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Oswald Chambers (24 July 1874 – 15 November 1917) was an early-twentieth-century Scottish Baptist evangelist and teacher who was aligned with the Holiness Movement.[1] He is best known for the daily devotional My Utmost for His Highest. Oswald Chambers displayed powerful teachings in Christianity from his readings.

Youth, Education, & Ministries
Oswald Chambers was born to devout parents in Aberdeen, Scotland on July 24, 1874. Chambers moved with his family in 1876 to Stoke-on-Trent when his father, Clarence Chambers, became Home Missions evangelist for the North Staffordshire Baptist Association. Then, the family moved to Perth, Scotland when his father returned to the pastorate; they move to London in 1889, when Clarence was appointed Traveling Secretary of the Baptist Total Abstinence Association.[2]

At 16, Oswald Chambers was baptized and became a member of Rye Lane Baptist Chapel.[3] Even as a teenager, Chambers was noted for his deep spirituality, and he participated in the evangelization of poor occupants of local lodging houses.[4] Chambers had an outgoing personality and a gift for poetry, art, and music.[27] He was gifted not only with a keen aesthetic sensitivity and outgoing temperament but also with a rigorous mind.[27]

From 1893 to 1895, Chambers studied at the National Art Training School, now the Royal College of Art and was offered a scholarship for further study, which he declined.[6] For the next two years he continued his study of art at the University of Edinburgh[7] while being greatly influenced by the preaching of Alexander Whyte, pastor of Free St. George's Church Archived 6 September 2014 at the Wayback Machine.[8] While at Edinburgh, he felt called to ministry, and he left for Dunoon College, a small theological training school near Glasgow, founded by the Rev. Duncan MacGregor. Chambers was soon teaching classes at the school and took over much of the administration when MacGregor was injured in 1898.[9]

While teaching at Dunoon, Chambers was influenced by Richard Reader Harris, KC, a prominent barrister and founder of the Pentecostal League of Prayer. In 1905, Reader introduced Chambers as "a new speaker of exceptional power." Through the League, Chambers also met Juji Nakada, a Holiness evangelist from Japan, who stimulated Chambers' growing interest in world evangelism. In 1906, Nakada and Chambers sailed for Japan via the United States.[10] In 1907, Chambers spent a semester teaching at God's Bible School, a Holiness institution in Cincinnati, then spent a few months in Japan working with Charles Cowman, a co-founder of the Oriental Missionary Society.[11] Arriving back in Britain by the end of the year, Chambers found the Holiness movement divided by the advocates and opponents of founding a new denomination and by supporters and detractors of the tongues movement. Chambers did not oppose glossolalia but criticized those who made it a test of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit.[12] Sailing back to the United States in 1908, Chambers became better acquainted with Gertrude Hobbs, the daughter of friends, whom he had known casually. They married in May 1910; and on 24 May 1913, Gertrude (whom Chambers affectionately called "Biddy") gave birth to their only child, Kathleen.[13] Even before they married, Chambers considered a partnership in ministry in which Biddy—who could take shorthand at 250 words per minute—would transcribe and type his sermons and lessons into written form.[14]

In 1911 Chambers founded and was principal of the Bible Training College in Clapham Common, Greater London, in an "embarrassingly elegant" property that had been purchased by the Pentecostal League of Prayer.[15] Chambers accommodated not only students of every age, education, and class but also anyone in need, believing he ought to "give to everyone who asks." "No one was ever turned away from the door and whatever the person asked for, whether money, a winter overcoat, or a meal, was given."[16] Between 1911 and 1915, 106 resident students attended the Bible Training College, and by July 1915, forty were serving as missionaries.[17]

