My Utmost brings me to the utmost

If the devotional guide, Our Daily Bread, helped me get started with my private devotions, Oswald Chambers' My Utmost for His Highest has challenged me to go deeper in my walk with God. I have heard many friends rave about this book of devotions and finally bought one for my personal use. I'm using it this year. At first, I couldn't understand what it was talking about. I must be dense, I've said to myself about a dozen times because I didn't feel the same way my friends did about it. Why couldn't I appreciate it?

But eventually, the devotional writings spoke to me. As in, bull's eye! This Chambers guy not only knows how the Christian life is, he knows what I'm going through! He actually experienced what I'm experiencing! He's the only author who has made me highlight sentences in a book. The highlighting pencils that my boss gave me years ago for Christmas suddenly became useful. Now, THAT's impact!

I still have my daily Bible readings (the one-chapter-a-day, five-times-read kind) and I benefit so much from this discipline. I consider the Utmost for His Hightest readings my spiritual vitamins in addition to my basic spiritual diet. They make me feel good (like, "Wow! I'm not weird at all!") and some days they depress me (like, "He won't let me off the hook"). But they give me a hard dose of spiritual reality that I need to meet the pressures of the season.

I will share some quotes in my next entry.