Do you agree, out of the experiences of your own life, with the following?
“If a preacher uses his position to further his own ends, he is heading for disaster. There are many devoted to causes, but few devoted to Jesus Christ. If I am devoted to a particular cause only, when that cause fails, I fail too. “
This Oswald Chambers statement is one of many I’ve underlined recently. In fact, I’ve quoted Chambers so much that the editors asked me to read through his books and develop selected portions for our next issue’s theme: “The Devotional Life.” I’ve gone through about a dozen Chambers books so far, and I’ve never had a more enriching experience.
There’s one side of Chambers that makes him especially ring true to me personally. He perceives not only piety, but the depth of despair without it. Like many of my generation (I’m 42), I’ve seen more brillant articulations of life’s absurdity than its meaning. Although I’ve hung on fiercely to my faith for the past twenty years, I’ve also wrestled a great deal with the angst of existential despair. When one looks straight into the face of terror, ennui, and wretchedness, which is the world most people know, the haunting images of Ibsen, Sartre, Camus, and Pinter become persuasive. One keeps peeling the onion of orthodox Christianity and finds it, too, full of contradictions and cultural encrustations that must be stripped away, and down it goes until nothing is left-except this historical Christ . . . and has he also been gilded by his followers?
I have heard all the airtight arguments from Christian apologists, but have known deep down that every argument of the orthodox can be met with an equally persuasive counter-argument. Christian books convincingly refute existential despair, but volumes could instantly be written against each piece of logic. Sometimes we feel the very force of our arguments will win converts. Not so. Only the Spirit can enable a man to see one worldview over the other.
About seven years ago I read The Waiting Father by Helmut Thielicke, and I fed on that book; here was a man, in the cynicism of post-war Germany, who not only understood existential despair but felt it. He addressed it from the context of a Lutheran nation that had been as Christian as the United States, but had been thoroughly disillusioned about both God and itself. Thielicke’s many books of sermons are masterpieces of looking at the modern mind (which Schaeffer describes) with full empathy, but then pointing to a living Christ who can only be found through acceptance and obedience.
I would not have expected a British pietist of the World War I era like Chambers to have that same understanding. But as I read Daily Thoughts for Disciples, I saw again and again that he understood all this logic could easily be overturned; that he saw, too, the utter despair that comes from the pure, rational approach (though he read widely and deeply), and that he had felt it himself. “The basis of life is tragic,” he keeps repeating. But his utter commitment to Christ as the Master gives him an unsullied perspective.
Today, a person goes to a movie and afterwards feels like jumping off a bridge. If we are to minister to the moderns who struggle with the media Z that depict despair so accurately, Thielicke and Chambers are good resources. C. S. Lewis, of course, also has a great deal to say, and he was enormously helpful to me in the sixties, along with Tournier, but only occasionally do I sense in Lewis that he felt the angst of the age like those “waiting for Godet.”
Here then are a few Oswald Chambers quotes (from The Place of Help):
“If all that we have is the human, it will end in bitter tears-not sometimes, but every time.”
“If you are serving men for their sakes, you will soon have the heart knocked out of you; but if you are personally and passionately devoted to the Lord Jesus Christ, then you can spend yourselves to the last ebb because your motive is love to the Lord.”
“When we try to understand Jesus Christ’s teaching with our heads, we get into a fog. It is a relationship of life, not intellect.”
“The experience of being baffled is common to us all, and the more religious and thoughtful a man is, the more intensely is he baffled. With regard to your own baffling, recognise it and state it, but don’t state it dishonestly to yourself. Don’t say you are not baffled if you are; and don’t tell a lie in order to justify your belief in God. If you are in the dark, don’t take refuge in any subterfuge which you know is not true. Never take an answer that satisfies your mind only; insist on an answer that satisfies more than your mind, an answer that satisfies by the ‘sound of gentle stillness.’ Jesus describes it as ‘My peace,’ the witness of God that goes all through you and produces a calm within.”
More from Oswald Chambers in the next issue.
Harold L. Myra President, Christianity Today, Inc.
Copyright © 1981 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
