KenBoa

My Utmost For His Highest

Introduction

Oswald J. Chambers (born July 24, 1874 in Aberdeen, Scotland; died November 15, 1917 in Egypt) was a prominent early twentieth century Scottish Protestant Christian minister and teacher, best known as the author of the widely-read devotional My Utmost for His Highest.

He was born to devout Baptist parents, and was inspired to become a Christian following a service conducted by Charles Spurgeon. He mentioned to his father that, had there been an opportunity, he would have become a Christian. Chambers developed quickly in his faith, but he did not plan to go into ministry. He studied at Kensing-ton Art School and attended the University of Edinburgh, where he studied fine art and archaeology. But while at Edinburgh, he felt called to ministry, and transferred to Dunoon College. An unusually gifted student, Chambers soon began teaching classes and started a local society dedicated to Robert Browning, his favorite poet. But during this time, Chambers did not find satisfaction in Christianity, finding the Bible “dull” and uninspiring.

After four years of religious dormancy, Chambers came to believe that he couldn't force himself to be holy; once he realized that the strength and peace he was looking for was Christ himself, Christ's life in exchange for his sin, he experienced great renewal, so much so that he described it as a “radiant, unspeakable emancipation.”

With new-found strength, Chambers traveled the world, stopping in Egypt, Japan, and America. It was on one of his trips to America that he met Gertrude Hobbs. In 1910 he was married to Hobbs, whom he affectionately called "Biddy". On 24 May 1913, Biddy gave birth to their first and only child, Kathleen.

In 1911 he founded and became principal of the Bible Training Col-lege in Clapham in London. In 1915, feeling called to the war effort (World War I), Chambers applied and was accepted as a YMCA chaplain. He announced that the Bible Training College would be suspending operations for the duration of the war. Chambers was as-signed to Zeitoun in Egypt, where he ministered to Australian and New Zealand troops who were later part of the disastrous Battle of Gallipoli.

Chambers is buried the British Commonwealth Cemetery in Old Cairo and ac-cording to the caretaker in August, 2008, his grave is the most visited grave in the World War I cemetery. To find his grave, face the large white stone cross in the center of the cemetery, turn right towards the tree in the green grass and his marker is the seventh from the end.

Chambers died November 15, 1917 in Egypt as the result of a ruptured appendix. He suffered the extreme pain of appendicitis for three days before seeking medical attention, refusing to take a hospital bed needed by wounded soldiers.

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.

1 A Surrender of the Will and the Cost of Discipleship

• The profound thing in man is his will, not sin. Will is the essential element in God’s creation of man: sin is a perverse disposition which entered into man. In a regenerated man the source of will is almighty. 158
• Belief is not an intellectual act; belief is a moral act whereby I deliberately commit myself. A surrender of the will. Every man is made to reach out beyond his grasp. It is God who draws me, and my relationship to Him in the first place is a personal one, not an intellectual one. 357
• If a man is going to do anything worth while, there are times when he has to risk everything on his leap, and in the spiritual domain Jesus Christ demands that you risk everything you hold by common sense and leap into what He says. We act like pagans in a crisis, only one out of a crowd is daring enough to bank his faith in the character of God. 151
• The battle is fought in the domain of the will before God. Are you more devoted to your idea of what Jesus wants than to Himself? 231
• The battle is lost or won in the secret places of the will before God, never first in the external world. 362
• A surrender of will, an absolute and irrevocable surrender. A transaction of will, not of sentiment. Have you deliberately committed your will to Jesus Christ? 1, 36, 37, 108
• Surrender is not the surrender of the external life, but of the will; when that is done, all is done. There are very few crises in life; the great crisis is the surrender of the will. The whole of the life after surrender is an aspiration for unbroken communion with God. 257
• Sanctification means being made one with Jesus so that the disposition that ruled Him will rule us.  Are we prepared for what that will cost? It will cost everything that is not of God in us. 39
• Get into the habit of saying, “Speak, Lord,” and life will become a romance. We disobey God by become amateur providences. 30
• It is only by abandon that you recognize Him. 170
• If we only give up something to God because we want more back, there is nothing of the Holy Spirit in our abandonment; it is miserable commercial self-interest. 72
• If you have only come the length of asking God for things, you have never come to the first strand of abandonment, you have be-come a Christian from a standpoint of your own. Are you prepared to ask yourself what it is you want from God and why you want it? He is not concerned about making you blessed and happy now; He is working out His ultimate perfection all the time—“that they may be one even as We are.” 118
• Have I ever been carried away to do something for God not because it was my duty, nor because it was useful, nor because there was anything in it at all beyond the fact that I love Him? There are times when it seems as if God watches to see if we will give Him the abandoned tokens of how genuinely we do love Him. Abandon to God is of more value than personal holiness. 52
• We must let go before we lay hold. 68
• If you will give God your right to yourself, He will make a holy experiment out of you. God’s experiments always succeed. The one mark of a saint is the moral originality which springs from abandonment to Jesus Christ. In the life of a saint there is this amazing well-spring of original life. 165
• A “white funeral”—the burial of the old life. Agreeing with Him that this is your last day on earth. 15
• God makes us broken bread and poured out wine to please Him-self. 33

