In November 1917, Scottish Bible teacher and evangelist Oswald Chambers died while serving as chaplain to British troops in Egypt. Ten years after his death, his wife Gertrude compiled her notes of his sermons into one of the most influential devotionals of all time: My Utmost for His Highest.  

Chambers revered the Scriptures. “God never fits His word to suit me,” he wrote; “He fits me to suit His word.”  But he also understood the kind of book the Bible is. It is not something only to be looked at, but to be looked through. Responding to a friend who said he only read the Bible, Chambers said, 

When people refer to a man as “a man of the book,” meaning the Bible, he is generally found to be a man of multitudinous books, which simply isolates the one Book to its proper grandeur. The man who reads only the Bible does not, as a rule, know it or human life. 

This Point was previously published on November 2, 2023.