This message was given at the Bible Training College in London (February-June 1915), where Chambers was teaching a course called Missionary Matters. Guest lecturers included well-known missionaries and evangelical leaders, such as C.T Studd. Chambers did not know that the school would close in a few months because of Great Britain’s involvement in World War I, or that he and his young family would soon be moving to Egypt to minister to soldiers through the YMCA.

“The first minister of munitions in this Empire has just said: You have read appeals for the front, appeals to the workshop, I would almost say at the present moment everything depends on the workshops of Britain. What is true in the enormous world crisis of war is symbolically true in work for God. But what are the workshops that supply the munitions for God’s enterprises? The workshop of missionary munitions is the hidden, personal, worshipping life of the saint.”

Nathanael said to Him, “How do You know me?” Jesus answered and said to him, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” John 1:48

“The constant, private habit of the life of the mission­ary ought to be worshipping as occasion serves, that is the first great essential for fitness. The time will come when no more fig tree life is possible; when we are right out in the open and glare of the work, and we shall find ourselves without any value then if we have not been worshipping God as occasion serves. We imagine we should be all right if a big crisis arose; but the crisis only reveals the stuff we are made of, it does not put anything into us. If God gives the call, of course, I shall rise to the occasion. You will not, unless you have risen to the occasion in the workshop. If you are not the real article before God there, doing the duty that lies nearest, instead of being revealed as fit for God when the crisis comes, you will be revealed as unfit. Crises always reveal character, and we are all ignorant of our true character until it is revealed to us.”

“If you do not worship as occasion serves at home, you will be of no use in the foreign field; but if you put the worship of God first, and get the revelation of Who God is, then, when the call comes you will be ready for it, because in the unseen life and preparing, and now when the strain comes you are perfectly fit to be relied on by God. Worshipping is greater than work in that it absorbs work.”

Nathanael answered and said to Him, “Rabbi, You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” Jesus answered and said to him, “Because I said to you, ‘I saw you under the fig tree,’ do you believe? You will see greater things than these.” And He said to him, “Most assuredly, I say to you, hereafter you shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” John 1:49-51

“Our Lord is the One in Whom God and man can meet as one. If that has never been learned in our private worshipping life, it will never be realised in active public work. There is no need for this private worship of God, I cannot be expected to live the sanc­tified life in the circumstances I am in; there is no time for praying just now, no time for Bible reading; when I get out into the work and the opportunity comes for all that, of course I shall be all right. If you have not been worshipping as occasion serves, you will not only be useless when you get out into service but a tremendous hindrance to those who are associated with you. Imagine a general having ammunition made in a workshop at the back of the trenches! His men would be blown up whilst attempting it. Yet that is what we seem to expect to do in work for God.”

Source: Oswald Chambers, So Send I You: A Series of Missionary Studies (London: Simpkins Marshall, 1930), 83.