2 Intimacy with Christ and Holy Aspiration

• Compared with the miracle of the forgiveness of sin, the experience of sanctification is slight. 325
• “If any man come to Me, and hate not . . . he cannot be my disciple.” Our Lord implies that the only men and women He will use in His building enterprises are those who love Him personally, passionately and devotedly beyond any of the closest ties on earth. 128
• Bend the whole energy of your powers to realize your election as a child of God. You cannot do anything for your salvation, but you must do something to manifest it, you must work out what God has worked in. 136
• Is my knowledge of Jesus born of internal spiritual perception, or is it only what I have learned by listening to others? All spiritual history must have a personal knowledge for its bedrock. 228
• The soul is in danger when knowledge of doctrine outstrips intimate touch with Jesus. 229
• Moving from what Jesus Christ does toward the impenetrable darkness of realizing Who He is.
• Learning to trust God enough that we no longer want His blessings, but only want Himself. Have we come to the place where god can withdraw His blessings and it does not affect our trust in Him? 297
• The destined end of man is not happiness, nor health, but holiness. 245
• It is not the devil but the cares of this world that choke the word He puts in us.  144
• The Psalmist says we are to be haunted by God. To be haunted by God is to have an effective barricade against all the onslaughts of the enemy. 154
• The love of God at work in me makes me hate with the hatred of the Holy Ghost all that is not in keeping with God’s holiness. 361
• Love is spontaneous, but it has to be maintained by discipline. 132
• Ask God to keep the eyes of your spirit open to the Risen Christ. 66
• The strong calm sanity that Our Lord gives to those who are intimate with Him. 7
• Your earlier life of faith was narrow and intense, settled around a little sun-spot of experience that had as much of sense as of faith in it, full of light and sweetness; then God withdrew His conscious blessings in order to teach you to walk by faith. Faith in its actual working out has to go through spells of unsyllabled isolation. 305

