the Third Week after Easter
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Daily Devotionals
Bowen's Daily Meditations
" To him that ordereth his conversation aright, will I show the salvation of God." - Psalms 50:23.
It is perhaps needless to remark that the word conversation is intended to include the entire conduct - literally, the way. The ordering of one’s conversation, implies meditation and study as to what one’s conduct should be, in its various particulars; a definite and well understood standard; a solemn and sustained resolution to live according to that standard, by the help of God.
Most men allow themselves to be wafted along by the current of events; their conduct is determined by circumstances and casual influences rather than by their own forethought and decision. And so, too, with Christians. Very many of these simply rejoice that they are acted on by better influences than once they were; and do not realize their obligation to labor, under the teaching of the Spirit of God, at the formation of a new and holy nature. Many seem to imagine that the responsibility rests with the Spirit of God, and that they are to be perfected in holiness by some mysterious process, that may just as well go on when they are asleep as at any other time. But the Spirit of God does what he does in us through our own agency and with our own consciousness. This is the principal drift of the direction, " Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who [thus] worketh in you to will and to do of his own good pleasure."
Perhaps no man that ever lived (if we except the apostles) engaged more earnestly than Jonathan Edwards in the work of ordering his conversation aright. His diary reveals him to us, a youth of nineteen or twenty, exercising the most intense watchfulness over himself, and laying hold with the utmost avidity of every flaw that appeared in his heart or life, in order to bring his energies to bear upon it, frame a resolution adapted to it, and cry to God for deliverance from it. All that forecast, and preparation, and study, and determination, and prayer could do to furnish him with armor in the hour of temptation, he compelled them to do. Other men when they have once fallen into temptation, succumb to it afterwards the more easily; but with him it was otherwise; he availed himself of the knowledge of sin once obtained, to defeat it on subsequent occasions. Any one who will carefully read his memoirs, will discover a striking illustration of the fact that God awakens the utmost energy of the soul when he would accomplish the deliverance of the soul. He fought the good fight of faith. Others who have not come so prominently before us, may perhaps have fought it still better. If so, we shall know them in the day of judgment.
God will give unto those who order their conversation aright, glorious and transporting views of the Saviour and of redemption through him.
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