“If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me." Luke 9:23
The test of our spiritual life is our understanding of the cross. The cross of Jesus is often wrongly taken as a type of the cross we have to carry. Jesus did not say, 'If anyone will come after Me, let him take up My cross,' but 'let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me.'
"Our cross becomes our divinely appointed privilege by means of His cross. We are never called upon to carry His cross.
"We have so hallowed the cross by twenty centuries of emotion and sentiment that it sounds a very beautiful and pathetic thing to talk about carrying our cross. But a wooden cross with iron nails in it is a clumsy thing to carry.
"The real cross was like hat, and do we imagine that the external cross was more ugly than our actual one? Or that the thing that tore our Lord's hands and feet was not really so terrible as our imagination of it?"
"...whoever does not bear his cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple." Luke 14:27
"The rich young ruler had the master passion to be perfect. When he saw Jesus Christ, he wanted to be like Him. Our Lord never puts personal holiness to the fore when He calls a disciple; He puts absolute annihilation of my right to myself and identification with Himself—a relationship with Himself in which there is no other relationship. Luke 14:26 has nothing to do with salvation or sanctification, but with unconditional identification with Jesus Christ. Very few of us know the absolute 'go' of abandonment to Jesus.
“'Then Jesus beholding him loved him.' The look of Jesus will mean a heart broken for ever from allegiance to any other person or thing. Has Jesus ever looked at you? The look of Jesus transforms and transfixes. Where you are ‘soft’ with God is where the Lord has looked at you. If you are hard and vindictive, insistent on your own way, certain that the other person is more likely to be in the wrong than you are, it is an indication that there are whole tracts of your nature that have never been transformed by His gaze.
“'One thing thou lackest. . .' The only ‘good thing’ from Jesus Christ’s point of view is union with Himself and nothing in between.
“'Sell whatsoever thou hast. . .' I must reduce myself until I am a mere conscious man, I must fundamentally renounce possessions of all kinds, not to save my soul, (only one thing saves a man— absolute reliance upon Jesus Christ) but in order to follow Jesus. 'Come, and follow Me.' And the road is the way He went." (September 28)
"I have been crucified with Christ." Gal. 2:20
"The imperative need spiritually is to sign the death-warrant of the disposition of sin, to turn all emotional impressions and intellectual beliefs into a moral verdict against the disposition of sin, viz., my claim to my right to myself....
“ '. . . nevertheless I live . . . .” The individuality remains, but the mainspring, the ruling disposition, is radically altered. ...
“'And the life which I now live in the flesh . . . ,' -- the life I now live in my mortal flesh, the life which men can see -- 'I live by the faith of the Son of God.' This faith is not Paul’s faith in Jesus Christ, but the faith that the Son of God has imparted to him—'the faith of the Son of God.' It is no longer faith in faith, but faith which has overleapt all conscious bounds, the identical faith of the Son of God." (March 21)
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Oswald Chambers (1874 - 1917)
Oswald Chambers was not famous during his lifetime. At the time of his death in 1917 at the age of forty-three, only three books bearing his name had been published. Among a relatively small circle of Christians in Britain and the U.S., Chambers was much appreciated as a teacher of rare insight and expression, but he was not widely known.While there are more than 30 books that bear his name, he only penned one book, Baffled to Fight Better. His wife, Biddy, was a stenographer and could take dictation at a rate of 150 words per minute. During his time teaching at the Bible College and at various sites in Egypt, Biddy kept verbatim records of his lessons. She spent the remaining 30 years of her life compiling her records into the bulk of his published works. His daily devotional: "Utmost For His Highest" has sold millions of copies and is well known in modern evangelicalism today.
Oswald Chambers was born July 24, 1874, in Aberdeen, Scotland. Converted in his teen years under the ministry of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, he studied art and archaeology at the University of Edinburgh before answering a call from God to the Christian ministry. He then studied theology at Dunoon College. From 1906-1910 he conducted an itinerant Bible-teaching ministry in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan.
In 1910, Chambers married Gertrude Hobbs. They had one daughter, Kathleen.
In 1911 he founded and became principal of the Bible Training College in Clapham, London, where he lectured until the school was closed in 1915 because of World War I. In October 1915 he sailed for Zeitoun, Egypt (near Cairo), where he ministered to troops from Australia and New Zealand as a YMCA chaplain. He died there November 15, 1917, following surgery for a ruptured appendix.
Although Oswald Chambers wrote only one book, Baffled to Fight Better, more than thirty titles bear his name. With this one exception, published works were compiled by Mrs. Chambers, a court stenographer, from her verbatim shorthand notes of his messages taken during their seven years of marriage. For half a century following her husband's death she labored to give his words to the world.
My Utmost For His Highest, his best-known book, has been continuously in print in the United States since 1935 and remains in the top ten titles of the religious book bestseller list with millions of copies in print. It has become a Christian classic.
Oswald Chambers was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, on July 24th, 1874, to Clarence and Hannah Chambers, the seventh of seven children. Years earlier, Hannah converted to Christ under the dynamic preaching of Charles Haddon Spurgeon. Both she and Clarence were baptized by Spurgeon; and Clarence was one of the first students to enroll at Spurgeon’s Pastor’s College at the Metropolitan Tabernacle.
After accompanying his father to hear C.H. Spurgeon preach, Oswald surrendered his life to Christ, and was duly baptized by Rev. Briscoe. At Rye Lane Baptist, he faithfully attended Bible classes and prayer meetings. Anxious to apply his newly-acquired knowledge, he engaged in street evangelism and preached at missions.
In 1895 he received an Art’s Master’s Certificate. Thereafter he pursued his education at the University of Edinburgh, where he excelled in rigorous classwork as well as successfully maintaining a balanced devotional life. Attending a gathering of the Christian Union, he heard Hudson Taylor, founder of China Inland Mission, preach winningly on the faithfulness of God, nudging Chambers yet further toward ministry. After much prayer, he surrendered to missionary service.
On October 29th, 1917, Chambers, suffering severe pains in his abdomen, was rushed to a Red Cross hospital in Cairo where an emergency appendectomy was performed. Recovering somewhat, he relapsed from a blood clot, and died on November 15th, 1917.