3 Identification with Christ

• The Death of Jesus Christ is the performance in history of the very Mind of God. Never allow the thought that Jesus Christ stands with us against God out of pity and compassion; that He became a curse for us out of sympathy with us. Jesus Christ became a curse for us by the Divine decree. 326
• God’s purpose is not the development of a man; His purpose is to make a man exactly like Himself, and the characteristic of the Son of God is self-expenditure. Spiritually, we cannot measure our life by success, but only by what God pours through us, and we cannot measure that at all. 246
• The only thing that exceeds right-doing is right–being. Jesus Christ came to put into any man who would let Him a new heredity which would exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees. The great marvel of Jesus Christ’s salvation is that He alters heredity. He does not alter human nature; He alters its mainspring. 206
• You only reach your own identity when you are merged with another person. When love, or the Spirit of God strikes a man, he is transformed, he no longer insists upon his separate individuality. 347
• 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. 272
• Paul was devoted to a Person not to a cause. 24
• The reality of God’s presence is not dependent on any place, but only dependent upon the determination to set the Lord always before us. Our problems come when we refuse to bank on the reality of His presence. 202
• All I do ought to be founded on a perfect oneness with Him, not on a self-willed determination to be godly. 28
• Sanctification is an impartation, not an imitation. 205
• Sanctification is not something Jesus Christ puts into me: it is Himself in me. 204
• Sin is a fundamental relationship; it is not wrong doing, it is wrong being, deliberate and emphatic independence of God. Other religions deal with sins; the Bible alone deals with sin. God made His own Son to be sin that He might make the sinner a saint. All through the Bible it is revealed that our Lord bore the sin of the world by identification, not by sympathy. 281
• If a man attracts by his personality, his appeal is along that line; if he is identified with his Lord’s personality, then the appeal is along the line of what Jesus Christ can do. 314
• Individuality counterfeits personality as lust counterfeits love. God designed human nature for Himself; individuality debases human nature for itself. 346
• The initiative of the saint is not towards self-realization, but towards knowing Jesus Christ. Self-realization leads to the enthronement of work; whereas the saint enthrones Jesus Christ in his work. 193
• The proof that we have the vision of God is that we are reaching out for more than we have grasped. Our reach must exceed our grasp. 123
• To be so much in contact with God that you never need to ask Him to show you His will, is to be nearing the final stage of your discipline in the life of faith. When you are rightly related to God, it is a life of freedom and liberty and delight, you are God’s will, and all your common-sense decisions are His will for you unless He checks. Think of the last thing you prayed about—were you devoted to your desire or to God? 80

4 Abiding in Christ

• Eternal life has nothing to do with Time, it is the life which Jesus lived when He was down here. The only source of Life is the Lord Jesus Christ. 103
• God’s life in us expresses itself as God’s life, not as human life trying to be godly. The secret of a Christian is that the supernatural is made natural in him by the grace of God. 264
• The Sermon on the Mount is not an ideal, it is a statement of what will happen in me when Jesus Christ has altered my disposition and put in a disposition like His own. Jesus Christ is the only One Who can fulfill the Sermon on the Mount. 269
• Every element of self-reliance must be slain by the power of God. Complete weakness and dependence will always be the occasion for the Spirit of God to manifest His power. 126
• “Ye cannot serve the Lord God” (Josh. 24:10), but you can put yourself in the place where God’s almighty power will come through you. 191
• Are you drawing your life from any other source than God Himself? 20
• Pay attention to the objective Source and the subjective energy will be there. The Cross is the great point of spiritual energy, and we have to concentrate on it. 331
• We have to maintain ourselves in the place of beholding. Never be hurried out of the relationship of abiding in Him. 23
• If we come to Him and ask Him to produce Christ-consciousness, He will always do it until we learn to abide in Him. 232

5 Prayer

• We are in danger of getting the barter spirit when we come to God. Stop the impertinence of debate. 296
• Prayer is not simply getting things from God, that is a most initial form of prayer; prayer is getting into perfect communion with God. 260
• Prayer is an effort of will. The great battle in private prayer is the overcoming of mental wool-gathering. We have to discipline our minds and concentrate on willful prayer. Get into the habit of dealing with God about everything. Unless in the first waking moment of the day you learn to fling the door wide back and let God in, you will work on a wrong level all day; but swing the door wide open and pray to your Father in secret, and every public thing will be stamped with the presence of God. 236
• Spiritual lust makes me demand an answer from God, instead of seeking God Who gives the answer. The meaning of prayer is that we get hold of God, not of the answer. 38
• Prayer is the way the life of God is nourished. We look upon prayer as a means of getting things for ourselves; the Bible idea of prayer is that we may get to know God Himself. It is not so true that “prayer changes things” as that prayer changes me and I change things. 241
• The purpose of God is not to answer our prayers, but by our prayers we come to discern the mind of God, and this is revealed in John 17.4 3

