MY UTMOST FOR HIS HIGHEST 24TH FEBRUARY 2025 BY OSWALD CHAMBERS
Read My Utmost for His Highest 24th February 2025 (Oswald Chambers Devotional) Monday Inspirational Message.
TOPIC: The Delight Of Sacrifice
I will very gladly spend for you everything I have. — 2 Corinthians 12:15
When the Spirit of God has filled our hearts with the love of God, we begin to identify ourselves with Jesus’s interest in other people—and Jesus is interested in everyone. As his disciples, we have no right to be guided by personal preferences or prejudices. The delight of sacrifice comes from laying down our lives—not from carelessly flinging our lives away or giving them over to a cause but from deliberately laying them down for Jesus and his interests in others.
Paul laid down his life in order to win people to Jesus, not to himself. He sought to attract people to Jesus, never to himself (1 Corinthians 1:13). “I have become,” he wrote, “all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some” (9:22). To do this, Paul had to become a sacramental personality. He didn’t hide away or insist on a holy life alone with God, a life in which he’d be no use to others. Instead, Paul told Jesus to help himself to his life.
Many of us are so caught up in pursuing our own goals that Jesus can’t help himself to our lives. Paul didn’t have any goals of his own. “I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my people,” he wrote (Romans 9:3). Wild, extravagant talk, isn’t it? No. When a person is in love, it isn’t extravagant to talk like this, and Paul was in love with Jesus Christ.
Further Reading: Numbers 9-11; Mark 5:1-20
Wisdom from Oswald
The remarkable thing about fearing God is that when you fear God you fear nothing else, whereas if you do not fear God you fear everything else. “Blessed is every one that feareth the Lord”;…
The Highest Good—The Pilgrim’s Song Book, 537 L