Getting Into God's Stride

Oswald Chambers preached the following message in 1917. This is from the book The Place of Help:

"Enoch walked with God" (Gen. 5:24).

"The test of a man's religious life and character is not what he does in the exceptional moments of his life, but what he does in the ordinary times when he is not before the spotlight, when there is nothing tremendous or exciting on. John looked upon Jesus 'coming toward him, and said, "Behold! The Lamb of God!"' In learning to walk with God there is the difficulty of getting into His stride; when we have got into His stride, what manifests itself in the life is the characteristic of God. The idea in the Bible is not only that we might be saved, but that we might become sons and daughters of God, and that means having the attitude of God to things.

Individual Discouragement and Personal Enlargement (Ex. 2:11-14)

"Now it came to pass in those days, when Moses was grown, that he went out to his brethren and looked at their burdens" (Ex. 2:11).

"Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, he was a mighty man and a great statesman, and when he saw the oppression of his people he felt that God had called him out to deliver them, and in the righteous indignation of his own spirit he started to right their wrongs. God is never in a hurry. After the first big strike for God and for the right thing, God allowed Moses, the only man who could deliver his own people, to be driven into the desert to feed sheep--forty years of blank discouragement. Then when God appeared and told him to go and bring forth the people, Moses said, 'Who am I that I should go?' The big 'I am' had gone, and the little 'I am' had taken its place. At first, Moses was certain he was the man, and so he was, but he was not fit yet. He set out to deliver the people in a way that had nothing of the stride of God about it. Moses was right in the individual aspect, but he was not the man for the work until he had learned communion with God, and it took forty years in the desert while God worked through him in ways of terrific enlargement before he recognized this.

"We may have the vision of God, a very clear understanding of what God wants--wrongs to be righted, the salvation of sinners, and the sanctification of believers; we are certain we see the way out, and we start to do the thing. Then comes something equivalent to the forty years in the wilderness, discouragement, disaster, upset, as if God had ignored the whole thing. When we are thoroughly flattened out, God comes back and revives the call, and we get the quaver in, and say, 'Oh, who am I, that I should go?' We have to learn the first great stride of God--'I AM WHO I AM . . . has sent . . . you.' We have to learn that our individual effort for God is an impertinence; our individuality must be rendered incandescent by a personal relationship to God, and that is not learned easily. The individual man is lost in his personal union with God, and what is manifested is the stride and the power of God. 'I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance, but He who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire' (Matt. 3:11).

"Moses had to learn this, and our Lord taught His disciples the same thing, 'You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain, that whatever you ask the Father in My name He may give you' (John 15:16), and He emphasized it in John 17--'that they may be one just as We are one.'

"How many of us have gone through this experience of getting into the stride of God? We have the vision, the real life is there, but we have not got into God's stride about the work and we fix on the individual aspect, 'This is what God wants me to do.' That is only my individual interpretation of what God wants me to do. Our efforts spring from the certainty that we understand God, and in our prayers we dictate to God what we think He ought to do. The individuality suffers terrible discouragement until we learn to get into personal union with God, then we experience an extraordinary enlargement. When the Spirit of God gets me into stride with God, He sheds abroad the love of God in my heart--'God so loved the world . . .' (John 3:16). I have my personal life, my home life, my national life, my individual attitude to things, and it takes time for me to believe that the Almighty pays no regard to any of these; I come slowly into the idea that God ignores my prejudices, wipes them out absolutely.

Inspired Direction and Personal Expression (Ezek. 3:12-17)

"So the Spirit lifted me up and took me away, and I went in bitterness, the heat of my spirit; but the hand of the LORD was strong upon me" (Ezek. 3:14).

"Ezekiel was inspired of God, God's message was blazing in him--'Wait till I get to the people. I'll tell them what God has said.' But when he did get there, he sat down flabbergasted and was dumb for seven days, all his message was gone from him; he hadn't the heart to say a solitary word. He was inspired surely enough, directed by God, the blazing message of God was in his heart; but when he saw the condition of his fellow exiles, all he could do was to sit down among them in their circumstances and let their circumstances talk to him. Ezekiel had his message, but he had not the communion of God's personal attitude expressed in the particular circumstances, and he sat dumbfounded for seven days. Then his attitude was, 'Yes, now you can give it free from individual spleen in a way which gives exactly My interpretation.' Ezekiel had the same message, but when he had come to the inspired direction of God he understood things differently.

"We have a blazing interpretation from God, we see perfectly well that certain things are wrong, and we know that God will not minimize wrong, but we do not yet understand how to deal rightly with these things. We have our inspired direction, we know that God says men are to be delivered, but we have to remember that when we sit down as Ezekiel did where people are, there is the a danger lest we lose all moral distinctions and powers of judging. The danger is that we are so completely overcome with pain over the result of sin in men's lives that we forget to deliver God's message. God says, in effect, 'Remember, I am a holy God, and when you have come into right relationship with Me, then give My message.' When Jesus said to the scribes and Pharisees, 'How can you escape the condemnation of hell?' He was speaking not out of personal vindictiveness but with a background of the inevitable; He had exhibited God before them, yet they turned from Him and despised Him. These words were uttered by the being who died on Calvary, and must be read in the light of the cross.

Inscrutable Disaster and Personal Experience

"And he was three days without sight, and neither ate nor drank" (Acts 9:9).

"Saul of Tarsus was 'knocked out,' and it took him three days to get his breath before he could begin to get into the stride of God. Who was Saul of Tarsus? A Pharisee of the Pharisees, a man of superb integrity and conscientiousness. If there ever was a conscientious objector it was Saul--'Indeed, I myself thought I must do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth.' He was conscientious when he hounded the followers of Jesus Christ to death. Then came disaster, all his world was flung to pieces. God arrested him, 'He was three days without sight, and neither ate nor drank"; but out of the inscrutable disaster and upset God brought him into a personal experience of Himself. 'But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb and called me through His grace, to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately confer with flesh and blood' (Gal. 1:15-16). For three years Saul went round about Sinai while the Holy Spirit blazed into him the things that became his epistles.

"It is a painful business getting through into the stride of God; it means getting our 'second wind' morally and spiritually. When I start walking with God, I have not taken three strides before I find He has outstripped me; He has different ways of doing things and I have to be trained and disciplined into His ways. It was said of Jesus, 'He will not fail nor be discouraged,' because He never worked from His own individual standpoint, but always from the standpoint of His Father. Discouragement is 'disenchanted egotism.' We learn spiritual truth by atmosphere not by intellectual reasoning; God's spirit alters the atmosphere of our ways of looking at things, and things begin to be possible which never were possible before.

"If you are going through a period of discouragement there is a big personal enlargement ahead. We have the stride of divine healing, of sanctification, of the second coming; all these are right, but the stride of God is never anything less than union with Himself."