Oswald Chambers Daily Devotional 3rd August 2026 (My Utmost for His Highest) Message
Read My Utmost for His Highest 3rd August 2026 (Oswald Chambers Daily Devotional) Monday Inspirational Message.
TOPIC: The Compelling Purpose of God
We are going up to Jerusalem. — Luke 18:31
In the life of our Lord, Jerusalem stands as the place where he reached the climax of his Father’s will. “For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me” (John 6:38). Doing his Father’s will was our Lord’s compelling purpose throughout his life. Nothing he met with along the way—neither joy nor sorrow, success nor failure—deterred him: “Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51).
Related Post
The big thing to remember is that we go to Jerusalem to fulfill God’s purpose, not our own. In our worldly life, our ambitions are our own. In our Christian life, we have no aims of our own. It’s common to hear people talking about their decision to follow Jesus Christ, their determination to be Christian. In the New Testament, the emphasis is on God’s decision: “You did not choose me, but I chose you” (John 15:16). We don’t have any conscious awareness of God’s decision; we are taken up into his purpose without any awareness at all. Nor do we have any conception of what he is aiming at. As we go on in our life with him, our understanding of his goal only gets more and more vague.
God’s aim looks like it’s missing the mark because we are too short-sighted to see his target. At the beginning of our life as Christians, we have our own ideas of God’s purpose. We think, “God has called me to do a special work,” and we go and do the work. Yet the work doesn’t satisfy the feeling of being compelled by his larger purpose.
“Jesus took the Twelve aside” (Luke 18:31). He is taking us aside for his purpose all the time. There’s more to his plan than we have yet understood.
BIBLE IN A YEAR: Psalms 63-65; Romans 6
WISDOM FROM OSWWALD
We are apt to think that everything that happens to us is to be turned into useful teaching; it is to be turned into something better than teaching, viz. into character. We shall find that the spheres God brings us into are not meant to teach us something but to make us something.
The Love of God—The Ministry of the Unnoticed, 664 L
