Two Are Better Than One

“RESTATEMENT OF OSWALD CHAMBERS BELIEFS”

(From Oswald Chambers: His Life & Work – Bio by Mrs. Chambers)

July 24, 1917 – His Diary. This is my birthday, my 43^rd. The Psalms for the day are great – 116-118. It has been a glorious day in all ways, very hot but psychically very fine, and as it was a summarizing time for me, I am going to put down the results of the summary as I wrote it to two of my friends. The first was a restatement of beliefs –

FOREMOST, that Redemption, and not Rationalism, is the basis of human life, and that on that basis spirituality is the reality of mind and conscience and feeling at one with Jesus Christ in a ‘spontaneous moral originality’ of relationship.

SECOND. That the ‘soul-saving passion’ as an aim must cease and merge into the passion for Christ, revealing itself in holiness in all human relationships.

THIRD. That the Holy Spirit must be recognized as the sagacious Ruler in the saint’s affairs, not astute common sense.

FOURTH. That organization must be seen to be scaffolding raised by the organism, and must never be allowed to take the place of the organism.

FIFTH. That a scheme of socialistic propaganda is about to be enacted on a universal scale, with a mixture of astonishing good and atrocious bad; and until this has had its vogue Our Lord will not return; that is, if the past fairness to human schemes which God seems ever to have exhibited, is anything to go on.

THE OTHER is rather intimate autobiography, but I will put it down –

There comes to me growingly a sense of the ‘externals’ of things. Perhaps the plunging horror and conviction of sin in my early life not only disrupted my Art calling and all the tendencies of those years, but switched me off by a consequent swing of the pendulum away from external beauties of expression in form and color and rhetoric, and made me react into the rugged and uncouth and unrefined. But now I seem to have the experience Ruskin refers to – his grief at realizing the loss of his appreciation of the beauty of an English hedgerow, and his sad wonder if he would ever have the old emotions back again; then his recurrent joy and bounding delight when he found it all came back with redoubled force in later life. That perhaps states it. The beauty of form, of expression, of color, all the fleeting features of the immense external fields of life, are again delighting me marvelously. The old delight is back in a glorious EDITION DE LUXE, as it were. It is no longer an individual delight but a personal one, without the lust to possess, and without the forced detachment of the spectacular, yet with all the complete delight which possess a child’s mind in things. My inner career at the beginning was heavy and strong, even lurid and agonizing in the earlier phases; latterly, austere and peaceful, and now it is merging into a joy which is truly the receiving of a hundredfold more.

NOTE: Within 4 months of writing the above words on his birthday, Oswald Chambers was with His Lord. It was difficult for his friends to reconcile the wisdom of God in his taking, for his life seemed about to begin.

But his wife of 7 years, Biddy, had been a legal secretary prior to their marriage, and recorded accurately in shorthand the majority of all his sermons, addresses and teachings prior to his Home-going. Three of his books were published before his death, but some 42 more were published posthumously by Biddy and friends in the wisdom of God. Now, he being dead, yet speaks.

In 2000 AD all of his writings were gathered together into “The Complete Works of Oswald Chambers” published by Discovery House Publishers of Grand Rapids, Michigan. This beautifully bound edition of l500 double-column pages, can be purchased through Amazon, or Christian Book Distributors (CBD) www.christianbook.com– with substantial discounts.

Should the Holy Spirit lead you to obtain this unique possession, may I suggest that soon you dip into his “The Psychology of Redemption,” and “Bringing Sons unto Glory.” These will root and ground you not only soundly in the “Written Word,” but even more importantly, into Jesus the “Living Word.” It could be the beginning for many of you – “Life’s Greatest Adventure!”

Your friend and brother – Jim Watt