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Bowen's Daily Meditations
Devotional: December 11th

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"The cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?" - John 18:11.

Art thou unwilling, believer, to drink the cup which thy Father giveth thee? It is a very different cup from that which the Saviour consented to drink for thee. It is wreathed around with the declaration, " All things shall work together for good to them that love God." It comes to thee by the hand of Jesus, the hand that was pierced for thee. In it you behold as in a transparency a crown of glory that fadeth not away, purchased for you by the Saviour’s righteousness. He that spared not his own Son for you, who was so tender of you as to suffer his Son to hang in your place, can you suspect him of offering you a cup of poison? What an unpardonable insult were this to offer to your heavenly Father! Yet just such insults are daily offered by those who reject the cup which their Father presents them, and steal away to some other path that they may not have to drink this cup.

To look upon an affliction as indicative of alienated feelings on the part of God, is base indeed for those who profess to believe the testimony of the cross. May not the Father and the Saviour be trusted to govern us, to guide us, correct us, bless us? Shall we teach them what our interests demand? Teach him who is Love, what is the way of love? Does the mother not know what the child can bear? You have been asking for precious things; for fruits of the Spirit; for love, joy, and peace; for knowledge, strength, and patience; for victory and glory; and the Lord presents you with a cup of humiliation and sorrow. Instead of enriching you with new hopes and joys he seems to come to you for the purpose of crushing and annihilating the few that you have. Nevertheless, for the Father’s sake, in Christ’s name, take the cup. Have you not agreed to surrender life’s joys and treasures when he that gave them demands them again? "What is the meaning of the faith you profess, but just this, that as you have let God choose for you a Saviour and a way of life, so you are to let him choose for you all your circumstances, all your experiences. Take the cup and drink it. Lo! one by one, the precious things you were demanding, are found to have been in the cup, and to have been communicated by means of it. So that the great and unendurable affliction from which you shrank, is ascertained at last to be the greatest of all your blessings, and to stand in the retrospect of your life a monument to the riches of divine grace, towering high above all the other monuments of your path.

May we have wisdom to choose the very cup which the Father chooseth for us. Balaam had not this; and entreated God to choose rather for him the cup which he, Balaam, desired for himself. Seeing that Balaam had more confidence in his own wisdom and discrimination than in God’s, God at length suffered Balaam to have the cup of his own choice; and all know the melancholy results. And may there not be around us Christians whose cup is of their own choice rather than God’s, who have taken the cup out of the left hand of God, and are living lives of worldly ease and dignity and affluence, felicitating themselves that they are exempt from so many bitternesses that once fell to the lot of Christians; and all because they had not wisdom to see a cup, preferred of God, in his right hand? The words " much tribulation" written over the gate of an avenue, almost of themselves carry conviction to the minds of many Christians that such an avenue is not the one that they are called to pursue. Are we of their number? Or of the number of those who have it profoundly engraved in their conviction that the will of the Lord, whatever its aspect, is the one path of life, and that the greatest of all calamities is when we get God to deal with us after our own wisdom, and to lead us in the pathway of our own crude desires?

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