Bowen's Daily Meditations

This word that we now encounter is moving with haste and earnestness among the haunts of men. Up one street, down another, knocking at this door and at that, stopping to address here a company of noble personages, there a gathering of the poor and mean, it wends its way with something angelic in its mien, on very much the same mission that engaged the thoughts and energies of our Lord when on the earth.

" Is any among you afflicted?" It speaks in a kindly accent, knowing that many of...

The Lord is close to the brokenhearted
    and saves those who are crushed in spirit. - Psalm 34:18 NIV

Here again, the parallelism tells us something.

He is nigh to save. His presence is salvation. Their misery is not nearer to them than their deliverer. To their broken heart, the whole universe seems broken; to their desolate...

These parallelisms of Scripture seem sometimes very rude. This one, for instance, teaches us that the wicked are they who trust not in the Lord. Men know not what to make of this definition. As for the wicked, they say, we know well who they are; these men that are brought up at the sessions of the Civil Courts, and tried for felonies, murders, misdemeanors; and besides these, certain other persons who have given us annoyance without rendering themselves amenable to the law. Men that beat...

The guide of whom? Of those who feel that this world is a labyrinth, and that the secret of its mazes is known only to God, - that it is the camp of an enemy; and that unless the cloud of the presence of God encompass us about, we have no security, not for a moment, - that it is a field thoroughly undermined and honey-combed, with subterranean trains of gun powder in every direction, exploding every minute; and that unless He lead us, we perish. What is the proof of this? Is not this...

There are those who never need to use these words, because they have no experience of that which is deprecated. They know not what is meant by such language as this: " Cause thy face to shine upon me." This language implies a personal acquaintance with a personal God. It teaches that God is pleased to make communications of his grace to the soul of the believer, that are to him like the uplifting of a veil from the face of the one beloved and adored. We ought all of us to have far higher...

Our Lord calls special attention to the danger by a special admonition. Out of that little band that accompanied him, one made shipwreck on this rock. The whole life of Jesus was cast into a mould of uttermost hostility to it; and the effect was seen in the Pentecostal Church, where no man called anything his own. But we are fallen upon very different times; and neither the example nor the earnest warnings of Christ and his apostles, have power to keep down this spirit in the Church. If the...

The way to possess unlimited treasure is to give yourself away. How little the philosophers who sought by alchemy to obtain the art of transmuting mean things to precious, - how little did they dream that the art of acquiring worlds of wealth had been long before divulged, and that it consisted simply in giving one's self away to Christ. Men are victims of the unhappy delusion that their own self is a nucleus, a beginning of wealth, around which they must wrap acquisition after acquisition,...

If one want poetry, there is a whole poem in these few words. Heaven, earth; time, eternity; saints, angels; the redeemed soul; its sins, passions, frailties, woes, miseries fleeing in the distance; - such, and more, are the characters and the scenery presented to our imagination, or to our faith, as we gaze into this verse. Perhaps some reminiscence of what he had himself experienced in his earthly career, visited the mind of David, and assisted him to form a bright conception of what God...

How many thousands are striving, by the sweat of their brow, by sleepless nights, by sacrifices of health and wealth, by bitter mental toil, by the unflagging consecration of all their powers, to win the attention of men, and are striving in vain. What disappointments pour daily upon them without inducing them to seek another goal for their hopes. " The spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes," do not extinguish the hope of winning from this unworthy world, sooner or later, some...

The object is to show that Christ has much more than repaired the ruin wrought by Adam, in the case of all those who avail themselves of the salvation wrought out by him. Instead of the one throne where Death sat and swayed the destinies of man, there are now myriads, millions of thrones, on each of which a believer is to sit and give the universe a visible demonstration of what Christ can bestow upon the soul that comes to him.

First, he is to receive abundance of grace, and of the...

This is the utterance of the Spirit, and teaches, if language can teach anything, that the influences of the Spirit may be lost. His presence is as the existence of a heaven-born flame in the heart, which needs to be carefully watched and guarded, which, if its proper aliment be withheld, will die out. The language of Scripture from beginning to end, is perfectly consistent with itself, though the points that establish this consistency are not thrust conspicuously forward. Scripture is...

Romans 8:31 KJV
What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us?

If God be for us, we are justified in making light of all our enemies. Any injury that they can do us is of little account, while we have this all-powerful ally.

This seems a mere truism; but it is really the language of an uncommon faith. He goes on to enumerate tribulation, persecution, distress, famine, nakedness, peril, the sword. Now, these things involve tremendous losses;...

If we owe much to the death of Christ, we owe much more to his life. It were little to give us the freedom of the universe, if in that universe we could not find Christ. It were little to give us immortality, if there were no Sun of Righteousness to make that immortality glorious and beautiful. It would be like discovering some unknown friend in his dying hour; we have hardly time to acquaint ourself with his amazing love, and to see the flash of his kindness illuminating our life, before he...

After all, there is nothing that men detest so much as a feeling of shame. We hear a great deal of calamities, bereavements, losses, sorrows, troubles, and numerous other synonyms; but all these are not near so odious to a man as a feeling of shame. There is not any calamity that men have not accepted in preference to a momentary feeling of shame. A feeling of shame in the mind of a man would make him insensible to the loss of his father, or of any other very dear friend; to the loss of...