Thursday October 24th, 2013 Oswald Chambers: Abandoned to God The Life Story of the Author of My Utmost For His Highest David McCasland PART 3 “Unless the life of a missionary is hid with Christ in God before he begins his work, that life will become exclusive and narrow. It will never become the servant of all men, it will never wash the feet of others.” —So Send I You 9 THE WANDERING PROPHET IN AMERICA (1906–1907) The SS Baltic steamed into New York harbor on November 15, 1906. Chambers stood at the rail, enthralled with the Statue of Liberty and the towering skyline of Manhattan. So this was America. Was he really here? With the curiosity of a child, he scanned the bustling harbor and feasted on the reality of arriving in this new land. Excited voices, shouts, and cheers from the decks below gave new meaning to Oswald’s understanding of the words “freedom and opportunity.” Of the Baltic’s 1,426 passengers, more than half were immigrants traveling in Third Class. Chambers had gone out of his way to talk to many of them during the voyage. He would especially remember the look of anticipation in their eyes and the ring of their names—Olson, Nyberg, Isaac, Johanson, Levy, Bajefsky, Barovitz, and Rabenda. They came from Norway, Sweden, Latvia, and Russia; their surnames speaking the history of nations, the oppression of minorities, and the universal longing for peace and a new beginning. A few were identified by specific occupations—tailor, farmer, and weaver—but most appeared on the passenger list as “laborer.” Chambers was coming to visit and would return to his homeland. But they had left home and were coming here to stay. Where and what was “home,” after all? He tried to imagine their feelings as the tugboats guided the ship toward its berth. Above, in First Class, the Honorable Earl of Suffolk and his wife, the Countess, prepared to disembark. Her maid and the Earl’s manservant had already left their own First Class accommodations to prepare the mountain of luggage and steamer trunks for arrival. Nakada and Chambers had shared a Second Class cabin during the ten-day journey. It was not luxurious, but much more comfortable than the crowded compartments below. Underneath the water line, shirtless men glistening with sweat labored in the engine room and the stokehold. Oswald’s literary mind could easily have seen a simile in this voyage of the Baltic. The world was like an ocean liner, filled with an incredible variety of people from every station in life. Some understood their ultimate destination and others did not. Whether they wore fine silk or ragged wool, people were the same, and Oswald believed they all hungered to know His Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. In America, a great land of freedom, people in mansions as well as tenements suffered from spiritual oppression. The thin Scotsman and the stocky Japanese watched as the gangplank was maneuvered into place. As the passengers began to disembark, they shook hands with broad smiles. They had come to do battle and see how God might use them for His glory in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” For a month Chambers and Nakada stayed with people on the East Coast, taking part in church services and preaching at special missions. Oswald’s fascination with these new friends grew along with his appreciation for them: From John Kimber’s home in Newport, Rhode Island, he wrote on November 27: I am staying now with a family of Quakers and it is all ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and ‘thy.’ One of the lads did something wrong, and in the mildest way possible the mother said, ‘Thee will be punished for that, dear’; the lad’s countenance fell and he was punished. A most judicious method, almost bordering on the impossible. These saints have had experiences, as I have, of two distinct works of grace, and I find the bonds of the Spirit are closer than anything I have ever known before. Just now I hear Mr. Kimber calling ‘Sophie,’ she is a saved and sanctified Negress of about 60, simply shining with the beauty of the Lord. She came up to me the first day I was here and said, ‘I love thee, thou’st brought heaven with thee.’ These black people are gems ... and so enthusiastic. They laugh and shout ‘Glory’ and interrupt the preacher to tell the audience an incident they think illustrates the point—gloriously unconventional. Brother Nakada and I are being handed around through these States in a wonderful way. The saints are actually squabbling over us! All we do is to eat and sleep and talk and God witnesses. It is doing me endless good. I have only one desire growing more and more, that the Lord may be glorified. On December 17, Oswald wrote from Brooklyn to his sister Florence: We had a blessed time on Sunday here, many came out for sanctification and for salvation and for healing. You see, I believe that Jesus Christ our Lord has all power in heaven and on earth; do you? I find most people believe that He has all power in heaven, but are not sure about earth. I am finding out day by day more and more wonderful things about Jesus our Lord and what He can do. I am getting overwhelmed with calls for missions and services, and God is leading and using me blessedly. I am now en route for Cincinnati, all the bottom berths are taken and the top ones are supposed to rock more; but, Hallelujah, I shall sleep like a babe and arrive in that city where as yet I do not know a living soul, but God knows and that is enough for me. His letter to Florence continued the next day. I slept like a top, really, every moment of the day reminds me of my Father’s care, tender, watchful and grand. Truly I think I am one of the Lord’s spoilt bairns. For seven hundred miles, nearly twice the distance from Edinburgh to London, Oswald’s train rolled across New Jersey and Pennsylvania, then southward through Ohio toward the junction of three rivers and “The Queen City of the West”—Cincinnati. He arrived on Friday, December 21, and was promptly whisked by streetcar to the top of a hill known as Mt. Auburn. There a warm welcome awaited him at God’s Bible School and Missionary Training Home. Founded in 1900 by Martin Wells Knapp, the school functioned as the hub of a growing holiness movement in the United States.