The Complete Works of Oswald Chambers

Very pleased with this, well presented and full of valuable information.

En dehors de la Bible, c'est l’œuvre le plus magnifique sur la relation entre l'homme et Dieu qui existe ! Absolument fantastique ! Un 'must'.

I have used Oswald Chambers's devotional "My Utmost for His Highest" for the last four to five years and I can't think of any other book (other than the Bible) that has influenced my Christian walk as this one has. So when I heard about "The Complete Works of Oswald Chambers" I was all ears - I couldn't wait to get my hands on more material from this writer! I haven't read it all (I only got it a month ago and it's over 1300 pages long!) but what I have read is excellent. I am finding that reading Chambers's notes on Isaiah while reading the book of Isaiah is an enlightening experience (just don't depend on Chambers - make sure you do your own study and meditation of the Scriptures!). He had such an excellent way of seeing the "big picture" in Scripture . . . and of expressing it in an unsurpassed way! But going beyond the content, the book is beautifully bound and very high quality and the CD is a wonderful asset (includes a half-hour long video on the life of Chambers). Although this book was published a number of years ago, the CD software worked just fine on my computer that runs Windows 7. This book is well worth your money and time!

it's such a blessing that in a generation of human, if there is a man who can really understand God and His will...one of those rare man is Oswald Chambers..

