Bowen's Daily Meditations

Few believe this. Men know what pitifulness is. They know how a very pitiful parent will act towards a suffering child: how he will show himself tenderly solicitous to staunch its wounds and alleviate its sorrows. They do not view God as characterized by this sympathizing tenderness and pitifulness. They regard him as a physician, who, by long familiarity with suffering, is able to look upon it without emotion, and coldly to calculate what remedies are best.

If we choose to see God...

Because, first, there is no doubt about that coming. His first coming was the most wonderful, the most staggering to faith. That the Son of God should have been found in fashion as a man, without form or comeliness, with but rare coruscations of his glory, enduring the contradiction of sinners, and dying on the cross; this is a marvel that swallows up all marvels, and frees from all embarrassment the question of his second advent.

Because he will come in glory such as no heart of man...

If we want a sublime utterance, here is one. Let us give glory to that Blessed Spirit of grace, who thus sometimes teaches the lips of man wondrous things.

Though he slay me, - not simply, though he take away my life. Job would have had no reluctance to part with his life. It would have been an inexpressible relief to him to escape from the load of misery laid upon him. The expression, " Though he slay me," is the strongest possible, and startles us with an exhibition of peculiar...

That is to say, " let thy vocation be that of the seraphim, my soul, and enter on the life of heaven!"

Why should I praise him? Can my praise be of any advantage to him? No; nor that of all the heavenly hosts. It is infinite condescension in him to hearken unto the praises of his most exalted creatures.

Let me bless the Lord, because no function will be more rich in blessings to my soul than this. The admiring contemplation of his excellence is in reality the appropriation...

" Even in Sardis." How full of reproach this little word " even." The wonder was that any good should live in such a sea of iniquity as that. Even in Sardis! It will be well for us to act as though our residence were in Sardis; as though there were the greatest possible danger of our soiling our robes. The robes that are polluted are robes that were given spotless. You cannot pollute that which is intrinsically vile. The garments which so many Sardians had defiled, were such as they had in...

There was a poor woman that spent all her living upon physicians. She went everywhere soliciting the help of man, and experimenting upon the capacities of earth. Finally she despaired. The shades of night were gathering around her; she cried unto God, saying, perhaps, " give us help from trouble, for vain is the help of man;" then speedily came the Prince of Life, and the mere sweep of his garment imparted what had been so long and vainly sought from man.

Altogether the bitterest...

With gladness and with exultation Paul contemplated the fact that God had made him what he was, a very dependent creature, in himself altogether incomplete, and in unceasing need of the presence and blessing of God.

Imagine a flower able to shine by phosphorescent rays, dim and dying at the best; and saying to the glorious sun in the heavens, "Depart from me, I have no need of thee; trouble not thyself to move through my skies; I am my own sun." What fatuity were this. It is the glory...

There is something exceedingly gracious and affecting about this declaration. It is the language of pure friendship and open-hearted confidence. " If things had been darker than they are, if your difficulties greater, if your future less glorious, be sure that I would have told you. Did I ever seek to disguise the difficulties that would throng your path, if you became my followers? Did I speak in a whisper of the cross that you would have to bear? Did I keep you ignorant of an opposing...

So says the Psalmist. A thousand years after, the angel who appeared to Mary takes up the refrain, saying, " He shall save his people from their sins." Peter in due time learns this admirable song, and thus modulates it in the hearing of the Jews: - " Unto you first, God, having raised up his son Jesus, sent him to bless you, in turning away every one of you from his iniquities." Paul suffers not the strain to die. but gives it the following utterance: - " Christ gave himself for us that he...

Self-confidence, self-reliance, pride of character, sense of power, consciousness of strength, self-possession, - these make a man great in the eyes of the world, and a fool in the sight of God. For strength is in the consciousness of weakness, not in the consciousness of strength. Wisdom is in the consciousness of ignorance; and true confidence is in the utter mistrust of self. Man by himself is a fragment. He is the sport of circumstances, - the foot-ball of time. Yea, though he have...

The Almighty Maker of all demands no more of anything he has made than he has made it capable of yielding. Although when each tree yields its appropriate fruits. The plants of righteousness have per-eminence above all the trees of the field; for on their boughs, they bear, wonderful to relate, many varieties of fruits. There is one Spirit; but his fruit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance. How beautiful when the trees planted in the courts...

Observe here the character of those that are spoken of: " they fear God."

Observe their condition present and prospective: "it shall be well with them."

Notice the certainty of this: " surely I know."

God is love. This word embraces all his perfections. But let none suppose that he is therefore bound down to a single line of manifestation. Light is one; yet, says the prism, manifold. The sternest acts of Providence unfold, in their own particular way, the love of God. ...

The resurrection because the life. He is the life, in that by him our souls live before God, and draw from the everlasting fulness of divine grace, and are changed into the image of our heavenly Father. He is the life that came into the world by one gate, almost at the very moment when death entered it by another. When Adam tasted the forbidden fruit, Death entered in state and enthroned himself in the world, with his royal train of terrors and miseries; but Life also entered in the meek and...

Pride is robbery. It is the robbery of that which is most precious and sacred in the universe, namely, the glory of God. To the Maker of the universe belongs all the glory of the universe. Pride takes its stand over against God and defies him. It claims for itself the tribute that belongs to God; and would have all eyes directed to itself, all knees bent before itself. God must resist pride: resist it when angels sin; when men build a tower of Babel; when men say of the voice of Herod, '' it...