself in every phase. Am I wil ing to relinquish my hold on al I possess, my hold on my affections, and on everything, and to be identified with the death of Jesus Christ?

There is always a sharp painful disil usionment to go through before we do relinquish. When a man real y sees himself as the Lord sees him, it is not the abominable sins of the flesh that shock him, but the awful nature of the pride of his own heart against Jesus Christ. When he sees himself in the light of the Lord, the shame and the horror and the desperate conviction come home.

If you are up against the question of relinquishing, go through the crisis, relinquish al , and God wil make you fi...

Many to-day are spending and being spent in work for Jesus Christ, but they do not walk with Him. The one thing God keeps us to steadily is that we may be one with Jesus Christ. After sanctification the discipline of our spiritual life is along this line.

If God gives a clear and emphatic realization to your soul of what He wants, do not try to keep yourself in that relationship by any particular method, but live a natural life of absolute dependence on Jesus Christ.

The natural heart wil do any amount of serving, but it takes the heart broken by conviction of sin, and baptized by the Holy Ghost, and crumpled into the purpose of God before the life becomes the sacrament of its message.

There is a difference between giving a testimony and preaching. A preacher is one who has realized the cal of God and is determined to use his every power to proclaim God's truth. God takes us out of our own ideas for our lives and we are "batter'd to shape and use," as the disciples were after Pentecost. Pentecost did not teach the disciples any thing; it made them the incarnation of what they preached

Let God have perfect liberty when you speak. Before God's message can liberate other souls, the liberation must be real in you. Gather your mat...

If we lose the vision, we alone are responsible, and the way we lose the vision is by spiritual leakage. If we do not run our belief about God into practical issues, it is al up with the vision God has given.

The only way to be obedient to the heavenly vision is to give our utmost for God's highest, and this can only be done by continual y and resolutely recal ing the vision. The test is the sixty seconds of every minute, and the sixty minutes of every hour, not our times of prayer and devotional meetings.

"Though it tarry, wait for it." We cannot attain to a vision, we must live in the inspiration of it until it accomplishes itself. We get so practical that we forget the vision. At the beginning we saw it but did not wait for it; we rushed off into pr...

Waiting for the vision that tarries is the test of our loyalty to God. It is at the peril of our soul's welfare that we get caught up in practical wo...

Watch God's cyclones. The only way God sows His saints is by His whirlwind. Are you going to prove an empty pod? It wil depend on whether or not you are actual y living in the light of what you have seen. Let God fling you out, and do not go until He does. If you select your own sp...

It is essential to practise the walk of the feet in the l...

Salvation is not merely deliverance from sin, nor the experience of personal holiness; the salvation of God is deliverance out of self entirely into union with Himself.

My experimental knowledge of salvation wil be along the line of deliverance from sin and of personal holiness; but salvation means that the Spirit of God has brought me into touch with God's personality, and I am thril ed with something infinitely greater than myself, I am caught up into the abandonment of God.

To say that we are cal ed to preach holiness or sanctification, is to get into a side eddy. We are cal ed to proclaim Jesus Christ. The fact that He saves from sin and makes us holy is part...

Abandonment never produces the consciousness of its own effort, because the whole life is taken up with the One to Whom we abandon. Beware of talking about abandonment if you know nothing about it, and you wil never know anything about it until you h...

In our abandonment we give ourselves over to God just as God gave Himself for us, without any calculation. The consequence of abandonment never enters into our o...

The first thing to do in examining the power that dominates me is to take hold of the unwelcome fact that I am responsible for being thus dominated. If I am a slave to myself, I am to blame because at a point away back I yielded to myself. Likewise, if I obey God I do so because I have yielded myself to Him.

Yield in childhood to selfishness, and you wil find it the most enchaining tyranny on earth. There is no power in the human soul of itself to break the bondage of a disposition formed by yielding.

Yield for one second to anything in the nature of lust (remember what lust is: "I must have it at once," whether it be the lust of the flesh or the lust of the mind) - once yield and though you may hate yourself for having yielded, you are a bondslave to that thing. There is no release in human power at al but only in the Redemption. You must yield yourself in utter humiliation to the only One Who can break the dom...

You find this out in the most ridiculously smal ways - "Oh, I can give that habit up when I like." You cannot, you wil find that the habit absolutely dominates you because you yielded to it wil ingly. It is easy to sing - "He wil break every fetter" and at the same time be living a life of obvious slavery ...

At the beginning we were sure we knew al about Jesus Christ, it was a delight to sel al and to fling ourselves out in a hardihood of love; but now we are not quite so sure. Jesus is on in front and He looks strange: "Jesus went before them and they were amazed."

There is an aspect of Jesus that chil s the heart of a disciple to the core and makes the whole spiritual life gasp for breath. This strange Being with His face "set like a flint" and His striding determination, strikes terror into me. He is no longer Counsel or and Comrade, He is taken up with a point of view I know nothing about, and I am amazed at Him. At first I was confident that I understood Him, but now I am not so sure. I begin to realize there is a distance between Jesus Christ and me; I can no longer be familiar with Him. He is ahead of me and He never turns round; I have no idea where He is going, and the goal has become strangely far off.

Jesus Christ had to fathom every sin and every sorrow man could experience, and that is what makes Him seem strange. When we see Him in this aspect we do not know Him, we do not recognize one feature of His life, and we do not know how to begin to fol ow Him. He is on in f...

The discipline of dismay is essential in the life of discipleship. The danger is to get back to a little fire of our own and kindle enthusiasm at it (cf. Isaiah 1:10-11). When the darkness of dismay comes, endure until it is over, because out of...