Sure I’m Right

Robert Browning wrote a poem that spoke to the faith-filled imagination of Oswald Chambers:

One who never turned his back but

marched breast forward,

Never dreamed, though night were worsted,

wrong would triumph,

Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,

Sleep to wake…

Chambers, serving as a military chaplain, then gave his series of talks on the Book of Job to soldiers stationed in Cairo, Egypt during the First World War in 1917. When his talks were made into a book, he titled it Baffled to Fight Better from the line in Browning’s poem.

Before the book was printed, Chambers took ill, but the beds in the military hospital would be needed for the wounded soldiers returning from the long-expected Third Battle of Gaza, and he did not want to take up a bed or resources.

When his condition didn’t improve after two weeks, Chambers had an emergency appendectomy. He did not recover from surgery and passed away.

In his own private diary, he recorded some of his musings as he studied the book of Job the previous year. He wrote: “Deeper and deeper grows the conviction that Tragedy is the basis of things and Redemption the way out… I feel growingly sure that Job is the Book of consolation for those sorrow-tossed, bereaved, and broken by the war.”

In reading the book of Job recently with my children, it struck me again how sure Job’s friends were that they were right. I am often so sure that I am right. I wondered how Job knew he was right, and then, how Chambers knew?  

As I puzzled through my thoughts on the topic, one of my Sunday school children called me with a perplexing cultural question. Could he bring a cultural object to Sunday school to use in our worship?

I often refer these types of questions to elders in our church who have a first hand understanding of these cultural questions in light of Christianity. How can I be sure of being right? 

I have this same feeling in conversations about politics, family life, and social issues. If I apply the Gospel to each question, that gives me a measurement to start from, but what if I apply it wrongly?

Chambers wrote, “Most of us get touchy with God and desert Him when He does not back up our creed.” He was thinking about Job but also about John 6:57,60 when Jesus said: “‘So whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me’…When many of his disciples heard it, they said, ‘This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?’”

Browning’s poem paints the picture of a man who never loses hope that he who falls will rise, the one who sleeps will wake. Chambers was just such a man because he never asked Jesus to back up his creed but instead, fell in line behind Jesus’s Gospel. 

In the tough questions (and the tough times), I would do better to worry less about being sure I’m right and making sure I’m fully convinced that Jesus is right.