Oswald Chambers wisdom over the past twenty-five years has literally saved my life. He sometimes startled audiences with his vigorous thinking and his vivid expression. Even those who disagreed with what he said found his teachings difficult to dismiss and all but impossible to ignore. Often his dry humor such as the following quote drove home a sensitive point: “Have we got in the way of letting God work, or are we so amazingly important that we really wonder in our hearts and minds what the Almighty does before we get up in the morning!” (Ouch!)
Oswald Chambers was not famous during his lifetime. At the time of his death in 1917 at the age of forty-three, only three booklets bearing his name had been published. Among a relatively small circle of Christians in Britain and the U.S., Chambers was much appreciated as a teacher of rare insight and expression, but he was not widely known.
Chambers was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1874, the youngest son of a Baptist minister. He spent his boyhood years in Perth; then his family moved to London when Oswald was fifteen. Shortly after the move to London, Oswald made his public profession of faith in Christ and became a member of Rye Lane Baptist Church. This marked a period of rapid spiritual growth, along with an intense struggle to find God’s will and way for his life.
A gifted artist and musician, Chambers trained at London’s Royal Academy of Art, sensing God’s direction to be an ambassador for Christ in the world of art and aesthetics. While studying at the University of Edinburgh (1895-96), he decided, after an agonizing internal battle, to study for the ministry. He left the university and entered Dunoon College, near Glasgow, where he remained as a student, then a tutor for nine years.
Having given up art completely, Chambers found total sanctification, holiness, and devotion to God through the nondenominational Holiness Movement, called the Pentecostal League of Prayer. Pentecostalism hadn’t yet been born as an official movement. Lecturing and preaching in small churches nearby, he became increasingly confident and prolific, realizing the power of his own words were not his but the Spirit’s. He’d always been deeply intellectual, consuming astonishing amounts of literature that ran the gamut from theology to modernist philosophy to fantasy fiction, and he’d always striven to incorporate his reading into his sermons. He continued in that vein, but being set free in the Spirit, it was said he never took notes or planned his sermons in advance.
In 1906 he traveled to the U.S., spending six months teaching at God’s Bible College in Cincinnati, OH. From there he went to Japan, visiting the Tokyo Bible School, founded by Mr. and Mrs. Charles Cowman. This journey around the world in 1906-07 marked his transition to full-time work with the Pentecostal League of Prayer.
In 1908 while on a ship bound for America, he met Gertrude Hibbs, a stenographer from home bound for New York City to look for secretarial work. Falling in love, they were married in 1910, the bride changing her name to Biddy Chambers after the two names Oswald had given her: the last was his own, and also his nickname for her, “B.D.”, (Biddy) for “Beloved Disciple.” Their daughter Kathleen was born in 1913.
.During the last decade of his life, Chambers served as:
Traveling speaker and representative of the League of Prayer, 1907-10
Principal and main teacher of the Bible Training College, London, 1911-15
YMCA chaplain to British Commonwealth soldiers in Egypt, 1915-1917
He died in Cairo on November 15, 1917, of complications following an emergency appendectomy. The complete story of his life is told in Oswald Chamber: Abandoned to God (1993), available from Discovery House Publishers, Box 3566, Grand Rapids, MI 49501 or at www.dhp.org.
Thus ended the life of Oswald Chambers, an obscure preacher with nothing but some articles and booklets to his name, none of them well known. His afterlife though, would tell a different story; he would become one of the best-selling authors of all times with over 50 books to his name, a credit to a wife’s devotion to her husband. In “My Utmost For His Highest”, which has been in continuous printing since it was first published in 1927, Biddy combined excerpts from hundreds of lectures into these succinct daily readings. This book’s enduring popularity testifies to her intimate knowledge of the material and her editing skill, being the mastermind, creator, and sustenance of the Oswald Chambers publishing industry, which she ran for nearly fifty years, until her death in 1966. That story is told in the book “My Utmost: A Devotional Memoir.”