Daily Devotionals

Bowen's Daily Meditations

Devotional: April 26th

" The riches of his grace." ― Ephesians 1:7.

Your idea of riches, does it run most naturally in this direction? Perhaps you are blessed (as men say) with worldly goods. Your wealth enables you to surround yourself with many beautiful and tasteful articles that some people might call objects of luxury; to live in a certain style; to associate with a certain class to which you think you belong in a peculiar sense. But, these are not your only riches. You are enabled to approach God by faith in Christ the mediator, morning and evening, to cast your care on him, commit yourself to his guidance, rejoice in his goodness, meditate in his word, and occupy yourself with elevating thoughts of the inheritance incorruptible reserved in heaven for you. Of these two portions, the worldly and the heavenly, which is dearest to you? You answer: " The heavenly of course. The favor of God, that is life. The love of Christ, this is true wealth. It pleases God to adorn my earthly path, by the gift of so much wealth as surrounds me and mine with things that a refined taste must prize; but my heart, while it accepts them with thankfulness, cleaves not to them."

The answer appears unexceptionable; perhaps is so. But is it not a conceivable thing that God has given you of the riches of earth, to test the force of your attachment to the heavenly treasure? Are you not looking at things rather from the modern point of view than from the apostolic and scriptural? Examine yourself Would it be a very disastrous thing to you to have to come down and associate with Christians of a humble order, as one of them? Do you grasp your worldly substance with much less tenacity than the heavenly? Do losses of the inferior kind seem to you every way inferior? Does Christian affection, at all times and under all circumstances, seem to you of greater price than the friendship of the worldly members of that society to which you fancy you inherently belong? Oh, be honest!

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