The Quill and Me—Devotional Blog•Oswald Chambers Reflections

John 21:16   ". . . do you love Me? . . . Tend My sheep"  Jesus asks if we love Him... and if we do, we are to tend His sheep. I love Him, so I am writing these devotionals to feed His sheep. I am working through Oswald Chambers' book  My Utmost for His Highest  for my own spiritual growth and sharing my journey through this blog. I am trying my best to be a consistent and reliable source of encouragement and growth for His sheep. I am devoted to my Lord.  The world's way does not support people being devoted to loving Christ. The world itself does not love Jesus Christ. The way of this world is to get involved and support causes. People do not desire to follow Christ and be his disciple. They only want God for what God can do for them.  Jesus does not want lukewarm love. He wants devotion. Jesus wants his people to love him above all else in their life.  Jesus' life on earth reflected His complete devotion to His Father in heaven. His obedience ...

  Reckless Faith in the Midst of the Waves Matthew 14:29-30 ". . . Peter . . . walked on the water to go to Jesus. But when he saw that the wind was boisterous, he was afraid . . ." Peter recklessly abandoned all precaution and stepped onto the water, and began walking toward Jesus.  When Peter saw Jesus, he had no thought to his own preservation; he just threw caution to the wind and stepped out of the boat and went toward Jesus.  Then he began to notice his surroundings. The winds were wild, the waves were tremendous, and he lost his focus on the Lord, and down he went. He called out to Jesus for help... ... the Lord reached out a hand and saved him.  How many people are going to throw caution to the wind and step out onto a wild, wet sea of water? Not very many of us. Even when we have our minds focused on the Lord, when troubles come and surround us... what do we do? We forget about the one holding us. We forget about the strong arm of the Lord that has never fa...

Matthew 7:1 "Judge not, that you be not judged" Like a hand reaching toward its own reflection, Jesus' words invite us to pause and see what is within us before we speak about what is within someone else.  Jesus said, "Do not judge others." The Holy Spirit is the only one in the discerning position to criticize. He alone is able to point out what is wrong in a person without causing undue harm.  Criticism serves to make us cruel and leaves us with the soothingly false idea that we are superior to others. The Lord reminds us that we should cultivate a character that does not include criticism. This may be difficult, but we must be constantly aware of anything that causes us to think we are superior to others. If you see, notice, or point out, a speck in someone else's eye, you can rest assured — you have a plank in your own eye. Every wrong we see in someone else, God will discover the same in us.  So every time we judge another, we are condemning ourselves....

John 15:13, 15 “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends… I have called you friends…” Jesus has not asked us to literally die for Him… but He has asked us to lay down our life for Him. This means we give Him our life — the one where we are in control. We surrender our right to ourselves, and He gives us His life in return. The self is selfish and willful. It does not want to give up control. It is a hard thing to understand and a hard thing to do. We call it our “free will.” God created the will and set it in our hearts for a purpose — so that we might choose Him freely. He will not force Himself on us. It is our God-given freedom to accept Him or reject Him. But in another sense, we are not truly free. We are burdened with sin, fear, striving, and worry among other things. Yet the Holy Spirit has come with all the power of God Almighty to set us free. But then why are we not free, we are saved, we have the Spirit of God within us... what is...

2 Peter 1:5 — “Also… add to your faith…” Yesterday I realized that I had lived out today's devotional in real time... again God engineered my circumstances so that I experienced today's devotional before I knew about it or wrote about it. One day a few months ago, I realized… I am living these devotionals day by day! And then just recently, I found this passage in my January 1 devotional where I introduced this book we’re working through, My Utmost for His Highest , and quoted Charles Stanley, who said: “This volume is not a treasure to be admired but a message to be lived.” And I wrote: Let’s live it.  Well… I am. Every devotional, every day, I’m experiencing it and writing about it in real time. Even when I realized that I was living out these devotionals, I did not remember writing that — but there it was in black and white on the first day of this series, the very first devotional reflection of Chambers' work. I had sealed my fate with my own words.  I guess God t...

