Oswald Chambers’s Theology of Preaching:
Expository, Wesleyan-Keswickian, and Practical
A Dissertation
Presented to
the Faculty
of the School of Theology
Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Doctor of Ministry
by
Patrick R. Findley
May 2018
Copyright © 2018 Patrick R. Findley
All rights reserved. Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary has permission to reproduce and disseminate this document in any form by any means for purposes chosen by the Seminary, including, without limitation, preservation, or instruction.
APPROVAL SHEET
OSWALD CHAMBERS’S THEOLOGY OF PREACHING: EXPOSITORY, WESLEYAN-KESWICKIAN, AND PRACTICAL
Patrick R. Findley
______Matthew McKellar, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Preaching, Faculty Supervisor
______Deron Biles, Ph.D., Professor of Pastoral Ministries and Preaching, Director of Professional Doctoral Studies, School of Preaching, Doctor of Ministry Committee Member
______Kyle Walker, Vice President for Student Services, Assistant Professor of Preaching, Doctor of Ministry Committee Member
Date ______
To Becca, my best friend and co-laborer in ministry
To Katie and Micah, my strong-willed, snuggly, awesome kids
To Hamlin Baptist Church in Springfield, Missouri, who helped me begin this journey,
To Ridgecrest Baptist Church in Springfield, Missouri who helped me finish it
&
to Fans of Oswald Chambers everywhere
Abstract
Oswald Chambers’s Theology of Preaching: Expository, Wesleyan-Keswickian, and Practical
This dissertation demonstrates Chambers’s theology of preaching as expository in nature within the historical-theological context of the Wesleyan and Keswickian views on sanctification.
Chapter 1 introduces the thesis, defines “expository preaching” and “theology of preaching,” and explains the methodology and viability of the dissertation.
Chapter 2 seeks to place Chambers in his correct historical context. Special consideration is given to the establishment of the Bible Training College (1911-1915).
Chapter 3 seeks to place Chambers in his correct theological context. Special consideration is given to comparing and contrasting the views of personal sanctification, according to Wesley and Keswick, toward understanding where Chambers stood.
Chapter 4 examines Chambers’s lectures to his students for evidence he was a professor of expository preaching.
Chapter 5 evaluates Chambers himself as an expository preacher by evaluating four of his expository sermons.
Chapter 6 provides a summary of the research conclusions, proposals for further research, and applications for continued ministry.
Patrick R. Findley, D. Min. Supervisor: Matthew McKellar, Ph.D. School of Theology Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2018
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Introduction to Oswald Chambers’s Theology of Preaching: Expository, Wesleyan-Keswickian, and Practical ...... 1
Introduction ...... 1
Thesis Statement ...... 2
Expository Preaching Defined ...... 3
Theology of Preaching Defined ...... 4
Methodology ...... 6
Uniqueness of Topic ...... 9
Ministry Need ...... 10
Chapter 2 Chambers in His Historical Context ...... 11
Biography of Oswald Chambers ...... 11
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………...26
Chapter 3 Chambers in His Theological Context ...... 28
The Complex Issue of Entire Sanctification ...... 28
Towards a Summarization of Wesleyan Perfectionism and Keswickian Theology Pertaining to the Preaching of Oswald Chambers…………….30
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………...58
Chapter 4 Chambers the Expository Preaching Professor ...... 60
Chambers’s Lectures to His Preaching Students…………………………….61
Chambers’s Purpose for Teaching Preaching ……………………………….65
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Chambers on the Purpose of Preaching……………………………………...67
Chambers on God’s Call to Preach………………………………………...... 75
Chambers on the Nature of Scripture ………………………………………..81
` Chambers on Exegesis …..…………………………………………………..87
Chambers on Preaching Without Notes……………………………………...93
Chambers on the Preacher’s Obedience...…………………………………...96
Conclusion..………………………………………………………………...102
Chapter 5 Chambers the Expository Preacher...……………………………………104
Genesis 22:1-3—“The Supreme Climb” .…………………………………..105
Isaiah 6:1-8—“The Painful Path to Power”.………………………………..110
Matthew 5:1-20—“His Teaching and Our Training” ……………………...116
Matthew 19:16-22—“The Philosophy of the Perfect Life”………………...130
Conclusion …………………………………………………………………134
Chapter 6 Conclusions, Future Plans, and Applications for Preaching…………………..136
Conclusions ………………………………………………………………...136
Recommendations for Further Research …………………………………...138
Applications for Preaching Today …………………………………………139
Bibliography.……………………………………………………………………………144
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Chapter 1
Introduction to Oswald Chambers’s Theology of Preaching: Expository, Wesleyan-Keswickian, and Practical
Introduction
David McCasland’s biography of Oswald Chambers begins with Chambers’s death, in 1917, at only forty-three years of age from the complications of an emergency appendectomy. At the time of Chambers’s death, he had published only three books— none of which were his well-known devotional My Utmost for His Highest, which “has been continuously in print since it was first published in 1927.”1 Curious, however, is the fact that Oswald Chambers did not personally pen the devotional for which he is so well- known, nor did he write most of the books bearing his name. How then did his books come to be?
At the time of Chambers’s death, he and his wife, Biddy, had been married seven years.2 Trained in Pitman Shorthand as a young girl, Biddy took verbatim notes of almost everything her husband preached and taught during their marriage.3 Biddy took the notes
1 The brief biographical information mentioned here is a summary of what is written by David McCasland, Foreword, in The Quotable Oswald Chambers, ed. David McCasland (Grand Rapids: Discovery House, 2008), 10-11. Where the details come from the in-depth look at Chambers’s life recorded in David McCasland, Oswald Chambers: Abandoned to God (Grand Rapids: Discovery House, 1993), those references will be noted.
2 “Biddy” was a nickname given to her by Oswald. Her real name was Gertrude (Hobbs).
3 McCasland, Abandoned to God, 140.
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2
merely to aid her listening.4 However, after Chambers’s death, she sensed God calling her to share her husband’s words with the world. McCasland writes, “Without her work, his words would never have existed on paper or in published form. Even so, she put
Oswald’s name on the cover. She saw herself as a channel through which his words were conveyed to others.”5 The foreword to the first edition of My Utmost is simply signed with the initials B. C. (Biddy Chambers).6
What does all this have to do with a dissertation on Oswald Chambers’s theology of preaching? It has everything to do with his theology of preaching! From 1911-1915,
Chambers was the principal and primary teacher of the Bible Training College in
London. While we do not have copies of his sermons and lectures themselves, Biddy’s publishing of her husband’s lecture notes provides the modern reader the opportunity to sit in on his lectures by proxy. The books and pamphlets published from this timeframe offer an overall picture of the curriculum Chambers taught and what he believed mattered most for those being trained for ministry.
Thesis Statement
Chambers is known for the devotional bearing his name, but many people are unaware that, for four years, Chambers was a professor of theology and preaching. A scholarly analysis of the kind of preaching he prescribed has yet to be published. This
4 Ibid.,180.
5 Ibid., 281.
6 Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, in The Complete Words of Oswald Chambers (Grand Rapids: Discovery House, 2000), 734.
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dissertation will reveal that Oswald Chambers’s theology of preaching is expository in nature within the historical backdrop of the Wesleyan and early Keswick views of personal sanctification. This is not a “three-pronged” thesis, but rather the defending of
Chambers’s theology of preaching as expository within its proper historical-theological context. For Chambers, faithful preaching and faithful ministry are inseparable. As will be shown, Chambers was not merely a professor of preaching, but he was also a professor of expository preaching in which orthodoxy (biblically accurate doctrine) and orthopraxy
(biblically faithful conduct) are inseparable.
Expository Preaching Defined
For the purposes of this dissertation, the term “expository preaching” must be defined as it will be used to evaluate what Chambers taught about preaching. In his book,
Biblical Preaching: The Development of Expository Messages, Haddon Robinson defines expository preaching as follows:
Expository preaching is the communication of a biblical concept, derived from and transmitted through a historical, grammatical, and literary study of a passage in its context, which the Holy Spirit first applies to the personality and experience of the preacher, then through the preacher, applies to the hearers.7
Robinson says the biblical passage being preached must “govern” the sermon.8 This kind of expository preaching rightly can be called “text-driven” preaching—where the biblical text is said to “drive” the sermon. Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary preaching professor David Allen explains, “A text-driven sermon is a sermon that develops a text
7 Haddon W. Robinson, Biblical Preaching: The Development and Delivery of Expository Messages, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001), 21.
8 Ibid.
4
by explaining, illustrating, and applying its meaning. Text-driven preaching stays true to the substance of the text, the structure of the text, and the spirit of the text.”9 Expository preaching rests on the “biblical and theological foundation” that “God has spoken.”10
Theology of Preaching Defined
Preaching a text-driven sermon does not occur in a vacuum.11 Expository preaching rests upon the foundation of the preacher’s theology regarding the various components of preaching, such as the nature and reliability of God’s Word and the purpose of preaching. This dissertation uncovers and explains the theological foundation upon which Chambers’s preaching and his teaching of preaching rests.
In accomplishing the ends defined herein, the phrase “theology of preaching” must be defined. In his book On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons, John Broadus observes, “The record of Christian history has been that the strength of the church is directly related to the strength of the pulpit.”12 Broadus asserts a direct correlation exists between the strength or weakness of the pulpit and the strength or weakness of the church; the two are inseparable. Peter Adam laments the “changes in our recent years in our theology of God’s revelation, of the Bible, of Christian formation, of communication,
9 David Allen, Foreword, in Text-Driven Preaching: God’s Word at the Heart of Every Sermon, ed. Daniel L. Akin, David Lewis Allen, and Ned Lee Mathews (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2010), 8.
10 Ibid., 3.
11 For the purposes of this dissertation, the terms expository preaching and text-driven preaching will be used synonymously.
12 John A. Broadus, On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons, 4th ed., rev. Vernon J. Stanfield (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), 7.
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of community and of ecclesiology have tended to undermine preaching.”13 This is a concern to Adam because “the practice of preaching suffers nowadays from an uncertain theological base.”14 A well-defined biblical theology of preaching is needed.
Peter Adam outlines a biblical theology of preaching under three headings:
(1) God has spoken; (2) It is written (and recorded for future generations in the Bible);
(3) God commissions people to preach His Word.15 In his Yale lectures on preaching,
Phillips Brooks spoke to the divine-human tension in preaching as “truth poured through personality.”16 By God’s design, His perfect message of salvation is to be passed along through the medium of imperfect people. Preaching happens through preachers.
Whether a preacher’s theological presuppositions ultimately help or hinder God’s goals in preaching hinge on the preacher’s personal convictions regarding preaching.
Every preacher will—consciously or unconsciously—answer in his heart, questions such as: What is preaching? What is the basis of preaching? What is the content of preaching?
How is preaching to be done? Why should a preacher preach instead of remaining silent?
How a preacher answers these questions informs what is meant here by “theology of preaching.” For the purposes of this dissertation, “theology of preaching” will be defined
13 Peter Adam, Speaking God’s Words: A Practical Theology of Preaching (Vancouver, BC: Regent College Publishing, 1996), 9.
14 Ibid., 9.
15 Ibid., 172.
16 Phillips Brooks, Lectures on Preaching (New York: Dutton, 1877), 8.
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as the theological presuppositions, which shape a preacher’s convictions regarding the what, how, and why of preaching.17
Methodology
The thesis that Oswald Chambers’s theology of preaching was expository will be demonstrated through an examination of the published lectures Chambers taught at the
Bible Training College in London between 1911 and 1915. Special consideration will be given to Chambers’s use of Methodist Perfectionism terminology, such as the phrase
“entire sanctification,” as well as the “Keswickian practicality” with which Chambers’s theology of preaching is saturated. For Chambers, effective preaching is expository, continually calls people to surrender all of self to Christ, and offers people an ever- growing, intimate, daily experience of the Lord termed the “Higher Life.”18
A morphological computer search of Chambers’s Complete Works for the root word “preach” found 693 matches. Because a degree of redundancy exists in the way
Chambers’s works were published (i.e. My Utmost is excerpts of other published lectures and sermons), some appearances of the word “preach” are being double-counted. The plethora of references show that the theme of preaching in Chambers’s lectures is worth exploring more deeply.
17 These three interrogatives follow the organization of chapters 17 through 19 in Jason C. Meyer, Preaching: A Biblical Theology (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013), 237-79.
18 David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (Grand Rapids: Baker House, 1989), 151. See also J. I. Packer, Keep in Step with the Spirit: Finding Our Fullness in Our Walk with God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2005), 120.
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This dissertation demonstrates Chambers’s theology of expository preaching from the lectures taught at the Bible Training College from 1911-1915, published posthumously by his wife.19 Works evaluated include:
1. Approved Unto God. Theme: Christian service, being a worker for God.
2. As He Walked. Theme: Christian experience.
3. Biblical Ethics. Theme: Christian ethics, morality, philosophy.
4. Biblical Psychology. Theme: Soul, spirit, personality; the soul of man.
5. Bringing Sons to Glory. Theme: Studies in the life of Christ, the meaning of His life for us.
6. Conformed to His Image. Theme: Christian thinking, faith.
7. Disciples Indeed. Theme: Belief, the Bible, the call of God, the character of God, the Holy Spirit, the moral law, prayer, preaching, preparation, redemption, sin, the teaching of Jesus, temptation, testimony, thinking, workers for God.
8. Facing Reality. Theme: Belief.
9. God’s Workmanship. Theme: Practical Christian living.
10. Thy Great Redemption. Theme: Redemption.
11. Grow Up Into Him. Theme: The Gospel mystery of sanctification.
12. He Shall Glorify Me. Theme: Three chapters on the Holy Spirit and miscellaneous sermons.
13. The Highest Good. Theme: Righteousness, morality, ethics.
14. If Thou Wilt Be Perfect. Theme: Spiritual philosophy/mystic writers.
15. If Ye Shall Ask. Theme: Prayer.
16. The Ministry of the Unnoticed. Theme: Service in ordinary circumstances.
19 Full bibliographic information given in the Bibliography.
8
17. The Moral Foundations of Life. Theme: Ethical principles, Christian living.
18. Not Knowing Whither. Theme: Faith; facing the unknown; lessons from the life of Abraham, Genesis 12-25.
19. Notes on Ezekiel. Theme: Abbreviated exposition of Ezekiel 1-34.
20. Notes on Isaiah. Theme: The character of God from Isaiah 1-53.
21. Now Is It Possible. Theme: Holy living, faith, discipleship.
22. Our Brilliant Heritage. Theme: The Gospel mystery of sanctification.
23. Our Portrait in Genesis. Theme: Exposition of Genesis 1-6; 26-37.
24. The Psychology of Redemption. Theme: Parallels between the life of Christ and the Christian’s life of faith.
25. The Philosophy of Sin. Theme: Studies in the problems of man’s moral life.
26. So I Send You (The Secret of the Burning Heart). Theme: The call, preparation, and service of a missionary.
27. Studies in The Sermon on the Mount. Theme: Study of Matthew 5-7.
Of the works mentioned above, several are especially pertinent to defending the thesis at hand. Two of the works, Approved Unto God and Disciples Indeed, are explicitly said to be lecture notes from Chambers’s sermon preparation class and will be quoted extensively.20 Five other works are series of lectures wherein Chambers taught his students expositionally, verse-by-verse, through certain books of the Bible, which give great insight into how Chambers modeled expository preaching for his students. These include Our Portrait in Genesis (covering Genesis 1-6 and 26-37), Not Knowing Wither
(Genesis 12-25 on the life of Abraham), Notes on Ezekiel (Ezekiel 1-34), Notes on Isaiah
20 Oswald Chambers, Approved Unto God, 1; and Oswald Chambers, Disciples Indeed, 383, both in Complete Works.
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(Isaiah 1-53), and Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). Other of the published lecture notes will appear throughout the dissertation, but the primary analysis will be of these seven works. The method employed will be to approach the breadth of the curriculum dealing with expository preaching and ask the research question, “Based upon Chambers’s Bible Training Curriculum regarding preaching, was an expository preacher likely to be produced?”
Uniqueness of Topic
Since Oswald Chambers’s death almost a century ago, very little has been written specifically on Chambers. A few biographies have been written and several works have been published further categorizing Chambers’s writings into themes or areas of
Scripture-focus.21 This writer performed an extensive academic search of scholarly journal articles, dissertations, theses, and books, but found nothing that has been written specifically on Chambers beyond the works listed below.22 No scholarly work has yet been done exploring Chambers’s theology of preaching.
21 D. W. Lambert, Oswald Chambers: An Unbribed Soul (London: Marshall Morgan & Scott, 1968); Bertha Chambers, Oswald Chambers: His Life and Work (Fort Washington, PA: Christian Literature Crusade, 1959; and McCasland, Abandoned to God. See also all three of Chambers’s works edited by Harry Verploegh: Oswald Chambers: The Best from All His Books, vol. 1 (Nashville: Oliver-Nelson Books, 1987); Oswald Chambers: The Best from All His Books, vol. 2 (Nashville: Oliver-Nelson Books, 1989); and The Oswald Chambers Devotional Reader: 52 Weekly Themes (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1990); and McCasland, ed., Quotable Oswald.
22 ATLA Religion Index, Research In Ministry, ProQuest, etc. reveal that Chambers is occasionally quoted by articles and dissertations on themes related to Chambers’s writings, but all searches for works focusing explicitly on Oswald Chambers found no results.
10
Ministry Need
The spiritual influence of Oswald Chambers is greater today than during his lifetime. McCasland writes:
Oswald Chambers was not famous during his lifetime. At the time of death at the age of forty-three, only three books bearing his name had been published. Among a relatively small circle of Christians in Britain and the U. S., Chambers was much appreciated as a teacher of rare insight and expression, but he was not widely known.23
McCasland concludes of Chambers’s expanding legacy:
We could expect his contemporaries to speak of him from time to time for months or even years, and then the references would fade with the passing of time and his generation. Instead, exactly the opposite has happened. Today, more people know his name and writing than when he was alive. Long years after Chambers’s death, his words are still in the hearts and on the lips of people around the world. The books that bear his name are read daily by literally millions of people in scores of languages. His messages can be found in print, on audio tapes, calendars, bookmarks, and even refrigerator magnets.24
Chambers is a well-known, beloved devotional writer but his views on homiletics have thus far gone unexplored. This dissertation seeks to focus specifically on what Chambers taught about expository preaching and to consider homiletical implications for today.
In 2008, McCasland compiled and edited a topical index of Chambers’s quotes entitled The Quotable Oswald Chambers. He explains his goal as follows: “We offer this book in the innovative spirit of Biddy Chambers, with the prayer that this arrangement of
Oswald’s teaching will open the door to new readers and point us all to the person of
Jesus Christ. . . .”25 This dissertation is proposed in that same spirit.
23 McCasland, ed., Quotable Oswald, 10-11.
24 McCasland, Abandoned to God, 119.
25 McCasland, ed., Quotable Oswald, 11.
Chapter 2
Chambers in His Historical Context
Biography of Oswald Chambers
Early Years (1874-1895)
Oswald Chambers was born on July 24, 1874, to Clarence and Hannah Chambers.
At the time, Clarence was the pastor of Crown Terrace Baptist Church in Aberdeen,
Scotland.1 Chambers spent his boyhood years in Perth. During that time, he attended a private school, Sharp’s Institution, where he “displayed an unusual aptitude” for art.2
When Chambers was fifteen years old, his family moved to London where
“Oswald’s love for art developed and for some time seems to have possessed his thoughts and ambition.”3 During this time, the Chambers family attended Rye Lane Baptist
Church, which boasted an attendance of “eight-hundred members, with more than a thousand people gathering for Sunday morning worship.”4 Up until this time, Chambers
“had given no outward expression” of becoming a believer in Christ. In the words of his brother Franklin:
but about this time, he went with Father to a Service held by the Rev. Charles Spurgeon and on the way home said that had there been an opportunity he would
1 Lambert, Unbribed Soul, 12.
2 McCasland, Abandoned to God, 28.
3 Lambert, Unbribed Soul, 12.
4 McCasland, Abandoned to God, 34.
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12
have given himself to the Lord. Father at once said, “You can do it now, my boy,” and then and there he gave himself to God, and shortly after was baptized by Rev. J. T. Briscoe and joined Rye Lane Baptist Church, where the family had become members.5
Chambers actively participated in the ministries of the church and grew quickly in his knowledge of the Scriptures, prayer, street preaching, and evangelistic outreach.
A Horace Bushnell sermon from Isaiah 45:5, entitled “Every Man’s Life a Plan of
God,” deeply impacted Chambers.6 The central idea of the sermon stated “that God has a definite life-plan for every human person, girding him, visibly or invisibly, for some exact thing which it will be the true significance and glory of his life to have accomplished.”7 Chambers fully embraced this truth in his own life and passed this idea on to others throughout his years of ministry. Sensing God wanting him to hone his skills as an artist, Chambers’s educational plans remained the pursuit of an art degree.
Edinburgh (1895-1897)
In 1895, Chambers returned to Scotland to pursue an Arts degree at the University of Edinburgh. Lambert noted that his school lodgings had previously been inhabited “by
J. H. Jowett, later to become perhaps the greatest preacher of his day, and Oswald felt he was in a noble succession.”8 Entering his time at Edinburgh, Chambers sensed God calling him to be a minister of the Gospel through the arts, what Chambers referred to as
5 B. Chambers, Life and Work, 14.
6 Ibid., 24.
7 Horace Bushnell, Sermons for the New Life (New York: Charles Scribner, 1858), 10.
8 Lambert, Unbribed Soul, 14.
13
the “Aesthetic Kingdom.”9 By the spring of 1896, however, Chambers’s journal entries reveal an inward wrestling with the specific nature of God’s call upon his life. He had long sensed God had a special plan for him, but increasingly, it seemed to be something beyond the mere “redeeming of the Aesthetic Kingdom.” From a diary entry on April 26,
1896, he wrote: “From my childhood, the persuasion has been that of a work, strange and great, an experience deep and peculiar, it has haunted me ever and ever. It spoke clearly to me about my coming here and I came, but now the mists have risen and chase and seethe up all through my soul and nothing is distinct.”10
By November 1896, however, Chambers sensed God making it clear that his primary calling as a minister would not be to the arts, but to the pulpit. During that time, he wrote in a letter to a friend:
It seems tonight that the great Spirit of God is near and all the lower and common- sense things have dwindled away down into their proper proportions, and the thought that is strongest in me is that of entering the ministry. How often have I hinted at it, how often have I stifled it back and down; but I cannot keep it hid any longer for it is perplexing me tremendously. It would be playing with the sacred touch of God to neglect or stifle again this strange yet deep conviction that some time I must be a minister. . . . I am going to leave the opening of the way in his hands, nor am I going to try and enter the ministry until it is so startling clear that not to go into would be to disobey, and this startling clearness has not come yet, but I feel it is coming.11
Chambers’s “strange yet deep conviction” of God calling him to ministry was growing.
9 Ibid., 15.
10 McCasland, Abandoned to God, 51.
11 Ibid., 57-58.
14
Around this same time, Chambers’s opportunities for employment as a freelance artist radically declined. He saw this as a sign of God making His plans clear. Seeking solitude and time alone with God, Chambers spent a night in prayer on the hilltop called
Arthur’s Seat, overlooking the city of Edinburgh. In that experience, Chambers sensed
God saying, “I need you for My service, but I can do without you.”12 From that moment on, everything in Chambers’s life pointed him toward enrolling at a little-known Bible
Training College in Dunoon.
Dunoon and the Dark Night of the Soul (1897-1906)
In the fall of 1897, Chambers began his educational journey at the Bible Training
College in Dunoon. “Dunoon College was a small independent training center for young men hoping to enter the Baptist ministry.”13 By following God’s call and leaving
Edinburgh, Chambers had “left an internationally recognized University and come to
Dunoon where there were but thirty students and a faculty of one—Duncan
MacGregor.”14 Although MacGregor was twenty-five years older than Chambers, the two of them became steadfast friends.15
12 Lambert, Unbribed Soul, 19.
13 Ibid., 20.
14 Susan Magnusson, narrator, “My Utmost for His Highest: The Legacy of Oswald and Biddy Chambers,” Day of Discovery (2011), accessed August 4, 2017, https://dod.org/programs/my-utmost-for- his-highest-the-legacy-of-oswald-biddy-chambers/.
15 McCasland, Abandoned to God, 67.
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At Dunoon, Chambers first experienced the powerful combination of theological instruction where the professor lived in close proximity with the students.16 Although
Chambers was unaware at the time, the benefits of this experience were already shaping the Bible College he himself would found. That Chambers excelled in his studies at
Dunoon “is suggested by the fact that after a short time in residence he became a student tutor.”17 On the surface, everything in Chambers’s life was going well, but a spiritual battle was raging deep within his soul.
Chambers could not discern what was amiss in his soul, but he ached under the weight of it. A poem from September 1901 offers a glimpse into Chambers’s inner struggle: “O Lord Jesus, hear my crying for a consecrated life, For I bite the dust in trying for release from this dark strife.”18 The series of events that delivered Chambers from this spiritual darkness into a deeper experience of God’s power and presence are essential to understanding the rest of Chambers’s life and ministry and merit the reading of the full account in the words of Chambers himself:
After I was “born again” as a lad I enjoyed the presence of Jesus Christ wonderfully, but years passed before I gave myself up thoroughly to His work. I was in Dunoon College as a tutor of Philosophy when Dr. F. B. Meyer came and spoke about the Holy Spirit. I determined to have all that was going and went to my room and asked God simply and definitely for the baptism of the Holy Spirit, whatever that meant. From that day on for four years, nothing but the overruling grace of God and the kindness of God kept me out of an asylum. God used me during those years for the conversion of souls, but I had no conscious communion with Him. The Bible was the dullest, most uninteresting book in existence, and the sense of depravity, the vileness and bad-motiveness of my nature was terrific.