6 God’s Guidance in Our Lives

• We give credit to human wisdom when we should give credit to the Divine guidance of God through childlike people who were foolish enough to trust God’s wisdom and the supernatural equipment of God. 300
• The circumstances of a saint’s life are ordained of God. In the life of a saint there is no such thing as chance. God by His providence brings you into circumstances that you cannot understand at all, but the Spirit of God understands. God is bringing you into places and among people and into conditions in order that the intercession of the Spirit in you may take a particular line. 312
• We must never put our dreams of success as God’s purpose for us; His purpose may be exactly the opposite. What we call the process, God calls the end. It is the process, not the end, which is glorifying to God. If we have a further end in view, we do not pay sufficient attention to the immediate present; if we realize that obedience is the end, then each moment as it comes is precious. 210
• Very few of us debate with the sordid and evil and wrong, but we do debate with the good. It is the good that hates the best, and the higher up you get in the scale of the natural virtues, the more intense is the opposition to Jesus Christ. Beware of refusing to go the funeral of your own independence. 344
• God does not tell you what He is going to do; He reveals to you Who He is. 2
• Never run before God’s guidance; wait for God to move.
• When God gives a vision and darkness follows, wait. 19
• Whenever you obey God, His seal is always that of peace, the witness of an unfathomable peace, which is not natural, but the peace of Jesus. Whenever peace does not come, tarry till it does or find out the reason why it does not. 349
• The nature of spiritual life is that we are certain in our uncertainty, consequently we do not make our nests anywhere. Certainty is the mark of the common-sense life; gracious uncertainty is the mark of the spiritual life. We are uncertain of the next step, but we are certain of God. 120
• The voice of the Spirit is as gentle as a zephyr, so gentle that unless you are living in perfect communion with God, you never hear it. The checks of the Spirit come in the most extraordinarily gentle ways, and if you are not sensitive enough to detect His voice you will quench it, and your personal spiritual life will be impaired. His checks always come as a still small voice, so small that no one but the saint notices them. 226
• Beware of not acting upon what you see in your moments on the mount with God. If you do not obey the light, it will turn into darkness. 240

7 Private Communion Vs. Public Activity

• A great many Christian workers worship their work. There is no responsibility on you for the work; the only responsibility you have is to keep in living constant touch with God, and to see that you allow nothing to hinder your co-operation with Him. 114
• The Church ceases to be a spiritual society when it is on the lookout for the development of its own organization.  194
• Spiritual leakage. It is the peril of our soul’s welfare that we get caught up in practical work and miss the fulfillment of the vision. 71
• The battle of being so absorbed in work that we are not ready to face Jesus Christ at every turn. Jesus rarely comes where we expect Him; He appears where we least expect Him, and always in the most illogical connections. The only way a worker can keep true to God is by being ready for the Lord’s surprise visits. It is not service that matters, but intense spiritual reality, expecting Jesus Christ at every turn. 89
• Active work and spiritual vitality are not the same thing. Active work may be the counterfeit of spiritual activity. 192
• The central thing about the kingdom of Jesus Christ is a personal relationship to Himself, not public usefulness to men. 293
• The ministry of the interior; I must take time to realize what is the central point of power. The disciple who abides in Jesus is the will of God, and his apparently free choices are God’s foreordained decrees. Mysterious? Logically contradictory and absurd? Yes, but a glorious truth to a saint. 159
• We are not turned into spiritual mediums, but into spiritual messengers; the message must be part of ourselves. The Son of God was His own message, His words were spirit and life; and as His disciples our lives must be the sacrament of our message. The natural heart will 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. 70
• Beware of outstripping God by your very longing to do His will. We run ahead of Him in a thousand and one activities, consequently we get so burdened with persons and with difficulties that we do not worship God, we do not intercede. 92
• Jesus Christ’s life was an absolute failure from every standpoint but God’s. But what seemed failure from man’s standpoint was a tremendous triumph from God’s, because God’s purpose is never man’s purpose. His call is to be in comradeship with Himself for His own purposes, and the test is to believe that God knows what He is after. A Christian is one who trusts the wits and the wisdom of God, and not his own wits. 218
• The measure of the worth of our public activity for God is the private profound communion we have with Him. 6
• A river touches place of which its source knows nothing. God rarely allows a soul to see how great a blessing he is. Keep right at the Source. 250
• Worship aright in your private relationships, then when God sets you free you will be ready, because in the unseen life which no one saw but God you have become perfectly fit, and when the strain comes you can be relied upon by God. 254

