My Utmost for His Highest

by Oswald Chambers

In the desert camp Oswald supervised the construction of rock-lined walkways and a myriad of flower beds. Some critics said it was a waste of time, but Chambers believed that if physical improvements were not made and new touches occasionally given to the huts, they would reflect slovenly care, unpleasing to God.

He then providentially produces a crisis where we have to decide—for or against. That moment becomes a great crossroads in our lives. If a crisis has come to you on any front, surrender your will to Jesus absolutely and irrevocably.

Never run before God gives you His direction. If you have the slightest doubt, then He is not guiding. Whenever there is doubt—wait.

True friendship is rare on earth. It means identifying with someone in thought, heart, and spirit.

The Christian who is truly intimate with Jesus will never draw attention to himself but will only show the evidence of a life where Jesus is completely in control.

God never tells us to give up things just for the sake of giving them up, but He tells us to give them up for the sake of the only thing worth having, namely, life with Himself.

But, my God, my soul has horizons further away than those of early mornings, deeper darkness than the nights of earth, higher peaks than any mountain peaks, greater depths than any sea in nature. You who are the God of all these, be my God. I cannot reach to the heights or to the depths; there are motives I cannot discover, dreams I cannot realize. My God, search me.”

Salvation means that we are brought to the place where we are able to receive something from God on the authority of Jesus Christ, namely, forgiveness of sins.

The greatest curse in our spiritual life is pride.

There is a “darkness” that comes from too much light—that is the time to listen.

Troubles almost always make us look to God, but His blessings tend to divert our attention elsewhere.

The busyness of things obscures our concentration on God.

Him? Consecration is the act of continually separating myself from everything except that which God has appointed me to do. It is not a onetime experience but an ongoing process.

“Sufficient for the day is its own trouble” (6:34).

Never ask another person’s advice about anything God makes you decide before Him. If you ask advice, you will almost always side with Satan. “I did not immediately confer with flesh and blood” (Galatians 1:16).

The one all-important thing is that the gospel of God should be recognized as the abiding reality. Reality is not human goodness, or holiness, or heaven, or hell—it is redemption.

We are not commissioned to preach salvation or sanctification—we are commissioned to lift up Jesus Christ (see John 12:32).

There is nothing easier than getting saved, because it is solely God’s sovereign work—“Look to Me, and be saved” (Isaiah 45:22).

God sends you through a crisis in private, where no other person can help you. From the outside your life may appear to be the same, but the difference is taking place in your will.

Dejection stems from one of two sources—I have either satisfied a lust or I have not had it satisfied. In either case, dejection is the result.

It is impossible to be well physically and to be dejected, because dejection is a sign of sickness. This is also true spiritually. Dejection spiritually is wrong, and we are always to blame for it.

Sanctification means to be intensely focused on God’s point of view. It means to secure and to keep all the strength of our body, soul, and spirit for God’s purpose alone.

Sanctification means being made one with Jesus so that the nature that controlled Him will control us.

The real test of spiritual focus is being able to bring your thoughts and imagination under control. Is your mind focused on the face of an idol? Is the idol yourself? Is it your work? Is it your idea of what a servant should be, or maybe your experience of salvation and sanctification?

“Whatever I tell you in the dark”—pay attention when God puts you into darkness, and keep your mouth closed while you are there.

If we were never depressed, we would not be alive—only material things don’t suffer depression. If human beings were not capable of depression, we would have no capacity for happiness and exaltation.

Drudgery is one of the finest tests to determine the genuineness of our character. Drudgery is work that is far removed from anything we think of as ideal work. It is the utterly hard, menial, tiresome, and dirty work. And when we experience it, our spirituality is instantly tested and we will know whether or not we are spiritually genuine.

Perseverance is more than endurance. It is endurance combined with absolute assurance and certainty that what we are looking for is going to happen.

Perseverance is our supreme effort of refusing to believe that our hero is going to be conquered.

We somehow have the idea that a person called to the ministry is called to be different and above other people. But according to Jesus Christ, he is called to be a “doormat” for others—called to be their spiritual leader, but never their superior.

The real test of a saint is not one’s willingness to preach the gospel, but one’s willingness to do something like washing the disciples’ feet—that is, being willing to do those things that seem unimportant in human estimation but count as everything to God.

“Let not your heart be troubled” (John 14:1).

We lose interest and give up when we have no vision, no encouragement, and no improvement, but only experience our everyday life with its trivial tasks. The thing that really testifies for God and for the people of God in the long run is steady perseverance, even when the work cannot be seen by others.

And the only way to live an undefeated life is to live looking to God.

Showing no concern for the uncertainties that lie ahead is the secret of walking with Jesus.

Watch for the storms of God. The only way God plants His saints is through the whirlwind of His storms. Will you be proven to be an empty pod with no seed inside?

Beware of surrender that is motivated by personal benefits that may result.

No struggling or praying will enable you to stop doing certain things, and the penalty of sin is that you gradually get used to it, until you finally come to the place where you no longer even realize that it is sin.

It is the simple, dreary day, with its commonplace duties and people, that smothers the burning heart—unless we have learned the secret of abiding in Jesus.

A heartless Christian must be a terrible grief to our Lord.

There is nothing in time or eternity more absolutely certain and irrefutable than what Jesus Christ accomplished on the Cross—He made it possible for the entire human race to be brought back into a right-standing relationship with God.

The heart of salvation is the Cross of Christ. The reason salvation is so easy to obtain is that it cost God so much. The Cross was the place where God and sinful man merged with a tremendous collision and where the way to life was opened. But all the cost and pain of the collision was absorbed by the heart of God.

The author or speaker from whom you learn the most is not the one who teaches you something you didn’t know before, but the one who helps you take a truth with which you have quietly struggled, give it expression, and speak it clearly and boldly.

Jesus Christ was born into this world, not from it. He did not emerge out of history; He came into history from the outside.

Let the past rest, but let it rest in the sweet embrace of Christ. Leave the broken, irreversible past in His hands, and step out into the invincible future with Him.