16 Magnusson, “Legacy of Oswald and Biddy Chambers.”
17 Lambert, Unbribed Soul, 20.
18 McCasland, Abandoned to God, 84.
16
I see now that God was taking me by the light of the Holy Spirit and His Word through every ramification of my being. The last three months of those years things reached a climax, I was getting very desperate. I knew no one who had what I wanted; in fact, I did not know what I did want. But I knew that if what I had was all the Christianity there was, the thing was a fraud. Then Luke 11:13 got hold of me—“If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children how much more so shall your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him?” But how could I, bad-motivated as I was, possibly ask for the gift of the Holy Spirit? It was then born in upon me that I had to claim the gift from God on the authority of Jesus Christ and testify to having done so. But the thought came—If you claim the gift of the Holy Spirit on the word of Jesus Christ and testify to it, God will make it known to those who know you best how bad you are in heart. And I was not willing to be a fool for Christ’s sake. But those of you who know the experience, know very well how God brings one to the point of utter despair, and I got to the point where I did not care whether everyone knew how bad I was, I cared for nothing on earth saving to get out of my present condition. At a little meeting held during a Mission in Dunoon, a well-known lady was asked to take the after meeting. She did not speak, but set us to prayer, and then sang, “Touch me again, Lord.” I felt nothing, but I knew emphatically my time had come, and I rose to me feet. I had no vision of God, only a sheer dogged determination to take God at His Word and to prove this thing for myself, and I stood up and said so. This was bad enough, but what followed was ten times worse. After I had sat down the speaker, who knew me well, said, “That is very good of our brother, he has spoken like that as an example to the rest of you.” I got up again and said, “I got up for no one’s sake, I got up for my own sake; either Christianity is a downright fraud, or I have not got hold of the right end of the stick.” And then and there I claimed the gift of the Holy Spirit is dogged committal on Luke 11:13. I had no vision of heaven or of angels, I had nothing. I was as dry and empty as ever, no power or realization of God, no witness of the Holy Spirit. Two days later I was asked to speak at a meeting and forty souls came out to the front. Did I praise God? No, I was terrified and at once went to Mr. MacGregor and told him what had happened, and he said, “Don’t you remember claiming the Holy Spirit as a gift on the word of Jesus, and that He said: ‘Ye shall receive power . . . ? This is the power from on high.’” And like a flash, something happened inside me, and I saw that I had been wanting power in my own hand, so to speak, that I might say, “Look what I have got by putting my all on the altar.” If the previous year has been hell on earth, these four years have been heaven on earth. Glory be to God, the last aching abyss of the human heart is filled to overflowing with the love of God. Love is the beginning, love is the middle, and love is the end. After He comes in, all you see is “Jesus only, Jesus
17
ever.” When you know what God has done for you the power and tyranny of sin is gone, and the radiant, unspeakable emancipation of the indwelling Christ has come, and when you see men and women who should be princes and princess of God bound up in a show of things—oh, you begin to understand what the Apostle meant when he said he wished that he himself were accursed from Christ that men might be saved.19
McCasland writes, “Chambers never looked back on this spiritual experience at Dunoon with the smug satisfaction of having ‘arrived.’ Instead, on a few occasions when he mentioned it in public meetings or private conversations, he spoke of it as a new beginning; a gateway instead of a goal.”20
In all, Chambers spent nine years at Dunoon. He came at age twenty-two and left at age thirty-one. He came a student. He left a teacher. As Chambers began to sense God leading him away from Dunoon, he penned these words, “I know in my bones that it is,
‘Go ye into all the world and make disciples of all nations’ and glory to God, I am going.”21 He had no way of knowing then that the next two years of ministry would see him travel to Japan and America, and then back home again.
Traveling and the League of Prayer (1907-1911)
Back in 1901, while teaching at Dunoon, “Chambers first attended a meeting of the League of Prayer in Perth.”22 In 1891, the Pentecostal League of Prayer was founded by Reader Harris as “an interdenominational organization explicitly dedicated to praying
19 Lambert, Unbribed Soul, 21-24.
20 McCasland, Abandoned to God, 85.
21 Magnusson, “Legacy of Oswald and Biddy Chambers.”
22 McCasland, Abandoned to God, 90.
18
for the filling of the Holy Spirit for all believers, for revival in the churches, and for the spread of Scriptural holiness.”23 The League of Prayer had influence in churches of various denominations, including Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, and Anglican.24
Randall assesses the League’s ecumenical disposition this way: “The League’s perspective was that ecclesiastical distinctions were relatively unimportant: all denominations required the renewal which the Wesleyan experience offered.”25
Perhaps Chambers’s theologically eclectic upbringing and training made the
League’s transdenominational influence appealing. McCasland says that Chambers’s
“experience of the Holy Spirit’s fullness and his study of the Bible convinced him that the organization’s emphasis on scriptural holiness sounded a much-needed call for
Christians in every denomination.”26 Harris was impressed by Chambers’s speaking abilities and desire to help others experience a deeper relationship with God. “By 1905,
Chambers was speaking regularly at League functions and brought a message at the
Annual Meeting in London.”27 Through the League of Prayer and word-of-mouth, God continued providing increasing opportunities for Chambers to travel and speak as part of the “international Wesleyan-Holiness network.”28
23 Ian W. Randall, “The Pentecostal League of Prayer: A Transdenominational British Wesleyan- Holiness Movement,” Wesleyan Theological Journal 33, no. 1 (1998): 187.
24 G. N. Fewkes, “Richard Reader Harris, 1847-1909: An Assessment of the Life and Influence of a Leader of the Holiness Movement” (M.A. thesis, University of Manchester, 1995), 55, 61.
25 Randall, “Pentecostal League of Prayer,” 188. The particulars of this “Wesleyan experience” are explained in chapter 3.
26 McCasland, Abandoned to God, 90.
27 Ibid., 91.
28 Randall, “Pentecostal League of Prayer,” 194.
19
In early 1906, Chambers met Japanese evangelist Juji Nakada at a League of
Prayer meeting in Scotland.29 The two became fast friends and during that summer traveled together teaching at League centers in England and Scotland. McCasland explains how God used a trip to the Keswick Convention to send them around the world:
“July found them at the famous Keswick Convention, soaking in the preaching of
G. Campbell Morgan, F. B. Meyer, J. Stuart Holden, and W. H. Griffith. By the time the convention was over they had made plans to go to America and then travel on to
Japan.”30 By the end of 1906, the two men found themselves in America with further plans to head to Japan.
Starting in November, Chambers and Nakada spent six months traveling around
America. They spent time in late 1906 and early 1907 at God’s Bible School and
Missionary Training Home in Cincinnati, which “functioned as the hub of a growing holiness movement in the United States.”31 During this time, God placed on Chambers’s heart a desire to one day open his own Bible Training School. He wrote in his diary, “My heart swells at the big thoughts and visions that come of founding Bible schools on these holiness lines in Britain and different parts of the world.”32
In July of 1907, Nakada and Chambers traveled to Japan. Chambers spent a month traveling and teaching in the Oriental Mission Society Bible School in Tokyo. He
29 Lambert, Unbribed Soul, 28.
30 McCasland, Abandoned to God, 95.
31 Ibid., 104.
32 B. Chambers, Life and Work, 58.
20
returned to London by mid-October. These experiences widened his passion for the nations of the earth to experience the salvation of Jesus Christ, but he also sensed God leading him to do a “Church-building work” in his homeland.33
Upon his return, Chambers recommenced teaching and preaching for the League of Prayer. From November 1907 to May 1908, he traveled all over Britain and Scotland.
That spring, Chambers boarded a ship bound for America to preach two months of Camp
Meetings. On that ten-day voyage, a romantic relationship was kindled with twenty-four- year-old Gertrude Hobbs, whom he nicknamed Biddy almost immediately. After many letters written back and forth and time spent together when Chambers was not traveling for the League, he asked Biddy to marry him. She said, “Yes.”34 They were married on
May 25, 1910.
The years between their engagement and wedding were fast and furious years of traveling ministry for Chambers. He spoke continually on behalf of Reader Harris and the
League of Prayer. He traveled around Ireland, Scotland, Britain, and beyond. The question of how better to train ministers continued to grow in Chambers’s heart.
McCasland writes, “The work God’s Bible School and [the Bible College] in Tokyo had convinced Chambers of the value of practical training carried out over time. In heart and method, he had always been more of a teacher than a preacher.”35
33 Ibid., 87.
34 McCasland, Abandoned to God, 139, 148.
35 Ibid., 160.
21
Future plans were paused, when Harris died on March 30, 1909, from the results of a stroke four days earlier.36 Leadership of the League passed to Mrs. Reader Harris and
Chambers’s responsibilities increased.37 With League of Prayer support, Chambers began to offer Bible Training classes regionally and by correspondence. God blessed this endeavor. In early December, the League bought a property for the explicit purpose of beginning a brick-and-mortar Bible Training College. Lambert explains:
It came about in this way. The leaders of the League of Prayer had a concern for such a place of spiritual training, and obviously Oswald Chambers was the man to act as Principal. . . . A fine building was acquired facing Clapham Common; it was ideal for the purpose, the large double drawing room providing an excellent lecture hall and the whole building being capable of holding about twenty-five people.38
The God-given dream, that had begun forming in Chambers’s heart three years earlier when he had first visited God’s Bible School in Cincinnati, was coming to fruition.
Bible Training College (1911-1915)
The Bible Training College opened on January 12, 1911.39 The best firsthand information on the Bible Training College is the little book Chambers asked Katherine
Ashe to write just after the College closed in 1915 due to World War I. Remaining copies of semester syllabi exist, which give great insight into the College’s purpose, plan, and processes of education. The information below gives an overview of life at the College,
36 Ibid., 161.
37 Randall, “Pentecostal League of Prayer,” 187.
38 Lambert, Unbribed Soul, 31.
39 Ibid., 32.
22
observations from looking at a Bible Training College syllabus, and recorded testimony from students. Focus on the curriculum and pedagogy regarding preaching will be explained later in chapters 4 and 5.
The motto of the College was “For Christ’s Crown and Covenant.”40 Chambers believed that even just one student a year who clearly heard God’s call was reason enough for the College to exist. Its only purpose was for God to “help himself to our lives.”41 Chambers felt an urgency to make sure his students received a depth and breadth of theological training that would support and sustain them for a lifetime of ministry.
Chambers wrote:
It is not its practical activities that are the strength of this Bible Training College, its whole strength lies in the fact that here you are put in to soak before God. You have no idea of where God is going to engineer your circumstances, no knowledge of what strain is going to be put on you either at home or abroad, and if you waste your time in overactive energies instead of getting in to soak on the great fundamental truths of God’s Redemption, you will snap when the strain comes; but if this time of soaking before God is being spent in getting rooted and grounded with God on the un-practical line, you will remain true to Him whatever happens.42
Chambers saw the College as both an institution for theological training and a sort of spiritual safe harbor for those attending.
The College was to provide “atmosphere and time for spiritual life to take root, before it is placed in the full blaze of the intellectual problems and actual difficulties in which we live.” Furthermore, it was to provide “a place of spiritual recuperation for
40 Katherine Ashe, The Book of the College (London: Complete Press, n.d.), 7. Lambert notes that this phrasing “reflected Chambers’s love of Scotland and the Covenanters,” 34.
41 Magnusson, “Legacy of Oswald and Biddy Chambers.”
42 Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, in Complete Works, 835.
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ministers, missionaries, etc.,” who are “pressed beyond measure” and need time to get readjusted before God spiritually.”43 For Chambers, this desire to “soak” students in the things of God so they would be adequately “rooted and grounded” gave the College a razor-sharp focus: “Underneath the whole rings the one insistent note—conformity to the purpose of the Lord Jesus Christ, in character, life, and thought; and emphasis is laid on the recognition of, and reliance on, the Holy Spirit as Interpreter and Guide in all Bible study and practical work.”44
The days at the College were filled to the brim with opportunities to grow in practical spirituality. Ashe writes, “The curriculum was strenuous, as can be seen from the time-tables of successive sessions. There were morning, afternoon, and evening lectures; there was essay writing, study of the Bible and a weekly written examination.”45
The syllabus summarizes the training plan of the College thus:
The Training is preeminently Bible Training. The teaching rests upon the great basal facts of the Atonement of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the integrity and authority of the Scriptures, as the Word of God. A practical, complete knowledge of the English Bible is aimed at by means of systematic and analytical methods.46
The Fall 1914 syllabus lists classes such as Christian Sociology, New Testament Greek,
Old Testament Subject Matter, History of Christian Doctrine, Bible Content, Biblical
Ethics, Bible Memory Class, Sunday School Teacher’s Class, Biblical Psychology, and
43 Lambert, Unbribed Soul, 33.
44 Bible Training College Syllabus, Autumn Session (September 26-December 19, 1914), 8.
45 Ibid., 17.
46 Ibid., 8.
24
Missionary Matters. In addition to these, specific preaching classes focused on sermon production, voice production, and elocution.
As has been observed, Chambers had been profoundly impacted by his own experiences of theological education. McCasland summarized:
In Dunoon he had learned more by living with Duncan MacGregor than from anything he said in the classroom. Listening to MacGregor preach had been inspiring. Observing him at home had been life-changing. Oswald’s month at God’s Bible School had brought home the value of day-to-day interaction in an atmosphere of commitment to God. In community living, more was “caught” than “taught.” During every Cincinnati camp meeting, he had been most impressed by the unselfish work of the students who cooked and cleaned. In a class, he could teach people to study and preach. In a home, he could help them learn and serve.47
In 1913, Biddy Chambers gave birth to a daughter, Kathleen. Immediately, the baby was a central part of the students’ lives, as well. Ashe recalls, Kathleen “brought what every
Baby brings—the nestling of the Babe of Bethlehem within the heart of every man and woman who is born of God. . . . The radiance and the profundity of her Babyhood were poured upon us. . . .”48 Chambers’s whole approach to theological education was a blend of spiritual truth taught and life experiences shared.
On August 4, 1914, Britain officially entered the fray of World War I. As increasing numbers of troops were sent into battle, Chambers struggled with how to respond.49 Ultimately, he sensed God calling Him to minister to the troops. Ashe records,
“In the June of 1915 the Principal announced his determination to volunteer for spiritual
47 McCasland, Abandoned to God, 181.
48 Ashe, Book of the College, 11.
49 Magnusson, “Legacy of Oswald and Biddy Chambers.”
25
service among our troops at the front, in obedience to God’s call, and it became known that the College would be temporarily closed.”50 The Bible Training College closed its doors on July 14, 1915, “for the period” of the war. There was no way of knowing then that the Bible Training College would never reopen.
Chambers’s Final Years in Egypt (1915-1917)
Oswald Chambers sailed for Egypt on October 12, 1915. He was stationed seven miles from Cairo, in the town of Zeitoun.51 This was a major staging area for the Middle
Eastern theater of war, which included over 100,000 troops.52 Chambers and his wife served the troops as the leaders of the Y.M.C.A. presence. Mr. Chambers’s days and nights were spent teaching, preaching, leading prayer services, counseling, and doing anything he could to make being so far from home feel like home—such as Mrs.
Chambers giving away free cups of tea to all the soldiers who would come hear her husband speak. It took some time for the troops to respond positively to Chambers’s ministry there, but before long soldiers were coming in large numbers to hear the Word of God preached and discover the hope of Jesus Christ found therein.
The time the Chambers spent in Egypt was fruitful, and God continued blessing their efforts abundantly. This is partially why it came as such a shock when Chambers suddenly became ill and was taken to the hospital in Cairo.53 He immediately underwent
50 Ashe, Book of the College, 11.
51 Lambert, Unbribed Soul, 35.
52 Magnusson, “Legacy of Oswald and Biddy Chambers.”
53 Lambert, Unbribed Soul, 42.
26
an operation for appendicitis. While the surgery was initially deemed “successful,”
Chambers died from complications on November 15, 1917.
Chambers was given a funeral with full military honors. McCasland writes:
Military funerals were common in Cairo, but this one was unusual, containing elements reserved for a high-ranking officer or government official. It was extraordinary that the man so honored was neither officer nor official but the Rev. Oswald Chambers, Y.M.C.A. secretary at nearby, Zeitoun.54
Chambers’s body was laid to rest in a cemetery in Old Cairo. The simple headstone includes the words “A Believer in Jesus Christ,” and “below this, a Bible opened at Luke
11:13, the promise which had meant so much to him, and to many through him.”55 His headstone was a fitting summary of the earthly life Chambers had lived.
Conclusion
Understanding the goodness and sovereignty of God in all affairs of His people, the shortness of Chambers’s earthly life nonetheless gives a prophetic irony to words he wrote at twenty-two years of age: “I feel I shall be buried for a time, hidden away in obscurity; then suddenly I shall flame out, do my work, and be gone.”56 McCasland’s words quoted in chapter 1, bear repeating here: “We could expect his contemporaries to speak of him from time to time for months or even years, and then the references would fade with the passing of time and his generation. Instead, exactly the opposite has happened. Today, more people know his name and writing than when he was alive.”57
54 McCasland, Abandoned to God, 10.
55 Lambert, Unbribed Soul, 43.
56 McCasland, Abandoned to God, 62.
57 Ibid., 119.
27
As will be shown, Chambers taught his students expository preaching. In addition to this, however, Chambers further taught that preaching can never be all God intends apart from the preacher living a life surrendered to God’s Word and lived in the power of
God’s Spirit. This message is part of the reason God’s work in and through the life of
Oswald Chambers has endured.
Chapter 3
Chambers in His Theological Context
The Complex Issue of Entire Sanctification
In proving the thesis that Chambers was a professor of expository preaching, this section, which compares and contrasts the ways Wesleyan Methodism and the
Keswick Convention viewed personal sanctification, is vital. Both movements influenced
Chambers, yet he seemingly conformed fully to neither. So much of Chambers’s preaching and teaching involves the topic of surrendering self for sanctification. Failure to understand how the various theological paradigms of Chambers’s time influenced him means failure rightly to understand him.
As the biographical information in the previous chapter showed, Chambers was raised a Scottish Baptist, saved as a child under the preaching of Baptist Charles
Spurgeon, and Baptists schooled at the Gospel Training College at Dunoon. Additionally, he was brought into a personal experience of the “Higher Life” under the Keswick teaching of F. B. Meyer, and eventually ministered within and later led the Bible Training
College for Richard Reader Harris’s Wesleyan-Perfectionist-leaning Pentecostal League of Prayer. Yet, Chambers himself spoke highly of what he experienced when he attended the Keswick Convention in July 1906.1 As this chapter will reveal, Chambers’s personal
1 B. Chambers, Life and Work, 77.
28
29
theology might well be called a “Baptist-Methodist-Keswick-Holiness Movement hodgepodge.” Interestingly, J. I. Packer labels Chambers a Baptist, but articulates his theology as Wesleyan.2 Where Chambers himself landed within these complementary, sometimes competing, and often confusing theological paradigms, however, allowed him to make a unique and important contribution to the theology of expository preaching.
Some Delimitations
Whereas many proverbial and worthwhile “rabbits” could be chased in placing the thesis under consideration in its proper historical context, some delineations are in order. First, assessing every possible theological pro and con of Wesleyan Methodism and the Keswick Movement is beyond the scope of this dissertation.3 What will be discussed, however, is Chambers’s interactions with both paradigms. Second, also beyond the scope of this dissertation, is a thorough analysis of how the theological streams of the Quakers, Brethren, Revivalists, Wesleyan Perfectionists, and subsequent holiness movements prepared the way for the arrival and assimilation of Keswick theology.4 What will be discussed is where Chambers fits both historically and
2 Packer, Keep in Step with the Spirit, 110.
3 For an excellent critique of Keswick theology from a theologically Reformed perspective, see Andrew David Naselli, Let Go and Let God? A Survey and Analysis of Keswick Theology (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2010). Naselli’s work clarifies the differences between a Keswickian view of sanctification versus a more traditional Reformed view as is the article by J. I. Packer, “Keswick and the Reformed Doctrine of Sanctification,” Evangelical Quarterly 27 (July-September 1955): 153-67.
4 For more on what pre-dated the arrival of Keswick, see chapter 5 of David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (Grand Rapids: Baker House, 1989), 150-80, as well as Naselli, Let Go and Let God.
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theologically with these various “higher life” movements. Third, while basic sanctification terminology of Wesleyan Perfectionism will be defined, the way
Methodism has nuanced that position over time will not be explored. In summary, what is necessary for the purposes of this dissertation is a general enough understanding of
Wesleyan Perfectionism versus Keswickian sanctification by which Chambers’s teaching on preaching might be better understood.
Towards a Summarization of Wesleyan Perfectionism and Keswickian Theology Pertaining to the Preaching of Oswald Chambers
The theologies of both Wesleyan Methodism and the Keswick Movement are notoriously difficult to summarize. The former used old terms of sanctification in new ways that grew increasingly nuanced as the masses struggled to understand what exactly
Wesley was teaching about personal holiness. The latter “developed a little over a century” later as a “modified version of the Wesleyan view,” taking a more moderate approach to the idea of entire sanctification.5 What follows discusses the origins of each movement, reasons why summarizing their overall theologies is difficult, an attempt to understand the views of both regarding personal sanctification, and a conclusion outlining where Chambers stood on this issue. These elements are vital for a right understanding of
Chambers in his historical-theological context.
5 Packer, Keep in Step, 120.
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Holiness Sub-Groups of the Nineteenth Century
Menzies notes that the so-called “nineteenth century Holiness movement was composed of two major sub-groups”—Wesleyan and non-Wesleyan groups.6 Chambers himself is a blend of the two depending on what aspect of the two theologies is being discussed. The first sub-group of the nineteenth century Holiness Movement concerned those groups descended in various ways from the Wesleyan-Methodist tradition. Because this is the larger of the two sub-groups, this tends to be what first comes to mind when the term “Holiness Movement” is employed, and yet another—albeit smaller—group of non-Wesleyan “higher life” advocates existed.7 These two sub-groups had much in common theologically but differed in several areas, including the extent of personal sanctification they believed a Christian may experience this side of heaven.
Difficulty of Defining Wesleyan Perfectionism
Summarizing the theology of John Wesley (1703-1791), as it pertains to his doctrine of Christian perfection, is difficult for two reasons. First, theologically speaking,
Wesley was a multifaceted, faith-tradition mixing, spiritually eclectic theologian.
Sanders’s book heading covering the difficulty in summarizing Wesley’s theology is cleverly entitled So Many Wesleys, So Little Time. Obviously only one John Wesley is under consideration, but the quip makes the point.
6 William W. Menzies, “Non-Wesleyan Pentecostalism: A Tradition Keswick and the Higher Life,” Asian Journal of Pentecostal Studies 14, no. 2 (July 2011): 213.
7 Ibid.
32
Sanders speaks to Wesley’s amazing ability to move intellectually among the prevailing evangelical theological paradigms of his day:
Wesley was not afraid to take definite positions on contentious, even divisive issues. But while most leaders grow narrower and narrower as they are forced to make decision after decision, Wesley did the opposite: the result of his declaring himself on so many issues was a kind of cumulative effect by which he became more and more comprehensive. He almost seemed to be moving around intellectually so he could be in the right places at the right times to affirm all the truths he wanted to affirm: first a Puritan background, next an Anglo-Catholic reading program, then a thunderbolt from Luther, and inundation from Pietist spiritual writers. John Wesley was hungry for truth and reality; he wanted it all, and in that pursuit he crossed lines and mixed traditions that are rarely combined.8
Packer called Wesley an “eclectic to his fingertips.”9 Collins observed, “Wesley developed a theological style that not only was sophisticated in its attempt to hold a diversity of truths in tension, but also has on occasion puzzled his interpreters, both past and present, precisely because of that diversity.”10
Lancaster wrote, “Wesley’s interpreters do not agree fully on how to read him. In particular, proponents on different sides of current theological debates have often cited
Wesley to support their own alternative positions.”11 Collins thus speaks to the ways in which post-Wesley theologians have sought to fit Wesley into their particular faith tradition. There is the Calvinistic Wesley, the Lutheran Pietistic Wesley, the Puritan
8Fred Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2013), 16-17.
9 Packer, Keep in Step, 111.
10 Kenneth J. Collins, The Theology of John Wesley: Holy Love and the Shape of Grace (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007), 4.
11 Sarah H. Lancaster, “Current Debates Over Wesley’s Legacy Among His Progeny,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Wesley, ed. Randy L. Maddox and Jason E. Vickers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 304.
33
Wesley, and the Greek Eastern Church Fathers Wesley.12 Discerning how Wesley himself intended to be read is difficult indeed.
The second reason Wesley’s theology is difficult to summarize involves his choosing of confusing terms to articulate his position on sanctification. Wesley called it by various names, but he “especially favored these three: entire sanctification, Christian perfection, and perfect love.”13 The phrase “Christian perfection” has its root in the New
Testament Greek idea of telios, meaning “perfection or completion” but, regardless, it created confusion from the moment Wesley chose it.
Wesley himself knew confusion would result from the use of the term. Indeed.
Wesley’s sermon “Christian Perfection” from Philippians 3:12, first published in 1741, began with these words:
There is scarce any expression in holy writ, which had given more offense than this. The word perfect is what many cannot bear. The very sound of it is an abomination to them; and whosoever preaches perfection (as the phrase is), that is, asserts that it is attainable in this life, runs a great hazard of being accounted by them worse than a heathen man or publican.14
In 1777, Wesley stated his purpose for writing Plain Account on Christian Perfection was
“to give a plain and distinct account of the steps by which I was led, during a course of many years, to embrace the doctrine of Christian Perfection.”15 While it is true that in this work Wesley shared the books and experiences which shaped his views on sanctification,
12 Collins, Theology of John Wesley, 4.
13 Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life, 191.
14 John Wesley, Wesley’s Standard Sermons, vol. 2, ed. Edward Sugden (Great Britain: Lamar & Barton, 1787), 150.
15 John Wesley, Plain Account of Christian Perfection (N.p.: N.p., 1777), 3.
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it is more so evident that Wesley published On Christian Perfection in an attempt re- clarify (all over again for the umpteenth time) for the confused and combative what he intended by Christian perfection.16
Sanders notes how Irishman Alexander Knox (1757-1831), a “sympathetic friend of Wesley’s,” put much of “the blame for the ongoing controversy” on Wesley. Even if
Wesley’s theology of Christian perfection was correct, “his use of the word was a mistake.” Knox wrote in 1828, “[Wesley] made an injudicious use of it, so that the word became hackneyed, and the idea which it conveys perniciously misconceived.”17 An attempt to summarize Wesley’s theology of Christian perfection appears below in the section exploring where Wesley and Keswick disagree on the issue of sanctification’s extent.
