The Secret Place of Oswald Chambers

Oswald Chambers was born on July 24, 1874, in Aberdeen to a pastor father and a mother whose steady faith shaped the rhythms of the family home. As a boy he moved with his parents to England and learned early that the life of God is not a theory but a fire that searches the heart. Gifted in art and music, he studied at the National Art Training School in South Kensington and seemed set for a future in the arts. Yet the Lord pressed him with a deeper call. Under the influence of searching preaching and the witness of prayerful saints, he yielded his ambitions to Christ and entered a season of consecration that would set the course for his life. He trained for ministry at Dunoon College in Scotland, where long hours with the Scriptures and the hush of the Scottish coast taught him to listen for the voice of God. He was ordained in the Baptist fellowship and soon found that his real classroom was any place where souls were hungry and the Spirit drew near.

The years before the Great War were years of wide travel and widening burden. Chambers taught and preached across Britain, spoke at conventions devoted to the deeper Christian life, and journeyed abroad to serve missionaries and students who longed for reality with God. He did not build an organization around his name. He built people on their knees. He spoke with warm authority that came from the secret place and he labored to make room for the Holy Spirit in ordinary believers. In 1910 he married Gertrude Annie Hobbs, the gifted shorthand writer whom he called Biddy. Their companionship of mind and spirit would prove crucial for the church, for she captured his spoken messages in meticulous shorthand and later turned those notes into books that carried his message far beyond his short lifetime. In 1911 he opened the Bible Training College in Clapham, London. It was a house of Scripture, prayer, worship, and simple service. Students rose early to meet God, studied the Bible with keen attention, served the poor, and learned that prayer is not a preface to work. Prayer is the work.

When the war closed the college in 1915, Chambers volunteered as a chaplain with the Young Men's Christian Association and was posted to the British camp at Zeitoun near Cairo. There a wooden hut became a sanctuary. He insisted that soldiers be treated with respect, that tea and food be offered freely, that lectures be plain, that music be sincere, and that Christ be set forth without sentimentality. He was as gentle with the wounded as he was firm with pretense. He met young men at the canteen tables, sat with them on sand and boards, opened the Bible, and brought them face to face with the living Lord. He taught them to pray as they were, not as they pretended to be, and to expect the Spirit to make Jesus real in barrack life as surely as in a chapel. In late 1917 he suffered acute appendicitis. After surgery he weakened and on November 15 he entered the presence of the Lord. He was forty-three. Soldiers and nurses wept. Biddy gathered his notebooks and her shorthand pages and quietly vowed that the message God had entrusted to her husband would not fall to the ground.