This latest book of Talks, Lectures, Addresses, given by Oswald Chambers at different times and in varied circumstances—as when the New Theology was making its shallow appeal in 1909, or in the strenuous days of the Bible Training College in London, or when speaking to the soldiers in Egypt in 1917 (just before his own Home-call)—covers a wide range of religious thinking.
The earlier chapters on Biblical Ethics remind us that the ultimate aim of Christ’s Atonement is that God may readjust man to Himself. That calls for a moral response on our part, involving thought and feeling and will. And we need to recognise the ethical demands made in the Scriptures on God’s people.
Our Lord gave us the Sermon on the Mount; it appears in the beginning of St. Matthew’s Gospel. He also taught what appears later in the Gospel, that “the Son of Man must suffer many things … and be killed, and the third day be raised up” (Matthew 16:21); and that His Life would be “a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28). The former without the latter would mock us. Oswald Chambers based all on the Atonement.
I have found in this book some of the most arresting truths I have yet met with. Those who have been most helped by the O.C. literature already published will find fresh pastures here. For he was indeed a scribe bringing forth “out of his treasure things new and old,” whose ideas never become obsolete or stale, as he is divinely enabled to see old and precious things in new relationships. May God make this book to be a blessing to many.