Difficulty of Summarizing the Theology of the Keswick Movement
In the early 1870s, an Evangelical movement began, referred to as “Keswick,” named for the town in England where the meetings were held.18 “Keswick is a small village of Cumberland, on the south bank of the [River] Greta, about twenty-four miles from Carlisle.”19 In Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the
16 Ibid. In reading Plain Account, one is overwhelmed by how many times Wesley had to reexplain his position—not just in sermons and tracts, but also in the prefaces of new hymnal releases of his brother Charles.
17 Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life, 213.
18 Ian M. Randall, “F. B. Meyer: Baptist Ambassador for Keswick Holiness Spirituality,” Baptist History and Heritage 37, no. 2 (2002): 44.
19 Arthur Tappan Pierson, The Keswick Movement: In Precept and Practice (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Co., 1903), 15.
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1980s, David Bebbington says Evangelicalism was “deeply influenced” by this “new movement,” which over time had global ramifications.
Advocates of [the Keswick] holiness tradition urged that Christians should aim for a second decisive experience beyond conversion. Afterwards they would live on a more elevated plane. No longer would they feel themselves ensnared by wrongdoing, for they would have victory over sin. They would possess holiness, enjoying “the higher life.”20
According to the teachings of Keswick, this “higher life” was not achieved by “effort” or
“endeavor,” but by what was called “the rest of faith.”21
As with Wesleyan Perfectionism, the theology of the Keswick movement is also challenging to summarize, because the movement itself never developed an “official theological statement.”22 Naselli says of Keswick theology, “Some claim that its theology is impossible to define authoritatively, partly because the convention was an unstructured, nondenominational group of conservative Christians who differed doctrinally among themselves in several areas.”23 In fact, Charles Harford notes that even the speakers at the Keswick Convention themselves tended to shy away from Keswick- specific labeling. They “wished that it were not necessary to use such terms as ‘the
Keswick Message,’ ‘the Keswick speakers,’ or ‘the Keswick Movement.’”24 With the early Keswick leaders’ aversion to the label “Keswick” taken into consideration, it must
20 Bebbington, Evangelicalism In Modern Britain, 151.
21 Ibid.
22 Melvin Easterly Dieter, Five Views on Sanctification (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 153.
23 Naselli, Let Go and Let God, 170; and Bebbington, Evangelicalism In Modern Britain, 151-52.
24 Charles Harford, ed., The Keswick Convention: Its Message, Its Method, and Its Men (London: Marshall Brothers, 1907), ix.
36
still be recognized that it is unavoidable to speak succinctly of the movement itself and the teachings it espoused without the label. As with Wesleyan Perfectionism above, the aspects of Keswick theology impacting Chambers’s understanding of sanctification will be examined below by comparison and contrast to one another.
Where Wesley and Keswick Agree and Disagree on “Higher Life” Sanctification
Wesleyan Methodism and the Keswick Movement agree and disagree theologically in several areas. The following analysis will focus on how both movements viewed the extent of personal sanctification a believer can experience in this life and the degree to which Chambers agreed or disagreed with Wesley or Keswick. This is such a recurring theme in Chambers that it is of paramount importance for a right understanding of his theology of preaching in its historical-theological context.
The topics discussed below are categorized into four areas, three on which
Wesley and Keswick agree, and one on which they disagree. Areas of agreement include
“The Desire to Apply Scripture for Personal, Practical Holiness,” “A Moment of
Accelerated Sanctification Experienced Later than Salvation,” and “Grace and Faith as the Means of this Accelerated Sanctification.” The area of disagreement to be highlighted is “The Extent of Personal Sanctification in this Life.” This writer is aware that this particular issue of theological contextualization could be the subject of another entire dissertation. Giving Chambers a fair hearing merits setting some parameters of where he stood on the issue of “Higher Life” sanctification.
The desire to apply Scripture for personal, practical holiness. Wesleyan
Methodism and the Keswick Movement shared the desire to see the Bible applied to
37
people’s lives for personal, practical holiness.25 Both movements wrestled theologically and practically with the wide gap between the lives of Christians described in God’s
Word and the daily experience of most contemporary believers. From reading Scripture, both movements maintained something was missing from the lives of today’s Christians.
Wesley arrived on the scene in eighteenth-century England at a time of discouraging apostasy.26 His unconventional preaching tactics coupled with his “new” methods for helping followers of Christ pursue practical holiness had a revival-like effect on the churches of England and beyond. Wesley emphasized what he called true “heart religion” that could lead a person to “holiness and happiness.”27 Sanders says of Wesley that “almost everything he wrote was in the field of ‘practical divinity,’ or the Christian life.”28 Likewise, Vickers adds that “as a theologian, John Wesley specialized in the doctrine of the Christian life.”29 Wesley sought to recover a more practical Christianity.
The Keswick Movement, likewise, sought a more practical Christianity that led to holy living. Charles Harford asserts that the message of Keswick is “perhaps best expressed in the terms of its original title, in which it was described as a ‘Convention for
25 Chapter 3 will examine the views of all three regarding their understanding of the nature of God’s Word.
26 Menzies, “Non-Wesleyan Pentecostalism,” 214.
27 Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life, 79-83.
28 Ibid., 21.
29 Jason E. Vickers, Wesley: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T.&T. Clark, 2009), 94.
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the Promotion of Practical Holiness.’ This is the one reason for its existence.”30 Canon
Battersby opened the first Keswick with these words:
Our desire is to let those speak to us and lead us, not who are able to make the most eloquent speeches, but whom God has manifestly led into the secret of the Divine Life, and who are willing to be nothing and let Him speak through them; men who will be faithful with us and not spare us, but set forth very plainly our sins, and the things that hinder our full enjoyment of God’s peace and our growth in holiness.31
Against claims that Keswick was teaching something novel, Harford explains how the leaders felt: “The Keswick Convention has set up no new school of theology, it has instituted no new sect, it has not even formed a society, but exists for the sole purpose of helping men to be holy.”32 Concerning Keswickian teaching, Pierson employed the old adage, “There is nothing new that is true or true that is new.”33 What Keswick taught was not new, only forgotten. Pierson says, “It is felt that some old truths need, from time to time, restatement and new emphasis.”34 This emphasis for Keswick was personal, practical holiness.
A moment of accelerated sanctification experienced later than salvation. The teachings of John Wesley and the Keswick Movement agreed on the idea of a believer having an experience of “accelerated sanctification” subsequent to salvation that ushered
30 Harford, Keswick Convention, 4.
31 Pierson, Precept and Practice, 46-47.
32 Harford, Keswick Convention, 4.
33 Pierson, Precept and Practice, 63.
34 Ibid.
39
the believer into a “higher life” of experiencing the Lord and holy living.35 This was a key issue that made Hannah Whitall Smith’s highly influential 1875 book The Christian’s
Secret of a Happy Life so impactful in furthering the “Higher Life” movement. She claimed that believers who are honest with themselves feel discontent with the level of happiness and contentment they experience in their everyday Christian lives. She proposed to her readers, “All of God’s children, I am convinced, feel instinctively, in their moments of divine illumination, that a life of inward rest and outward victory is their inalienable [spiritual] birthright.”36 Her book made no qualms about her belief that
“the experience of sometimes called the Higher Christian Life” is “the only true Christian life.”37 Her assertions proverbially “struck a chord” with those who read her book.
Likewise, the Keswick Convention taught a potential and essential experience of
“accelerated sanctification” at a moment subsequent to salvation. They described this in terms of moving from one “category” of sanctification to another. Keswick leaders spoke of sanctification in three categories: positional sanctification (every believer receives at the moment of salvation), experimental sanctification (progressive, “day-by-day” transformation of the believer into the image of Christ), and ultimate sanctification
35 Neither Wesley nor Keswick used the term “accelerated sanctification,” but it is proposed by the writer as a term which fairly summarizes that upon which both groups agreed.
36 Hannah Whitall Smith, The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life (Westwood, NJ: Barbour and Co., 1985), 15.
37 Ibid., 37.
40
(sinless perfection of the believer in the life to come).38 Keswick focused on how to experience more completely the experimental category of sanctification.
Barabas summarized Keswick’s view of experimental sanctification with three terms: process, crisis, and gift. Keswick’s belief in a moment of accelerated sanctification subsequent to salvation is seen in this middle term “crisis.” According to Keswick, practical sanctification is both a life-long process and is marked by moments of “spiritual crisis,” which results in “an enlargement of vision of their spiritual resources in Christ, or a more adequate realization of God’s requirements of them as Christians, or a willingness to surrender some sin that stands between them and God.”39 This moment was oftentimes experienced so profoundly by Keswick Convention attenders that Hubert Brooke explained:
No wonder then, that with so much alike in the need, in the Deliverer, and in the condition of faith, they should express the blessing received as a “second conversion,” or more often a “second blessing.” It was no denial that many more blessings might follow, but only a thankful confession of the very marked and real change effected by this grace of God.40
Brooke’s testimony highlights again the difficulty with summarizing where Wesleyan
Methodism and Keswick stood on the issue of sanctification. In addition to the usage of terms that it was assumed people would rightly understand, discrepancies existed between what was taught by the leaders of these movements and how those impacted by the movements articulated their personal experiences.
38Steven Barabas, So Great Salvation: The History and Message of the Keswick Convention (London: Marshall, Morgan, & Scott, 1952), 85.
39 Ibid., 86.
40 Hubert Brooke, “The Message: Its Method of Presentation,” in Keswick Convention, ed. Harford, 80.
41
Grace and faith as the means of this accelerated sanctification. Wesleyan
Methodism and Keswick also agreed that the moment of acceleration came about in a believer’s heart at the crossroads of two elements: God’s grace and man’s faith. Packer affirmed this assertion when he wrote that the teaching of John Wesley and the Keswick
Movement agree on the idea of God performing in the life of a believer a “second transforming work of grace, distinct from and ordinarily subsequent to the new birth
(conversion).”41 Despite some variance in the nuances of how Wesley and Keswick understand the means of sanctification, they agreed on the fact that God makes it happen by grace, and the believer must be willing to have it happen by faith.
Wesleyan Methodism saw the moment as a second work of grace. In his sermon,
“The Scripture Way of Salvation,” Wesley rhetorically proposes the question, “But do you believe we are sanctified by faith?” His answer, “I have continually testified in private and in public, that we are sanctified as well as justified by faith. . . . Faith is the condition, and the only condition, of sanctification, exactly as it is of justification.”42
Collins summarized Wesley’s view in this way: “Redemption, then, is not accomplished in a grand stroke, nor is it an uninterrupted process of gradual, barely distinguishable changes; instead, a second distinct work of grace is needed.”43
Collins further contends that “it was Wesley himself, and not the American holiness movement, who first championed the notion of a ‘second’ work of grace,” and
41 Packer, Keep in Step, 110.
42 Wesley, Standard Sermons, vol. 2, 453 (italics added for emphasis).
43 Collins, Theology of John Wesley, 281.
42
then gives several examples of evidence from Wesley’s writings.44 League of Prayer leader J. A. Harper confirms and clarifies the Wesleyan Methodist view that the New
Testament teaches “two definite experiences of grace, namely, The New Birth, and Entire
Sanctification.” He defines the terms as follows:
This means, negatively, the Purifying of our heart by faith (Acts 15:8-9, John 1:7) and positively the filling of the Holy Ghost, Who purifies the heart (Acts 15:8-9); endues with power (Acts 1:8); sheds abroad the love of God in the heart (Rom 5:5); and completes the work of sanctification (1 Thess 5:23, 1 Pet 1:2).45
This second work of grace brought about in the life of the believer was referred to as
“entire sanctification.”46
Likewise, Keswick saw sanctification as a second work of grace subsequent to salvation. What happens in the moment of crisis to propel a believer to a higher spiritual plane of living? Keswick maintained that sanctification is received by faith as a gift from
God just as salvation is received.47 Barabas summarizes this idea as follows.
God’s provision for sin is a twofold one—our identification with Christ in His death to sin, and the gift of the Holy Spirit through whose counteracting influence we are freed from the dominion of sin. Sanctification is thus, first and foremost, the gift of God’s grace—not the result of self-effort—and is available to all believers.48
Handley Moule well-summarizes this essential teaching of the Keswick
Convention as “holiness by faith.” He then defined faith as “the attitude of quiet
44 Ibid.
45 J. A. Harper, “The League of Prayer,” undated pamphlet, 4.
46 See below for a fuller explanation of this term.
47 Barabas, So Great Salvation, 88.
48 Ibid., 97.
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confidence in Him, as able to keep His promises, and willing to do so, and under gracious covenant to do so.”49 Simply put, in the teaching of Keswick, faith is simply trusting God to do what He promises to do in His Word. A. T. Pierson wrote, “God’s command is His enablement. Whatever is believed or suspected to be opposed to His will and to our well- being should be, and can be, renounced, and abandoned at once and forever. Because it should be, it may be. This is essential Keswick teaching.”50
This aspect of Keswickian theology has been explained by the phrase “let go, and let God,” and yet the “trusting rest” of faith is not the absence of human effort but rather the continual reliance upon the power of God for living out God’s will. Keswick calls for believers to claim, by the combination of faith in God and surrender of self, the fullness of what God’s Word promises is possible in the day-to-day sanctification of the believer.
Moule adds, “Ultimately, at the heart of everything, in order to live the life of dedicated loyalty, in order to receive more and more the spiritual force with which to live it, is to
‘act Faith,’ hour by hour, step by step.”51
The extent of personal sanctification in this life. This is the issue on which
Wesleyan Methodism and Keswick disagree. As stated above, the way in which Wesley asserted his doctrine of Christian Perfection has been notoriously difficult to summarize.
One may argue that Wesleyan and Keswickian views laid side-by-side are nothing more
49 Handley Moule, “The Message: Its Scriptural Character,” in Keswick Convention, ed. Harford, 68, 70.
50 A. T. Pierson, “The Message: Its Practical Application,” in Keswick Convention, ed. Harford, 92 (italics added for emphasis).
51 Moule, “Its Scriptural Character,” 69, 71.
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than semantics, and yet Menzies asserts these viewpoints “differed significantly” in how each one understood sanctification.52
What did Wesley mean by “entire sanctification, Christian perfection, and perfect love?”53 Building upon Wesley’s robust theology of the new birth and spiritual growth were his conclusions regarding the degree of personal holiness a believer can hope for in this life. As explained above, it is difficult to simply explain Wesley’s view on this for two reasons: the term “Christian perfection” is problematic, and his views shifted over time. Maddox explains:
Wesley’s actual use of the term “sanctification” fluctuated. In the early years of the revival it was often used to denote the ideal that he would later call “Christian Perfection.” Eventually he recognized that the Bible usually used the term in a broader sense covering the entire therapeutic transformation of our lives following the New Birth, leading him to add qualifiers like “entire” when referring specifically to his conception of the ideal expression of sanctification in this life.54
In A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, Wesley gives eleven statements of his viewpoint on this issue with a plethora of explanations as to what Christian perfection is and is not.55 Perhaps more helpful for the purposes of summarization is Watson’s four- point formula: First, all men need to be saved. Second, all men can be saved. Third, all men can know they are saved. Four, all men can be saved to the uttermost.56
52 Menzies, “Non-Wesleyan Pentecostalism,” 213.
53 Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life, 191.
54 Randy L. Maddox, Responsible Grace: John Wesley’s Practical Theology (Nashville: Kingswood Books, 1994), 176.
55 Wesley, Plain Account, 108-09.
56 Philip S. Watson, The Message of the Wesleys: A Reader of Instruction and Devotion (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 34.
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With those four items in mind, perhaps Wesley gave the most helpful definition of
Christian Perfection in his 1759 Thoughts on Christian Perfection. Wesley preached:
“What is Christian perfection? The loving God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. This implies that no wrong temper, none contrary to love, remains in the soul; and that all the thoughts, words and actions are governed by pure love.”57 For Wesley, a
Christian moving toward spiritual maturity will always be growing in obedient love for
God and holy living to the point that the sin principle (aspect of a person inclined toward sin) can be completely eradicated. Packer summarized Wesley as follows: “Perfection, then, is a state but it is not static; it is a state of wholeheartedly going on with God in obedient worship and service that are fueled by love and love alone.”58
Packer went on to propose a less confusing term that perhaps Wesley should have chosen instead. Packer explains his reasoning:
He certainly could have said what he had to say without using the language of perfection or sinlessness at all, and the fact that he found this vocabulary in both Scripture and tradition cannot of itself excuse his willfulness or insensitiveness or truculence (it is hard to know which word best fits) in persisting with it when he saw the vast confusion it caused.59
In an attempt to clarify what Wesley was asserting, Packer proposed the doctrine of “the imparting of total love, or total love for short.”60 This is a good working definition of
Wesley’s use of the phrase “Christian perfection” regarding sanctification. Also, worth
57 Wesley, Plain Account, 43.
58 Packer, Keep in Step, 112.
59 Ibid., 115.
60 Ibid. (italics added for emphasis).
46
noting is that near the end of his life, Wesley stated that his doctrine of Christian perfection “was the chief reason for which God had raised up the Methodists.”61
The Keswick Convention was, likewise, emphatic about the increase of practical holiness in a believer’s life. While Keswick saw increased sanctification in the life of a believer as a gift of God’s grace to be received by faith, they disagreed on the extent of sanctification a believer can experience in this life. Pugh notes the role that Methodist
Perfectionism played in the “formation of early Keswick expectations of a second blessing.”62 Yet, the Keswickian understanding of the potential holiness differed from the teaching of Wesley—especially regarding sanctification’s extent. Menzies explained the difference succinctly when he wrote, “Non-Wesleyan ‘higher life’ teaching emphasized the suppression of sinful desires rather than the eradication of the sin principle” as did the
Wesleyan viewpoint.63
In speaking to the idea of “holiness by faith” taught by Keswick, a clarification needs to be made regarding the limits of sanctification in this life. Unlike various strains of the Wesleyan Methodist tradition, the “Higher Life” of the Keswick Movement did not teach that a person could achieve “sinless perfection” this side of Heaven. Moule says that it was by “God’s providence” that the message of Keswick was “kept from ever formulating, as its authentic message, a dream of ‘sinlessness. . . .’”64 Yet, this did not
61 Maddox, Responsible Grace, 180.
62 Ben Pugh, “The Wesleyan Way Entire Sanctification and Its Spin-offs—A Recurring Theme in Evangelical Devotion,” Evangelical Review of Theology 38, no. 1 (January 2014): 14.
63 Menzies, “Non-Wesleyan Pentecostalism,” 214.
64 Moule, “Scriptural Character,” 70.
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keep the Evangelical Leaders of Britain from accusing Keswick of teaching “a false doctrine of what was often called ‘Pearsall-Smithism’ or ‘Sinless Perfection.’”65 Due to the ensuing controversy, Pollock notes that “the first Keswick was nearly the last.”66
What Keswick taught dealt not with the idea that sinless perfection was possible for man, but a surrendering, dependent-on-the-Lord faith made living a holy, higher life possible here-and-now. The Keswickian understanding of this divided people into one of three categories: (1) the Natural Man (unsaved), (2) the Carnal Man (saved by faith, but not yet sanctified by faith), and (3) the Spiritual Man (a saved man fully surrendered to
God’s Spirit).67 Keswick theology taught that all Christians receive the person of the
Holy Spirit at the moment of salvation.68 At the same time, clearly, not all Christians have what Keswick referred to as the “fullness” of the Holy Spirit.69 Barabas again summarizes this aspect of Keswick teaching as follows:
Two things are crystal clear in Scripture; that not all Christians are filled with the Spirit, and that God commands all Christians to be filled with the Spirit. The responsibility is not God’s, but that of believers. The condition of filling is also made crystal clear. In the words of the apostles, God gives the Holy Spirit to them that obey Him (Acts 5:32). The Holy Spirit can control our members only in so far as we allow Him to do so by our obedience. That is the only way the blessing of the fullness of the Spirit can be made experimental in our lives.70
65 H. W. Webb-Peploe, “Early Keswick Conventions,” in Keswick Convention, ed. Harford, 40.
66 John C. Pollock, The Keswick Story: The Authorized History of the Keswick Convention (Chicago: Moody Press, 1964), 47.
67 Andrew Murray, The Spirit of Christ: Thoughts on the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the Believer and the Church (London: Lisbet & Co., 1888), 224-25.
68 Evan Henry Hopkins, The Law of Liberty in the Spiritual Life (Philadelphia: Sunday School Times, 1952), 204.
69 Barabas, So Great Salvation, 132.
70 Ibid., 145.
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Evan Hopkins explains the difference between being “full” of the Spirit and being
“filled” with the Spirit: “The first indicates an abiding or habitual condition, the latter a special inspiration or illapse—a momentary action or impulse of the Spirit for service, at particular occasions.”71 A. T. Pierson referred to the Great Law of Life as “the surrender of the will to God in habitual obedience. . . . The Lord Jesus Christ must to every believer become not only Savior, but Lord.”72 For Keswick, this did not mean sinlessness or even
Wesleyan Perfection, but it did mean holiness.
Chambers’s Views on “Higher Life” Sanctification
Everything discussed thus far in this chapter is much ado about nothing without connecting it all to Chambers’s theology of preaching. As mentioned above, it is acknowledged that this is a side issue to proving the thesis that Chamber taught his students expository preaching. Due to the theological movements among which
Chambers moved and ministered, it is still maintained that understanding the Wesleyan and Keswickian views on personal sanctification are indispensable for the modern reader rightly to understand Chambers in his theological context.
The desire to apply Scripture for personal, practical holiness. Chambers agreed fully with the Wesleyan-Keswickian desire for personal, practical holiness.
Lambert explained, “Perhaps the central feature in the teaching of Oswald Chambers is the insistence that the true pattern for the experience of the Christian life, is the life of
71 Hopkins, Law of Liberty, 206.
72 A. T. Pierson, “The Message: Its Practical Application,” in The Keswick Convention: Its Message, Its Method, and Its Men, ed. Charles F. Harford (London: Marshall Brothers, 1907), 94.
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Christ. The Christian ideal is not the outward and literal imitation of Jesus, but the living out of the Christ life implanted within by the Holy Spirit.”73 For Chambers, the Christian life lived out meant practical holiness in the affairs of everyday life. He encouraged his preaching students to ask themselves the question, “If I believe the character of Jesus, am
I living up to what I believe?”74
On the experience of the Christian life, Chambers told them, “Our identity with
Jesus Christ is immediately practical or not at all, that is, the new identity must manifest itself in our mortal flesh otherwise we can easily hoax ourselves into delusions. Being
‘made the righteousness of God in Him’ is the most powerfully practical experience in a human life.”75 Additionally, Chambers challenged his students to ask themselves honestly, “Am I becoming more and more in love with God as a holy God, or with the conception of an amiable Being who says, ‘Oh well, sin doesn’t matter much?’”76 For
Chambers, holy living was essential for those who claim to follow Christ. His thoughts on the holy-living similarities between the life of Jesus and the lives of contemporary believers are explained in his Bible Training College lecture notes published as The
Psychology of Redemption and Bringing Sons Unto Glory.
A moment of accelerated sanctification experienced later than salvation.
Consistent with Wesley and Keswick, Chambers endorsed a moment of “accelerated
73 Lambert, Unbribed Soul, 59.
74 Chambers, Disciples Indeed, in Complete Works, 386.
75 Ibid., 389.
76 Ibid.
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sanctification” that is experienced at a date later than salvation. For Chambers, this conviction was intensely personal. His own faith journey included the moment where he realized a vital element was missing from his Christian life. At that moment, he stood up spontaneously and announced to a room full of people, “Either Christianity is a downright fraud, or I have not got hold of the right end of the stick.”77 What was
Chambers’s response? “And then and there I claimed the gift of the Holy Spirit is dogged committal on Luke 11:13.”78 In his traveling lectures, Chambers once said,
“Sanctification begins at regeneration, and goes on to a second great crisis, when God, upon an uttermost abandonment in consecration, bestows His gracious work of entire sanctification.”79 Speaking of entering that next level of holiness as a moment of death to self, Chambers added, “The mark of the Holy Spirit in a man’s life is that he has gone to his own funeral and the thought of himself never enters.”80
For Chambers, “discipleship and salvation” were “two different things.”81
Salvation is the moment a sinner realizes he needs God’s offer of forgiveness found in
Jesus Christ. In contrast, “a disciple is one who, realizing the meaning of the Atonement, deliberately gives himself up to Jesus Christ in unspeakable gratitude.”82 Chambers told his students:
77 Lambert, Unbribed Soul, 23.
78 Ibid.
79 Oswald Chambers, Christian Disciplines, vol. 2, in Complete Works, 323.
80 Chambers, Disciples Indeed, in Complete Works, 390.
81 Ibid., 395.
82 Ibid.
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The biggest blessing in your life was when you came to the end of trying to be a Christian, the end of reliance on natural devotion, and were willing to come as a pauper and receive the Holy Spirit. The humiliation is that we have to be quite sure we need Him, so many of us are quite sure we don’t need Him.83
Chambers endorsed the idea that a believer could receive Jesus as Savior and then at a later, subsequent moment, surrender to Christ’s control and experience Him as Lord.
Grace and faith as the means of this “accelerated sanctification.” Like Wesley and Keswick, Chambers asserted that grace and faith are the means of accelerated sanctification. In a lecture to his preaching students, Chambers taught, “The teaching of
Jesus Christ applies only to the life He puts in, and the marvel of His redemption is that
He gives the power of His own disposition to carry any man through who is willing to obey Him.”84 In another lecture to his preachers, Chambers said, “Our Lord did not come to this earth to teach men to be holy: He came to make men holy, and His teaching is applicable only on the basis of experimental Redemption.”85 For Chambers, personal sanctification happened by grace through faith.
Even in seeing grace and faith as the means of further sanctification, Chambers agreed with Methodism and Keswick that human effort was still a part of the process of growing in holiness. In his traveling lectures, Chambers once said: “The point of entire sanctification is reached not by the passing of the years but by obedience to the heavenly vision and through spiritual discipline.”86 Chambers said to his preaching students, “The
83 Ibid., 390.
84 Chambers, Approved Unto God, in Complete Works, 20 (italics added for emphasis).
85 Chambers, Disciples Indeed, in Complete Works, 405 (italics added for emphasis).
86 Chambers, Christian Disciplines, vol. 2, in Complete Works, 323.
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strenuous effort of the saint is not to produce holiness, but to express in actual circumstances the disposition of the Son of God which is imparted to him by the Holy
Ghost.”87 This idea of living “surrendered to the will of God” so permeated the works of
Chambers that biographer David McCasland chose the phrase, “Abandoned to God” as the title for his biography on Chambers. As shown, Chambers’s views on experimental sanctification are consistent with those of Keswick.