The Complete Works of Oswald ChambersDiscovery House Publishers© 2000 by Oswald Chambers Publications Association, LimitedPreface to Review. Sifting through the sands of time, the lives of men and of times and of places and of things are easily lost or forgotten. My own life, that of my family, of my ancestry, are not noticeable or distinct, when contrasted with the span of civilization, and perhaps that is as it should be. From a Christian perspective, if we are content to let the hand of God mold us and the events and circumstances which confront us, it matters not whether we make a noticeable mark in world history. But if during our lives we can have a glimpse of the nature of the eternal, of God, His character, and our relation to him, and make that known to others - then we should take note of the source of this inspiration. Thus, if for no other reason than to learn of God, we ought to read and study The Complete Works of Oswald Chambers.Review. The book is a collection of his sermons and teachings and lectures; as you read these materials, you quickly learn and observe that Chambers was gifted in revealing the nature of God, in a manner unique to his times (post Victorian era, WWI), but eternal in its message.But how were these messages, which Chambers preached, reduced to writing, since the messages were given during a six year span, from 1911 - 1917? At that time, there were no tape recorders or digital voice devices. The answer: a pencil, note pad and Biddy Chambers' shorthand notes. When he taught and preached, Biddy Chambers (Mrs. Oswald Chambers) took shorthand notes of what he said, then later transcribed his lectures and sermons, most of which were transcribed and published after he died.Though he had the message, she had a gift, perhaps a streak of genius, as she compiled the shorter daily devotional, My Utmost for His Highest circa 1928, which was completed about ten years after he died in 1917, through the use of her shorthand notes. Though I had read this daily devotional several times, it was not until I taught a Sunday School class on My Utmost for His Highest that I sought biographical material on Oswald Chambers. After locating and reading the very good biography Abandoned to God, a friend mentioned that Chambers' works had been reduced to a single book, which even included a searchable CD; the computer program (on the CD) uses a book reader, which is a very handy tool, whenever I want to share bits and pieces of his teachings with friends.But let me return to the point I was making: after I read the biography, I learned how the sermons and lectures were transcribed.The Complete Works is a monster-sized book, about 1500 pages. It took me over 3 years to read it. As I worked my way though each large page, I was surprised to learn that Oswald Chambers was not only bright and well read (in fields other than Christianity), he was a master psychologist. His insights into human behavior are profound, and this gift of making our actions transparent is somewhat alarming when contrasted with contemporary ethics, philosophy and psychology of Christianity.In these teachings and sermons, his theology does not repeat itself, for each sermon casts different nuances on Christian living that no one else has reduced to writing (to my knowledge). But permit me to give a sampling of his works, which are rich in his knowledge of God and his theology:Chambers' Basic Beliefs (materials in quotations taken from his message, Disciples Indeed)"The essence of Christianity is a personal relationship to Jesus Christ with any amount of room for its outworking. The appeal of the Gospel is not that it should be preached in order that men might be saved and put right for heaven, but that they might enter into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ here and now."Discipleship and salvation are two different things: a disciple is one who, realizing the meaning of the Atonement, deliberately gives himself up to Jesus Christ in unspeakable gratitude. The one mark of discipleship is the mastership of Jesus ¬¬-- His right to me from the crown of my head to the sole of my foot."The one essential element in all our Lord's teaching about discipleship is abandon, no calculation, no trace of self-interest. A disciple is one who not only proclaims God's truth, but one who manifests that he is no longer his own, he has been "bought with a price.""The mark of the saint is the good right things he has the privilege of not doing. There are a hundred and one right and good things which, if you are a disciple of Jesus, you must avoid as you would the devil although there is no devil in them. If our Lord's words in Matthew 5:29-30 were read more often we would have a healthier young manhood and womanhood."Beware of the people who tell you life is simple. Life is such a mass of complications that no man is safe apart from God. Coming to Jesus does not simplify life, it simplifies my relationship to God. When Jesus Christ is bringing a son to glory , He ignores the work he has done; the work has been allowed as a discipline to perfect his relationship to the Father. The work we do for God is made by Him a means till He has got us to the place where we are willing to be purified and made of worth to Himself."Overmuch organization in Christian work is always in danger of killing God-born originality; it keeps us conservative, makes our hands feeble. A false artificial flow of progress swamps true devotion to Jesus. Whenever a spiritual movement has been true to Jesus Christ it has brought forth fruit in a hundred and one ways the originator of the movement never dreamed of."Though Oswald Chambers did not mention the phrase "Let God engineer" in the above quotation, this message is a constant theme in his teachings. He believed God was actively at work in our lives, and in some instances, with or without our cooperating faith or help. To me, that is very important. I want God to be at work in our lives. As he stated in The Lord Omnipotent Reigneth, "unless God can alter me, He dare not forgive me." Our job: surrender, then listen and obey. His job: take control of me, my circumstances, my habits which might need adjustment, etc.On Prayer (materials in quotations taken from message "What's the Good of Prayer")One of the surprising comments Chambers made concerns the nature of prayer: he said our perception of prayer is that it is preparation for the work God has given us to do, which is wrong. To him, prayer is the work. He did not regard prayer as easy or normal; but let him say it, not me:"It is not part of the natural life of a man to pray. By "natural" I mean the ordinary, sensible, healthy, worldly-minded life. We hear it said that a man will suffer in his life if he does not pray; I question it. Prayer is an interruption to personal