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Bowen's Daily Meditations
Devotional: December 20th

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" I have set the Lord always before me." - Psalms 16:8.

The habit of mind that is here indicated is very important, very rare, and very hard to be attained. Every Christian no doubt perceives, though more distinctly at certain times than at others, how exceedingly desirable it is that he should have a continual consciousness of the presence of the Lord, and what a grievous loss he is sustaining all the time that his Spirit forgets to realize that presence. And if he could attain unto this sublime habit of the soul by any single impulse and concentrated effort, he would put forth the needed violence and take possession of this blessed kingdom. But habits are not acquired in this way even when the Spirit of God is the teacher. He is indeed a wondrous teacher, and is able to give a rapid acceleration to all the movements of the soul; and to accomplish in weeks what would be wonderful in threescore years or a thousand years. Therefore there need be no despair: but let us distinctly understand the way in which he works, in order that there may be cooperation on our part and not hindrance.

Let us have it fully impressed upon our minds that the life to which the Lord is calling us, is not a life of occasional communion, of interspersed prayer, of pious seasons, but a life of unbroken communication with God, of never interrupted cooperation with Christ. " Without me ye can do nothing." ’ Whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all to the glory of God." " Abide in me." " Lo, I am with you always." Besides so many declarations of the word, there is the continual testimony of our experience, the testimony of our many mistakes, and follies and embarrassments, assuring us that we can of our own selves do nothing. For what we do without the Lord we do disobediently; and this single fact stamps it with a certain measure of opprobrium, no matter how commendable it might seem from other points of view. On the other hand whatever we do with the Lord, has an everlasting value; it may be but the tying of a shoe-string, yet if it be done in faith and in an enlightened dependence, as in the very presence of the Lord, it has a value that no vicissitudes of time can ever destroy. The will of the Lord abideth forever; and whatever is done with a right reference to that will, is celestial in character, immortal in destiny.

Let us enthrone in our minds this great truth, that nothing whatever is insignificant when a relation between it and God is perceived. Life is profane because men choose that it shall be so, by disconnecting it from God; not because God has chosen that it be so. Christ lived a human life, and there were every day thousands of trifling secularities in that life, as you perhaps may designate them; but all was exalted, all was sacred, according to the judgment of heaven. And he that is filled with the fulness of God, he in whose heart Christ abideth by faith, is careful all the day long lest any little thing divorce him from his Lord. He sets the Lord always before him; he seeks to see ever the vision that Isaiah saw in the temple.

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