Oswald Chambers Daily Devotional – Utmost for His Highest 1 December 2024 Topic: The Law and the Gospel

The Law and the Gospel

By Oswald Chambers

Whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. — James 2:10

The moral law doesn’t take into account the fact that we are weak human beings. It doesn’t consider our infirmities or our sinful heredity. It simply demands that we be absolutely moral. The moral law never changes, either for the noblest or for the weakest. It doesn’t adjust itself to our shortcomings or make itself weak for the weak. It remains absolute for all time and eternity. If we don’t realize this, it’s because we are less than fully alive. Once we are born again and become fully alive to God’s will for us, life becomes a tragedy. The Spirit of God convicts us, and we know: “Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died” (Romans 7:9). Until we get to this place of conviction and see that we have no hope on our own, the cross of Christ is a farce to us.

“The law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin”

(v. 14). Conviction of sin always brings a fearful, binding sense of the law. It makes me feel hopeless, because I know that a guilty sinner like me cannot keep the law on my own. There is only one way I can get right with God, and that is by the death of Jesus Christ. I must get rid of the idea that I can ever be right with God through obedience. Who among us could ever obey God with absolute perfection!

“If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture . . .” (James 2:8). The moral law comes with an if. God never coerces us. In certain moods, we wish he would; in others, we wish he’d leave us alone. But when his will is ascendant in our lives, any question of compulsion is gone. Obeying God has to be a deliberate choice. Once we have made it, God will tax the remotest star and the last grain of sand to help us obey.

Ezekiel 40-41; 2 Peter 3

Wisdom from Oswald

We are only what we are in the dark; all the rest is reputation. What God looks at is what we are in the dark—the imaginations of our minds; the thoughts of our heart; the habits of our bodies; these are the things that mark us in God’s sight.

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