ambition, and no man who is busy has time to pray. What will suffer is the life of God in him, which is nourished not by food but by prayer. If we look on prayer as a means of developing ourselves, there is nothing in it at all, nor do we find that idea of prayer in the Bible. Prayer is other than meditation; it is that which develops the life of God in us. Prayer is the way the life of God is nourished. Our Lord nourished the life of God in Him by prayer; He was continually in contact with His Father. We generally look upon prayer as a means of getting things for ourselves, whereas the Bible idea of prayer is that God's holiness and God's purpose and God's wise order may be brought about, irrespective of who comes or who goes. Our ordinary views of prayer are not found in the New Testament.Prayer is not a question of altering things externally, but of working wonders in a man's disposition. When you pray, things remain the same, but you begin to be different. The same thing when a man falls in love, his circumstances and conditions are the same, but he has a sovereign preference in his heart for another person which transfigures everything. If we have been born from above (rv mg) and Christ is formed in us, instantly we begin to see things differently-- "If any man is in Christ, there is a new creation" (rv mg)."Too often we slip into believing that God is three million miles away from us, that He put the earth in orbit a long time ago, then sat in his Lazy-boy recliner, turned on the television, and started playing video games or began channel surfing. Chambers knew that is simply not the case. It may be difficult to understand that God is at work and that we can communicate with Him, and that He will communicate with us. However, in order to hear from Him, and to begin to learn the nature of God, our job is to pray.The Incarnation (materials in quotations taken from his message, In Thought)There are so many things wrong in the world - wars, famines, disease, broken families, harmful addictions, corruption in government - one might throw in the towel, and simply work out a life style commensurate with his or her personality and circumstances, and blithely finish our life cycle. But that still doesn't resolve the question, what is wrong with the world, and is there anything I might do to fix it? Chambers understood these questions and concerns, and responded as follows:"A fanatic sees God's point of view but not man's. He says God ought not to allow the devil, or war, or sin. We are in the whirlwind of things that are, what is the use of wasting time and saying things ought not to be? They are! In the midst of the problems, what is the way out? The line of solution is not to apply the plaster of a philosophical statement or the principles of teetotalism, or of vegetarianism, but something more fundamental than these, viz., a personal relationship to God and Man as one--Jesus Christ. "Don't make principles your aim, but get rightly related to Me," Jesus Christ says."The revelation of Christianity is that God, in order to be of use in human affairs, had to become a typical Man. That is the great revelation of Christianity, that God Himself became human; became incarnate in the weakest side of His own creation. The doctrine of the Incarnation is that God did become actual, and that He manifested Himself on the plane of human flesh. He had to take upon Himself "the likeness of sinful flesh." There must be the right alloy. You cannot use pure gold as coin, it is too soft to be serviceable, and the pure gold of the Divine is no good in human affairs; there must be the alloy mixed with it, and the alloy is not sin. Sin, according to the Bible, is something that has no right in human nature at all, it is abnormal and wrong. Human nature is earthly, it is sordid, but it is not bad. The thing in human nature that is bad is the result of a wrong relationship set up between the man God created and the being God created who became the devil, and the wrong relationship whereby a man becomes absolute "boss" over himself is called sin. Sin is a wrong element, an element that has to be dealt with by God in Redemption through man's conscience."The fanatical person is certain that human beings can live a pure Divine life on earth. But we are not so constituted, we are constituted to live the human life presenced with Divinity on earth, on the ground of Redemption. We are to have the right alloy--God and humanity one, as in our Lord Jesus Christ. That is the miracle of the Redemption when it works actually in human flesh. The way out is to remember that the alloy must be discovered in you and me, viz., the pure Divine working on the basis of my pure human. I may have the most beautiful sentiments in prayer and visions in preaching, but unless I have learned how God can mix the human and the Divine and make them a flesh and blood epistle of His grace, I have missed the point of Jesus Christ's revelation.As you can see, God was a real, vital component in the persona of Oswald Chambers. If you read his biography (which comes with The Complete Works, on the CD), you will learn that Chambers sought the guiding presence of God for several years before he received the infilling of the Holy Spirit (for my Baptist readers who might be alarmed at the thought of being filled by the Holy Spirit, because they might speak in tongues -- be advised that Chambers had no fondness for the gift of tongues).To put his life in order, he first had to submit to the lordship of Jesus Christ (and this happened after he was saved); thereafter, the events of his life changed in a way noticeable to Chambers. Throughout the remainder of his life, he observed the similar transformations in the lives of those who surrender and submitted. He saw that God really did engineer our lives and the attendant events and circumstances.Conclusion. I could quote other comments he made, which are as profound as the ones cited, but that would serve little purpose. You must read this book, then re-read it, to grasp how God is working in your own life.As I conclude this lengthy review, please don't overlook the work of his spouse: it is obvious that Biddy Chambers (Mrs. Oswald Chambers) composed a masterpiece in stitching together 366 topics, from the mass of materials in The Complete Works, as she compiled My Utmost for His Highest (she had no computer, no database, no concordance; just her notes written in shorthand). Though this little devotional is wonderful, it almost pales in comparison with The Complete Works.As I continue to re-read The Complete Works, the focus of my life is sharpened a bit more by the teachings and admonitions of Oswald Chambers. Next to scripture itself, I can recommend no better resource in Christian living, doctrine, psychology, and philosophy, than The Complete Works.