8 The Role of Service

• The snare in Christian work is to rejoice in successful service, to rejoice in the fact that God has used you. Beware of the people who make usefulness their ground of appeal. If you make usefulness the test, then Jesus Christ was the greatest failure that ever lived. The lodestar of the saint is God Himself, not estimated usefulness. It is the work that God does through us that counts, not what we do for Him. 243
• There is a difference between devotion to a Person and devotion to principles or to a cause. Our Lord never proclaimed a cause; He proclaimed personal devotion to Himself. 184
• Beware of anything that competes with loyalty to Jesus Christ.  The greatest competitor of devotion to Jesus is service for Him. 18
• If I am devoted to the cause of humanity only, I will soon be exhausted and come to the place where my love will falter; but if I love Jesus Christ personally and passionately, I can serve humanity though men treat me as a doormat. 171
• The mainstream of Paul’s service is not love for men, but love for Jesus Christ.  If we are devoted to the cause of humanity, we shall soon be crushed and brokenhearted, for we shall often meet with more ingratitude from men than we would from a dog; but if our motive is love to God, no ingratitude can hinder us from serving our fellow men. 54
• The call of God is essentially expressive of His nature; service is the outcome of what is fitted to my nature. Service is expressive of that which is fitted to my nature: God’s call is expressive of His nature. 17
• We count as service what we do in the way of Christian work; Jesus Christ calls service what we are to Him, not what we do for Him. Discipleship is based on devotion to Jesus Christ, not on adherence to a belief or a creed. Today we have substituted creedal belief for personal belief, and that is why so many are devoted to causes and so few devoted to Jesus Christ. 171
• There is no joy in the soul that has forgotten what God prizes. Am I so in love with Him that I take no account of where I go? or am I watching for the respect due to me; weighing how much service I ought to give? 21
• What do I really count dear? If I have not been gripped by Jesus Christ, I will count service dear, time given to God dear, my life dear unto myself. Practical work may be a competitor against abandonment to God, because practical work is based on this argument—Remember how useful you are here, or—Think how much value you would be in that particular type of work. Never consider whether you are of use; but ever consider that you are not your own but His. 64

9 Intercession and Other-centered Ministry

• If you have been shrewd in finding out the defects in others, re-member that will be exactly the measure given to you. Life serves back in the coin you pay. Who of us would dare to stand before God and say—“My God, judge me as I have judged my fellow men?” 174
• We get distracted by the lust of vindication. God never gives us discernment in order that we may criticize, but that we may inter-cede. 328
• Discernment is God’s call to intercession, never to fault finding. 124
• One of the subtlest burdens God ever puts on us as saints is the burden of discernment concerning other souls. He reveals things in order that we may take the burden of these souls before Him and form the mind of Christ about them. 91
• If you become a necessity to a soul, you are out of God’s order. As a worker, your great responsibility is to be a friend of the Bridegroom. Hear the Bridegroom’s voice in the life of another. 84
• God educates us by means of people who are a little better than we are, not intellectually but “holily,” until we get under the domination of the Lord Himself. 201
• You can never give another person that which you have found, but you can make him homesick for what you have. 162
• The process of being made broken bread and poured out wine means that you have to be the nourishment for other souls until they learn to feed on God. Before other souls learn to draw on the life of the Lord Jesus direct, they have to draw on it through you; you have to be literally ‘sucked,’ until they learn to take their nourishment from God. 40
• In sanctification the regenerated soul deliberately gives up his right to himself to Jesus Christ, and identifies himself entirely with God’s interest in other men. 10
• To be a disciple means that we deliberately identify ourselves with God’s interests in other people. 264
• Vicarious intercession means that we deliberately substitute God’s interests in others for our natural sympathy with them. 125
• Jesus Christ never trusted human nature, yet He was never cynical, never suspicious, because He trusted absolutely in what He could do for human nature. 176
• The disillusionment which comes from God brings us to the place where we see men and women as they really are, and yet there is no cynicism, we have no stinging, bitter things to say. Every relationship not based on loyalty to Himself will end in disaster. Our Lord trusted no man, yet He was never suspicious, never bitter. If our trust is placed in human beings, we shall end in despairing of everyone. 212

