the Third Week after Easter
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Daily Devotionals
Bowen's Daily Meditations
"To us belongeth confusion of face, because we have sinned against thee." - Daniel 9:8.
A great many of our confessions of sin fall trippingly from the tongue, as though the commission and the acknowledgment were all a mere matter of course. How little of self-reproach there seems to be in it all! How little shame, how little confusion of face! A public exposure - the attention of men drawn to one of the least of these sins - would fill us with unspeakable shame. Is God then nobody in comparison with man? Because God has forgiven us so readily, are we to make light of the sins committed against him? But in order that God might forgive us the least of all these sins, it was necessary that Christ should endure the contradiction of sinners, pass through the agony of Gethsemane, and die upon the cross.
Christians sometimes say, " Of what avail is it to be studying our committed sins? Rather let us exercise faith..." Faith is everything indeed; but faith will never attain its proper proportions where there is no just idea of what it is that God has forgiven us. How can we rightly know the goodness of God, if we do not know the greatness of sin? In fact this is one of the exercises of faith, one of her most distinctive and honorable triumphs; the perception, namely, of what sin really is. Some Christians imagine that they will lose their peace in this way. Let them lose it, and get a better one. Do they not know that the Holy Ghost is the Spirit of truth, and that he is given to guide us into all truth, that relating to ourselves and that relating to God? Contrition and faith are not enemies; contrition and love, contrition and joy; all these in fact belong together.
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