Bowen's Daily Meditations

The blessedness of God will be the blessedness of his people. Their purity shall be without stain, their love without limit; wherefore their happiness shall know no bound. Their character will correspond to the character of God; wherefore their felicity will be the same as his. Men, as they are generally, could find no satisfaction in God's house, in the place where his glory has its highest revelation; nor is there anything attractive to them in the river of his pleasures. Satan has so...

Called unto the fellowship of Christ, seems to mean, called unto a community of interest and of destiny with Christ. One Spirit is to be common to the believer and Christ; to each there is one life of humiliation, one eternity of glory; to each the hatred of the world. Christ's peace and joy are the believer's; the same love of the Father is given to each; there is to each a resurrection and ascension. But he that is called to a part is called to the whole. If we suffer with him, we shall...

The parallelism shows us that his servants are those that trust in him. How can a man enter upon this service without trusting in him? To acknowledge this master is rebellion to the world. Thousands are ready to spring to their arms when they see us put away from our forehead and from our hand the sign of our submission to the powers of this world. A man that would serve God, has no longer sword or spear to trust in; riches or luck or cunning; rank or favor; the multitude or the prince; a...

The Bible does not mock the anguish-bitten soul by telling it that the Christian cannot experience unhappiness or disappointment; or by telling it that it has no business to be wretched. The followers of the righteous Jesus are told distinctly that there are afflictions for them; and that these afflictions are many. So in drawing up an inventory of what belongs to them, they may put down many afflictions. These are a part of their property.

We see that it is not a disreputable thing...

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...