10 Trust and Obedience

• Beware of the inclination to dictate to God as to what you will allow to happen if you obey Him. 11
• Many of us are loyal to our notions of Jesus Christ, but how many of us are loyal to Him? Loyalty to Jesus means I have to step out where I do not see anything (cf. Matt. 14:29); loyalty to my notions means that I clear the ground first by my intelligence. Faith is not intelligent understanding, faith is deliberate commitment to a Person where I see no way. 88
• God cannot reveal anything to us if we have not His Spirit. An obstinate outlook will effectually hinder God from revealing anything to us. 98
• My vision of God depends upon the state of my character. Character determines revelation. 195
• Make room for God to come in as He chooses. Keep your life so constant in its contact with God that His surprising power may break out on the right hand and on the left. Always be in a state of expectancy, and see that you leave room for God to come in as He likes. 25
• All God’s revelations are sealed until they are opened to us by obedience. You will never get them open by philosophy or thinking. Obey God in the thing He shows you, and instantly the next thing is opened up. God will never reveal more truth about Himself until you have obeyed what you know already. 284
• If a man cannot get through to God it is because there is a secret thing he does not intend to give up. 354
• The golden rule for understanding spiritually is not intellect, but obedience. Intellectual darkness comes through ignorance; spiritual darkness comes because of something I do not intend to obey. No man ever receives a word from God without instantly being put to the test over it. 209
• You cannot think a spiritual muddle clear, you have to obey it clear. In intellectual matters you can think things out, but in spiritual matters you will think yourself into cotton wool. Spiritual muddle is only made plain by obedience. 258
• Vision depends on character—the pure in heart see God. Not only must the inner sanctuary be kept right with God, but the outer courts as well are to be brought into perfect accord with the purity God gives us by His grace. The spiritual understanding is blurred immediately the outer court is sullied. 86
• The grace you had yesterday will not do for today. 178
• We are in danger of forgetting that we cannot do what God does, and that God will not do what we can do. We cannot save ourselves nor sanctify ourselves, God does that; but God will not give us good habits, He will not give us character, He will not make us walk aright. 131
• Nothing is a light matter with a child of God. You cannot have a moral holiday and remain moral, nor can you have a spiritual holiday and remain spiritual. God wants you to be entirely His, and this means that you have to watch to keep yourself fit. 106
• Keep yourself steadily faced by the judgment seat of Christ. One carnal judgment, and the end of it is hell in you. The penalty of sin is that gradually you get used to it and do not know that it is sin. 76
• Never allow a truth of God that is brought home to your soul to pass without acting on it, not necessarily physically, but in will. 309

