Oswald Chambers Quotes

We hear it said that a man will suffer in his life is he does not pray; I question it. What will suffer is the life of the Son of God within him, which is nourished not by food but by prayer...Prayer is the way the life of God is nourished.

In the natural life, we eat, we drink water, we give birth, we pay taxes. In the spiritual life, we can only reach it by faith.

If we would accept heaven's life, we need by all means to live in the world and to participate in its duties and affairs. In this way, we accept a spiritual life by means of our moral and civic life; and there is no other way a spiritual life can be formed within us, no other way our spirits can be prepared for heaven. This is because living an inner life and not an outer life at the same time is like living in a house that has no foundation, that gradually either settles or develops gaping cracks or totters until it collapses.

If God sees that my spiritual life will be furthered by giving the things for which I ask, then He will give them, but that is not the end of prayer. The end of prayer is that I come to know God Himself.

Much praying is not done because we do not plan to pray. We do not drift into spiritual life; we do not drift into disciplined prayer. We will not grow in prayer unless we plan to pray. That means we must self-consciousl y set aside time to do nothing but pray.

Prayer is a sacred and appointed means to obtain all the blessings that we want, whether they relate to this life or the life to come.

As a man must be born before he can begin to lead his physical life, so he must be born to lead a Divine Life. That birth occurs in the Sacrament of Baptism. To survive, he must be nourished by Divine Life; that is done in the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist.

Intercession means raising ourselves up to the point of getting the mind of Christ regarding the person for whom we are praying.

In the name of the Fathers, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, here goes-I mean Amen.

Keep your soul fit to manifest the life of the Son of God. Never live on memories; let the word of God be always living and active in you.

As Christ was born of the Virgin's womb, so must He be spiritually formed in our hearts. As He died for sin, so must we die to sin. And as He rose again from the dead, so must we also rise to a divine life.

If your life is rushing in many directions at once, you are incapable of the kind of deep, unhurried prayer that is vital to the Christian walk.

Reading is at the threshold of spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it. There are, however, certain cases, certain pathological cases, so to speak, of spiritual depression in which reading can become a sort of curative discipline and assume the task, through repeated stimulation, of continuously reintroducing a lazy mind into the life of the spirit.

I pray daily, and I pray in all kinds of places. I mean, I pray in bed, I pray in the Oval Office. I pray a lot. And just different as the spirit moves me. And faith is an integral part of my life.

Spirituality does not mean going away from life. Spirituality means becoming alive in the fullest possible way so you are not just alive on the surface, you are alive to the core.

It would be of course a low voltage spiritual life in which prayer was chiefly undertaken as a discipline, rather than as a way of co-labouring with God to accomplish good things and advancing his Kingdom purposes.

[Repentance] means unlearning all the self-conceit and self -will that we have been training ourselves into... It means killing part of yourself, under-going a kind of death.

Prayer is not an exercise, it is the life.

Come, Lady, die to live.

a spiritual life without prayer is like the gospel without Christ.

Our circumstances are the means God uses to exhibit just how wonderfully perfect and extraordinarily pure His Son is.

Prayer itself, born in Catholic families, nurtured by programs of Christian formation, strengthened by the grace of the sacraments, is the first means by which we come to know the Lord’s will for our lives. To the extent that we teach young people to pray, and to pray well, we will be cooperating with God’s call. Programs, plans and projects have their place; but the discernment of a vocation is above all the fruit of an intimate dialogue between the Lord and his disciples. Young people, if they know how to pray, can be trusted to know what to do with God’s call.

Just as the first sign of life in an infant when born into the world is the act of breathing, so the first act of men and women when they are born again is praying.

The most potent and acceptable prayer is the prayer that leaves the best effects. I don't mean it must immediately fill the soul with desire . . . The best effects are those that are followed up by actions-when the soul not only desires the honor of God, but really strives for it.

Is the Son of God praying in me, or am I dictating to Him?... Prayer is not simply getting things from God, that is a most initial form of prayer; prayer is getting into perfect communion with God. If the Son of God is formed in us by regeneration, He will press forward in front of our common sense and change our attitude to the things about which we pray.