Extent of personal sanctification in this life. Plainly, Chambers used the
Methodist phrase “entire sanctification” fairly often. A word search through Chambers’s
Complete Works for the phrase “entire sanctification” found over thirty occurrences.88
The question to discern from Chambers’s own words is whether he used the phrase in a
Wesleyan way or with a more Keswickian bend.
Packer labels Chambers a Baptist, but then places him in the theological lineage of Methodists in the same sentence. Speaking of Wesley’s “Christian perfection,” Packer wrote, “This is a noble doctrine, which historically has been adorned by men of the caliber of Wesley’s designated successor, the Anglican John Fletcher; William Booth and
Samuel Logan Brengle among Salvationists; and the Baptist Oswald Chambers.”89
Writing after Chambers’s death, Bishop Juji Nakada wrote that on their trip to Japan, “All
87 Chambers, Disciples Indeed, in Complete Works, 391.
88 As in chapter 1 regarding the word count for “preach,” a chance exists that some occurrences of “entire sanctification” are being double-counted due to the manner and timing of which Mrs. Chambers published the books.
89 Packer, Keep in Step, 110.
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the churches opened their doors wide . . . and we preached the real Wesleyan doctrine [of sanctification], which amazed them for they never heard the likes of it before.”90
Two reasons are why it is so difficult to discern where Chambers lands theologically on the topic of entire sanctification. First, though some differences exist between the Wesleyan view and the Keswickian view, these differences are not always distinct, and the fact that Keswick used many of Wesley’s terms, albeit with varying meanings, makes it difficult to separate out exactly what Chambers is saying. On one hand, perhaps the solution is as simple as Chambers’s use of the term entire sanctification, and yet he does not always quite speak to the way Wesley defined
Christian perfection either.
Chambers followed Wesley and Keswick by understanding that the idea of a believer being “in Christ” is of paramount importance for understanding sanctification.
The following passage is included in its entirety, for it shows the entire process, as
Chambers understood it, from salvation and being “in Christ” to the way Christ’s life begins to work its way out through the physical body of the believer. Chambers told his
Biblical Psychology class:
In the Bible, the experiences of salvation and sanctification are never separated as we separate them; they are separable in experience, but when God’s Book speaks of being “in Christ” it is always in terms of entire sanctification. We are apt to look upon the blood of Christ as a kind of magic-working thing, instead of an impartation of His very life. The whole purpose of being born again and being identified with the death of the Lord Jesus is that His blood may flow through our mortal body; then the tempers and the affections and the dispositions which were manifested in the life of the Lord will be manifested in us in some degree. Our present-day “wise talk” is to push all the teaching of Jesus Christ into a remote domain, but the New Testament drives its teaching straight down to the essential necessity of the physical expression of spiritual life; that just as the bad soul life
90 B. Chambers, Life and Work, 51.
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shows itself in the body, so the good soul life will show itself there too. There are two sides to the Atonement—it is not only the life of Christ for me but His life in me for my life; no Christ for me if I do not have Christ in me. All through there is to be this strenuous, glorious practicing in our bodily life of the changes which God has wrought in our soul through His Spirit, and the only proof that we are in earnest is that we work out what God works in. As we apply this truth to ourselves, we shall find in practical experience that God does alter passions and nerves and tempers. God alters every physical thing in a human being so that these bodies can be used now as slaves to the new disposition. We can make our eyes, and ears, and every one of our bodily organs express as slaves the altered disposition of our soul. Remember, then, that blood is the manifestation of the soul life, and that all through the Bible God applies moral characteristics to the blood. The expressions “innocent blood,” and guilty blood, have reference to the soul, and the soul life must show itself in the physical connection.91
According to Chambers, there is simply no such thing as a Christian who does not align his life by the power of God’s Spirit with the revelation of God’s Word.
For Chambers, living “by the Spirit” rather than the sinful disposition of the flesh, is powered by God but only experienced by the believer as the believer surrenders and submits his own will to God’s will. He spoke to this in a section of Biblical Psychology on the connection between depending on God and experiencing sanctification. Chambers asserts:
The Spirit of God works independently in me to begin with, just as my natural spirit does, and if I do not obey the Spirit of God the insistence of the flesh, of “the carnal mind,” will gradually defile everything He has been trying to do. When we are being brought into harmony with the Spirit of God and are learning to form the mind of Christ the flesh “lust against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh”; nevertheless we can, slowly and surely and victoriously, claim the whole territory for the Spirit of God, until at entire sanctification, the only thing there is, is the Spirit of God, Who has enabled us to form the mind of Christ, and now we can begin to manifest that growth in grace which will express the life of Jesus in our mortal flesh.92
91 Oswald Chambers, Biblical Psychology, in Complete Works, 159 (italics in the original).
92 Ibid., 212.
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However, none of this is mandatory. The believer’s personal surrender to the Lord is essential. Preaching on the rich young ruler in Matthew 19:16-22, Chambers speaks to the opportunity every believer has to not enter into the fullness of sanctification.
Remember, the conditions of discipleship are not the conditions for salvation. We are perfectly at liberty to say, “No thank you, I am obliged for being delivered from hell, very thankful to escape the abominations of sin, but when it comes to these conditions it is rather too much; I have my own interests in life, my own possessions.”93
Thus, on the issue of entire sanctification in the lectures published as Facing Reality,
Chambers posed the following opportunity to his students:
Will I give a moral surrender to Jesus Christ’s authority? If so, the privilege of becoming a child of God will be a moral fact for me because the Holy Spirit will teach me how to apply the Atonement of Jesus Christ to my own life, and how to be identified in obedience to Him with the life of Jesus Christ in the experience of entire sanctification.94
Chambers’s lectures are saturated with the idea that the experience of sanctification is a combination of God’s gift of grace and the believer’s faith and surrender.
In Chambers’s College lectures published as The Psychology of Redemption, he posed the question to his students, “Do I seek to stop sinning, or have I stopped sinning?”
He taught from 1 John 3:9, “Whoever has been born of God does not sin, for His seed remains in him; and he cannot sin, because he has been born of God.”95 What Chambers taught in this lecture is worth quoting extensively, because he so directly deals with the question at-hand of where Chambers stood on the issue of entire sanctification.
93 Oswald Chambers, If Thou Wilt Be Perfect, in Complete Works, 602.
94 Oswald Chambers, Facing Reality, in Complete Works, 36.
95 Unless noted otherwise, all Scripture will be taken from the New King James Version (NKJV).
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Speaking to the idea of personal, experiential sanctification, Chambers cautioned his students, “We are always inclined to make theoretical what God makes practical. . . .
In the Bible, it is never, “Should a Christian sin? The Bible puts is emphatically, ‘A
Christian must not sin.’”96 Chambers claims salvation brings with it the power to stop sinning but takes it a step further. He continued, “The effective working of the new birth in us is that we do not commit sin, not merely that we have the power not to sin, but that we have stopped sinning—a much more practical thing.”97
How can a believer experience this? Tongue-in-cheek, but practically serious at the same time, Chamber’s answer is simply to be a believer. He said, “The one thing that will enable us to stop sinning is the experience of the new birth, i.e. entire sanctification.
When we are born into the new realm the life of God in us cannot sin (1 John 3:9).”98
Chambers is not going so far here as to assert that a Christian can live a sinless life. He explains: “That does not mean that we cannot sin; it means that if we obey the life of God in us we need not sin. God never takes away our power to disobey; if He did, our obedience would be of no value for we should cease to be morally responsible.”99 In the hypothetical Chambers created, the believer would be more like a robot than a moral agent.
96 Oswald Chambers, The Psychology of Redemption, in Complete Works, 1070 (italics in original).
97 Ibid.
98 Ibid.
99 Ibid.
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Chambers’s argument hinges on his conviction that, at the moment of salvation, a fundamental change occurs in the core “disposition” of a believer that makes a holy life possible, whereas, without salvation it was impossible. Chambers continued:
By regeneration God puts in us the power not to sin. Our human nature is just the same after new birth as before, but the mainspring is different. Before new birth we sin because we cannot help it; after new birth we need not sin. There is a difference between sin and sins; sin is a disposition, and is never spoken of as being forgiven, a disposition must be cleansed. Sins are acts for which we are responsible. Sin is a thing we are born with, and we cannot touch it; God touches sin in redemption. If we have been trying to be holy, it is a sure sign we are not. Christians are born, not made. They are not produced by imitation, nor by praying and vowing; they are produced by new birth. “By the grace of God I am what I am.”100
Chambers maintains that a life of holy living where sin is rare is possible, because God has put His very nature inside the believer. God indwelling the Christian fundamentally changes the Christian’s disposition.
Chambers concluded his lecture with a paragraph that could fit under the Wesley or Keswick banner depending on how one understands Chambers’s use of the terms:
The characteristic of new birth is that we deliberately obey all that God reveals through His Spirit. We yield ourselves so completely to God that Christ is formed in us. When He is formed in us, the characteristics of His life in our mortal flesh are that we see Jesus for ourselves; we see the rule of God; and we quit sinning— all by the wonder of His supernatural new birth in us, and that is how it works all through.101
All the themes discussed above regarding what Wesley and Keswick believed about personal sanctification in this life are referred to or supposed.
100 Ibid.
101 Ibid.
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Conclusion
This chapter has sought to give the reader a framework for understanding
Chambers and his lectures in their original historical-theological context. While this chapter alone does not prove anything regarding the expository nature of Chambers’s theology of preaching, it is nonetheless necessary for understanding Chambers’s own personal theology regarding sanctification and the historical context within which he taught his students.
From the previous discussion regarding personal sanctification in this life, it appears Chambers is a sort of hybrid-blend of Wesley and Keswick. Two 1907 diary entries show how comfortably Chambers moved among the theological camps explored in this chapter. On July 24, 1907, Chambers’s birthday, he wrote in his journal of spending his birthday the previous year at the Keswick Convention. On the same day, he referred to the League of Prayer calendar through which he was devotionally reading. A couple of weeks later, on August 6, Chambers again wrote in his diary fond memories of
Keswick. He had that day attended a worship service in which “the hymns were sweet and beneficial through associations with past Keswick seasons. I also met Rev. Rowlands and his wife in the south of Japan, and it recalled the dull dusk of the evenings during last year’s Keswick when I talked with them both about entire sanctification, and God blessed us too abundantly.”102 Representatives of every viewpoint this chapter has discussed can be seen in these two journal entries. Perhaps it is best to stick with the understanding that,
102 B. Chambers, Life and Work, 77, 80.
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regarding sanctification, Chambers simply is a “Baptist-Methodist-Keswick-Holiness
Movement hodgepodge.”
Chapter 4
Chambers the Expository Preaching Professor
This chapter will examine Bible Training College lectures for evidence Chambers was a professor of expository preaching. The following seven key factors lend support to his expository focus. First, Chambers’s purpose for teaching preaching will be explored.
Second, what Chambers believed about God’s purpose for preaching will be examined.
Third, Chambers’s convictions regarding the importance of a preacher knowing he has been called to preach will be discussed. Fourth, the ways in which the theological training
Chambers received, the ministries he served, and the lectures he taught pointing to the veracity of the Bible as the foundation upon which expository preaching stands, will be examined. Fifth, what Chambers taught about the exegesis of passages of Scripture will be analyzed. Sixth, Chambers’s thoughts on preaching without notes will be evaluated.
Seventh, Chambers’s assertion that faithful preaching is inseparable from a life of faithful obedience unto the Lord will be shown. Taken together, these elements prove Chambers to have been a professor of the spiritual discipline of expository preaching.1
For the purposes of this dissertation, the term “expository preaching” follows
Robinson’s definition, which is as follows:
1 For a fascinating position on sermon preparation being a spiritual discipline from a Wesleyan point of view, see Lenny Luchetti, “Preaching as a Spiritual Discipline: An Incarnational Model,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Homiletics Society, La Mirada, CA, October 17-19, 2013. 60
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Expository preaching is the communication of a biblical concept, derived from and transmitted through a historical, grammatical, and literary study of a passage in its context, which the Holy Spirit first applies to the personality and experience of the preacher, then through the preacher, applies to the hearers.2
That is expository preaching.
Chambers’s Lectures to His Preaching Students
This chapter takes an in-depth look at notes by Mrs. Chambers explicitly taken during Chambers’s lectures on sermon preparation at the Bible Training College.3 His sermon preparation class was one of the two classes visitors to the College were forbidden to attend.4 McCasland explains Chambers’s reasoning: “Since sermon preparation and delivery were course requirements, he wanted all class members on equal footing as participants and no idle observers or critics.”5 This makes the two books Mrs.
Chambers published from his sermon preparation class notes invaluable for giving readers a glimpse of the content shared with students during that time.
This chapter will evaluate Chambers’s books, Approved Unto God and Disciples
Indeed. Before beginning the overviews, three reminders are in order. First, D. W.
Lambert’s assertion to remember the original setting in which these lectures were delivered and that they were published later. These are verbatim notes of lectures
2 Robinson, Biblical Preaching, 21.
3 Oswald Chambers, Approved Unto God and Disciples Indeed, in Complete Works, 1-23 and 383- 411, respectively.
4 McCasland, Abandoned to God, 187. The other class was “the weekly devotional hour.”
5 Chambers, Approved Unto God, in Complete Works, 1.
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produced “just as they were given.”6 Second, all Bible Training College students were required to learn how to preach. This shows the high value Chambers placed on expository preaching for all varieties of ministries. Third, while Chambers’s sermon preparation classes reveal his theology of preaching to be expository, Chambers was as equally committed to seeing the preachers spiritually prepared and living obediently to
God’s Word as he was the technicalities of preaching itself. Again, according to
Chambers, faithful preaching and faithful living are inseparable.
Overview of Approved Unto God
In 1936, Mrs. Chambers published Approved Unto God as a book.7 In the foreword, Lambert starts by quoting 2 Timothy 2:15, which well-summarizes Chamber’s approach to sermon preparation. “Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” Approved
Unto God gives the reader a more extended-lecture viewpoint to what Chambers taught in his sermon-preparation class as opposed to the topically organized thematic format of
Disciples Indeed.8
One may surmise these segments of Approved Unto God were taught early in the semester as Chambers sought to give his preaching students a foundation of expository preaching. McCasland says of these more extended lectures, “Much more than a course
6 Lambert, Unbribed Soul, 81.
7 Chambers, Approved Unto God, in Complete Works, 1.
8 Disciples Indeed will be overviewed in the following sections.
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on how to prepare and deliver sermons, these lectures reveal Chambers’s heart concerning being a worker for God.”9 Echoing the words of Paul in 2 Timothy 3:16-17,
Lambert asserts the same in the foreword of Approved Unto God:
The man of God must be thoroughly furnished unto every good work and must accept the spiritual discipline of reproof and correction and training in righteousness that the Scriptures convey, and also the mental discipline which a right understanding of the Scripture demands. These talks in a striking manner put us in the way of becoming competent servants of Jesus Christ, spiritually fit, and mentally fitted, for the great task entrusted to us.10
Lambert closes the foreword with the following exhortation of warning: “Do not read this book unless you mean business, but if you do you will find wisdom and understanding on every page.”11 The one who reads Approved Unto God with openness to the Spirit of God will find Lambert’s words very true. The sections below showing Chambers to be a professor of expository preaching will contain excerpts from Approved Unto God.
Overview of Disciples Indeed
In 1955, Mrs. Chambers published a book entitled Disciples Indeed containing lecture notes from the sermon preparation class at the Bible Training College.12 This published series of quotes glean their title from John 8:31, “Then Jesus said to those Jews who believed in Him, ‘If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed.’”13 In the
Introduction of Disciples Indeed, McCasland notes:
9 Chambers, Approved Unto God, in Complete Works, 1.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 2.
12 Chambers, Disciples Indeed, in Complete Works, 383.
13 NKJV (italics added for emphasis).
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Oswald Chambers’ sermon class at the Bible Training College was a combination of lecture and practical experience. Because of the give and take nature of the class, [Chambers’] lectures were short and practical. Rather than giving a detailed process to follow in sermon preparation, he sought to motivate students to think, study, and prepare.14
In the foreword, Lambert observes that Disciples Indeed varies from Chambers’s typical, preplanned “careful preparation” of “every spoken message.”15 This is perhaps due to this content being taught during the latter portion of the semester when Chambers lectured less, because most of the class time was filled with the students preaching and his suggestions. One eyewitness said of the way Chambers critiqued his students’ sermons, “On these occasions the Principal was the sympathetic hearer and kindly critic.
Like his Lord, he never broke the bruised reed or quenched the smoking flax. Had we received the criticism we felt we merited, our exposition of the word and our witness in public would have ceased.”16
Some of Chambers’s remarks recorded in Disciples Indeed appear to have dealt specifically with a certain Bible passage just preached in class. Other remarks appear to speak to the improvement of a certain element within a student’s sermon, which
Chambers had just heard preached. Others still seem to be “the spontaneous word of a
Spirit-filled man” pausing between student sermons to exhort his pupils.17 What is unknown to contemporary readers is the specific sermon texts students preached from or
14 Chambers, Disciples Indeed, in Complete Works, 383.
15 Ibid., 384.
16 Chambers, Oswald Chambers: His Life and Work, 144.
17 Lambert again, from Chambers, Disciples Indeed, in Complete Works, 384.
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what aspect of a particular student’s sermon delivery Chambers may have been critiquing.
Most certainly, knowing those details would aid modern understanding. At the same time, the depth and breadth of topics Chambers addresses speak to the idea of expository preaching involving the whole person—mind, intellect, will, and passion.
Lambert said of the lectures contained in Disciples Indeed, “They touch a wide range of subjects, and take us to the heart of Oswald Chambers’ message.”18 Today’s reader is indebted to Mrs. Chambers for organizing these comments by theme. While this does not answer every question of original context, it does give firsthand clues so the reader can use his so-called sanctified imagination. The sections below showing Chambers to be a professor of expository preaching will contain excerpts from Disciples Indeed.
Chambers’s Purpose for Teaching Preaching
Chambers placed a high value on academic training in spiritual things. The
Syllabus from Autumn 1914, has an entire section under the heading “Experts Wanted.”
“On all hands, the world is crying out for experts. It is admitted everywhere that this demand must be recognized and met. And the Church of Christ today is needing efficient, expert men and women to send as laborers into God’s harvest.”19 This is followed by a section noting the “strenuous training” that precedes becoming a social worker, business
18 Ibid.
19 Bible Training College Syllabus, 5.
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worker, political worker, and the like. However, for the Christian worker—especially in that time period—opportunities for theological education were very rare.20
Under Chambers’s leadership, the Bible Training College aimed to make theological experts of every student. The syllabus continues, “But the Christian worker!
How little training he gets. He has all the magnificent possibilities of an expert lying unexplored in his own life. He is called to the greatest service in the world. He is willing—but that does not make him efficient.”21 Chambers believed strongly in the potential of every student and would often say, “You have a marvelous God-given capacity to reason and think. All of you have intelligence and you must use it for God.”22
Using the metaphor of the Bible as a sword, the Syllabus says the Christian worker “must learn how to use his sword, and when to use it, and why it is so invincible when wielded in the power of God.”23
Accomplishing this task involved both “heart training” and “mind training.”
The College’s goal was the making of ministers who would fulfil the admonition of
2 Timothy 2:15: “Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” While many aspects of
Chambers’s curriculum were beneficial to the spiritual formation of ministers in general,
20 Lambert, Unbribed Soul, 32. Lambert references “the Bible Training Institutes in Glasgow, founded after Moody’s visit to Scotland and run rather on American lines, catering for a large student body.”
21 Bible Training College Syllabus, 6.
22 McCasland, Abandoned to God, 180.
23 Bible Training College Syllabus, 6.
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the following analysis asks the question, “Based upon Chambers’ Bible Training
Curriculum regarding preaching, was an expository preacher likely to be produced?”
Chambers on the Purpose of Preaching
Chambers had strong convictions when answering questions like, “What is preaching? What is the basis of preaching? Why should a preacher preach instead of remain silent?” The answers to these questions define Chambers’s view on the purpose of preaching.
Primacy of Gospel Proclamation
Chambers believed the central purpose of all preaching was to proclaim the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, giving hearers the opportunity to receive Him as
Savior and surrender to His lordship over their lives. He purported:
The Cross of Christ is the Self-revelation of God, the way God has given Himself. In the preaching and writing of today there is much brilliant stuff that passes into thin air because it is not related to this tremendous fact of the Self-bestowal of God that lifts up humanity to be in accordance with himself.24
Preaching of the Gospel is so important because God has chosen it to be His instrument for proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Chambers told his preaching students,
“Remember that preaching is God’s ordained method of saving the world.”25 He then referenced 1 Corinthians 1:21, which says, “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the
24 Chambers, Approved Unto God, in Complete Works, 13.
25 Ibid., 11.
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message preached to save those who believe.” Chambers told his preachers, “Behind the preaching of the Gospel the creative Redemption of God is at work in the souls of men. . . .”26 For him, Gospel preaching is not just to be done from the New Testament but from the Old Testament, as well. He taught, “Our Lord Jesus Christ put His impress on every revelation from Genesis to Revelation.”27 All of Scripture points to Jesus.28 Gospel proclamation is God’s primary purpose for preaching.
Not Poetry, But Surgery
In Approved Unto God, Chambers taught a lecture entitled, “The Right Lines of
Work.” By the phrase “right lines of work,” Chambers spoke again to the purpose of preaching. Chambers lectured from 2 Timothy 1:13-14: “Hold fast the pattern of sound words which you have heard from me, in faith and love which are in Christ Jesus. That good thing which was committed to you, keep by the Holy Spirit who dwells in us.”
Preaching on those verses, Chambers told his students:
Paul gives Timothy indications of the right lines of work: he is to concentrate on the deposit of truth conveyed by the words of Scripture. As a preacher never have as your ideal the desire to be an orator or a beautiful speaker; if you do, you will not be of the slightest use. . . . An orator moves men to do what they are indifferent about; a preacher of the Gospel has to move men to do what they are dead set against doing . . . giving up the right to themselves.29
26 Ibid., 7.
27 Ibid., 14.
28 For more information on preaching Christ from all of Scripture see Bryan Chapell, Christ- Centered Preaching: Redeeming the Expository Sermon, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005); and Graeme Goldsworthy, Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2000).
29 Ibid., 6-7.
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For Chambers, expository preaching has the purpose of opening sinful man’s heart to their need for forgiveness and salvation found only in Jesus Christ. Chambers explained that preachers: “are not sent to give beautiful discourses which make people say, ‘What a lovely conception that is,’ but to unearth the devil and his works in human souls. We have to probe straight down where God has probed us, and the measure of the probing is the way God has probed us.”30 Preaching’s purpose is the awakening of people to their own sinfulness in the hopes they will see their need for forgiveness and seek it in Jesus.
Chambers said of God’s purpose in preaching: “The one calling of a New Testament preacher is to uncover sin and reveal Jesus Christ as Savior, consequently he cannot be poetical, he has to be surgical.”31
The preacher must remain focused on the Gospel, trusting the Holy Spirit to make it effectual in the lives of the hearers. Chambers reminded his preaching students, “A man never believes what Jesus Christ says about the human heart until the Holy Ghost gives him the startling revelation of the truth of his diagnosis (see Mark 7:20-23).”32 For
Chambers, faithful Gospel preaching was always “surgical” with God’s Word, knowing it is ultimately the Holy Spirit who wields the scalpel in the heart of sinful man.
In fulfilling God’s purpose for preaching, the preacher should not be surprised when people are offended. The Gospel tells men they are sinners, hopeless apart from a
30 Ibid., 7.
31 Ibid. This writer views Chambers’s comment as consistent with Paul in 1 Cor 2:1-5. While not condemning the use of rhetorical ornamentation, Chambers wanted his preachers to put their confidence in and emphasis on the message of the Gospel itself.
32 Ibid., 15.
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saving relationship with Christ. The Gospel informs sinners that, in order to be saved, they must turn from their sinful ways and surrender themselves to Christ. Even when done lovingly, faithful Gospel preaching will offend people.
In one lecture, Chambers spoke against “a method of making disciples that is not sanctioned by our Lord.”33 He was referring to the begging people to be reconciled to
Jesus “on the line of: Jesus has done so much for us, cannot we do something out of gratitude for him?”34 Chambers found this method lacking, because it fails to use God’s law to awaken sinners to their own sinfulness; rather, it places Jesus in the role of pity rather than that of authority. This method appears to ask a sinner to believe because they feel sorry for Jesus rather than sorry for their own sinfulness. Chambers explained:
This method of getting people into relationship to God out of pity for Jesus is never recognized by Our Lord. It does not put sin in the right place, nor does it put the more serious aspect of the Gospel in its right place. . . . Today there is a tendency to take the harshness out of Our Lord’s statements. . . .35
Chambers exhorted his students to let the bad news of the Gospel (i.e. a person’s sinfulness) confront people with their sin and need for Jesus because it is then, and only then, people will have the chance of seeing Jesus as their Savior. A preacher must trust the Holy Spirit to search the hearts of his hearers. Chambers reminded his students:
Never sympathize with a soul who finds it difficult to get to God; God is never to blame. We have to so present the truth that the Spirit of God will show what is wrong. The element of judgment must always come out; it is the sign of God’s love. The great sterling test in preaching is that it brings everyone to judgment; the Spirit of God locates each one.36
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., 16.
36 Ibid., 19.
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For the preacher, a kind of spiritual confidence comes from sticking to God’s purpose for preaching. Chambers explained, “The Holy Spirit takes care that we fix our attention on
Jesus Christ; then He will look after the presentation given of our Lord through us.”37 A preacher faithfully preaching the Gospel can have assurance, despite how things may look at any given moment, that God will bless his preaching.
Beware of Distractions
Since the primacy of preaching the Gospel is so important, Chambers strongly warned his preachers to beware of anything that could distract them from preaching it. He cautioned his students to be wary of the trap of preaching to make oneself famous:
The great passion in much of the preaching of today is to secure an audience. As workers for God our object is never to secure our audience, but to secure that the Gospel is presented to men. Never presume to preach unless you are mastered by the motive born of the Holy Ghost: “For I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.”38
In the same vein, Chambers told his students to avoid biblical passages that are highly debated.39 Chambers said, “Don’t be controversial. . . . Never choose disputed texts; if you do, you are sure to cut yourself. The spirit [in a preacher] that chooses disputed texts is the boldness born of impudence, not the fearlessness born of morality.”40 In
37 Chambers, Disciples Indeed, in Complete Works, 391.
38 Chambers, Approved Unto God, in Complete Works, 10.
39 This writer was unable to discover a definition for how Chambers defined a “disputed text.” What can be inferred from the overall emphasis of his teaching is his insistence that his students should keep their preaching focused on the communication of the Gospel.
