Certainty is the mark of the commonsense life-gracious uncertainty is the mark of the spiritual life.
The reason we see hypocrisy and fraud and unreality in others is because they are all in our own hearts. The great characteristic of a saint is humility-Yes, all those things and other evils would have been manifested in me but for the grace of God, therefore I have no right to judge.
Interpretation
What this quote means
We often recognize flaws in others because they exist within us, and true humility prevents us from judging them.
This quote emphasizes the importance of self-awareness and humility in our perceptions of others' faults. Oswald Chambers suggests that the flaws we see in others reflect our own internal struggles, and that understanding this can foster compassion rather than judgment. By recognizing that we too are susceptible to these evils, we are reminded to approach others with grace and humility, acknowledging that it is only through divine grace that we can overcome our own shortcomings.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about morality at a community gathering, you could reference this quote to emphasize the importance of understanding our own flaws.
More from Oswald Chambers
All quotes →Never make the blunder of trying to forecast the way God is going to answer your prayer.
Service is the overflow which pours from a life filled with love and devotion. But strictly speaking, there is no call to that. Service is what I bring to the relationship and is the reflection of my identification with the nature of God.
When we preach the love of God there is a danger of forgetting that the Bible reveals not first the love of God but the intense, blazing holiness of God, with His love at the center of that holiness.
It is much easier to do something than to trust in God; we mistake panic for inspiration.
Service is the overflow which pours from a life filled with love and devotion.
Similar quotes
Talk of the abuses of slavery! Humbug! The thing itself is the essence of all abuse!
The doctrine that might makes right has covered the earth with misery. While it crushes the weak, it also destroys the strong. Every deceit, every cruelty, every wrong, reaches back sooner or later and crushes its author. Justice is moral health, bringing happiness, wrong is moral disease, bringing mortal death.
There's too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.
I'm a study of a man in chaos in search of frenzy.
There is the mind itself. It is like a smooth lake which when struck, say by a stone, vibrates. The vibrations gather together and react on the stone, and all through the lake they will spread and be felt. The mind is like the lake; it is constantly being set in vibrations, which leave an impression on the mind; and the idea of the Ego, or personal self, the "I", is the result of these impressions. This "I" therefore is only the very rapid transmission of force and is in itself no reality.
Huts they made then, and fire, and skins for clothing, And a woman yielded to one man in wedlock... ... Common, to see the offspring they had made; The human race began to mellow then. Because of fire their shivering forms no longer Could bear the cold beneath the covering sky.