Daily Devotionals

Bowen's Daily Meditations

Devotional: April 23rd

" Lord, lift thou up upon us the light of thy countenance." ― Psalms 4:6.

Give us the tokens of thy favor, the expressions of thy grace, the revelation of thy glory. Acknowledge us as thy sons and daughters, privileged ones, having access to thine audience chamber, and permitted to behold the majesty and kindness that to others are veiled. Let the light of thy loving glance descend into our soul. A day is coming when thy glory shall be flashed abroad through all the heavens, and when it shall fall like one immense sheet of lightning upon the nations. But what the world cannot now behold, let us behold. Though the rising of the Sun of Righteousness, in full-orbed glory, be not yet, let at least the day-star arise in our hearts.

It is not in the hour of worldly prosperity that we are best able to behold the light of God’s countenance in its most transporting manifestations. The benefits that God bestows equally upon the just and upon the unjust, upon his children and his enemies, are not those that most favor our perception of the light of God’s countenance. The Spirit of glory and of God resteth especially on those who are reproached for the name of Christ. Stephen, when encompassed by his numerous enemies, saw heaven opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of the glory of God. Sometimes the revelation of the glory is vouchsafed in the midst of the trial; (call to mind several instances of this in the word of God;) ― sometimes to prepare the believer for fiery trials; witness Isaiah, Ezekiel; ― sometimes after the enduring of the trials; witness Job, Simeon, and others.

Is there not something held out to thee in this sentence, that looms far higher than any conception that thou hast ventured to form of the readiness of God to reveal himself to the friends of Jesus, and of his power to enrapture the soul by a glance that faith discerns? If there be anything soul-gladdening in the light of a created countenance, what exalted ideas may we not form of the incomparable delights that shall descend into the soul when God, the Creator, the Redeemer, the Sanctifier, fixes on us his unrestricted glance of love.

Let us utter this prayer with all intensity of desire and strength of expectation. Let our life utter it. Men go down into deep wells that they may see a star, a mere star; let us not shrink from any position to which the angels of divine providence may beckon us, and from which we are likely to behold more gloriously the revelation of the countenance of our God.

-