40 Chambers, Approved Unto God, in Complete Works, 13.
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Chambers’s estimation, a young inexperienced preacher should focus on making the message of the Gospel clear instead of delving into texts with debated meanings. He should avoid anything that might hinder clear preaching of the Gospel.
Interestingly, Chambers also warned his student about the dangers of the Holiness
Movement itself of which Chambers was a part. Based upon Chambers freely floating in and out of the various Holiness movements in his context, it is difficult to surmise what group or groups Chambers felt had become distracted from the Gospel, but his caution is clear: “Whenever a Holiness Movement raises its head and begins to be conscious of its own holiness, it is liable to become an emissary of the devil, although it started with an emphasis on a neglected truth.”41 This accusation could apply to the followers of Wesley or Keswick.
Chambers was obviously not against holiness itself, but that the focus must remain on Jesus who is the Source of holiness. Chambers reminded his students, “If you preach Holiness, or Sanctification, or Divine Healing, or the Second Coming, you are off the track because you decentralize the Truth. We have to fix our eyes on Jesus Christ, not on what He does.”42 Faithful preaching blessed by God’s Spirit will have an effect in people’s lives—like the Holiness movements—but the preacher must never get distracted away from God’s message by the ways in which God is moving. Chambers told his students:
In preaching the Gospel remember that salvation is the great thought of God, not an experience. Experience is the gateway through which salvation comes into our
41 Chambers, Disciples Indeed, in Complete Works, 386.
42 Ibid.
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conscious life, the evidence of a right relationship with God. Never preach experience, preach the great thought of God that lies behind. . . . Jesus Christ Himself is the Revelation, and all our experiences must be traced back to Him and kept there.43
Chambers’s proposed cure for this distraction is an unyielding, uncompromising commitment to the primacy of preaching the Gospel. In Chambers’s words: “The one mastering obligation of our life as a worker is to persuade men for Jesus Christ, and to do that we have to learn to live amongst facts; the fact of human stuff as it is, not as it ought to be; and the fact of the Bible revelation, whether it agrees with our [preferred] doctrines or not.”44 What matters most is the clear, faithful preaching of the Gospel.
Jesus First, then Biblical Understanding
Chambers desired his students to understand that God’s Word is authoritative as the source of preaching the Gospel, and yet, Chambers himself believed the Bible will not be seen as an authority over the lives of people who are not yet Christian. In a lecture in
Approved Unto God, Chambers taught from Matthew 21:23, “Now when He came into the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people confronted Him as He was teaching, and said, ‘By what authority are You doing these things? And who gave You this authority?’” He defines authority as “a rule to which the worker is bound,” but not yet the unbeliever.45 Then he told his students:
It is not sufficient to say, “Because Jesus Christ says so, therefore you must obey,” unless we are talking to people who know Who Jesus Christ is. Authority
43 Chambers, Approved Unto God, in Complete Works, 15.
44 Ibid., 10.
45 Ibid., 5 (italics added for emphasis).
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must be of a moral, not a superstitious character. In the old days, it was the authority of the Church, or the authority of the Bible; both these were external authorities, not indigenous to man. Nowadays people are saying, “Bother external authority; why should I accept external authority?”46
Lambert records Chambers saying something similar: “Our attitude toward the
Bible is a stupid one; we come to the Bible for proof of God’s existence, but the Bible has no meaning for us until we know God does exist. The Bible states and affirms facts for the benefits of those who believe in God; those who don’t believe in God can tear it to bits if they choose.47 Chambers told his students that the moment a person becomes a
Christian:
the Bible becomes his authority, because he discerns a law in his conscience that has no objective resting place save in the Bible; and when the Bible is quoted, instantly his intuition says, “Yes, that must be the truth”; not because the Bible says so, but because he discerns what the Bible says to be the word of God for him. When a man is born from above he has a new internal standard, and the only objective standard that agrees with it is the word of God as expressed in the Bible.48
Chambers believed that becoming a believer in Jesus was a prerequisite to a person being able to understand the Bible. He told his Biblical Ethics class, “The Holy Spirit alone makes the Word of God understandable.49 For Chambers, this inability for the unbeliever to understand the authority of God’s Word is part of the motivation for Gospel preaching.
He stated in closing this lecture, “What is needed to-day is not a new gospel, but live men
46 Ibid.
47 Lambert, Unbribed Soul, 47.
48 Chambers, Approved Unto God, in Complete Works, 5 (italics added for emphasis).
49 Chambers, Biblical Ethics, in Complete Works, 131-32.
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and women who can re-state the Gospel of the Son of God in terms that will reach the very heart of our problems.”50 The Gospel is the purpose of preaching!
Chambers on God’s Call to Preach
Chambers spoke often of the importance of a preacher being explicitly called to the ministry of preaching. Chambers told his young preachers, “Remember, God calls us to proclaim the Gospel.”51 It is recognized that God calling a man to preach does not automatically mean that man will be an expository preacher, but for Chambers, the two are inseparable. Not only is Gospel proclamation God’s purpose for preaching, but God must explicitly call a preacher to the ministry of proclamation.
The Preacher’s Call from 1 Corinthians
For Chambers, it was absolutely essential that a minister have a clear sense of
God calling him—not just to salvation, but to ministry itself. Without a clear and certain calling, Chambers felt the preaching was doomed to fail. In this lecture, Chambers taught from 1 Corinthians 1:26: “For you see your calling, brethren, that not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called.” From this verse,
Chambers spoke to the uniqueness of God’s calling on the life of a preacher:
A preacher must remember that his calling is different from every other calling in life; his personality has to be submerged in his message (cf. John 3:30). An orator has to work with men and enthuse them; a New Testament preacher has to come upon men with a message they resent and will not listen to at first. The Gospel comes in with a backing of Divine authority and an arrestment which men resent. There is something in every man that resents the interference of God. Before a
50 Chambers, Approved Unto God, in Complete Works, 5.
51 Ibid.
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man can be saved, the central citadel of his being has to be stormed and taken possession of by the Holy Spirit.52
Here, Chambers offers a great image of the way God’s grace in the Gospel lovingly attacks a man’s “citadel” of self. The expository preacher is a text-driven soldier.
For Chambers, it mattered a great deal whether those who claimed God had called them to ministry had, in fact, been called. He said:
Every Christian must testify, testimony is the nature of the life; but for preaching there must be something akin to verse 16. “The whole of my life,” says Paul, “is in the grip of God for this one thing, I cannot turn to the right or to the left, I am here for one purpose, to preach the gospel.” How many of us are held like that?53
Chambers believed no “middle ground” existed for a person God has chosen to preach.
That person will be consumed by the call of God and compelled to comply. From Paul’s desire in 1 Corinthians 9:20-23 to become “all things to all men” that he “might by all means save some,” Chambers said a desire to do whatever it takes to see people come to faith is the “stamp of the worker gripped by God.”54
Chambers made a blunt distinction between those God has genuinely called to ministry and those who have chosen on their own to do so. He said, “One man or woman called of God is worthy of a hundred who have [self-]elected to work for God.”55 For
Chambers, the preacher not truly “called” by God would not only be less effective but would also be most likely to fail in preaching the Bible accurately. He told his students,
“The worker chosen by God has to believe what God wishes him to believe, though it
52 Ibid., 10.
53 Ibid., 3.
54 Ibid.
55 Chambers, Disciples Indeed, in Complete Works, 3.
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cost agony in the process; the worker who chooses to work for God may believe what he likes. It is the latter class who exploit the Bible.”56 Chambers insisted that the preacher truly called by God into ministry will be fully devoted and biblically faithful.
Foundation of the Preacher’s Call from 1 Timothy 1:12
In Approved Unto God, Chambers taught a lecture on the preacher’s calling entitled, “The Base,” in which he exposits 1 Timothy 1:12: “And I thank Christ Jesus our
Lord who has enabled me, because He counted me faithful, putting me into the ministry.”
The title “The Base,” refers to the preachers’ personal understanding of exactly what it means to be called into ministry. What does the preacher recognize as the “base,” the foundation of his ministry calling? Because this exposition is both Chambers’s convictions on God’s call to preach and an example of Chambers’s expository approach to teaching and preaching, only “The Base” will be discussed in this section so the reader may best understand the flow of Chambers’s exegesis and thought. He divided 1 Timothy
4:12 into four points and, as Chambers liked to do, fully alliterated it.
Point 1: The real thanks of the worker. On the 1 Timothy 1:12 phrase, “And I thank Christ Jesus Our Lord. . . .” For Chambers, gratitude is an essential quality for those called to preach. He told his students:
Everything that God has created is like an orchestra praising Him. In the ear of God everything He created makes exquisite music, and man joined in the paean of praise until he fell, then there came in the frantic discord of sin. The realization of Redemption brings man by way of the minor note of repentance back into tune with praise again. The angels are only too glad to hear that note, because it blends man into harmony again (see Luke 15:10).57
56 Chambers, Approved Unto God, in Complete Works, 3.
57 Ibid., 4.
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However, Chambers did not want his students left with the false idea that being brought into right relationship with God meant earthly life would be easy. God’s people must praise Him even in painful situations. He explained: “Praising God is the ultimate end and aim of all we go through. . . . What does it matter whether you are well or ill!
Whether you have money or none! It is all a matter of indifference, but one thing is not a matter of indifference, and that is that we are pleasing to the ears of God.”58 Chambers puts forth the Apostle Paul as a model for preachers: “Paul had got back again by way of repentance into tune with God (cf. 1 Tim 1:13), and now he has his base as a worker in thanksgiving to Christ Jesus; his whole life has been brought into perfect relation to
God.”59 A preacher’s heart must be a grateful heart.
Point 2: The realized test of the worker. On the 1 Timothy 1:12 phrase, “who has enabled me . . . ,” Chambers told his students, “The test of the worker is that he knows he has been enabled by the Lord Jesus, therefore he works and learns to do it better all the time. The realization that my Lord has enabled me to be a worker keeps me strong enough never to be weak.”60 Chambers is not speaking a type of “health and wealth” gospel here, but rather a confidence that God will help His ministers endure the trials they face. The key is to keep focusing on Jesus and asking for the strength He promises His people. He explains:
Conscious obtrusive weakness is natural unthankful strength; it means I refuse to be made strong by Him. When I say I am too weak it means I am too strong; and
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid.
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whenever I say “I can’t” it means “I won’t.” When Jesus Christ enables me, I am omnipotently strong all the time. Paul talks in paradoxes, “for when I am weak, then am I strong.”61
Here again is the recurring idea Chambers mentioned above in chapter 3 regarding the process of experiential sanctification: Faithful obedience requires dogged determination by the believer, but ultimately comes by faith that God will do for the believer what He promises to do.
Point 3: The recognized truth by the worker. This section of the lecture was on the phrase of 1 Timothy 1:12, which reads, “because He counted me faithful,” and carries forth the idea of the previous section in that the success of a preacher requires personal surrender but is ultimately the result of God working in the preacher. Chambers told his students, “To recognize that my Lord counts us faithful removes the last snare of idealizing natural pluck.”62 By the term “pluck” here, Chambers means something like
“self-courage in the face of difficulties.” He continued, “If we have the idea that we must face the difficulties with pluck, we have never recognized the truth that He has counted us faithful; it is His work in me He is counting worthy, not my work for Him.”63 This reveals how much emphasis Chambers places on the importance of the preacher actively relying on God to work in and through the preacher:
The truth is we have nothing to fear and nothing to overcome because He is all in all and we are more than conquerors through Him. The recognition of this truth is not flattering to the worker’s sense of heroics, but it is amazingly glorifying to the work of Christ. He counts us worthy because He has done everything for us. It is a shameful thing for Christians to talk about “getting the victory”; by this time the
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid.
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Victor ought to have got us so completely that it is His victory all the time, not ours. The overcoming referred to in the Book of the Revelation is not the personal overcoming of difficulties but the overcoming of the very life of God in us while we stand resolutely true to Him.64
According to Chambers, the preacher following this exhortation will find himself faithful to that which Paul spoke of at the end of 1 Timothy 1:12.
Point 4: The responsible trust of the worker. On the last phrase of 1 Timothy
1:12, “putting me into the ministry,” Chambers explains the purpose of a well-laid foundation for ministry. He told his students, “The ministry is, the ‘glorious gospel of the blessed God, which was committed to my trust.’ If I am going to be loyal to that trust, it will mean I must never allow any impertinent sensitiveness to hinder my keeping the trust.”65 As used by Chambers here, the word “trust” refers to the sacred responsibility
God has given to the preacher to make sure the Good News of Jesus Christ is shared with others. He continued: “My trust is the glorious gospel for myself and through me to others, and it is realized in two ways: in the perfect certainty that God has redeemed the world, and in the imperative necessity of working on that basis with everyone with whom
I come in contact” (cf. Col 1:28-29).66 For Chambers, the preacher’s responsibility to the sacred trust of the Gospel encompasses every aspect of the preacher’s life.67
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
67 More on this idea is presented in the section below entitled, “The Preacher’s Obedience.”
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Chambers on the Nature of Scripture
A theology of preaching that is expository demands a high view of Scripture.68 By definition, expository preaching rests on the “biblical and theological foundation” that
“God has spoken.”69 The theological training a man receives and the ministries he serves in are not always an indication of that man’s personal beliefs, but with Chambers, it appears to be exactly that.
As asserted above, Chambers’s personal theology might well be called a “Baptist-
Methodist-Keswick-Holiness Movement hodgepodge.” Recognizing again the difficulty of understanding where Chambers himself landed theologically within these complementary, sometimes competing, and often confusing theological paradigms, this much is clear: All of these various expressions of evangelicalism in Britain and the surrounding areas, immediately before, during, and after the life of Chambers, generally shared the belief “that the Bible is inspired by God.”70 Evangelicals are devoted to the
Bible because they believe “all spiritual truth is to be found in its pages.”71 As the sections below reveal, Wesleyan Methodism and the Keswick Movement both maintained a high view of the Bible as the very words of God.
68 Adam, Speaking God’s Words, 172.
69 Allen, Text-Driven Preaching, 3.
70 Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 13.
71 Ibid., 12.
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Wesley’s High View of Scripture
John Wesley declares his philosophy of preaching in the preface of volume 1 of his Standard Sermons: “I design plain truth for plain people. . . .”72 He claimed the Bible alone was the source of the doctrine of salvation, so thus the content of his preaching.73 In showing sinful man the way to heaven, “God Himself has condescended to teach the way, for this very end He came from heaven. He hath written it down in a book. O give me that book! At any price, give me the book of God! I have it here is knowledge enough for me. Let me be homo unius libri.” Those final words in Latin mean “a man of one book.”74 This was Wesley’s perspective on the greatness of God’s Word!
The preface of Wesley’s Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament, likewise, show that Wesley held God’s Word in high esteem. Wesley’s primary goal in publishing his notes was not to further equip “men of learning,” but rather to “write chiefly for plain unlettered men, who understand only their mother tongue, and yet reverence and love the word of God and have a desire to save their souls,”75 and yet, out of respect for the biblical text, Wesley kept his notes “as short as possible, that the comments may not obscure or swallow up the text.”76
72 John Wesley, Wesley’s Standard Sermons, vol. 1, ed. Edward Sugden (Great Britain: Lamar & Barton, 1787), 30.
73 Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 12.
74 Wesley, Wesley’s Standard Sermons, 1:31-32.
75 John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament (New York: Carlton & Porter, 1754), 3.
76 Ibid., 4.
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Later, in the Explanatory Notes preface, Wesley gives an extended explanation regarding the content and nature of the Bible. Toward understanding Wesley’s high view of Scripture, his words bear repeating in full:
Concerning the Scriptures in general, it may be observed, the word of the living God, which directed the first patriarchs also, was, in the time of Moses, committed to writing. To this were added in several succeeding generations, the inspired writings of the other prophets. Afterward, what the Son of God preached, and the Holy Ghost spake by the apostles, the apostles and evangelists wrote. This is what we now style the Holy Scripture: this is that word of God which remains forever, of which, though heaven and earth pass away, one jot or tittle shall not pass away. The Scriptures therefore of the Old and New Testament, is a most solid and precious system of Divine truth. Every part thereof is worthy of God; and all together are one entire body, wherein is no defect, no excess. It is the fountain of heavenly wisdom, which they who are able to taste, prefer to all writings of men, however wise, or learned, or holy.77
Wesley’s copious published sermons all begin with a Scripture, which Wesley then proceeded to explain, illustrate, and apply to the lives of his hearers.
Keswick’s High View of Scripture
Likewise, the Keswick Convention maintained a high view of Scripture. Barabas says that “the first and perhaps most important particular of the Keswick Method is that it is Bible-centered. . . . One may agree or disagree with their interpretation of the
Scriptures under consideration, but there is never any doubt that central in their thought is what God has to say.”78 In speaking to the lasting influence of Keswick on Convention attendees, Rev. C. G. Moore writes, “The Conventions have benefitted very many by showing them how to use the Bible for spiritual purposes. Keswick does honor the Word
77 Ibid., 5.
78 Barabas, So Great Salvation, 29.
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of God, and in fact is found a chief secret of its influence. It is almost impossible to imagine a speaker standing up without a Bible in his hand.”79 The Keswickian view of
God’s Word was essential to everything they did because they believed “God’s Word is
God speaking to us” in a direct manner.80
In studying the Keswick view of Scripture, the word “foundation” appears repeatedly. Keswick leader Charles Harford explained, “This is characteristic of the teaching of the Convention: the impregnable rock of Holy Scripture is the foundation upon which each speaker builds his message, and it is in faith in the Living Word speaking through the written Word in the power of the Holy Spirit that the work is done.”81 Speaking to what occurred in the main preaching tents, J. B Figgis reflected:
The Bible readings [these were sermons preached] entrusted to one or two chosen teachers has been one of the most helpful features in the Convention program. Nothing is more striking than the manner in which it has been shown that the Word of God is filled from end to end with teaching as to the life of faith which it is the purpose of the Convention to set forth, and these expositions of Holy Scripture provide the firm foundation upon which the rest of the teaching is based.82
Expository preaching and the Keswick Convention were built upon the same foundation:
The Bible as God’s Word.
79 C. G. Moore, “Some of the Results,” in The Keswick Convention: Its Message, Its Method, and Its Men (London: Marshall Brothers, 1907), 128.
80 Barabas, So Great Salvation, 29.
81 Charles F. Harford, “Introduction,” in The Keswick Convention: Its Message, Its Method, and Its Men (London: Marshall Brothers, 1907), 10.
82 J. B. Figgins, “Some Characteristics of the Message,” in The Keswick Convention: Its Message, Its Method, and Its Men, ed. Charles F. Harford (London: Marshall Brothers, 1907), 104.
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Keswick leader C. G. Moore well-summarized their high view of Scripture when he wrote,
The supreme glory of the Scriptures is just this, that they are the means and instrument, through the Spirit, of a present, conscious, intelligent fellowship with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ, which is the essence of eternal life; and the Conventions render a vast service by their special revelation of this fact.83
Keswick’s reverence for God’s Word elevated the views of those who attended who, in turn, carried this higher view back to their regular local churches. In describing this effect, Moore adds, “Keswick stands for absolute loyalty to the Bible as the Word of
God, for the great experiences of spiritual religion, for large fellowship amongst all who love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity, and for unreserved devotion to the Kingdom of
God.”84 As with John Wesley and the foundation of Methodism, the leaders of Keswick, likewise, held God’s Word in high esteem.
League of Prayer’s High View of Scripture
A great deal of Chambers’s ministry was under the banner of the League of
Prayer, including the foundation and operation of the Bible Training College itself.
Following the views of Wesley, the League of Prayer also held the Bible as the very
Word of God. The League’s founder, Reader Harris, listed a high view of Scripture as the first thing listed in response to the question, “What does the League of Prayer stand for today?”
First and foremost, it stands for the integrity and authority of the Scriptures. The League believes the Bible to be the Word of God and invites and unites believers in all sections of the Church to study the Bible under the light of the Holy Spirit—
83 Moore, “Some of the Results,” 128.
84 Ibid., 130.
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to feed upon it, to be armed with it. The League so therefore loyal and faithful to the great heritage of the Truth.85
The League defined the holiness they felt compelled to share with the world as
“Scriptural” holiness.86 While Chambers never became the official leader of the League of Prayer after Harris’ death, he no doubt became the leading preacher of the movement, making his writings an extension of League bibliology.
Chambers’s High View of Scripture
Chambers himself held a high view of Scripture, teaching his students that the
Bible was the wholly true and trustworthy Word of God Himself revealed to mankind. In
Approved Unto God, Chambers taught a lecture entitled, “The Absoluteness of the New
Testament” from 2 Peter 1:16-21, in which Chambers’s application of this portion of
Scripture screams expository preaching: “In the New Testament, we deal not with the shrewd guesses of able men, but with a supernatural revelation. . . . The Gospel of the
New Testament is based on the absoluteness of revelation, we cannot get at it by common sense. . . . As a preacher, base nothing on less than revelation. . . .”87 Speaking on Isaiah
40:6-8 and the idea of the Word of God standing forever, Chambers said, “Everything will shift but God and His Word. How steadily the Spirit of God warns us not to put our
85 Richard Reader Harris, “The League of Prayer,” undated pamphlet, 2.
86 Maurice Winterburn, The League of Prayer: An Historical Review 1891-1991 (Great Britain: League of Prayer, 1991), 6.
87 Chambers, Approved Unto God, in Complete Works, 14.
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trust in men and women, not even in princes, or in anything or anyone but God and His word.”88
Chambers read widely in varying genres of literature but gave special consideration to study of the Bible. Lambert says Chambers “gave [the Bible] the first place and to study it was his greatest delight. He would say to his students ‘ransack your
Bibles.’ All his works show an unusual grasp of Scripture.”89 For his students to preach
God’s Word rightly, Chambers knew they must be convinced themselves that the Bible truly is God’s Word. This is essential to understand, because expository preaching rests on the “biblical and theological foundation” that “God has spoken.”90
Chambers on Exegesis
Chambers supported a text-driven theology of preaching when he said: “The preacher has to concentrate on what God’s word says; he is dealing with a written revelation, not an unwritten one.”91 The question then becomes, “What should or should not be done in seeking to understand a passage for preaching?” Chambers’s lectures to his sermon preparation class entitled Approved Unto God include a section entitled,
“Don’ts and Do’s About Texts.” These are the questions of biblical exegesis.
88 Chambers, Notes on Isaiah, in Complete Works, 1384.
89 Lambert, Unbribed Soul, 46.
90 Ibid., 3.
91 Chambers, Approved Unto God, in Complete Works, 13.
88
“Chewing the Cud”
No expository preaching exists without biblically faithful exegesis. The question is, “What exactly is exegesis?” Erickson’s Concise Dictionary of Christian Theology defines exegesis as “the obtaining of the meaning of a passage by drawing the meaning out from, rather than reading into, the text.”92 Exegesis is the opposite of eisegesis, which is defined as “the practice of reading meaning into a biblical text, as opposed to the practice of drawing out the meaning that is already there (exegesis).”93 The assertion that
Chambers theology of preaching was “expository” in nature cannot stand apart from his conviction that exegesis of a biblical text is the essence of preaching.
Chambers taught his students the fundamentals of exegesis. In Disciples Indeed,
Chambers told his preaching students: “Exegesis is not torturing a text to agree with a theory of my own, but leading out its meaning.”94 In Approved Unto God, Chambers said, “When a text has chosen you, the Holy Spirit will impress you with its inner meaning and cause you to labor to lead out that meaning for your congregation.”95 Both of those last two quotes include the idea of the preacher leading out the meaning of the preaching passage. That is literally the textbook definition of exegesis (according to
Erickson).
92 Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1985), 62 (italics added for emphasis).
93 Ibid., 56.
94 Chambers, Disciples Indeed, in Complete Works, 387 (italics added for emphasis).
95 Chambers, Approved Unto God, in Complete Works, 13 (italics added for emphasis).
89
Those are not the only two instances when Chambers spoke to the principles of exegesis for expository preaching. He exhorted his preaching students: “Be keen in sensing those Scriptures that contain the truth which comes straight home, and apply them fearlessly. The tendency nowadays is to get a truth of God and gloss it over. Always keep the sense of the passage you expound.”96 In another place, Chambers said, “Always carry out the significance of your text with as many details as possible. . . .”97 This idea of
“keeping the sense” and including textual “details” speaks to the “historical, grammatical, and literary study of a passage in its context” as is seen in Robinson’s definition of expository preaching.98 In this same lecture, Chambers also speaks to the aspect of
Robinson’s definition regarding the Holy Spirit first applying a passage “to the personality and experience of the preacher, then through the preacher, applies to the hearers.”99 In the words of Chambers, “Let your text get such a hold of you that you never depart from its application.”100 All of this speaks to Chambers teaching his students to exegete Scripture.
Chambers’s journal reveals he employed exegesis not just for the preparation of sermons, but for his own spiritual development as well. On his 1907 boat passage to
Japan, Chambers was particularly moved in his spirit by a passage of Scripture. In a great
96 Ibid., 7.
97 Ibid.
98 Robinson, Biblical Preaching, 21.
99 Ibid.
100 Chambers, Approved Unto God, in Complete Works, 7.
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metaphor of exegesis and meditation, Chambers said he intended to “chew the cud” of those verses.101 That is the essence of exegesis.
Exegesis Requires Exertion
Regarding expository preaching, Chambers told his students, “Do be concentrated.” Chambers called his students to take seriously the call to prepare for preaching, forewarning them that faithful preaching takes diligence and dedication.
