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Daily Devotionals
Bowen's Daily Meditations
’’Unto you therefore which believe, he is precious." - 1 Peter 2:7.
Before you, seated in the cavern of this world, the wizard of this world causes to appear, one after another, scenes of beauty, dissolving scenes that scarce have presented themselves to your vision before they have gone, leaving you in darkness. The wizard shows them to you that he may bind you to himself forever. "All these things will I bestow upon you," he says, " if you fall down and worship me." " The realities are in my chambers," he says; "I give them to whomsoever I will." Infatuated man, madly pursuing these vanished visions, descends deeper and deeper into the region of death and despair. Happy he, unutterably happy, if, ere it be too late, his eyes be anointed with a celestial eye-salve and he discover that all the glorious visions that ever darted across his path or illumined his conceptions, when they dissolved as visions be came reconstituted as realities in Christ. Yes, this is the wondrous knowledge that the believer obtains by faith. All exquisite music died out in Christ, to live in him forever; all beautiful sunsets vanished not into night, but into the blessed reality of Christ; all lovely flowers faded to bloom perennially in him; the smile of youth, the look of love, the scintillation of genius, the burst of eloquence, everything that lent a momentary radiance to life, has its apotheosis in Christ, is found in him by the believer.
Christ is precious to me, because I believe that the beauty and attractiveness of all admirable things owe their charm to him, and yield their charm to him. They crossed my path that they might speak to me of him. My enthusiasm staggered like a drunken man in the pathway of this world, and only knew its vocation when it discovered him.
When he cometh, the new Jerusalem cometh; the paradise of God cometh; the river of the water of life; saints; angels; the new heaven; the new earth; all beauty, all splendor, all sanctity; the fruition of all right desires, the realization of all lovely dreams; love; in a word all that is precious cometh; nor will it ever after be possible for me to conceive of a good not found in the legion irradiated by his smile.
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