Oswald Chambers was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1874, the son of a Baptist minister. He studied art in London before a decisive religious experience in his early twenties redirected the whole course of his life. He trained at Dunoon College, spent time with the League of Prayer, and eventually founded the Bible Training College in Clapham, where he taught until the outbreak of the First World War. In 1915 he traveled to Egypt as a YMCA chaplain to British Commonwealth troops stationed near Cairo, and it was there, in 1917, that he died suddenly of complications following an emergency appendectomy. He was forty-three years old.
Chambers lived and taught at a moment when evangelical Christianity in Britain was navigating the currents of higher criticism, social reform, and the catastrophic losses of a world war. His work sat apart from systematic theology; he was less interested in defending doctrinal positions than in pressing his students and soldiers toward an unguarded surrender to God. His lectures and addresses had an urgency and psychological frankness that distinguished them from the more decorous devotional writing of the era.
His enduring influence rests almost entirely on a book he did not himself prepare for publication. His wife, Gertrude — known as Biddy — had learned stenography and transcribed his spoken words throughout their years together. After his death she gathered that material and compiled My Utmost for His Highest, a daily devotional drawn from his lectures and sermons, first published in 1927. The book asks of its reader a quality of total commitment that Chambers considered the only honest response to Christian faith, and it has remained in continuous print through every subsequent decade.
My Utmost for His Highest has sold tens of millions of copies and been translated into scores of languages, making Oswald Chambers one of the most widely read devotional writers in the history of Protestant Christianity.