Speaking to the hard work of dealing with the text, as opposed to taking the surface meaning, he said, “Strenuous mental effort to interpret the word of God will fag us out physically, whereas strenuous mental effort that lets the word of God talk to us will recreate us. We prefer the spiritual interpretation to the exegetical work because it does not need any work . . . ,”102 and yet God’s purpose for preaching calls the minister to prepare well. Chambers said:
Remember that preaching is God’s ordained method of saving the world (see 1 Corinthians 1:21). Take time before God and find out the highest ideal for an address. Never mind if you do not reach the ideal, but work at it, and never say fail. By work and steady application, you will acquire the power to do with ease what at first seemed so difficult. Avoid the temptation to be slovenly in your mind and be deluded into calling it “depending on the Spirit.”103
Chambers conceded that expository preaching would take hard work and dedication.
Over time, however, as the preacher grows as a communicator and believer, understanding Scripture will come more easily.
101 Chambers, Oswald Chambers: His Life and Work, 77 (italics in original).
102 Chambers, Approved Unto God, in Complete Works, 13.
103 Ibid., 11.
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Considering God’s purpose for preaching is the saving of souls, the preacher truly called to preach will always “reach for the ideal” to preach as well as possible.
Chambers’s words in Disciples Indeed, should spur the preacher on to good exegetical works: “If we understood what happens when we use the Word of God, we would use it oftener. The disablement of the devil’s power by means of the Word of God conveyed through the lips of a servant of His, is inconceivable.”104 Exegesis requires exertion, but it is more than worth it based upon how God has promised to use it.
On the topic of working hard at exegesis, Chambers also told his preachers to begin their preparation with their own personal study of the text. He warned his students about turning too quickly away from their own study of a passage to the commentaries, study aids, and resources of others.105 He believed strongly in the importance of a preacher’s personal discovery of the truths to be preached. Chambers said, “Be careful to develop the power of perceiving what you look at, and never take an explanation from another mind unless you see it for yourself.”106 In another lecture, Chambers said:
In immediate preparation don’t call in the aid of other minds; rely on the Holy Spirit and on your own resources, and He will select for you. Discipline your mind by reading and by building in stuff in private, then all that you have assimilated will come back. Keep yourself full to the brim in reading; but remember that the first great Resource is the Holy Ghost Who lays at your disposal the Word of God.107
104 Chambers, Disciples Indeed, in Complete Works, 386.
105 Chambers, Approved Unto God, in Complete Works, 13.
106 Ibid.
107 Ibid., 11.
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This position rests upon the prior statement of exegesis, but also echoes the latter part of Robinson’s definition of expository preaching, namely that the biblical concept discovered in the text is “first applied by the Holy Spirit to the personality and experience of the preacher, then through the preacher, applies to the hearers.”108 Exegesis and firsthand discoveries are to the sermon what a good marinade is to a steak. Both can be served either way, but a marinated sermon has an extra exegetical quality that an unmarinated sermon does not.
Exegesis Leads to “Seeing”
A student from Chambers’s early traveling days of teaching Bible Training
Classes for the League of Prayer recalled the following about Chambers’s teaching of expository preaching:
He enabled us to see things. His method of Bible study was not merely systematic, but to turn the Bible into personal use; that God’s plan was to bring the life up against the puzzling things which called for earnest searching of the Scriptures, and in this way the Bible was incorporated into thinking and practical experience. . . . Above all, he taught us to “receive, recognize, and rely on the Holy Spirit” for mental aid as well as spiritual.109
Furthermore, Chambers prescribed a tenacity to Bible study in a vigorous pursuit of truth.
A student explained, “We were not to treat the Bible as a cultivated park into which to saunter more or less aimlessly, but under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and with a
108 Robinson, Biblical Preaching, 21.
109 Chambers, Oswald Chambers: His Life and Work, 98.
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personal hunger for spiritual truth, we were to treat the Bible as new territory needing to be colonized.”110
Chambers on Preaching Without Notes
Based on excerpts from Chambers’s lecture notes to his preachers, he clearly affirmed that preaching without notes is preferred.111 It is acknowledged that preaching without notes does not automatically make someone an expository preacher but in
Chambers’s mind, the latter prepares the way for the former. The lecture notes published as Disciples Indeed are actually a compilation of lecture quotes. Because there are so many quotes on this topic under the heading “Preparation” (and the majority of them refer to filling the mind in order to put away notes), one can surmise that this was something Chambers often offered by way of suggestion to his students.
As already demonstrated, Chambers believed a preacher should work hard in careful exegesis of a text prior to preaching. In preparation, Chambers told his students,
“It is by thinking with your pen in hand that you will get to the heart of your subject.”112
Preaching without notes does not mean the preacher should not prepare. In fact, it means strongly the opposite. In explaining this idea, Chambers quoted Proverbs 15:28: “The heart of the righteous studies how to answer. . . .” He then told his students, “To give
110 Ibid.
111 For the ways in which an expository approach to preaching can lead to the freedom of preaching without notes, see Charles W. Koller, How to Preach Without Notes (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2007); and Jerry Vines and Jim Shaddix, Power in the Pulpit: How to Prepare and Deliver Expository Sermons (Chicago: Moody Press, 1999), 340-48.
112 Chambers, Disciples Indeed, in Complete Works, 399.
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your congregations extemporaneous thinking, i.e. thinking without study, is an insult— ponderous ‘nothings.’ The preacher should give his congregation the result of strenuous thinking in un-studied, extemporaneous speech.”113 He explained, “Extemporaneous speech is not extemporaneous thinking, but speech that has been so studied that you are possessed unconsciously with what you are saying. . . . In order to expound a passage, live in it well beforehand.”114 This is again Chambers’s emphasis on the connection between obedient living and faithful preaching.
Chambers told his students, “The speaker without notes must have two things entirely at his command—the Bible and his mother tongue.”115 He maintained that the hard work of preparation is “meant to get our minds into such order that they are at service for His inspiration.”116 Good preparation sets the preacher free to trust the Holy
Spirit in the act of preaching. Chambers said, “When you speak, abandon yourself in confidence; don’t try to recall fine points in preparation.”117 A preacher should study hard, then simply make himself available to the Lord. Chambers again, “Keep yourself full to the brim in reading; but remember that the first great Resource is the Holy Ghost
Who lays at your disposal the Word of God.”118
113 Ibid.
114 Ibid.
115 Ibid., 400.
116 Ibid.
117 Ibid.
118 Chambers, Approved Unto God, in Complete Works, 11.
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In the book, If Thou Wilt Be Perfect, one section is entitled “The Way of Hearing the Eternal Word.” It is a mini-lecture on John 14:23, which reads, “Jesus answered and said to him: If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and
We will come to him and make Our home with him.” Applying the verse to the lives of his students, he told them that, while sermon preparation is important, sensitivity to the
Spirit is even more important. Chambers challenged the assumption that a great sermon exposition has immediate application to every situation. A preacher should beware of the complacency of saying to himself, “I have such a fine message, it will do for such an audience.” Or “I have got a wonderful exposition of this text.” Chambers says to take the sermon, “burn it and never think any more about it. Give the best you have every time and everywhere.”119
Chambers anticipated his students wondering how they would find the time to always be prepared for the next sermon. Could they really count on God to supply the words? The remedy Chambers proposed was regular communion with God through His
Word. He said:
Learn to get into the quiet place where you can hear God’s voice speak through the words of the Bible, and never be afraid that you will run dry, He will simply pour the word until you have no room to contain it. It won’t be a question of hunting messages or texts, but of opening the mouth wide and He fills it.120
In Chambers’s words can be heard echoes of Paul’s exhortation for Timothy to be ready to preach the Word in-season and out-of-season. He believed strongly in thorough sermon preparation, but dependence on the Spirit is indispensable either way. As will be
119 Chambers, If Thou Wilt Be Perfect, in Complete Works, 595.
120 Ibid.
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outlined below, according to Chambers, “The thing to prepare is not [just] the sermon, but the preacher.”121
Chambers on the Preacher’s Obedience
Chambers’s goal in teaching preaching was about more than the practical preparation of great sermons; it was also about the spiritual preparation of obedient preachers. He was absolutely a professor of expository preaching, but any attempt to divorce faithful preaching from faithful living is to misunderstand his teachings.
On Discernment and Disobedience
According to Chambers, a preacher living in willful disobedience to the written, revealed will of God will struggle to understand God’s Word, let alone preach effectively. For him, wholehearted obedience creates “open vision” toward discerning what God is saying through His Word, but the opposite is also true. Chambers explained,
“The reason we have no ‘open vision’ is that in some domain we have disobeyed God.
Immediately we obey, the word is opened up.”122 A preacher not actively experiencing the presence of God, needs to double-check his level of obedience. Chambers asserted:
The atmosphere of the Christian is God Himself, and in ordinary times as well as exceptional times He brings words to us. When He does not, never deceive yourself, something is wrong and needs curing, just as there would be something wrong if you could not get your breath. . . . Maintain your personal relationship with God at all costs. Never allow anything to come between your soul and God, and welcome anyone or anything that leads you to know Him better.123
121 Chambers, Approved Unto God, in Complete Works, 11.
122 Ibid., 13.
123 Ibid.
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Chambers said something similar in another lecture to his preaching students: “My spiritual character determines the revelation of God to me.”124 Chambers speaks to this idea as well in his Studies in the Sermon on the Mount:
The golden rule for understanding in spiritual matters is not intellect, but obedience. Discernment in the spiritual world is never gained by intellect; in the commonsense world, it is. If a man wants scientific knowledge, intellectual curiosity is his guide; but if he wants insight into what Jesus Christ teaches, he can only get it by obedience. If things are dark to us spiritually, it is because there is something we will not do. Intellectual darkness comes because of ignorance; spiritual darkness comes because of something I do not intend to obey.125
For Chambers, “Discernment of God’s truth and development in spiritual character go together.”126 Faithful preaching is inseparable from faithful living.
Chambers desperately desired his students to understand it is the living of a holy life that makes a preacher most usable to God. The next two quotes again show
Chambers’s connecting faithful living and faithful preaching. First, “In the New
Testament, we deal not with the shrewd guesses of able men, but with a supernatural revelation, and only as we transact business on that revelation do the moral consequences result in us. . . .”127 Second, “As a preacher, base nothing on less than revelation, and the authenticity of the revelation depends on the character of the one who brings it.”128
124 Ibid., 14.
125 Chambers, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, in Complete Works, 1458.
126 Chambers, Approved Unto God, in Complete Works, 20.
127 Ibid., 14.
128 Ibid.
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Chambers is not saying that the meaning of a passage of Scripture hinges on the holiness of the preacher. He instead calls his students to take seriously the call to holy living so that the message of God’s Word would not be skewed or overshadowed by a preacher’s immorality. Chambers calls the obedience that leads to the understanding of truth the “first golden lesson of the spiritual life.” He told his Biblical Ethics class, “The only interpreter of the Scriptures is the Holy Spirit, and when we have received the Holy
Spirit we learn the first golden lesson of spiritual life, which is that God reveals His will according to the state of our character (cf. Psalm 18:25-26).”129
Here again, in this aspect of Chambers’s theology of preaching is a reference to the aspect of expository preaching in Robinson’s definition dealing with “the Holy Spirit” first applying the truth of a passage “to the personality and experience of the preacher, then through the preacher, applies to the hearers.”130 God’s power unto salvation for all who believe is embedded in the Gospel and wielded by the Spirit of God, and yet God’s plan is for a preacher’s practical holiness to support His message of how men can be made holy. Chambers told his students:
It is easy to tell men they must be saved and filled with the Holy Ghost; but we have to live amongst men and show them what a life filled with the Holy Ghost ought to be. A preacher has to come upon men with a message and a testimony that go together. The great pattern for every witness is the abiding Witness, the Lord Jesus Christ. He came down on men from above; He stood on our level, with what men never had, in order to save men.131
129 Chambers, Biblical Ethics, in Complete Works, 131-32.
130 Robinson, Biblical Preaching, 21.
131 Chambers, Approved Unto God, in Complete Works, 12.
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Jesus is not only the focus of expository preaching, He is also the model for the expository preacher. Chambers repeatedly drives home the point to his preaching students that personal obedience to God’s Word leads to a personal understanding of God’s Word, will, and ways. Obedience and understanding are inseparable.
Preacher’s Spiritual Life
In this series of three mini-lectures, entitled “The Worker’s Spiritual Life,”
Chambers focuses on three aspects of the inner spiritual life to which preachers need to give close attention. He employs three different Bible passages to make his point and focuses primarily on the application of those passages to the lives of his students. The reader will notice the effort Chambers exerted on alliterating his points.
Point 1: Communication of the life of God. Chambers makes his point from
Galatians 2:20. By way of application, Chambers focuses not at all here on the aspect of being “crucified with Christ.” Instead, he focuses practically on how the life of God in a believer is experienced. Chambers warned his students:
As a worker, watch the “sea-worthiness” of your spiritual life; never allow a spiritual leakage. Spiritual leakage arises either by refusing to treat God seriously, or by refusing to do anything for Him seriously. Bear in mind two things: the pressure of God on your thought from without, and the pressure of God on your attention from within.132
Chambers taught his students that God would be relentless in His spiritual remaking of a person both from the outside-in and the inside-out.
To experience the fullness of what God desires to do, Chambers named three ways God transmits His life to believers. He listed the ways and then explained them:
132 Ibid., 4.
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by giving deliberate thoughtful attention to the Incarnation; by identifying ourselves with the Church, and by means of Bible revelation. God gave Himself in the Incarnation; He gives Himself to the Church; and He gives Himself in His Word; and these are the ways He has ordained for conveying His life to us.133
Important for expository preaching is the extra emphasis Chambers placed on the role of
God’s Word in the life of a believer. He told his students: “The mere reading of the Word of God has power to communicate the life of God to us mentally, morally and spiritually.
God makes the words of the Bible a sacrament, i.e., the means whereby we partake of His life, it is one of His secret doors for the communication of His life to us.”134 For
Chambers, God’s Word is His most powerful medium of communication with His people.
Point 2: Co-Ordination of our capacities for God. On this point, Chambers taught his students from Ephesians 3:16-19. What God does “through His Spirit in the inner man” of a believer must grow outwardly in a person until all of life is affected. He told his students:
Our whole being, not one aspect of it, has to be brought to comprehend the love of God. We are apt to co-ordinate our spiritual faculties only; our lack of co- ordination is detected if we cannot pass easily from what we call the secular to the sacred. Our Lord passed from the one to the other without any break; the reason we cannot is that we are not pressed on to the life of God.135
Chambers told his students to beware faux coordination with the Spirit of God.
This can lead to separating the inner man from the tensions of the outward realities of life and creates an artificial, even “sickly piety.” Chambers continued:
133 Ibid. 4-5.
134 Ibid., 5.
135 Ibid.
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There is no room in the New Testament for sickly piety, but room only for the robust, vigorous, open-air life that Jesus lived—in the world but not of it, the whole life guided and transfigured by God. Beware of the piety that is not stamped by the life of God, but by the type of a religious experience. Be absolutely and fiercely godly in your life, but never be pious. A “pi” person does not take God seriously, he only takes himself seriously, the one tremendous worship of his life is his experience.136
The word piety here could be placed in quotes, as in “piety,” for Chambers is not speaking of genuine piety but rather the opposite. Chambers does not mince words when speaking of the danger of becoming a “pi” or “pious” person.
Point 3: Concentrated centering on God. Romans 8:3-4 are the verses from which Chambers taught in this part of his lecture. His explanation of what he meant by
“centering on God” is the essence of walking by the Spirit rather than according to the flesh. He told his students, “If we would concentrate on God we must mortify our religious self-will. . . .” The tendency of the preacher is to be “self-willed . . .” Chambers warned his students of the results:
Consequently, we tell God we do not intend to concentrate on Him, we only intend to concentrate on our idea of what the saintly life should be, and before long we find that the pressing in of the life of God ceases and we begin to wilt. We are living a religiously self-centered life and the communication of life from God comes no longer.137
Chambers maintained that the result of a holy life will reflect the life of Jesus
Christ, but the preacher is not to focus on what he is becoming, but solely on the Lord. A believer who looks away from Jesus to consider himself is in spiritual danger regardless
136 Ibid.
137 Ibid.
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of whether the preacher likes what he sees in his obedience to the Lord or not. Chambers explained it like this:
God does not expect us to imitate Jesus Christ: He expects us to allow the life of Jesus to be manifested in our mortal flesh. God engineers circumstances and brings us into difficult places where no one can help us, and we can either manifest the life of Jesus in those conditions, or else be cowards and say, “I cannot exhibit the life of God there.” . . . The spiritual life of a worker is literally, God manifest in the flesh.138
According to Chambers, a preacher centered on Jesus will exhibit the characteristics of
Jesus as long as the preacher remains centered on Jesus. This is the key to the Christian worker’s spiritual life.
According to Chambers, this connection between preaching and surrender is the very foundation of the Bible Training College. He explained:
Here, in this College, God can break or bend or mold, just as He chooses. You do not know why He is doing it; He is doing it for One purpose only, that He may be able to say, “This is My man, My woman.” Never choose to be a worker, but when once God has put His call on you, woe be to you if you turn to the right hand or to the left. God will do with you what He never did with you before the call came; He will do with you what He is not doing with other people. Let Him have His way.139
This is the essence of what it is to be a preacher of the Gospel, growing in grace.
Conclusion
A preacher best helps his hearers become who God wants them to be by being the fullness of who God has made them to be. Chambers shared with his students two
“general maxims” for preaching. First, “If you lack education, first realize it, then cure
138 Ibid., 5 (italics in original).
139 Ibid., 3.
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it.” Second, “Beware of knowing what you don’t practice.”140 These statements are foundational to both Chambers’s purpose for opening the Bible Training College and expository preaching itself.
Chambers’s goal in teaching preaching was not just the practical preparation of sermons, but the spiritual preparation of preachers. Chambers’s lectures include statements for students such as, “Keep yourself full to the brim in reading but remember that the first great Resource is the Holy Ghost Who lays at your disposal the Word of
God. The thing to prepare is not the sermon, but the preacher.”141 This chapter has thoroughly established the seven aforementioned proofs that Chambers was, indeed, a professor of expository preaching.
140 Ibid., 11.
141 Ibid. (italics added).
Chapter 5
Chambers the Expository Preacher
Chambers not only taught his students expository preaching, but he modeled it for them in his own expositions of passages preached during class. The previous chapter explored what Chambers taught his students about preaching. This chapter explores what
Chambers modeled for them in his own preaching.
Four passages of Scripture Chambers taught his students at the Bible Training
College will be examined. The four selections are taken from the lectures of four different classes to show consistent sermonic methodology regardless of class subject.
The writer acknowledges some of the evidence employed in the previous chapter to show that Chambers was a professor of expository preaching reappears in the analysis below.
For example, Chambers’s emphasis on a believer living a life of holy obedience to God’s
Word as revealed in the Bible reoccurs often in his works. The decision was made to leave the flow of the following sermons intact, regardless of any overlap with the preceding material to help in understanding the manner in which Chambers himself preached. The sermon texts analyzed below include the following: Genesis 22:1-3; Isaiah
6:1-8; Matthew 5:1-20; and Matthew 19:16-22.1
1 These four passages were chosen because they reflect the expository nature of Chambers’s ministry from both the Old and New Testaments.
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Genesis 22:1-3—“The Supreme Climb”2
The introduction to Not Knowing Whither says Chambers taught this material in the Old Testament class at the Bible Training College from January through April 1915.
The personal context in which he preached these sermons is noteworthy. McCasland explained:
During the months Oswald Chambers gave these lectures on the life of Abraham, he was struggling to find God’s leading for the next step in his own life. Should he remain at the Bible Training College, or should he volunteer for military service in the British forces then fighting World War I? By the time he concluded this series, he had offered to serve as a chaplain and within a few weeks was selected for duty with the YMCA in Egypt.
Chambers’s first sermon on Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac exposits the first three verses of
Genesis 22:1-3 and preached five alliterated points. He again prefaced his sermon by providing his students some context and overview of the passage he is preparing to exposit. He explained:
In the life of Abraham, we deal with the failures and the triumphs of the life of faith, and this chapter records the perfecting of the obedience of faith in Abraham. His obedience was not merely in the sacrifice of Isaac, but in his readiness to perceive a revelation even when it seemed to contradict what God had told him (cf. Gen 22:11-12).
Chambers then paused to expand a little on the biblical term “faith.” He knew his students needed to understand this concept if they were rightly to understand the experience of Abraham in the passage being preached. Chambers highlighted the meaning of faith in the life of Abraham as follows:
The very nature of faith is that it must be tried; faith untried is only ideally real, not actually real. Faith is not rational; therefore, it cannot be worked out on the basis of logical reason; it can only be worked out on the implicit line by living
2 For ease of reading and avoiding redundant uses of ibid., unless otherwise noted, all Chambers’s quotes from this section are taken from Chambers, Not Knowing Whither, in Complete Works, 899-900.
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obedience. God proves Abraham’s faith by placing him in the most extreme crisis possible, because faith must prove itself by the inward concession of its dearest objects, and in this way, be purified from all traditional and fanatical ideas and misconceptions.
With the passage placed in its theological context, Chambers turns to the body of his exposition of the text.
Crucible for Abraham (Genesis 22:1)
Genesis 22:1 begins, “Now it came to pass after these things that God tested
Abraham. . . .” Chambers dealt first with the “startling words” that God would “test”
Abraham since James 1:13, in the New Testament, says God Himself tempts no one, and
Jesus taught His people to pray that God would lead them not into temptation. For clarification, Chambers distinguished between “the providence of God’s rule and the providence of God’s grace.” He explained:
The providence of God’s grace is wrought out in the development of faith, and Paul refers to this when he says, “we know that all things work together for good to them that love God”—everything that happens transforms ideal faith into actual reality by the alchemy of God’s providence (cf. Hebrews 12:11). The providence of God’s grace is worked out in and through the arrangement of His rule, but is conditioned by the individual life of the one with whom He is dealing. . . .
Chambers summarized his point with the words: “God does not further our spiritual life in spite of our circumstances, but in and by our circumstances. The whole purpose of God is to make the ideal faith actually real in the lives of His servants. God is working for His highest purpose until it and man’s highest good become one.”
For Chambers, living in experiential fellowship with God will alter the way a person endures the trials and tests of life. He told his students: “It is easy to pass a crude verdict on God if you are not living in touch with Him. If you look at God through the
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mist of the heat of the crucible, you will say God is cruel.” Chambers said it was only after a person has passed through the trial that an accurate “verdict” of the experience can be understood. God is a “refiner and purifier of silver. . . . Go through the crucible, and you will find that in it you learned to know God better.”
Concentration of Abraham (Genesis 22:1)
Under this heading, Chambers focused on God’s call and Abraham’s response of
“Here I am.” To Chambers, this is the quintessential declaration of a true follower of
God. He told his students, “These words express the greatest application of the human mind. To say, ‘Here I am’ when God speaks, is only possible if we are in His presence, in the place where we can obey. To understand where I am in the sight of God means not only to listen but to obey promptly all He says. I can always know where I am.” From this idea, Chambers cautioned, “Whenever I want to debate about doing what I know to be supremely right, I am not in touch with God.” Submission to God’s Word, will, and ways is vital to the life of a believer in Jesus Christ.
Command to Abraham (Genesis 22:2)
In this sermon point, Chambers expounded the first half of Genesis 22:2, which reads, “Then He said, ‘Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love. . . .’”
For Chambers, a person’s refusal to surrender “self” to the Lord is where many Christians fail. He viewed so much of God’s activity in a believer’s life as bringing that person to the point of surrender. Chambers taught from this verse:
God’s words are, as it were, blows aimed against the incrustations of natural individual life in order that Abraham’s personal faith might be emancipated into fellowship with God. The blows are aimed at individuality because individuality will not come into fellowship with God; personality always does. Individuality is
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the husk of the personality, the home of independence and pride; but when God is developing the faith of a man all that must be sacrificed.
Chambers illustrated his point with the metamorphosis of a caterpillar to a butterfly: “It is the chrysalis developing into a butterfly, a winged creature of personal life. If you are not in the crucible yourself, the blows seem cruel; but if you are, you find the ecstasy of being brought into personal fellowship with God.” Trusting that God does, in fact, know what He is doing includes being ever-ready to respond in obedience as God leads.
Chambers concluded, “God’s command is—‘Take now’ . . . To go to the height God shows can never be done presently, it must be done now.”3 Delayed obedience is disobedience.
Climb for Abraham (Genesis 22:2)
Chambers dealt here with the latter half of Genesis 22:2, “and go to the land of
Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.” Chambers maintained that Abraham’s faith never wavered in the face of this unimaginably strange and difficult command God gave. He said to his students:
The mount of the Lord is the very height of the trial into which God brings His servant. There is no indication of the cost to Abraham, his implicit understanding of God so far out-reaches his explicit knowledge that he trusts God utterly and climbs the highest height on which God can ever prove him, and remains unutterably true to God. There was no conflict, that was over, Abraham’s confidence was fixed; he did not consult with flesh and blood, his own or anyone else’s, he instantly obeyed.
Chambers applied the passage as follows: “The point is that though all other voices should proclaim differently, obedience to the dictates of the Spirit of God at all costs is to
3 Italics added for emphasis.
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be the attitude of the faithful soul.” For him, the mountain God was calling Abraham to climb was not a “mountain of sacrifice,” but rather the “mountain of proof that Abraham loved God supremely.”
Chambers warned his students of the proverbial “slippery slope” of responding to
God’s commands with a “self-first” mentality. He said:
It is extraordinary how we debate with right. We know a thing is right but we try to seek excuses for not doing it now. Always beware when you want to confer with your own flesh and blood, i.e., your own sympathies, your own insight. These things are based on individuality, not on personal relationship to God, and they are the things that compete with God and hinder our faith.
Chambers spoke again to the issue of God’s loving desire to destroy a person’s self, so the fuller blessings of God might be experienced. He told his students, “When Our Lord is bringing us into personal relationship with Himself, it is always the individual relationships He breaks down.” God will stop at nothing to have the relationship with His people He knows is best for them.
Consecration of Abraham (Genesis 22:3)
Chambers spoke briefly under this heading to the “wonderful simplicity of
Abraham.” Abraham’s obedience is instant and without rebuttal. Chambers declared,
“This is the sacrifice of Abraham, not of Isaac. Always guard against self-chosen service for God; self-sacrifice may be a disease. God chose the crucible for Abraham, and
Abraham made no demur, he went steadily through.”4 He then turned the application specifically to his students called into ministry. He said:
4 Italics added for emphasis.
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If God has made your cup sweet, drink it with grace; if He has made it bitter, drink it in communion with Him. If it is a hard time of difficulty in the providential order of God, go through with it, but never choose your own service. If God has given the command, He will look after everything; your business is to get up and go, and smilingly wash your hands of the consequences.