* In spite of Knapp’s sudden death during a typhoid epidemic in 1901, the school continued to grow, and by 1906 it served nearly two hundred students. Chambers and Nakada arrived just in time for the school’s ten-day Christmas Convention. Juji was listed on the slate of expected speakers, but Oswald was a surprise. That mattered little to the convention organizers who were always ready for God’s surprises. In holiness circles, most meetings were advertised as: LEADERS: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost; WORKERS: Names of those invited to preach and lead. Invariably, a final line was added: “And others whom the Lord may send.” Chambers was enthusiastically welcomed as one of their own, asked to speak at the gathering, and involved in ordaining nine candidates to the gospel ministry. In the January 17, 1907, issue of God’s Revivalist magazine, Oswald described the evening meetings, held in the school’s George Street Mission, as taking place “away down in the heart of that awful city of Cincinnati, in a street of unblushing sin and shame.” His assessment was more than Victorian prudery. Cincinnati, with four hundred thousand inhabitants, had its genteel, religious, and cultured side. But, like every metropolis, it was an “awful city” in many ways. In the slums bordering the Ohio River, crime, drunkenness, prostitution, and family disintegration left their scars on a poor, often transient, community. Children suffered most from the harsh existence in and around Shantytown, a collection of tarpaper shacks littering the banks of the Ohio down to the water’s edge. Cincinnati’s tenements and back alleys became the arena in which God’s Bible School students put their Christian principles into practice. They were in training as Christian workers, preachers, and missionaries, and that involved more than classes at their two-acre hilltop campus. Besides working one hour each day at the school, students passed out tracts, conducted street meetings, visited hospitals, and held gospel services in jails, infirmaries, missions, and churches. In the area around George Street, they were often greeted by jeers and physical threats. Every Thanksgiving Day, God’s Bible School held its annual dinner for the city’s poor children. In 1905 seven hundred pounds of turkey with all the trimmings were served to eighteen hundred children. The neediest received better clothing and all were given a “goody bag” as they left the dining room. A service presenting the message of Christ completed the day. Students spent a week cooking and preparing for the Thanksgiving Day event, then worked into the night cleaning up. That evening they fed five hundred men at the George Street Mission. A primary school in Kentucky, an orphanage and farm, a publishing company, and a rescue home for girls were also operated by the school. It is not surprising that Chambers said of the whole enterprise, “This is truly Holiness socialism.” ________________________________________ * Holiness was widely accepted to mean “the Bible doctrine of regeneration and entire sanctification as taught by the original founders of Methodism, John and Charles Wesley.” The “full-gospel” message of the early twentieth-century holiness movement included “regeneration, entire sanctification, healing, and the second coming of Jesus.” ________________________________________ At the Christmas Convention Nakada remarked on the exuberance of people during the services. “I, having come from England lately, notice especially the liberty in the demonstration. May the Lord rub off the starch of every Holiness people in every country.” Chambers was keenly aware of the differences between a quiet, orderly Pentecostal League of Prayer service in Britain and the shouting, arm-waving, open emotion of an American holiness meeting. He had no problem with happy religious enthusiasm or weeping penitence, but he looked to criteria other than these for evidence of the work of the Holy Spirit. He wrote in the January 17, 1907, Revivalist, There was nothing to hinder the blessed Lord having His way at this Convention. The hearts of all were eager and expectant and hungry. Many were the signs of God’s mighty presence—the full altars, the spontaneous freedom, and the prominent place the Bible received, but perhaps the most significant sign to some of us was the opening of God’s truth to us and the ability granted us by the Holy Spirit to understand and grip the Lord’s vital truth. On January 1, 1907, he wrote in his diary: The Bible School is situated on a hill overlooking Cincinnati, and the school is called The Mount of Blessing. The Bible School in Tokyo started from here and is largely supported by them. It is all run on faith lines, such as I have been used to. For many months they have been praying for a teacher, and at their request I have agreed to stay until July and teach and write some books. 