Bowen's Daily Meditations

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...

It will hardly be denied by any reflecting person that it is reasonable to suppose that there is for every human being a particular line of procedure which commends itself to God as the best, and every deviation from which is a deviation from that which is best. When we consider how admirably God has organized man, how richly he has endowed him, with what authority he has invested him, and with what appliances he has surrounded him; when we consider what an infinitude of wise and good...

The idea is, that his anger is fugitive, his favor perennial. The contrast is between the words moment and life. The contrast is sustained in what follows: " Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning," even in the morning of a day, whose sun shall never go down. Paul renews it in the words, " Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." As the ages of our prospective existence unfold to us, the misery...

Before you are conscious of any strength in your heart, while you feel yourself exceedingly weak and utterly incompetent, even then you are to be of good courage. It requires very little true courage to be bold when there is the consciousness of strength. The courage that is well-pleasing in the sight of God, is the courage of faith; the courage of David, whose sling and stone were nothing, but who trusted simply in God.

Nothing is more essential to the Christian than good courage. He...

Imagine a number of men whose hearts are filled with bitterness against their sovereign, and, in a certain chamber, are industriously laboring at the construction of an infernal machine, to be exploded on some approaching day when the sovereign is to pass that way. The heart of this sovereign, say, is kindness itself. He receives information of what these men are doing. Disguising himself he comes among them, and succeeds in convincing them that he is friendly, and will prove a valuable...