He concluded his lecture with a warning to his preachers about attempting a preaching ministry without living an obedient life. He warned, “Beware of pronouncing any verdict on the life of faith if you are not living it.”
Isaiah 6:1-8—“The Painful Path to Power”5
In January 1912, Chambers “began teaching Isaiah in his biblical theology class at the Bible Training College.” The introduction to Notes on Isaiah states that, due to the business of her daily responsibilities at the time, “Mrs. Chambers apparently did not take detailed notes of these lectures as she did with other classes.” Whether Chambers taught straight through from every chapter of Isaiah is unknown, but the notes that are recorded again show an emphasis on expository preaching.
Chambers’s sermon from Isaiah 6:1-8 is entitled, “The Painful Path to Power” and is a six-point, verse-by-verse, fully alliterated sermon. Again, Chambers begins his exposition with some introductory thoughts. Here in this sermon, the emphasis is less on the context of the Bible passage (he deals with that more in the sermon itself) and more on the importance of this passage specifically for those considering ministry. He writes,
“This chapter is a record of the experience Isaiah went through before entering on his prophetical ministry. Isaiah is his own remembrancer. It is easy to forget the love of our
5 Unless otherwise noted, all Chambers’s quotes in this section come from Notes on Isaiah, in Complete Works, 1367-88.
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espousals, to be so taken up with Christian work that we forget after a while what God has done for us.” What did Chambers offer by way of solution? “We have to keep the call of God alive, and continually to recall to our minds what we are here for. The process will at once reveal whether the soul has any personal history with God.”
Chambers closes his introduction with an encouragement and a challenge. The encouragement: “There is no danger of spiritual retrogression if we keep in mind the times, one or more, when the Spirit of God has touched us.” The challenge: “The proof that the Spirit of God is at work in me is that I am willing to testify to what God has done; that is always the evidence of a supernatural element at work.” Where God’s people are remembering what God has done, spiritual progress is present. Where God is moving in His people, God’s people will proclaim!
Price of Vision (Isaiah 6:1)
Chamber deals here with verse 1 and the timing of the vision. It was in the “year
King Uzziah died. . . .” Recognizing Uzziah’s near-hero status to the people of Israel and the uncertainty his death would have caused the people, Chambers speaks both to the issue of God’s perfect timing and man’s tendency to place too much hope in people instead of the Lord. Chambers reminded his students, “God’s dates are not man’s. God seems to pay no attention to our calendars; He has a calendar of His own in which He suddenly surprises a man in the midst of his days.” Though these times of transition may feel traumatic, there is the reassurance that God is working everything together to help
His people remember that He should be most important to them. Under point one,
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Chambers also speaks to the fact that receiving salvation precedes further revelation.
Chambers said:
My vision of God depends upon the state of my character. Character determines revelation. Before I can say “I saw also the Lord” there must be something corresponding to God in my character. Until I am born again and enter into the Kingdom of God I see only along the line of my prejudices; I need the surgical operation of external events and an internal purification.
This idea of salvation preceding revelation is an idea Chambers returned to more than once in his Notes on Isaiah.
Purging of the Prophet’s Perception (Isaiah 6:1)
Point two of the sermon reads, “The Purging of the Prophet’s Perception.” Here,
Chambers speaks specifically of God’s purpose in revealing Himself to Isaiah.
Referencing Isaiah 53:1, Chambers said, “The purpose of the vision is to enable me to see
‘the arm of the Lord.’ God never gives a man the power to say ‘I see’ until his character proves itself worthy of purification.” After God makes a believer’s character able to receive revelation, God reveals Himself to His people to reveal His purposes. Chambers explained: “What hinders the purging of our perception is that we will build our faith on our experiences instead of on the God who gave us the experiences. My experience is the evidence of my faith, never the ground of it, and is meant to reveal to me a God who is bigger than any experience.” Again, Chambers puts the emphasis back on God being the
Source of a believer’s experience. This is equally true for the preacher and the effect the preacher should desire in his hearers. Chambers closes this section with the rhetorical question, “Have I seen also the Lord, and do I know that He is holy?”
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Platform of the Vision (Isaiah 6:1)
Point three of the sermon reads, “The Platform of the Vision.” In this, Chambers speaks to the significance of the Lord being “high and lifted up” on His throne (Isa 6:1).
He defines the term “holy” as “that aloofness and separateness, the sublimity of God.” He reminded his preachers, “If my worship is consumed in the glory of the Lord till that is the one thing left in my mind, I have come to the right place of vision.” For sinful people to come into the holiness of God’s presence, sinfulness must be removed from the sinner.
Chambers said:
“No un-holiness can ever stand before God, therefore if God is going to bring man into fellowship with Himself He has to reinstate him in every particular. Anything that belittles or obliterates the holiness of God by a false view of the love of God is untrue to the revelation given by Jesus Christ.”
How can such a change be made available and experienced by a sinner needing salvation? Chambers finds the answer in the picture of atonement in the following verses.
The Presence and the Perfected Praise (Isaiah 6:2-3)
Point four of the sermon reads, “The Presence and the Perfected Praise.” Isaiah sees the Lord in all His splendor and his initial response is not joyful worship, but rather humble fear. In verse 5, Isaiah cries out in “woe” with an acute awareness of his sinfulness. Chambers explained, “Isaiah went through the crisis of face-to-face contact with God and the effect of the vision of God’s holiness was to bring home to him that he was a man of unclean lips, i.e. the expression of his nature was pernicious.” Isaiah not only became shockingly aware of his own sinfulness but the collective sinfulness of the people of Israel, as well.
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Chambers applied this section of Isaiah 6 with a reflection on how times of real or apparent disaster reveal the depths of a sinner’s depravity. What Chambers said next merits quoting in full:
The majority of us are much too cunning to express what is in our heart until we are brought to a crisis, then the true state of our heart is out instantly. A crisis will always reveal the condition of our heart because it makes us express ourselves. The Spirit of God convicts us by focusing our mind on one particular point, there is never any vague sense of sin, and if we yield to His conviction He will lead us down to the disposition of sin underneath.
All the reasons a person must experience crisis to get to the heart of the sin matters may never be understood fully beyond the fact that the human heart apart from Jesus is wicked through and through. Nevertheless, what Chambers observes about the role of crisis in accelerating holiness seems to be true.
Process of the Vision (Isaiah 6:6-7)
Chambers’s fifth point explains the meaning of the seraphim taking the live coal from the altar to purge Isaiah’s sin. It is all symbolic of what Paul wrote of in 2
Corinthians 5:21, namely the so-called “Great Exchange” of Christ’s receiving the wrath sinners deserve so that sinners would have the chance to be recipients of the righteousness Christ earned. According to Chambers, “Second Corinthians 5:21 . . . states what God makes to transpire in every soul who is identified with Jesus: there is a moral agreement with God’s verdict on sin in the Cross and agreement with the expiation of our sin through the marvel of His substitution for us on the Cross.” The result of this
“exchange” is a whole life given over to God’s service. Chambers continues:
The symbol of the live coal “from the altar” represents the twofold nature of the substitution of Christ, not only Christ for me, but Christ in me. This is the key to the Apostle Paul’s teaching of identification, now the sacrifice of the body of
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Christ at a distance, but my identification with that sacrifice so that the Atonement is made efficacious in me and God can indwell me as He indwelt His Son.
For Chambers, the imputation of the sinner’s sin to Christ and Christ’s righteousness to the sinner is not merely transactional concerning salvation, but rather is transforming concerning the rest of a believer’s life.
Program After the Vision (Isaiah 6:8)
Chambers’s last point addresses Isaiah 6:8 and God’s calling for someone willing to be sent in His service. Chambers noted God did not call Isaiah to service with a “strong compulsion.” No, “Isaiah was in the presence of God and realized that there was nothing else for him to do but say, in conscious freedom, ‘Here I am; send me.’” Chambers resisted the idea that God forces people to obey Him. God gives a clear invitation, but man’s responsibility is to respond to what God is asking. Chambers explained:
We have to get out of our minds the idea of expecting God to come with compulsion and pleadings. When Our Lord called His disciples, there was no irresistible compulsion from outside; the quiet, passionate insistence of His “Follow Me” was spoken to men with every power wide awake.
God revealed Himself to Isaiah and Isaiah rightly responded.
Chambers concludes the sermon by pointing out that Isaiah did not just hear
God’s call, but rather more so understood the nature of the God who had called.
Chambers asserts that “once we know Him we can stand wherever He puts us.” How does this happen in a believer today? It happens the same way it happened for Isaiah in
Isaiah 6. Chambers stated: “The Spirit of God holds us steady until we learn to know
God, and the details of our lives are established before Him, then nothing on the outside can move us. God can rely on the man or woman to whom He has given the vision of
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Himself.” This precisely is the promise offered to every preacher by the vision of
Isaiah 6.
Matthew 5:1-20—“His Teaching and Our Training”6
Chambers often preached and taught through the Sermon on the Mount throughout his earthly ministry.7 The Introduction to Studies in the Sermon on the Mount gives the date range in which this material was taught at the Bible Training College as
1911-1915, showing Mrs. Chambers took these notes as these sermons were preached multiple times. This series of sermons shows that Chambers himself was an expository teacher of preaching in two ways. First, it continues to give examples of Chambers’s preaching through a passage verse-by-verse. Second, like the Genesis 22 passage examined above, it gives another example of Chambers preaching through an extended section of Scripture passage-by-passage. These two facts alone do not prove Chambers was an expository preacher, but rather are things consistent with him being one.
Chambers divided Jesus’ sermon into five multi-sermon “studies” organized as follows: (I) His Teaching and Our Training (Matt 5:1-20); (II) Actual and Real (Matt
5:21-42); (III) Incarnate Wisdom and Individual Reason (Matt 5:43-6:34); (IV) Character and Conduct (Matt 7:1-12); and (V) Ideas, Ideals, and Actuality (Matt 7:13-29). The following analysis will examine the first study entitled, “His Teaching Our Training.”
Chambers structures this first section (into three sub-points, again fully alliterated as:
6 Unless otherwise noted, all Chambers’s quotes in this section come from Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, in Complete Works, 1440-44.
7 See introduction to Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, in Complete Works, 1438.
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(1) Divine Disproportion (Matt 5:1-12); (2) Divine Disadvantage (Matt 5:13-16); and
(3) Divine Declaration (Matt 5:17-20). Though the entirety of his Studies on the Sermon on the Mount reveals Chambers to be an expository teacher of preaching, special attention will be given below to his good examples of explaining, illustrating, and applying the passage in an expositional manner. It will also be noted how Chambers spoke to the way the Sermon must be handled both for preaching and for living it out in the Christian life.
Introduction
Chambers introduced the first section with some important information both for understanding the historical context of the Sermon and remembering the importance of the role of the Holy Spirit in understanding and applying what Jesus says here to everyday life. Chambers said, “In order to understand the Sermon on the Mount, it is necessary to have the mind of the Preacher, and this knowledge can be gained by anyone who will receive the Holy Spirit (Luke 11:13; John 20:22; Acts 19:2). The Holy Ghost alone can expound the teachings of Jesus Christ.”
For Chambers, the Sermon on the Mount has two purposes—one for the believer and one for the unbeliever. For the believer, it teaches what it looks like to live out the
Christian life in a practical manner. Chambers asserted, “The Sermon on the Mount is a statement of the life we will live when the Holy Spirit is having His way with us.” For the unbeliever, the Sermon aims to convince a person of their utter hopelessness to ever be right with God apart from the salvation offered by faith in Jesus Christ. Chambers said,
“The Sermon on the Mount produces despair in the heart of the natural man, and that is
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the very thing Jesus means it to do, because immediately [when] we reach the point of despair we are willing to come to Jesus Christ as paupers and receive from Him.” This is what the first Beatitude in Matthew 5:3 means by “poor in spirit.” Faced with Jesus’ demands of moral perfection as perfect as God the Father’s perfection (Matt 5:48),
Chambers declared:
The bed-rock of Jesus Christ’s Kingdom is poverty . . . a sense of absolute futility, “I cannot begin to do it.” Then, Jesus says, “Blessed are you.” That is the entrance, and it takes us a long while to believe we are poor. The knowledge of our own poverty brings us to the moral frontier where Jesus Christ works.
With this foundation laid, Chambers launches into the biblical text of Matthew 5.
Divine Disproportion (Matthew 5:1-12)
Chambers sets the emotional context for Matthew 5:1-12 by pointing out how absurd the Beatitudes would have been to the ancient Jews. He observed:
Our Lord began His discourse by saying: “Blessed are . . .” and His hearers must have been staggered by what followed. According to Jesus Christ they were to be blessed in every condition which from earliest childhood they had been taught to regard as a curse. Our Lord was speaking to Jews, and they believed that the sign of the blessing of God was material prosperity in every shape and form, and yet Jesus said, “Blessed are you for exactly the opposite. . . .”
This sermon was compelling to Jesus’ original hearers, because it took everything the
Jews of that time thought they knew and turned it upside-down.
The “Mines” of God (Matt 5:1-10). Chambers saw in the Beatitudes a simplicity to be received on the level of human consciousness, but something powerfully potent as it sinks down into a person’s subconscious. He said,
We are so used to the sayings of Jesus that they slip over as unheeded, they sound sweet and pious and wonderfully simple, but they are in reality like spiritual torpedoes that burst and explode in the subconscious mind, and when the Holy
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Spirit brings them back to our conscious minds we realize what startling statements they are.
Chambers notes that the Beatitudes seem, at first, to be “mild and beautiful precepts,” and yet they are spiritually volatile materials. In the title of this section, Chambers means
“mines” as in explosives. He explained to his students that the Beatitudes “contain the dynamite of the Holy Ghost, they explode like a spiritual ‘mine’ when the circumstances of our lives require them to do so, and rip and tear and revolutionize all our conceptions.”
Chambers then transitioned again to the role of obedience in the spiritual growth of a believer. He told his students, “The test of discipleship is obedience to the light when these truths are brought to the conscious mind.” Normal life continues as normal until a situation requires these verses to be applied in a believer’s life. It is then that the
Christian is tested by whether he responds obediently in that moment.
None of this, however, according to Chambers, is about the believer working harder to apply these truths in his life. The person’s natural desires and abilities will never create in one the likeness of Christ. Only Christ Himself can create His likeness in
His people. Chambers explains:
Neither is it a question of applying the Beatitudes literally, but of allowing the life of God to invade us by regeneration, and then soaking our minds in the teaching of Jesus Christ which slips down into the subconscious mind. By and by a set of circumstances will arise when one of Jesus Christ’s statements emerges, and instantly we have to decide whether we will accept the tremendous spiritual revolution that will be produced if we do obey this precept of His.
Chambers again challenged his students to make the choice to pursue obedience. God always blesses the prayer for strength to obey. He told his students if they would obey what God has brought to mind, in the moment God brings it to mind, “our actual life will
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become different, and we shall find we have the power to obey if we will. That is the way the Holy Spirit works in the heart of a disciple.”8
The working of God in and through the life of a believer is incredible but will not come easily at first. Chambers asserted,
The teaching of Jesus Christ comes with astonishing discomfort to begin with, because it is out of all proportion to our natural way of looking at things; but Jesus puts in a new sense of proportion, and slowly we form our way of walking and our conversation on the line of His precepts: Remember that our Lord’s teaching applies only to those who are His disciples.
God’s truths may have an explosive, painful at times, effect in the life of a believer, but
God’s end goal is not to blow the believer to bits. His goal is to remake His people into the likeness of Christ.
Motive of Godliness (Matt 5:11-12). The second subpoint under “Divine
Disproportion” exposits Matthew 5:11-12 in which Jesus speaks to the persecution suffering believers will experience if they follow Jesus boldly. Only as the believer loves
God completely can he begin to understand God’s love for him more fully. In light of verses 11-12, Chambers refers back to the Beatitudes, restating them as suffering— embracing, love-motivated responses to God:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit”—towards God. Am I a pauper towards God? Do I know I cannot prevail in prayer; I cannot blot out the sins of the past; I cannot alter my disposition; I cannot lift myself nearer to God? Then I am in the very place where I am able to receive the Holy Spirit. No man can receive the Holy Spirit who is not convinced he is a pauper spiritually. “Blessed are the meek”— towards God’s dispensations. “Blessed are the merciful”—to God’s reputation. Do I awaken sympathy for myself when I am in trouble? Then I am slandering God because the reflex thought in people’s minds is—How hard God is with that man. It is easy to slander God’s character because He never attempts to vindicate Himself. “Blessed are the pure in heart”—that is obviously Godward. “Blessed
8 Italics added for emphasis.
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are the peacemakers”—between God and man, the note that was struck at the birth of Jesus.
A believer’s response to the Beatitudes should be motivated by love, but from where does the believer gain the ability to obey? Chambers next turned to that issue.
Chambers again pointed out to his students the impossibility of responding to God rightly apart from God’s help:
Is it possible to carry out the Beatitudes? Never! Unless God can do what Jesus Christ says He can, unless He can give us the Holy Spirit Who will remake us and bear us into a new realm. The essential element in the life of a saint is simplicity, and Jesus Christ makes the motive of godliness gloriously simple, viz., be carefully careless about everything saving your relationship to Me. The motive of a disciple is to be well-pleasing to God. The true blessedness of the saint is in determinedly making and keeping God first.
Keeping God first in a worldly, often-hostile environment, requires a committed focus on the person of Jesus Christ. Mere devotion to an idea will fail to sustain the disciples when hard times come. Chambers said:
There is a difference between devotion to principles and devotion to a person. Jesus Christ never proclaimed a cause; He proclaimed personal devotion to Himself—“for My sake.” Discipleship is based not on devotion to abstract ideals, but on devotion to a Person, the Lord Jesus Christ, consequently the whole of the Christian life is stamped by originality.
Remember, Chambers was speaking here in the context of remaining faithful amidst persecution. This requires focusing on Christ as well as help from the Holy Spirit.
Chambers explained, “No man on earth has that love unless the Holy Ghost has imparted it to him. Men may admire Him and respect Him and reverence Him, but no man can love God until the Holy Ghost has shed abroad that love in his heart (see Rom 5:5). The only Lover of the Lord Jesus Christ is the Holy Ghost.”
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Chambers completed his section on the “Motive of Godliness” with some specific explanation of Matthew 5:11: “Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake.” The blessing God promises to those who remain faithful through persecution is not guaranteed to those who suffer “for conscience’s sake, or for convictions’ sake, or because of the ordinary troubles of life, but something other than that.” It is for Jesus’ sake. Chambers desired his students to count the cost of following Jesus truly in their daily lives. He told them, “When you begin to deport yourself amongst men as a saint, they will leave you absolutely alone, you will be reviled and persecuted. No man can stand that unless he is in love with Jesus Christ; he cannot do it for a conviction or a creed, but he can do it for a Being Whom he loves.”
According to Chambers, love for Christ is the enduring and sustaining motivation for godliness.
Divine Disadvantage (Matthew 5:13-16)
Chambers entitled his second lecture on the Sermon on the Mount, “Divine
Disadvantage.” He introduced his students to this passage by reminding them how much easier life would be if the Christian life was to be lived in private rather than public. He conceded, “It would doubtless be to our advantage from the standpoint of self-realization to keep quiet, and nowadays the tendency to say—‘Be a Christian, live a holy life, but don’t talk about it’—is growing stronger.” A secret Christian life, however, is not how
God calls His people to live! Chambers said: “Our Lord uses in illustration the most conspicuous things known to men, viz., salt, light, and a city set on a hill, and He says—
Be like that in your home, in your business, in your church; be conspicuously a Christian
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for ridicule or respect according to the mood of the people you are with.’” Reading
Chambers, it is clear he knows being a Christian is ultimately an everlasting advantage, but he wanted his students to have honest expectations about the temporal difficulties believers will face if they live boldly in light of eternity.
Concentrated service (Matt 5:13). The first subpoint under “Divine
Disadvantage” is entitled, “Concentrated Service.” Knowing how much Chambers speaks to the issue of sanctification, it takes the reader by surprise that he used the word
“concentrated” instead of “consecrated.” Yet, all this was by mischievous design.
Chambers explained to his students, “Not consecrated service, but concentrated.
Consecration would soon be changed into sanctification if we would only concentrate on what God wants. Concentration means pinning down the four corners of the mind until it is settled on what God wants.”9 This kind of desire and result cannot happen apart from the work of God’s Spirit in the life of believers. Chambers reminded, “The literal interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount is child’s play; the interpretation by the Holy
Spirit is the stern work of a saint, and it requires spiritual concentration.”
Chambers next turned to the phrase, “You are the salt of the earth” from Matthew
5:13. What Jesus intended by this phrase is the opposite of what contemporary preachers appear to believe. Chambers said, “Some modern teachers seem to think our Lord said,
‘Ye are the sugar of the earth,” meaning that gentleness and winsomeness without curative-ness is the ideal of the Christian.’” He sought to place Jesus’ words in their historical context. What did this phrase mean to Jesus’ original hearers? He explained:
9 Italics in original quote.
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Our Lord’s illustration of a Christian is salt, and salt is the most concentrated thing known. Salt preserves wholesomeness and prevents decay. It is a disadvantage to be salt. Think of the action of salt on a wound, and you will realize this. If you get salt into a wound, it hurts, and when God’s children are amongst those who are “raw” towards God, their presence hurts. The man who is wrong with God is like an open wound, and when “salt” gets in it causes annoyance and distress and he is spiteful and bitter. The disciples of Jesus in the present dispensation preserve society from corruption; the “salt” causes excessive irritation which spells persecution for the saint.
For Chambers, the ability to “maintain the healthy, salty tang of saintliness” is contingent on the believer “remaining rightly related to God through Jesus Christ. He reminded his students, “In the present dispensation . . . men are called on to live out His teaching in an age that will not recognize Him, and that spells limitation and very often persecution.”
There is coming a “next dispensation,” however, in which the saints will be glorified with
Christ! This is reminiscent of the section above regarding the motivation of godliness.
Conspicuous setting (Matt 5:14-16). In this second subpoint, Chambers dealt with the “conspicuous setting” God’s people must embrace if they are truly to follow
Him. Chambers told his students, “The illustrations our Lord uses are all conspicuous, viz., salt, light, and a city set on a hill. There is no possibility of mistaking them.” He explained what he meant by referring to the images mentioned by Jesus:
Salt to preserve from corruption has to be placed in the midst of it, and before it can do its work it causes excessive irritation which spells persecution. Light attracts bats and night-moths, and points out the way for burglars as well as honest people: Jesus would have us remember that men will certainly defraud us. A city is a gathering place for all the human drift-wood that will not work for its own living, and a Christian will have any number of parasites and ungrateful hangers-on.
When talking to his students, Chambers never diluted the difficulty of ministry. He urged his students to count the cost of living boldly for Jesus. He wanted them resolved and unafraid to be as salt and light for the Lord. Chambers taught, “All these considerations
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form a powerful temptation to make us pretend we are not salt, to make us put our light under a bushel, and cover our city with a fog, but Jesus will have nothing in the nature of covert discipleship.”
Chambers next turned to the phrase, “You are the light of the world” and explained the illustration to his students:
Light cannot be soiled; you may try to grasp a beam of light with the sootiest hand, but you leave no mark on the light. A sunbeam may shine into the filthiest hovel in the slums of a city, but it cannot be soiled. A merely moral man, or an innocent man, may be soiled in spite of his integrity, but the man who is made pure by the Holy Ghost cannot be soiled, he is as light.
Here again is Chambers speaking to the idea of Christianity being about something more than good morality. It is about a change in the character of a person by the Holy Spirit. In applying this idea to the lives of his students, Chambers’s mind jumped to the importance of innercity ministries. He told his students: “Thank God for the men and women who are spending their lives in the slums of the earth, not as social reformers to lift their brother men to cleaner sties, but as the light of God, revealing a way back to God. God keeps them as the light, unsullied.” Then came Chambers’s exhortation, “If you have been covering your light, uncover it! Walk as children of light.” He ended the sermon with a series of reflective questions: “Are we the salt of the earth? Are we the light of the world?
Are we allowing God to exhibit in our lives the truth of these startling statements of Jesus
Christ?”
Divine Declaration (Matthew 5:17-20)
Chambers’s third message on the Sermon on the Mount was entitled, “Divine
Declaration” and taught Matthew 5:17-20. He included no introduction section to these
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verses before beginning his two subpoints. In his excitement of what these verses entail, he moved immediately into the body of his sermon.
His mission (Matt 5:17-19). Chambers was amazed by how Jesus articulated His mission in these verses. He said:
An amazing word! Our shoes ought to be off our feet and every common-sense mood stripped from our minds when we hear Jesus Christ speak. In Him we deal with God as man, the God-Man, the Representative of the whole human race in one Person. The men of His day traced their religious pedigree back to the constitution of God, and this young Nazarene Carpenter says, “I am the constitution of God”; consequently, to them He was a blasphemer.
For modern man to understand how truly scandalous Jesus’ words were to His original hearers is difficult.
That Chambers was an expository preacher is shown by his understanding of this passage. He said of Christ’s claim in these verses, “Our Lord places Himself as the exact meaning and fulfillment of all Old Testament prophecies.” Chambers asserts the hermeneutical principle that all Old Testament prophecies find their exact meaning and fulfillment in Christ. Concerning God’s commands from the Old Testament, Jesus did not lower the moral standard, but rather raised it higher than humanly attainable—apart from the help of God’s Spirit. He explained:
If the old commandments were difficult, our Lord’s principles are unfathomably more difficult. Our Lord goes behind the old law to the disposition. Everything He teaches is impossible unless He can put into us His Spirit and remake us from within. The Sermon on the Mount is quite unlike the Ten Commandments in the sense of its being absolutely unworkable unless Jesus Christ can remake us.
Chambers’s point here is that, while the Ten Commandments dealt with a person’s behavior, the Sermon on the Mount deals with a person’s motives and inner thoughts, or to use Chambers’s word, our inward “disposition.”
