My Utmost For His Highest

Oswald Chambers’ devotional, My Utmost for His Highest, is filled with encouraging challenges – and challenging encouragement – to develop a fruitful life as a child of God. A dear friend once described it as “stern” and, in places, it is! There are times that I need God to be stern with me! But He is like the firm, tender parent of a toddler – with abundant reason to correct, knowing the discipline is unwanted, but that it will yield a lifetime of protection. Never wavering, at times with great concern, other times with great amusement, He provides the training required of a child of God. 

Recommended to me over 25 years ago, this book is now a well-worn, inviting companion, always prepared to accept me in any condition, and to send me on my way with the sure and gentle instruction that only a true friend can provide. 

The particular passage from December 27, captures the essence of why spending valuable time alone with God is vital, if one is serious about all this faith stuff. To mature and grow in His design for us, we need to hear His whispered messages, meant directly for our hearts. And once hearing, may we begin to fully realize what it means to live centered around the prayer, “Your will be done.” 

THE BATTLE’S LOST AND WON

‘If thou wilt return, O Israel, saith the Lord…’ Jeremiah 4:1

The battle is lost or won in the secret places of the will before God, never first in the external world. The Spirit of God apprehends me and I am obliged to get alone with God and fight the battle out before Him. Until this is done, I lose every time. The battle may take one minute or a year, that will depend on me, not on God; but it must be wrestled out alone before God, and I must resolutely go through the hell of a renunciation before God. Nothing has any power over the man who has fought out the battle before God and won there. 

If I say, ‘I will wait till I get into the circumstances and then put God to the test,’ I shall find I cannot. I must get the thing settled between myself and God in the secret places of my soul where no stranger intermeddles, and then I can go forth with the certainty that the battle is won. Lose it there, and calamity and disaster and upset are as sure as God’s decree. The reason the battle is not won is because I try to win it in the external world first. Get alone with God, fight it out before Him, settle the matter there once and for all.

In dealing with other people, the line to take is to push them to an issue of will. That is the way abandonment begins. Every now and again, not often, but sometimes, God brings us to a point of climax. That is the Great Divide in the life; from that point we either go towards a more and more dilatory and useless type of Christian life, or we become more and more ablaze for the glory of God – My Utmost for His Highest.