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. Zech. 8:21–23 came to me with power today. While Nakada traveled to renew old ties around the States, Chambers began teaching on January 4. Eight days into his Biblical Theology course, he greeted his students with an examination: 1. What do you understand by Biblical Theology? 2. Define science. 3. What do you mean by Bible facts being Revelation facts? 4. Show the difference between common sense and the common people. 5. Define Agnosticism, theory, and hypothesis. 6. Give Scriptural proof that God created both the material and Bible worlds. 7. What do you understand by insanity? 8. What is Biblical criticism? What is higher criticism? If Chambers had a pet peeve it was, in his words, “intellectual slovenliness, disguised by a seemingly true regard for the spiritual interests.” The solution? “Extermination by honest, hardworking, sanctified students of God’s Word.” His course outline set forth bedrock convictions about the importance of diligent study and sound teaching. To his students he said: “More than half the side-tracks and all the hysterical phenomena that seize whole communities of people, like a pestiferous epidemic, from time to time, arise from spiritual laziness and intellectual sloth on the part of so-called religious teachers. There are a host of Holiness adventurers whose careers would suddenly end, if vigorous sanctified saints were abroad.” His warning to prospective teachers of Christian doctrine came in the words of Dean Alford’s Golden Rule: “What thou has not by suffering bought, presume thou not to teach.” With all his emphasis on truth, Oswald was never content to affect the mind alone. His goal was to stir the will to act on sound principles of Scripture, so that people might demonstrate the love of Christ. He looked intently at his eager, earnest students, ready to go out and battle for the truth, then read from Dr. Alexander Whyte’s exposition of Job: “Oh, the unmitigated curse of controversy! Oh the detestable passions that corrections and contradictions kindle up to fury in the proud heart of man! Eschew controversy, my brethren, as you would eschew the entrance to hell itself! Let them have it their own way. Let them talk, let them write, let them correct you, let them traduce you. Let them judge and condemn you, let them slay you. Rather let the truth of God itself suffer than that love suffer. You have not enough of the Divine nature in you to be a controversialist.” On February 4, he wrote to Franklin and his wife Ethel: ‘Go with Him all the way.’ The end and aim and meaning of all sanctification is personal, passionate devotion to Jesus Christ. Keep bold and clear and out in the bracing facts of His revelation world, the Bible. Never compromise with those who water down the word of God to human experience, instead of allowing God to lift up our experience to His Word. I go to Japan in July I expect; we shall most probably not stay there longer than four months. 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. A mid-February speaking engagement in Providence, Rhode Island prompted a typical display of Chambers’ playful yet practical spirit. Sensing the physical and spiritual tiredness of his hosts, Meredith and Bessie Standley, he convinced them to travel east with him for a few days of rest. They found inexpensive, off-season accommodations at a summer resort in Pennsylvania where Chambers promptly located a horse-drawn sleigh. Morning and afternoon Oswald took them skimming across the snow-covered roads and fields. Outfitted in fur hats purchased for $2.50 each, they looked like a threesome out of a Leo Tolstoy novel. “That week was exactly what we needed,” Standley said later. “We didn’t know what was coming on, but God knew, so He got us ready by giving us that rest.” The Standleys were welcomed back to Cincinnati with a lawsuit and a complex legal tangle created, in large part, by Martin Wells Knapp’s faulty will. When Knapp died in December 1901, he had bequeathed God’s Revivalist Publishing and God’s Bible School to God. Although he named three trustees to oversee things for the Almighty, controversy ensued and Knapp’s family couldn’t agree on who owned what. Early in 1906, a Cincinnati court decided that God could not hold property in Hamilton County. A judge put the school under a court-monitored trusteeship. When Meredith and Bessie Standley became particularly burdened by all the opposition, Chambers told them of the false accusations he had faced during his days of struggle in Dunoon. He urged them to keep on doing God’s work through the school and let the Almighty defend their reputation.[1][1][1] Tomorrow: Life in America was a tonic to Chambers. The people, the ministry, and the travel combined to fill each day with new adventures. In February of 1907, he wrote home from New York after viewing the magnificent Niagara Falls: ________________________________________ -~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~ Isaiah 40: 28: Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? there is no searching of his understanding. 29 He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. 30 Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: 31 But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint. “Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.” James 4: 8
Posted on: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 13:02:28 +0000
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