Bowen's Daily Meditations

Take away the sense of need, and blessings are bestowed in vain. They are no longer blessings. Food is of no avail to a man whose appetite is satisfied. Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness; they shall be filled, but not in any sense that shall leave them unacquainted with need. They shall never hunger, as those who have not the means of satisfying their hunger; but only as those who have much goods laid up for everlasting days in Christ. The spring of our happiness is...

These words are remarkable as being the utterance of a Hebrew prophet, in days when Gentiles were viewed as castaways. What Christ long afterwards commanded is here prophesied. We now behold the beginning of the fulfilment. The ends of the earth are becoming in some sense acquainted with the wonderful ransom paid for sinners by the Lord Jesus Christ.

The universal preaching of the Gospel brings out first and foremost the great truth of the universality of man's apostasy and of his...

Written according to the analogy of the English language, this would be, "Is not Ephraim my dear son? Is he not a pleasant child?" The sins of the ten tribes, represented by Ephraim, had required of the Lord to withhold from them the expressions of his kindness, and to give them into the hands of their enemies that they might have a taste of the great difference between the service of an earthly master and that of their heavenly master. But as a king whose son has transgressed the laws of...

Your affliction is very great; but there is a corresponding greatness in your comforter. I that died on Calvary, that have all power in heaven and in earth, who am from everlasting to everlasting, I am he that comforteth you. I looked upon your sorrow long before you came into existence, and on every page of my word that I caused to be written, I introduced some word of comfort with reference to you. Turn over the leaves of Scripture and see how much I have been occupied about you in days of...

What an inconceivable length and breadth, depth and height has every such declaration as this! The whole life-journey of the Christian is a journey into the treasures that he heaped up in this sentence. In it, in fact, are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. After a month of some peculiar experience, let the believer come and look into this verse, and he will find what he never found before. In the avenue commanded by this verse, no two Christians are at exactly the same place; no two...

" That put their trust in thee." Among all the people on the face of the earth, these are the only ones that properly speaking have anything to do with joy.

In thee - in the God of the Bible - the God of whom Moses wrote, whom David feared, whom Elijah served, whom Isaiah saw in the temple, whose angel succored Daniel, who was manifest in Christ, and who for Christ's sake gave the Spirit to the apostles and giveth it unto us. Some believe that they can improve upon the character of...

Help is needed to discharge duties that are too great for us, to encounter dangers that are too severe for us, to face enemies that are too powerful for us, to bear up under sore disappointments, under the loss of friends, of health, of fortune, to sustain the consciousness of our deep demerit, and in fact it is difficult to exhaust the catalog of the ends for which we need help. Yet there are very few who are visited with a sense of any such need as this. The reason is that men generally...

It is especially when a feeling has taken possession of the mind that the Lord calls us to enter some new sphere, to engage in some new labor for his glory, that we long for an explicit revelation of his will. It is to be feared that too many grieve the Spirit of God by dismissing this conviction of duty from their mind, when there cometh not some plain providential notice of what the Lord would have them to do. The Lord still teaches by his word, and the way is this. He shows us the...

Perhaps throughout the wide domains of God, there is hardly any sight more remarkable than that presented by the little flock of believers who, in this world of iniquity and of misery where Satan's seat is, regard the Lord as their King and are kept by him through faith unto salvation. Their existence is a marvel; their peace and joy another; their triumphs another. They are without a visible Leader, and have no visible Comforter; yet they pursue their way and have an invincible hope....

The context sheds all the light that we need upon this passage, explaining both the nature of the diligence that we are to use, and the object to be obtained by it. "If ye do these things, ye shall never fall." The things are mentioned before: " Giving all diligence, add to your faith, virtue; and to virtue, knowledge; and to knowledge, temperance, etc. The words " shall never fall" have an immediate reference to the words " to make sure." Let no one bring in here his theory of election to...

The true life of the soul is in union with God. The souls of men are dead, because they are separated from God. Each man walketh apart, liveth unto himself, cleaveth to the earth; he calls it solitude when his fellow-men are not there. The word of God is life-giving. We have not to go to a distant planet for the bread of life. "Without any movement of ours, it has already been introduced into this world. We have not to pay for the liberty to appropriate it. All the price required has been...

If God withholds from us the tokens of his love, an explanation may almost always be found in the fact that we had made light of them in some way or another. God gives his love unto us that he may draw us by its sweet influences to renounce evil and to embrace good. If we receive the expressions of his loving-kindness and manifest no corresponding readiness to forsake sin, then it becomes needful that we should take lessons in the value and virtue of his love, through the privation of it....

This stony heart is not what is commonly understood by a hard heart, an unfeeling heart. A person of a gentle tender yielding disposition may yet have what God regards as a stony heart. A heart insensible to the word of God is what is here spoken of The commands, the promises, the invitations all fail to make an impression upon one with such a heart; he refuses to see his sin, his helplessness, his danger, his need, the holiness, the grace, the love of God. The mighty and countless motives...

The instability of many of the things with which we have to do in this world, only tends to make the believer appreciate the more, by contrast, the immutability of his God. The Lord of all sits upon his throne, and before him the universe passes like a panorama. He is unchangeable in character as well as in sovereignty. As we follow the indications of geology into the dim chambers of what seems to be a past eternity, it is a comfort to think there was then the same God that we now know;...