11 Faithfulness in the Ordinary

• Beware of allowing yourself to think that the shallow concerns of life are not ordained of God; they are as much of God as the pro-found. 327
• A Christian worker has to learn how to be God’s noble man or woman amid a crowd of ignoble things. 299
• We are built for the valley, for the ordinary stuff we are in, and that is where we have to prove our mettle. The times of exaltation are exceptional, they have their meaning in our life with God, but we must beware lest our spiritual selfishness wants to make them the only time. 275
• The real test of the saint is not preaching the gospel, but washing disciples’ feet, that is, doing the things that do not count in the actual estimate of men but count everything in the estimate of God. 56
• The test of the life of a saint is not success, but faithfulness in human life as it actually is. 321
• It is far easier to die than to lay down the life day in and day out with the sense of the high calling. We are not made for brilliant moments, but we have to walk in the light of them in ordinary ways. 168
• The test of a man’s religious life and character is not what he does in the exceptional moments of life, but what he does in the ordinary times, when there is nothing tremendous or exciting on. 286
• Do not expect God always to give you His thrilling minutes, but learn to live in the domain of drudgery by the power of God. 167
• If we do not do the running steadily in the little ways, we shall do nothing in the crisis. 255
• We can all see God in exceptional things, but it requires the culture of spiritual discipline to see God in every detail. Never allow that the haphazard is anything less than God’s appointed order, and be ready to discover the Divine designs anywhere. 319
• The proof that we are rightly related to God is that we do our best whether we feel inspired or not. One of the great snares of the Christian worker is to make a fetish of his rare moments. 116
• God is trying to make us do our duty as obscure people. If we try to re-introduce the rare moments of inspiration, it is a sign that it is not God we want. We are making a fetish of the moments when God did come and speak, and insisting that He must do it again. Never live for the rare moments, they are surprises. God will give us touches of inspiration when He sees we are not in danger of being led away by them. We must never make our moments of inspiration our standard; our standard is our duty. 122
• In the history of God’s work you will nearly always find that it has started from the obscure, the unknown, the ignored, but the steadfastly true to Jesus Christ. 251
• God does not give us overcoming life: He gives us life as we overcome. The strain is the strength. God never gives strength for tomorrow, or for the next hour, but only for the strain of the minute. 215
• God plants His saints in the most useless places. We say—God in-tends me to be here because I am so useful. Jesus never estimated His life along the line of the greatest use. God puts His saints where they will glorify Him, and we are no judges at all of where that is. 223
• Which are the people who have influenced us most? Not the ones who thought they did, but those who had not the remotest notion that they were influencing us. In the Christian life the implicit is never conscious, if it is conscious it ceases to have this unaffected loveliness which is the characteristic of the touch of Jesus. We always know when Jesus is at work because He produces in the common-place something that is inspiring. 234

12 Pleasing God Rather than Others

• Being ambitious only to be pleasing to Him. I have to learn to relate everything to the master ambition, and to maintain it without any cessation. My worth to God in public is what I am in private. 77
• The danger of taking the pattern and print of the religious age we live in, making eyes at spiritual success. Never court anything other than the approval of God. One life wholly devoted to God is of more value to God than one hundred lives simply awakened by His Spirit. 115
• If I put my trust in human beings first, I will end in despairing of everyone; I will become bitter, because I have insisted on man being what no man ever can be—absolutely right. Never trust anything but the grace of God in yourself or in anyone else. 152
• Christian perfection is not, and never can be, human perfection. Christian perfection is the perfection of a relationship to God which shows itself amid the irrelevancies of human life. I am called to live in perfect relation to God so that my life produces a longing after God in other lives, not admiration for myself. 337

13 Self-knowledge

• Either Jesus Christ is the supreme Authority on the human heart, or He is not worth paying any attention to. He understood the terrible possibilities that are in the heart. 208
• It is astounding how ignorant we are about ourselves! 12
• Most of us are much sterner with others than we are in regard to ourselves; we make excuses for things in ourselves whilst we condemn in others things to which we are not naturally inclined. 340
• When I get into the presence of God, I do not realize that I am a sinner in an indefinite sense; I realize the concentration of sin in a particular feature of my life. 185
• I have never met the man I could despair of after discerning what lies in me apart from the grace of God. 169
• When I am born again of the Spirit of God, I know that Jesus Christ did not come to teach only: He came to make me what He teaches I should be. The teaching of the Sermon on the Mount produces despair in the natural man—the very thing Jesus means it to do. The bedrock in Jesus Christ’s kingdom is poverty, not possession; not decisions for Jesus Christ, but a sense of absolute futility—I cannot begin to do it. The knowledge of our own poverty brings us to the moral frontier where Jesus Christ works. 203
• It is not a question of our equipment but of our poverty, not of what we bring with us, but of what God puts into us. The comrade-ship of God is made up out of men who know their poverty. The main thing about Christianity is not the work we do, but the relation-ship we maintain and the atmosphere produced by that relationship. 217
• The thing I am blessed in is my poverty. If I know I have no strength of will, no nobility of disposition, then Jesus says—Blessed are you, because it is through this poverty that I enter His Kingdom. I cannot enter His Kingdom as a good man or woman, I can only enter it as a complete pauper. 234

