Top 757 Quotes & Sayings by Oswald Chambers

The dearest friend on earth is a mere shadow compared to Jesus Christ.

Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.

We have to pray with our eyes on God, not on the difficulties.

Character in a saint means the disposition of Jesus Christ persistently manifested.

Holiness, not happiness, is the chief end of man.

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

When it is a question of God's almighty Spirit, never say, 'I can't.'

We look upon the enemy of our souls as a conquered foe, so he is, but only to God, not to us.

If in preaching the gospel you substitute your knowledge of the way of salvation for confidence in the power of the gospel, you hinder people from getting to reality.

Faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you may not understand at the time.

When a man is at his wits' end it is not a cowardly thing to pray, it is the only way he can get in touch with Reality.

You will never cease to be the most amazed person on earth at what God has done for you on the inside.

The whole point of getting things done is knowing what to leave undone.

I have learnt that I am me, that I can do the things that, as one might put it, me can do, but I cannot do the things that me would like to do.

It is the unseen and the spiritual in people that determines the outward and the actual.

We look upon prayer simply as a means of getting things for ourselves, but the biblical purpose of prayer is that we may get to know God Himself.

God never forces a person's will into surrender, and He never begs. He patiently waits until that person willingly yields to Him. True surrender is a matter of being 'united together [with Jesus] in the likeness of His death' (Romans 6:5) until nothing ever appeals to you that did not appeal to Him. And after you surrender--then what? Your entire life should be characterized by an eagerness to maintain unbroken fellowship and oneness with God.

To say that 'prayer changes things' is not as close to the truth as saying, 'prayer changes me and then I change things.' God has established things so that prayer, on the basis of redemption, changes the way a person looks at things.

The expression of Christian character is not good doing, but God-likeness. If the Spirit of God has transformed you within, you will exhibit Divine characteristics in your life, not good human characteristics . God's life in us expresses itself as God's life, not as human life trying to be godly.

God never gives us discernment in order that we may criticize, but that we may intercede.

We are not responsible for the circumstances we are in, but we are responsible for the way we allow those circumstances to affect us; we can either allow them to get on top of us or we can allow them to transform us into what God wants us to be.

The prayer of the feeblest saint who lives in the Spirit and keeps right with God is a terror to Satan. The very powers of darkness are paralyzed by prayer; no spiritualistic seance can succeed in the presence of a humble praying saint. No wonder Satan tries to keep our minds fussy in active work till we cannot think in prayer.

All our fret and worry is caused by calculating without God.

God speaks in the language you know best - not through your ears, but through your circumstances.

Some prayers are followed by silence (from God) because they are wrong, others because they are bigger than one can understand. It will be a wonderful moment for some of us when we stand before God and find that the prayers we clamored for in early days and imagined were never answered, have been answered in the most amazing way, and that God's silence has been the sign of the answer.

When God gets us alone through suffering, heartbreak, temptation, disappointment, sickness, or by thwarted friendship - when He gets us absolutely alone, and we are totally speechless, unable to ask even one question, then He begins to teach us.

We pray when there's nothing else we can do; Jesus wants us to pray before we do anything at all.

God never fits His word to suit me; He fits me to suit His word.

Faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you cannot understand at the time.

Solitude with God repairs the damage done by the fret and noise and clamour of the world.

The more you fulfill yourself, the less you will seek God.

Beware of harking back to what you once were when God wants you to be something you have never been.

Spiritual maturity is not reached by the passing of the years, but by obedience to the will of God. Some people mature into an understanding of God’s will more quickly than others because they obey more readily; they more readily sacrifice the life of nature to the will of God.

The moment we recognize our complete weakness and our dependence upon Him will be the very moment that the Spirit of God will exhibit His power.

I must learn that the purpose of my life belongs to God, not me. God is using me from His great personal perspective, and all He asks of me is that I trust Him. ... When I stop telling God what I want, He can freely work His will in me without any hindrance. ... Self-pity is of the devil, and if I wallow in it I cannot be used by God for His purpose in the world.

God is not concerned about our plans; He doesn’t ask, “Do you want to go through this loss of a loved one, this difficulty, or this defeat?” No, He allows these things for His own purpose. The things we are going through are either making us sweeter, better, and nobler men and women, or they are making us more critical and fault-finding, and more insistent on our own way. The things that happen either make us evil, or they make us more saintly, depending entirely on our relationship with God and its level of intimacy.

By realizing the reality of our Prince within us, we are never bothered again by the fact that we do not understand ourselves, or that other people do not understand us. The only One who truly understands me is the One who made me and who redeems me... It is a tremendous freedom to get rid of every kind of self-consideration and learn to care about only one thing - the relationship between our Prince and ourselves.

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.

'I have chosen you!' Keep that note of greatness in your creed. It is not that you have got God but that He has got you.

Your priorities must be God first, God second, and God third, until your life is continually face to face with God.

Spiritual maturity is not reached by the passing of the years, but by obedience to the will of God.

Faith never knows where it is being led, but it loves and knows the One who is leading.

Isaiah was so attuned to God, because of the great crisis he had just endured, that the call of God penetrated his soul. The majority of us cannot hear anything but ourselves. And we cannot hear anything God says. But to be brought to the place where we can hear the call of God is to be profoundly changed.

A life of intimacy with God is characterized by joy.

Get into the habit of saying, ''Speak, Lord,'' and life will become a romance.

The strain of life is what builds our strength. If there is no strain, there will be no strength.

Spend plenty of time with God; let other things go, but don't neglect Him. We are not here to do work for God, we are here to be workers with Him, those through whom He can do His work.

For understanding in spiritual matters, the golden rule is not intellect but obedience.

If you are going to be used by God, He will take you through a number of experiences that are not meant for you personally at all. They are designed to make you useful in His hands, and to enable you to understand what takes place in the lives of others.

The great thing about faith in God is that it keeps a man undisturbed in the midst of disturbance.

The greatest test of a man's character is his tongue.

God brings you to places, among people, and into certain conditions to accomplish a definite purpose through the intercession of the Spirit in you. Your part in intercessory prayer is not to agonize over how to intercede, but to use the everyday circumstances and people God puts around you by His providence to bring them before His throne, and to allow the Spirit in you the opportunity to intercede for them. In this way God is going to touch the whole world with His saints.

Prayer is the vital breath of the Christian; not the thing that makes him alive, but the evidence that he is alive.

The root of all sin is the suspicion that God is not good.

If sin rules in me, God's life in me will be killed; if God rules in me, sin in me will be killed.

God will never reveal more truth about himself until you have obeyed what you know already

We are not meant to be seen as God's perfect, bright-shining examples, but to be seen as the everyday essence of ordinary life exhibiting the miracle of His grace.

The remarkable thing about God is that when you fear God, you fear nothing else, whereas if you do not fear God, you fear everything else.

Christianity is not devotion to work, or to a cause, or a doctrine, but devotion to a Person, the Lord Jesus Christ.

God places His saints where they will bring the most glory to Him, and we are totally incapable of judging where that may be.