He was born on July 24, 1874, in Aberdeen, Scotland, the son of Baptist pastor Clarence Chambers. The family moved while he was still a child, living in Stoke-on-Trent and Perth, Scotland, before settling in London in 1889.
He studied art in London at the Royal College of Art, and later entered the University of Edinburgh, where he studied fine arts and archaeology. It was there that he felt the call to ministry and left his secular studies to teach at Dunoon College, in Scotland, beginning in 1897.
The first years in Dunoon were marked by a deep spiritual crisis. Chambers later described living through four years of intense inner suffering, wrestling with pride and an overwhelming sense of his own sin, to the point of saying that only God’s grace and the kindness of friends kept him from collapse. The turning point came in 1901, when he found in Luke 11:13 the assurance that the Father gives the Holy Spirit to those who ask, an experience he described as a radiant and indescribable emancipation.
Between 1906 and 1910 he carried out an itinerant Bible teaching ministry across the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan. In 1908, on a voyage to America, he grew close to Gertrude Hobbs, known as Biddy, whom he married on May 24, 1910.
In 1911 he founded and directed the Bible Training College, in Clapham, London, where he trained workers from different Christian traditions. Biddy became superintendent of the college and, over the following years, took down in shorthand practically everything her husband taught, a habit that would prove decisive after his death. The couple had a daughter, Kathleen.
World War I led to the college’s closure in 1915. That October, Chambers sailed for Egypt as a YMCA chaplain, serving Australian and New Zealand soldiers encamped at Zeitoun, near Cairo. Biddy and Kathleen joined him in December.
In October 1917 Chambers was struck by appendicitis, but delayed going to the hospital, fearing he would occupy a bed that might be needed for soldiers wounded in the imminent Battle of Gaza. Only on October 29 did he undergo emergency surgery. Pulmonary complications followed, and he died on November 15, 1917, at age 43, in Zeitoun. He was buried in Cairo with military honors.
After her husband’s death, Biddy spent the rest of her life organizing and publishing what she had recorded in shorthand, about thirty books in all. The best known, My Utmost for His Highest, brings together 365 daily meditations and was published in the United Kingdom in 1927. It became one of the most widely read devotionals in the history of Christianity, and biographers recognize that its reach owes as much to Chambers’s teaching as to his wife’s quiet editorial work.