In 1915, a year after the outbreak of World War I, Chambers suspended the operation of the school and was accepted as a YMCA chaplain. He was assigned to Zeitoun, Cairo, Egypt, where he ministered to Australian and New Zealand troops, who later participated in the Battle of Gallipoli. Chambers raised the spiritual tone of a center intended by both the military and the YMCA to be simply an institution of social service providing wholesome alternatives to the brothels of Cairo. When he told a group of fellow YMCA workers that he had decided to abandon concerts and movies for Bible classes, they predicted the exodus of soldiers from his facilities. "What the skeptics had not considered was Chamber's unusual personal appeal, his gift in speaking, and his genuine concern for the men." Soon his wooden-framed "hut" was packed with hundreds of soldiers listening attentively to messages such as "What Is the Good of Prayer?" Confronted by a soldier who said, "I can't stand religious people," Chambers replied, "Neither can I."[19] Chambers irritated his YMCA superiors by giving away refreshments that the organization believed should be sold so as not to raise expectations elsewhere. Chambers installed a contribution box but refused to ask soldiers to pay for tea and cakes.[20]

My Utmost For His Highest
'My Utmost For His Highest'' is the most common daily devotional that Oswald Chambers is known for. Written in 1924, it was the most successful of the thirty books Chambers wrote in his lifetime. My Utmost For His Highest is a daily devotional composed of 365 selections of Chamber's talks, each of about 500 words, with millions of Christian have read so far.[26] The work has never been out of print and has been translated into 39 languages.[23]'''

Chambers explains the importance of believing in Jesus Christ who is considered a miracle “by the effectiveness of redemption.”[25] “The creative power of redemption comes through the preaching of the gospel, but never because of the personality of the preacher.”[25] The preacher, himself, is the representative of God as he commands his teachings.[25] In the end, Chambers hopes that it will allow people to be better people and become closer with Jesus.[25]

His Writings
Many authors were strongly attached to Chambers as a person and captivated by his vision of what it means to be a believer in the modern world.[27] Chambers insisted that the heart of Christian faith remains an existential relationship with the living Christ.[27] Authentic Christian living involves a personal and mystical encounter with the God who walked and cannot be reduced to any philosophical or theological system of knowledge or control.[27] Chambers' keen sense of God's real presence in the world and the truth hidden in Christ often emerges in the form of nature.[27] It is not scenes of pastoral tranquility but rather ones of wildness and desolation that are most evocative in his mind of God's grandeur and Christ's implacable love.[27] Perhaps the greatest testament to the spiritual depth and continuing relevance of Chambers' thinking is the capacity his words have to explode like mines, setting fires in the minds of his readers.[27]

'''The theme of discipleship emerges repeatedly in his letters and diaries not only as a spiritual discipline but also as an intellectual vocation.[26] In his meditations on the implications of the life of discipleship, Oswald Chambers commented on being "partakers of Christ's sufferings" (1 Peter 4:13).[31] Chambers also stressed that discipleship involved the hard work of understanding the faith.[28] In his thinking about the cross, he was indebted to the writings of the Congregational theologian, P.T. Forsyth, and in turn Forsyth spoke of Chambers as combining in an unusual way "moral incision and spiritual power."[28] Chambers dedicated himself to stimulating broader thinking about spirituality. As an amateur psychologist, artist, and poet, he found it easy to think of the whole of the cosmos as God's sphere of operation; he argued for a broader vision of the work of Christ and of his people.[28]'''

Death and Legacy
Chambers was stricken with appendicitis on 17 October 1917, but resisted going to a hospital on the grounds that the beds would be needed by men wounded in the long-expected Third Battle of Gaza. On 29 October, a surgeon performed an emergency appendectomy; however, Chambers died 15 November 1917 from a pulmonary hemorrhage. He was buried in Cairo with full military honors.[21]

Before he died, Chambers had proofread the manuscript of his first book, Baffled to Fight Better, a title he had taken from a favorite line by Robert Browning.[22] For the remainder of her life—and at first under very straitened circumstances—Chambers' widow transcribed and published books and articles edited from the notes she had taken in shorthand during the Bible College years and at Zeitoun. In commemoration of Chambers, the YMCA of Hong Kong Christian College, which was founded by YMCA of Hong Kong, has also named the Chambers House in his honor.[24]