John 15:4 —  "Abide in Me . . ." Chambers teaches that abiding is a matter of determination. God will not make us think like Jesus — we must choose to bring every thought into obedience to Christ. Abiding is not limited to one corner of life. We abide in Him in all matters: our thinking, our finances, our work, our conversations, our routines. Life is not neatly divided, and neither is fellowship with Him. We often imagine we must finish a task before we can abide. But abiding is not something we do after life — it is something we do within life. As we think, cook, clean, drive, plan, and work, we can keep our inner attention turned toward Him. Abiding becomes the quiet posture of the heart. Jesus never arranged His own circumstances. He submitted to His Father’s plans and walked through each moment with a calm, unhurried spirit. His life was never frantic because He carried the peace of His Father within. He was always abiding, no matter what surrounded Him. So begi...

This devotional is a direct answer to Chambers' June 13 devotional...  based on Luke 18:22, "...come, follow Me" A Testimonial Devotional with Scripture Reflection Scripture:     Psalm 139:16 "All the days ordained for me were written in Your book before one of them came to be."   There are moments in life when God lets us look back and finally see what we could not understand when we were living it. The other day, He brought me all the way back to a playground when I was seven years old — a little girl who should not have survived what happened there, yet somehow did. For years I thought I was forgotten that day. But now I see the truth: He saved me then… for today. Not just to keep me alive, but to keep unfolding the story He had already written. "The Lord will keep your life… from this time forth and forevermore."  —   Psalm 121:7–8 God does not reveal our lives all at once. He unfolds them like the petals of a flower — slowly, gently, in...

A Spiritual Insight Devotional Scripture:  1 Corinthians 2:14   “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God… for they are spiritually discerned.”  There is a kind of seeing that does not come from the eyes. It comes from surrender. And once God opens that kind of sight in you, you begin to understand things you never understood before — not because you became smarter, but because you became yielded. But there is a quiet ache that comes with this awakening: Others cannot see what God is doing in you. Not because they refuse… but because they cannot. “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.” — Matthew 13:11 This is the part no one prepares you for. You try to explain the shift inside you — the peace, the clarity, the surrender, the unfolding, the way God is shaping your days — and people look at you with kind eyes but uncomprehending hearts. They hear your words, but they do...

  John 1:38-39 "They said to Him, 'Rabbi . . . where are You staying?'  He said to them, 'Come and see'"  Jesus said, "Come and see." Come and see where I am staying, where I abide...My abode. And they went and stayed with Him for a while. That is all — a short time — then their self-interests rose and they departed. That is what we do:  we stay with Jesus for a little while, and then we move on to our self-interests.  Jesus never left the Father. He was in constant contact with His heavenly Father no matter what was going on around Him here on earth. We have the ability to do the same thing — to abide with God all the time, no matter what we are doing or where we are.  Our inner world is where we abide with God. Our spiritual world is a world untouched by this earthly place. Therefore, we can abide with God at all times. There is no circumstance in life where you cannot abide with God. The Holy Spirit lives within you; you can abide with Him 24/7. ...

  Matthew 11:28   "Come to Me..."  First we are convicted of our need to be cleansed. And now Jesus is saying, "Come to Me," and I will cleanse you. And He will ... if... you will come.  You must be willing to come to Him as a little child comes to a parent when they skin their knee. He will clean it, doctor it, and put you back on your feet. You come to Him in an all-trusting manner, as to a Father, ready to lean your whole weight on Him because you know He cares for you. Then you trust Him with your whole self, and He takes it and gently restores you, but gives it back to you in better form than when you gave it to Him.  It is when we determine in our heart that Jesus is the way, and come to Him with a surrendered heart, that He can finally have His way in your life. His way is the only way. He will cleanse you; He will keep you. He will control the self, sin, and the wayward, willful will in your inner life. He can even reach the unconsciousness and heal you ...