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Chambers spends the next section helping his students understand the implications of Jesus’ statements concerning the application of the Old Testament law to
New Testament believers who are said to be “under grace.” He observed: “There are teachers who argue that the Sermon on the Mount supersedes the Ten Commandments, and that because “we are not under law, but under grace” it does not matter whether we honor our father and mother, whether we covet, et cetera.” Chambers warned his students:
Beware of statements like this: There is no need nowadays to observe giving the tenth either of money or of time; we are in a new dispensation and everything belongs to God. That, in practical application, is sentimental dust-throwing. The giving of the tenth is not a sign that all belongs to God, but a sign that the tenth belongs to God and the rest is ours, and we are held responsible for what we do with it.
Jesus coming to fulfill the Old Testament Law and to die on the cross to usher believers into a state of grace “does not mean we can do as we like.” Chambers said:
It is surprising how easily we can juggle ourselves out of Jesus Christ’s principles by one or two pious sayings repeated sufficiently often. The only safeguard is to keep personally related to God. The secret of all spiritual understanding is to walk in the light, not the light of our convictions, or of our theories, but the light of God (1 John 1:7).
In his exposition of these verses, readers gain insight into his hermeneutics regarding both the preaching of Christ from all the Scriptures, as well as how Chambers understood the system of Old Testament Law versus the dispensation of New Testament grace.10
His message (Matt 5:20). If Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:20 do not startle the modern reader, it is because it is difficult today to grasp the high level of esteem given to
10 Further study toward a full analysis of this is proposed in the Recommendations for Further Research in chapter 6.
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the Pharisees of New Testament times. Chambers desired his students to understand, so he asked them to think of the “most upright person” they knew, the “most moral, sterling, religious man.” By way of example, he mentioned Nicodemus and Saul of Tarsus—or the most moral man imaginable, and yet, someone “who has never received the Holy Spirit.”
Imagine the best behaving, most moral person. Chambers said, “Jesus says you must exceed him in righteousness. You have to be not only as moral as the most moral man you know, but infinitely more—to be so right in your actions, so pure in your motives, that God Almighty can see nothing to blame in you.”
Rightly understood, this is a challenging statement indeed. Chambers refers to it as a “spiritual torpedo.” He explained, “These statements of Jesus are the most revolutionary statements human ears ever listened to, and it needs the Holy Ghost to interpret them to us; the shallow admiration for Jesus Christ as a Teacher that is taught to- day is of no use.” By way of application, Chambers quotes from Psalm 24:3, “Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who may stand in His holy place?” Chambers’s response is that only Jesus can. He said, “Only the Son of God; and if the Son of God is formed in us by regeneration and sanctification, He will exhibit Himself through our mortal flesh. That is the ideal of Christianity. . . .”
This is the genius of what Jesus accomplished in the Sermon on the Mount. As said in the first sermon from Matthew 5, it “produces despair in the heart of the natural man.” Jesus’ fulfillment of God’s Law makes morality about something deeper than outward behavior. Chambers explained:
Jesus says our disposition must be right to its depths, not only our conscious motives but our unconscious motives. Now we are beyond our depth. Can God make me pure in heart? Blessed be the Name of God, He can! Can He alter my
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disposition so that when circumstances reveal me to myself, I am amazed? He can. Can He impart His nature to me until it is identically the same as His own? He can. That, and nothing less, is the meaning of His Cross and Resurrection.
Jesus died on the cross for the forgiveness of every sinner who will turn from sin and trust in Him for salvation. Jesus’ death makes it possible for the sinner to be delivered from sin’s penalty. His resurrection makes it possible for the sinner to be delivered from sin’s power. Chambers desperately wanted that to be understood by his students.
Picking up the idea of a believer’s righteousness exceeding that of the scribes and
Pharisees, Chambers pointed out one more thing to his students. He told them the
“righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees was right, not wrong; that they did other than righteousness is obvious, but Jesus is speaking here of their righteousness, which His disciples are to exceed.” This, then begged the question, “What exceeds right doing if it be not right being?” Chambers explained:
Right being without right doing is possible if we refuse to enter into relationship with God, but that cannot “exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees.” Jesus Christ’s message here is that our righteousness must “exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees” in doing—they were nothing in being—or we shall never enter into the kingdom of heaven.
A person cannot “exceed” the righteousness of “the most moral man we know” apart from the disposition of Jesus coming into the believer in a saving way and the power of
Jesus enabling a believer in sanctifying way. Chambers reminded his students at the close of his sermon:
The teaching of the Sermon on the Mount must produce despair in the natural man; if it does not, it is because he has paid no attention to it. Pay attention to Jesus Christ’s teaching and you will soon say, “Who is sufficient for these things?” “Blessed are the pure in heart.” If Jesus Christ means what He says, where are we in regard to it? “Come unto Me,” says Jesus.
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According to Chambers, Christianity is not about “doing” to “become,” but “being” that leads to doing.
Matthew 19:16-22—“The Philosophy of the Perfect Life”11
The introduction to If Thou Wilt Be Perfect states Chambers gave these lectures and sermons in his biblical psychology class from “January to July 1912.” Chapter eleven is entitled, “The Philosophy of the Perfect Life.” It is a sermon from Matthew 19:16-22, the story of Jesus and the rich young ruler.
Before beginning his sermon, Chambers paused to remind his students of the importance of context for right understanding of the Bible. This is noteworthy, since
Robinson’s definition of expository preaching speaks to the “historical, grammatical, and literary study of a passage in its context.”12 Chambers said:
The occasion of a conversation is in many respects as important as its subject. The occasion of this conversation was the coming to Jesus of a splendid, upright, young aristocrat who was consumed with a master passion to possess the life he saw Jesus possessed. He comes with a feeling that there is something he has not yet, in spite of his morality and integrity and his riches, something deeper, more far-reaching he can attain to, and he feels instinctively that this Jesus of Nazareth is the One who can tell him how to possess it.
Chambers then proceeded to preach a four-point, verse-by-verse, fully alliterated sermon which explains, illustrates, and applies the passage.
11 Unless otherwise noted, all Chambers’s quotes in this section come from If Thou Wilt Be Perfect, in Complete Works, 568-605.
12 Robinson, Biblical Preaching, 21 (italics added for emphasis).
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Occasion of the Conversation of Perfection (Matthew 19:16)
Chambers’s first assertion reads, “The Occasion of the Conversion of Perfection,” and deals with verse 16. Chambers calls this the “What” and the “May.” The rich young ruler wanted to know what he must do to inherit eternal life. After a brief word study on the kind of “life” Jesus had which the man sought, Chambers applies the text by saying,
“The great lesson our Lord taught him was that it is not anything he must do, but a relationship he must be willing to get into that is necessary.” Challenging those who say a person must do this or stop that to be saved, Chambers points out that Jesus always brings sinners back to one thing—standing in right relationship to Jesus.
Obedience to the Conditions of Perfection (Matthew 19:17-20)
Chambers’s second point was “The Obedience to the Conditions of Perfection” and deals with verses 17-20. Chambers calls this the “Why” and the “If.” He points out that Jesus was not being “captious” by pressing the man for a definition for the word
“good.” Jesus wants to know if the man understands Jesus’ true identity. The man recounting his good resume of morality leads Chambers to clarify the universal salvation need of every person whether they are deemed to have a lot of sin or a little. Of the rich man, Chambers remarks, “This man was an upright, sterling, religious man; it would be absurd to talk to him about sin, he was not in the place where he could understand what it meant.”
Then, in his challenge to the students, “There are hundreds of clean-living, upright men who are not convicted of sin, I mean sin in the light of the commandments
Jesus mentioned. We need to revise the place we put conviction of sin in and the place
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the Spirit of God puts in.” Repeatedly in Chambers’s lectures and sermons, he brings things back around to the fact that salvation for any soul hinges solely on whether that person responds to the salvation offered in Jesus. “The most staggering thing about Jesus
Christ,” said Chambers, “is that He makes human destiny depend not on goodness or badness, not on things done or not done, but on Who we say He is.”
Under sermon point two, Chambers exposits the question from whence the title of the sermon comes. In verse 21, Jesus asks the question, “If you want to be perfect. . . .”
Chambers takes a brief sidebar on the definition of perfection saying, “Beware the mental quibbling over the word ‘perfect.’ Perfection does not mean the full maturity and consummation of a man’s powers, but a perfect fitness for doing the will of God.” He then immediately presses his students on whether they actually do want God to perfect or
“adjust” them to Him which, in turn, positions them to do the will of God. The cost to
“self” is high if God should answer such a prayer. Chambers ends this section by asking his students: “Is that really the desire of our hearts?”
Obliterating Concessions to Perfection (Matthew 19:21)
Chambers entitled point three, “The Obliterating Concessions to Perfection” and deals with verse 21. Chambers calls this the “Go” and “Come.” The conditions of this rich, young ruler entering into the perfection of eternal life required him to go and sell everything he possessed and give it to the poor. Does this mean every believer must take a vow of poverty? Chambers makes the appropriate application clear: “To you or me
Jesus might not say that, but He would say something equivalent over anything we are
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depending upon.” Chambers then gave his students a quick hermeneutical principle:
“Never push an experience into a principle by which to guide other lives.”
Chambers often put great emphasis on what he called the “Ifs of Jesus.” For
Chambers, there are some “ifs” involving what it means to receive salvation, but other
“ifs” involving what it means to live the life of a believer. To pay attention to what kind of “if” is involved is important. Chambers explains regarding the “if” of verse 21:
Remember, the conditions of discipleship are not the conditions for salvation. We are perfectly at liberty to say, “No thank you, I am obliged for being delivered from hell, very thankful to escape the abominations of sin, but when it comes to these conditions it is rather too much; I have my own interests in life, my own possessions.”
“Go, sell . . . come, follow Me.”
Obstructing Counterpoise to Perfection (Matthew 19:22)
Last, Chambers taught under the heading, “The Obstructing Counterpoise to
Perfection” and deals with the final verse of the pericope, verse 22. Chambers calls this the “When” and “Went.” When the young man heard what Jesus said, he went away sorrowful, for he was rich. The young man desperately wanted to hear from Jesus, but upon hearing what Jesus had to say to the man’s surrender, it was simply too much.
Chambers observed: “Most of us have only ears to hear what we intend to agree with, but when the surgical operation of the Spirit of God has been performed on the inside and our perceiving powers are awakened to understand what we hear, then we get to the condition of this young man.” Each person must come to understand that his possessions can be utilized for God’s glory, but ultimately what God wants is “us.”
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Chambers closes the sermon with an application section asserting Jesus’
“antipathy” toward “emotional excitement.” Matthew 19:21 ends with Jesus giving the man the simple command, “Come, follow Me.” Chambers notes the ordinariness of the encounter. Chambers said, “Beware of the ‘seeking great things for yourself’ idea—cold shivers down the back, visions of angels and visitations from God.” He puts forth the misguided, rhetorical question, “I can’t decide in this plain, commonplace, ordinary evening as to whether I will serve Jesus or not.” Chambers contends, “That is the only way Jesus Christ ever comes to us. He will never take us at a disadvantage, never terrify us out of our wits by some amazing manifestation of His power and then say, ‘Follow
Me.’ He wants us to decide when all our powers are in full working order. . . .” Jesus is ever-willing to transform a life, but Chambers emphasized the ordinariness of how Jesus comes to people.
Conclusion
Chambers’s theology of preaching matches the aforementioned attributes, which define preaching as “expository.” Readers should recall Robinson’s definition of expository preaching as: “the communication of a biblical concept, derived from and transmitted through a historical, grammatical, and literary study of a passage in its context, which the Holy Spirit first applies to the personality and experience of the preacher, then through the preacher, applies to the hearers.”
Chambers himself wrote: “What is expository preaching? It is not taking a text out of its setting and using it as a title; it means that the verse is taken in its setting and
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applied where it is meant to apply.”13 Regarding the primacy of the Word and exegesis, he observed, “There is no true illumination apart from the written Word. . . . Exegesis is not torturing a text to agree with a theory of my own, but leading out its meaning.”14
Chambers repeatedly stressed, “God grant that we may be workmen approved unto God, rightly dividing the word of truth.”15 Chambers was an expositor of God’s Word and a professor of expository preaching.
13 Chambers, Workmen of God, in Complete Works, 1363.
14 Chambers, Disciples Indeed, in Complete Works, 386-87.
15 Chambers, Workmen of God, in Complete Works, 1364.
Chapter 6
Conclusions, Future Plans, and Applications for Preaching
Conclusions
This dissertation demonstrates that Oswald Chambers’s theology of preaching was expository in nature within the historical-theological backdrop of the Wesleyan and early-Keswickian views of personal sanctification. It has been shown that Chambers was not merely a professor of preaching, but also a professor of expository preaching in which orthodoxy (biblically accurate doctrine) and orthopraxy (biblically faithful conduct) are inseparable.1 This dissertation determined to answer the research question,
“Based upon Chambers’s Bible Training College curriculum regarding preaching, was an expository preacher likely to be produced?”
An examination of the lectures that were taught and the sermons preached by
Chambers at the Bible Training College between 1911 and 1915 proved the thesis. In the analysis, two primary proofs substantiated the thesis. First, Chambers’s lectures to his sermon preparation classes show he taught expository preaching to his students. Second,
Chambers’ published lectures reveal that he himself employed a method of preaching
Scripture that fits the definition of expository preaching.2 By the aforementioned proofs,
1 The writer found no example of Chambers himself using the term “expository preaching,” but the evidence still reveals him to be a professor of expository preaching.
2 Robinson, Biblical Preaching, 21. 136
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this question has been answered in the affirmative. Chambers was, without a doubt, an expository preacher who taught his students expository preaching.
With those conclusions maintained, a couple of caveats need explanation. First, though an expository preacher, Chambers lacked emphasis on the grammatical aspects of a passage. Robinson’s definition of expository preaching speaks to the “communication of a biblical concept, derived from and transmitted through a historical, grammatical, and literary study of a passage in its context. . . .”3 That Chambers viewed the study of the
Greek of the New Testament important is shown by his making New Testament Greek part of the Bible Training College’s curriculum.4 Curious, however, is the fact that a search for the phrases “Hebrew word” and “Greek word” in Chambers’s Complete Works identifies only one explicit linguistic reference. In the class notes from Biblical
Psychology, Chambers refers to the Greek word “nous” and defines it as “responsible intelligence.”5 That Chambers does not often speak directly to the original languages does not mean he is not an expository preacher. As chapters 4 and 5 demonstrated,
Chambers did employ the other Bible study elements of Robinson’s definition, namely the historical and literary aspects of a passage in its biblical context.
A second caveat is regarding a reminder not to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater regarding Chambers’s theology of preaching. The difficulty in summarizing what he believed regarding sanctification is no reason to dismiss what he
3 Ibid.
4 Bible Training College Syllabus, 2.
5 Chambers, Biblical Psychology, in Complete Works, 207.
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taught about preaching. Chapters 2 and 3 went to great lengths to make the point that one cannot rightly understand Chambers without understanding his historical and theological context. Whether the preacher understands it or not, every preacher is influenced by the times in which he lives. On one hand, it is bothersome to define Chambers’s theology as a Baptist-Methodist-Keswick-Holiness Movement hodgepodge. On the other hand, as was noted above, all these streams of influence held in common the high view of
Scripture as the foundation upon which expository preaching rests. A debate may ensue as to whether the content of Chambers’s preaching fits this or that theological mold, but clearly is evident his method was expository.
Recommendations for Further Research
In showing Chambers’s theology of preaching to be expository in nature, several opportunities for further study became apparent. Some of these topics would help further clarify Chambers’s theology of preaching, while some lie in other areas of study. The writer’s sincerest hope is that this dissertation could pave the way for more research on this influential, but largely unresearched man.
The following topics are proposed as considerations for further research. More study needs to be done in exploring the nuances of what Wesley, Keswick, and Chambers believed about the means and extent of personal sanctification this side of heaven. More analysis is needed to compare and contrast how Wesley, Keswick, and Chambers understood the role of preaching the Old Testament Law for further sanctification in the lives of New Testament believers.6 Over one hundred times in Chambers’s Complete
6 Packer explores this topic briefly in chapter 4 of Keep in Step with the Spirit, 101-38.
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Works, he uses the word “dispensation.” Further research should be done exploring what that word meant for Chambers and the implications that holds for Chambers’s views on eschatology.
More study needs to be done regarding Chambers’s understanding of the role of the Holy Spirit in sermon preparation and preaching. Knowing Chambers spent his final years of ministry in the Y.M.C.A. tents in Egypt serving troops during World War I, more research needs to be done examining what Chambers taught about trusting the sovereignty and goodness of God in a time of war. For the sake of equipping modern-day preachers, a need can be seen for taking the teaching outlines from Chambers’s Complete
Works, reformatting them as ready-made sermon outlines, and publishing them according to the order of the Protestant Bible canon. Since little has been published on Chambers, areas abound for further study.
Applications for Preaching Today
Several items addressed in this dissertation have immediate application for aiding contemporary preachers. First, the preacher should double-check and make sure God really has called him to preach. Without an explicit calling, Chambers believed the preacher would not succeed. He told his students, “Remember, God calls us to proclaim the Gospel.”7 The preacher who “self-elects” to become a preacher will fail in preaching the Bible faithfully and, furthermore, will be in danger of exploiting it.8 On the contrary,
7 Ibid., 5.
8 Ibid., 3.
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a preacher possessed by a clear sense of God’s calling will have the sense of being
“enabled by the Lord Jesus.”9 This deep sense of calling will drive the preacher’s passion for adequate sermon preparation and his passion to see unbelievers turn from sin and trust
Christ in salvation.
A second application exhorts the preacher to obtain as much theological training as possible. Chambers’s desire to open a Bible Training College was based upon his conviction that the Christian worker should be an “expert” in his field of ministry and theology.10 The curriculum at the Bible Training College was academically strenuous, because Chambers desired his students to be fulfillments of 2 Timothy, workers “rightly dividing the word of truth.” If a minister has an opportunity to better equip himself for the Lord’s work, he should make the most of it.
A third application to contemporary preaching is that preaching is primarily about the communication of the Gospel. The verse in 1 Corinthians 1:21 says it “pleased God through the foolishness of the message to save those who believe.” Chambers told his students, “The determination to be a fool if necessary is the golden rule for a preacher.”11
Even though the preacher must be willing to embrace both positive and negative reactions to his preaching of the Gospel, God’s purpose for preaching must never be forgotten. As Chambers said, “Remember that preaching is God’s ordained method of saving the world.”12
9 Ibid.
10 Bible Training College Syllabus, 5.
11 Chambers, Disciples Indeed, in Complete Works, 398.
12 Chambers, Approved Unto God, in Complete Works, 13.
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A fourth application for contemporary preaching from Chambers is that expository preaching calls for an unwavering commitment to the hard work of exegesis from whence faithful preaching flows. Perhaps this application is obnoxiously obvious in a dissertation on expository preaching, but nonetheless deserves explicit mention.
Chambers said that “exegesis is not torturing a text to agree with a theory of my own, but leading out its meaning.”13 He called his students to work hard in studying the Scriptures, so they could “reach for the ideal” in preaching. By this, he was referring to being effective in faithful preaching of a passage and clear communication of the gospel from it.14
A fifth application regards Chambers’s insistence that obedience to God’s Word is essential to the faithful preaching of God’s Word. He taught his students that biblical discernment is impossible if the preacher has chosen a life of disobedience. His remarks on this idea from Studies in the Sermon on the Mount bear repeating here:
The golden rule for understanding in spiritual matters is not intellect, but obedience. Discernment in the spiritual world is never gained by intellect; in the commonsense world, it is. If a man wants scientific knowledge, intellectual curiosity is his guide; but if he wants insight into what Jesus Christ teaches, he can only get it by obedience. If things are dark to us spiritually, it is because there is something we will not do. Intellectual darkness comes because of ignorance; spiritual darkness comes because of something I do not intend to obey.15
Here, Chambers’s words have profound implications for the preachers. A preacher struggling to hear from God through His Word should pause and self-evaluate himself
13 Chambers, Disciples Indeed, in Complete Works, 387.
14 Chambers, Approved Unto God, in Complete Works, 13.
15 Chambers, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, in Complete Works, 1458.
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spiritually. Chambers told his students, “Maintain your personal relationship with God at all costs. Never allow anything to come between your soul and God, and welcome anyone or anything that leads you to know Him better.”16 The more obedient a preacher is, the more understanding he will have regarding the things of God. This is essential, because “the life of a preacher speaks louder than his words.”17
A sixth application for contemporary preaching says the preacher must resolve to remain dependent on the Holy Spirit in both sermon preparation and preaching.
Theological training matters immensely, but it is all for naught if the preacher is not surrendered to the power of God. Chambers’s lectures include statements students such as, “Keep yourself full to the brim in reading but remember that the first great Resource is the Holy Ghost Who lays at your disposal the Word of God. The thing to prepare is not the sermon, but the preacher.”18 In another place, Chambers said, “The deep and engrossing need of those of us who name the Name of Christ is reliance on the Holy
Spirit.”19 With the Gospel-proclaiming purpose of preaching established, he reminded his students, “Impressive preaching is rarely Gospel-preaching; Gospel-preaching is based on the great mystery of belief in the Atonement, which belief is created in others, not by my impressiveness, but by the insistent conviction of the Holy Spirit.”20
16 Chambers, Approved Unto God, in Complete Works, 11.
17 Chambers, Disciples Indeed, in Complete Works, 398.
18 Ibid. (emphasis added).
19 Ibid., 391.
20 Ibid., 398.
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And finally, the ministries of Mr. and Mrs. Chambers call every minister to a life stewardship self-assessment. Oswald Chambers lived only forty-three years and yet his impact on evangelical Christendom remains prolific through My Utmost for His Highest.
As McCasland has noted, “Today, more people know his name and writing than when he was alive.”21 As asserted above, Chambers’s commitment to teaching expository preaching is perhaps part of what has caused his message to be so enduring through the years. At the same time, his impact would have been far less had Mrs. Chambers not sensed God calling her to give her husband’s word to the world by publishing a host of his books after his death. As McCasland said, “Without her work, his words would never have existed on paper or in published form. Even so, she put Oswald’s name on the cover. She saw herself as a channel through which his words were conveyed to others.”22
The story of this unique ministry couple, married a mere seven years, is a testimony to his willingness to be fully surrendered to the Lord and her willingness to trust God’s sovereignty and pursue a ministry of her own after his death. Without the works of Mrs.
Chambers, the opportunity to reassemble Mr. Chambers’s theology of preaching would never have existed. For that, the preachers of this generation and the ones to come are richly blessed.
21 McCasland, Abandoned to God, 62.
22 Ibid., 281.
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Trumbull, Charles Gallaudet. “The Let Go of Surrender.” Sunday School Times 53 (September 16, 1911): 442.
156
Warburton, T. Rennie. “Holiness Religion: An Anomaly of Sectarian Typologies.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 8, no. 1 (1969): 130-39.
Webster, Douglas. “P. T. Forsyth’s Theology of Missions.” International Review of Mission 44, no. 174 (April 1955): 175-81.
Wirt, Sherwood Eliot. “Their Utmost for His Highest: Oswald and Gertrude Chambers.” Christianity Today 18, no. 19 (June 21, 1974): 16-17.
Dissertations, Theses, and Papers
Barabas, Steven. “Keswick and Its Use of the Bible.” Ph.D. diss., Princeton Theological Seminary, 1948.
Cho, Jaeyoung. “A Critical Examination of Jonathan Edward’s Theology of Preaching.” Ph.D. diss., New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, 2012.
Dennis, Austin McIver. “The Reconciling Word: A Theology of Preaching.” Th.D., Duke University, 2014.
Dunn, Phillip Lang. “An Analysis of the Preaching Ministry of Charles Silvester Horne and Its Implications for a Theology of Preaching for the Contemporary Church.” Ph.D. diss., Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011.
Fewkes, G. N. “Richard Reader Harris, 1847-1909: An Assessment of the Life and Influence of a Leader of the Holiness Movement.” M.A. thesis, University of Manchester, 1995.
Hurley, Baxter S. “Practicing Like Jesus: A Study of Christian Spiritual Disciplines.” D.Min., Asbury Theological Seminary, 2013.
Jacobsen, Timothy Allen. “Nurturing Spiritual Formation among Missionaries.” D.Min., Providence College and Seminary (Canada), 2006.
Johnson, Gregory O. “From Morning Watch to Quiet Time: The Historical and Theological Development of Private Prayer in Anglo-American Protestant Instruction, 1870-1950.” Pd.D., Saint Louis University, 2007.
Long, David C. “Spiritual Formation: A Course for Leaders of the Church in the Majority World.” D.Min., Asbury Theological Seminary, 2014.
Pearce, Thomas Preston. “An Examination of the Higher Life Concept of Sanctification with Respect to Its Dependence upon the Trichotomous View of Man.” Th.D. diss., Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary, 1994.
157
Russell, Andrew C. “None of Self, and all of Thee: The Keswick Movement at Home and Abroad.” Ph.D., Saint Louis University, 2013.
Von Kanel, Randall Lewis. “A Critical Analysis of the Discipleship Motif in the Keswick Movement.” Th.D., New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, 1989.
Wimberly, Collin. “A Study of the Common Theological Elements of Keswick Preaching.” D.Min., New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, 2003.
Electronic Resources
Magnusson, Susan, narrator. “My Utmost for His Highest: The Legacy of Oswald and Biddy Chambers.” Day of Discovery (2011). Accessed August 4, 2017. https:// dod.org/programs/my-utmost-for-his-highest-the-legacy-of-oswald-biddy- chambers/.
Oswald Chambers Publications Association. Accessed June 14, 2017. http://www.oswald chambers.co.uk.
Sceats, D. D. “Perfectionism and the Keswick Convention, 1875-1900.” University of Bristol (United Kingdom), 1970. Order No. U370310. Accessed August 18, 2017. http://aaron.swbts.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.aaron.swbts.edu/doc view/301296754?accountid=7073.
Ule, Michelle. “Oswald and Biddy Chambers.” Accessed August 5, 2016. http://www. michelleule.com/oswald-and-biddy-chambers/.
Waay, Bob. “Oswald Chambers: Personal Piety Combined With Flawed Theology.” Critical Issues Commentary 132 (2016). Accessed April 15, 2017. http://cic ministry.org/commentary/issue132.pdf.
Miscellaneous
Bible Training College Syllabus. Autumn Session (September 26-December 19, 1914).
Luchetti, Lenny. “Preaching as a Spiritual Discipline: An Incarnational Model.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Homiletics Society, La Mirada, CA, October 17-19, 2013.