14 The Thought Life

• In the spiritual life beware of walking according to natural affinities. 264
• Supernatural sense is the gift of His Son; never enthrone common sense. Our ordinary wits never worship God unless they are trans-figured by the indwelling Son of God. 222
• Always make a practice of provoking your own mind to think out what it accepts easily. Our position is not ours until we make it ours by suffering. The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance. 350
• Growth in spiritual life does not depend on our watching it, but on concentration on our Father in heaven. 139
• The one thing that keeps the conscience sensitive to Him is the continual habit of being open to God on the inside. Keep your inner vision clear. 134
• If I allow any private deflection from God in my life, everyone about me suffers. When once you allow physical selfishness, mental slovenliness, moral obtuseness, spiritual density, everyone belonging to your crowd will suffer. 46
• If we give way to self-pity and indulge in the luxury of misery, we banish God’s riches from our own lives and hinder others from entering into His provision. No sin is worse than the sin of self-pity, be-cause it obliterates God and puts self-interest upon the throne. 137
• You can never be the same after the unveiling of a truth. That moment marks you for going on as a more true disciple of Jesus Christ  or for going back as a deserter. 364
• Learning to use the imagination aright.  Nature to a saint is sacra-mental. Bringing the imagination into captivity. Imagination is the greatest gift God has given us and it ought to be devoted entirely to Him. Learn to associate ideas worthy of God with all that happens in Nature. Provoke yourself by recollection. 41-42

15 The Role of Adversity

• Faith must be tested, because it can be turned into a personal possession only through conflict. 242
• Troubles nearly always make us look to God; His blessings are apt to make us look elsewhere. 22
• Abraham did not choose the sacrifice. Always guard against self-chosen service for God; self-sacrifice may be a disease. If you are not living in touch with Him, it is easy to pass a crude verdict on God. You must go through the crucible before you have any right to pronounce a verdict, because in the crucible you learn to know God better. 316
• God gets us alone by affliction, heartbreak, or temptation, by dis-appointment, sickness, or by thwarted affection, by a broken friend-ship, or by a new friendship He reveals the plague of our own hearts. 13
• We are not quite prepared for the blows which must come if we are going to be turned into the shape of the vision. The batterings always come in commonplace ways and through commonplace people. 278
• You cannot receive your self in success, you lose your head; you cannot receive your self in monotony, you grouse. The way to find your self is in the fires of sorrow. 177

16 Perspective on the Past and the Future

• Keep your soul fit to manifest the life of the Son of God. Never live on memories; let the word of God be always living and active in you. 135
• The unfathomable sadness of the “might have been”. Never be afraid when God brings back the past. Let memory have its way. It is a minister of God with its rebuke and chastisement and sorrow. God will turn the “might have been” into a wonderful culture for the fu-ture. 94
• The initiative against despair—let the past sleep, but let it sleep on the bosom of Christ, and go out into the irresistible future with Him. Never let the sense of failure corrupt your new action. 49
• Our present enjoyment of God’s grace is apt to be checked by the memory of yesterday’s sins and blunders. But God is the God of our yesterdays, and He allows the memory of them in order to turn the past into a ministry of spiritual culture for the future. God reminds us of the past lest we get into a shallow security in the present. Our yesterdays present irreparable things to us; it is true that we have lost opportunities which will never return, but God can transform this destructive anxiety into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future. Let the past sleep, but let it sleep on the bosom of Christ. Leave the irreparable past in His hands, and step out into the irresistible future with Him. 366
• There is nothing noble the human mind has ever hoped for or dreamed of that will not be fulfilled. 53