Have you ever been rocked to the core after reading something profound? A phrase or two that gives you chills, causes you to pause, or perhaps you ruminate on for the next few days, weeks, or even months. It grabs hold of you. That’s what My Utmost for His Highest does . . . it takes the Scriptures, asks the probing questions, and ignites a passion to know God better. In our world of easy-peasy, feel-good spirituality, these words invite you into the deeper truths that cause soul reflection and engaging conversations. They did for Macy Halford at the age of just fifteen when she started reading My Utmost for His Highest, and they still do today as she has now adapted these timeless truths into this Modern Classic Edition. It’s a grace to welcome Marcy to the farm’s table today…

Guest Post by Macy Halford

Has there ever been a book quite like My Utmost for His Highest?

“My utmost for his highest. To be all for God; to act with boldness, expressing Christ in every word and deed. This, Paul says, is how to walk through life unashamed.”  

from My Utmost For His Highest-the Modern Classic Edition

Since it first appeared in England in 1927, the so-called golden book of Oswald Chambers has traversed languages and countries and denominations to become one of the best-selling daily devotionals of all time.

Published ten years after the death of its author, a Scottish preacher who lived and died in relative obscurity, it has established itself as a living document, playing a vital role in the daily spiritual experience of millions. It is a classic, to be sure, but one which lives on the reader’s bedside table rather than the collector’s shelf. 

I received my first copy of My Utmost for His Highest when I was fifteen, but I was aware of it long before then.

It is a book that sat on my grandmother’s bedside table, and on my mother’s; a book that was spoken of often during the coffee hour following Sunday service or at the Wednesday evening Bible study.

In the place and time where I grew up—Dallas, Texas, in the 1980s and ’90s—Chambers was so well known and so well loved that people referred to him simply as “Oswald,” and for them that name had become synonymous with his most famous book. “Have you read Oswald today?” people would ask.

The conversations that would follow were so lively and immediate that I remember being shocked when I first learned the basic details of Oswald’s biography. He wasn’t, as I’d supposed, a pastor one might hear on the radio; you wouldn’t find him on a speaking tour of local libraries. He was a painter-turned-preacher of no specific denomination who’d been born in 1874 and who’d died during the First World War.

“The journey isn’t a journey of reason or debate. We can’t think or argue our way through it. It is a journey of surrender, of abandoning ourselves to God, absolutely and forever.”  

from My Utmost For His Highest-the Modern Classic Edition

Yet it didn’t take me long, after I began reading Utmost, to understand Oswald’s appeal. My grandmother had warned me that I might find him challenging at first, but had urged me to give him a chance. (Her exact words, if I recall correctly, were “Oswald ain’t easy, but he’s worth it.”) The challenging part was true enough.

Utmost was full of ideas drawn from theology, philosophy, and psychology; its language was sophisticated and fairly dated. In many places, though, it was entirely accessible. Each entry contained some gem—some profound reading of Scripture, some meditation on the Holy Spirit, some astute advice on living the life of a Christian disciple—that made Utmost seem as though it had just been written, and just for me. 

If there is a single quality shared by all classic works of literature, it must be timelessness—a word which surely describes My Utmost for His Highest.

It is a forever book, a book that will always belong to right now. Why, then, a new version? Does it even make sense to speak of “updating” a book that belongs to forever?

Summarized briefly, the story of Utmost is the story of a Scottish preacher, Oswald Chambers, who fell in love with an English stenographer, Gertrude Hobbs, in 1908 on a boat bound for America. He was going over to preach, she to look for secretarial work.

Almost immediately, the two discovered that they shared numerous passions: a passionate interest in Jesus Christ, a passionate interest in Christian discipleship, and a passionate interest in the written word. On this journey, Oswald gave Gertrude the name she would go by for the rest of her life—Biddy, from B.D., for “Beloved Disciple”—and the two dreamed up their future publishing endeavor.

In one of his earliest letters to Biddy, Oswald wrote:

It will be such a meagre home we will have, you and myself going heart and soul into literary and itinerating work for Him. It will be hard and glorious and arduous. I want us to write and preach; if I could talk to you and you shorthand it down and then type it, what ground we could get over! I wonder if it kindles you as it does me! 

Oswald and Biddy wed in England in 1910, after which they took jobs at a Bible college on the outskirts of London that was dedicated to training missionaries for fieldwork. (This is why numerous entries in Utmost speak to the missionary life.)

“My best for his glory. At first, the call comes gently. Then it grows louder, until finally  God produces a crisis in our lives that demands we make a choice. For or against; yes or no; stay  or go.”  

from My Utmost For His Highest-the Modern Classic Edition

Oswald gave lectures and sermons; Biddy took notes. In 1913, their daughter, Kathleen, was born, and in 1915, following the outbreak of the war, the family decamped to the Egyptian desert, where Oswald was to serve as chaplain to British troops. In the desert, Oswald continued giving talks, and Biddy continued writing them down.

When he died, in an army field hospital in 1917, following surgery for appendicitis, Biddy had amassed enough notes to fill more than fifty books. This is precisely what she went on to do, dedicating the remaining forty-nine years of her life to bringing Oswald’s teaching to the world.

My goal, then, for this Modern Classic Edition of My Utmost for His Highest has been to bring clarity and readability, while preserving Chambers’s message and voice.

In several instances, I’ve gone back to the original sermons and lectures from which the excerpts were taken in an effort to grasp their wider context. The vocabulary has been updated, though many choice “Oswaldisms” remain.

Throughout, my aim has been not only to honor Oswald’s intentions for the messages in Utmost, but also Biddy’s. It seems fitting to give the final word to her—the woman responsible for bringing Oswald Chambers’s words to the world.

“It is because,” Biddy Chambers wrote in her foreword to the first edition, October 1927, “it is felt that the author is one to whose teaching men will return, that this book has been prepared, and it is sent out with the prayer that day by day the messages may continue to bring the quickening life and inspiration of the Holy Spirit.”

May they continue to do so.

[ Our humble thanks to Our Daily Bread Publishing for their partnership in today’s devotional. ]