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Thursday, March 28th, 2024
Maundy Thursday
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Daily Devotionals
Bowen's Daily Meditations
Devotional: March 28th

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"God is love, and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in him." - 1 John 4:16.

Let us define. But who can define? For the interpretation of this word, love is the interpretation of God. It is easy to say that love is a delight in the happiness of the loved. But the mind will not rest satisfied with this definition; it again and again replies, that the meaning includes more. Love cannot be defined, for it is itself a definition, the definition of God; but it may be described in its operations and effects.

The love that God has towards you, passes knowledge. The whole universe is intended to express it. When he reared the sublime mountains and clothed the plains in beauty, he said, this is for my beloved. The course of his providence is commissioned to express it. Your own form is a revelation of his love to you. Your endowments are other utterances of the same. His word and all the marvels of redemption are a token of love given to you over the head of angels. In its augmenting utterances, the divine love stops not with the cross of Christ. It comes to the believer and says, " Be thy heart emptied that I may dwell therein, and render thine eyes, thy tongue, thy hands, thy possessions, thy time, thy all, expressive of the love that God bears to thy fellow-believer.’ Every believer is thus made to become another multiple of that love that is enthroned on the throne of the universe.

There never was a door opened in heaven so wide as this word. We learn from it the mystery of heaven. We see what is the nature of its felicity.

Sin has armed all its host against love, and hath given a commandment that if any man know where it be, he may show it, that it may be taken. Fiery darts fall thick and fast about him that gives it a home. The ugliness of man’s nature becomes gigantic, and, seizing a tremendous spear, says, " Love, if thou darest." But here, as elsewhere, there is a victory for faith.

To abide in love is to abide in the thoughts of God’s love, in the memory and consciousness of Christ’s love, in the sense of one’s own unworthiness and in the renunciation of self, in the rejection of selfish pleasure and advantage, and the study of the true happiness of others, in intercession, in the Holy Spirit, in the faith that discerns a present God and knows how to discover the relations of every creature to God. Especially is it to abide in the great thought that Christ tasted death for every man, and that your life is to be an embodiment of the gospel for every creature. And if you set about this heartily, with entire consecration, it may please God to help you by a wonderful device of his own. But this is a secret.

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