the Third Week after Easter
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Daily Devotionals
Bowen's Daily Meditations
"Hear, and your soul shall live." - Isaiah 55:3.
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 already paid. We have only to hear. If we hear, our souls shall live. If we hear not, then life and immortality shall never be their portion.
Hear the word of life. All the days of your life, you have heard it with your outward ear, but it has never made its way to your inmost soul. The adversary that has such dominion over you has lined the passage betwixt your outward ear and your inmost soul with gins and traps, so that the word may not travel in safety. We see hundreds of chariot loads of precious truth go in at the portal of your ear; but it is too manifest that none of it reaches the place of power in your mind.
Hear! Enter into conflict with your adversary for the possession of this truth. It is your life, therefore embrace it with the instinct of self-preservation. Let everything else go, in laying hold of this. There was a man who, after many years of labor, was returning from California with a number of bags of most fine gold. The steamer was wrecked, and finding himself in the water with his bags, he let them all go that he might seize an old plank that came floating along. He escaped with his life and without his bags. I am afraid that he never was quite reconciled to the loss of his bags. Suppose, however, that what seemed an old rotten plank, should turn out to have an inscription on it, guiding him to a treasure a thousand times greater than what he had cast away. In that case he never would give another thought to what he had relinquished, unless it were a thought of self-congratulation that he had made such a wonderful exchange.
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