If You Will Ask - Softcover

Oswald Chambers (1874-1917) was born July 24, 1874, in Aberdeen, Scotland. He came into a personal relationship with Jesus as his Savior in his teen years under the ministry of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and studied art and archeology at the University of Edinburgh before answering a call from God to the Christian ministry. He then studied theology at Dunoon College. From 1906-1910 he conducted an itinerant Bible-teaching ministry in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan.

In 1910, Chambers married Gertrude Hobbs. They had one daughter, Kathleen.

In 1911 he founded and became principal of the Bible Training College in Clapham, London, where he lectured until the school was closed in 1915 because of World War I. In October 1915 he sailed for Zeitoun, Egypt (near Cairo), where he ministered to troops from Australia and New Zealand as a YMCA chaplain. He died there November 15, 1917, following surgery for a ruptured appendix.

Although Oswald Chambers wrote only one book, Baffled to Fight Better (since updated and titled Our Ultimate Refuge), more than thirty titles bear his name. Mrs. Chambers, a court stenographer, compiled the rest of her husband's published works from her verbatim shorthand notes. For half a century following her husband's death she labored to give his words to the world.

My Utmost For His Highest, his best-known work, has been continuously in print in the United States since 1935 and remains in the top ten titles of the religious book bestseller list with millions of copies in print. It has become a Christian classic.

The Oswald Chambers material is published and licensed exclusively by Discovery House Publishers through arrangement with the Oswald Chambers Publications Association, Ltd.

Prayer changes things, we say. Oswald Chambers would modify that phrase to prayer changes me, and then I change things.

In this small but powerful book on prayer, Chambers reveals the key problem with the way many of us pray today. That is, we focus our prayers on ourselves instead of on God. The purpose of prayer is not to get healed, get a job, get our house sold, or get whatever else we want. It is to get the life of God in us.

Our me-centered culture has infiltrated our prayer life. We suffer from what Chambers calls a disease of the nerves taking a spiritual twist. Our relative affluence has left us foolishly self-sufficient and complacent. If our only reason to pray is for our own needs, and if we are pretty well meeting our own needs, why pray?

Chambers tells us why. He shows us what we are missing when we don't have the life of God in us.