Daily Devotionals

Bowen's Daily Meditations

Devotional: February 21st

" The Lord is very pitiful" - James 5:11.

Few believe this. Men know what pitifulness is. They know how a very pitiful parent will act towards a suffering child: how he will show himself tenderly solicitous to staunch its wounds and alleviate its sorrows. They do not view God as characterized by this sympathizing tenderness and pitifulness. They regard him as a physician, who, by long familiarity with suffering, is able to look upon it without emotion, and coldly to calculate what remedies are best.

If we choose to see God thus, we shall perhaps find him thus; for according to our faith is he manifested. Nevertheless, he is what the prophets and apostles declare, - very pitiful. There is in him no indifference to human suffering. He does not willingly afflict, nor grieve the children of men; nay, " in all their affliction he was afflicted.’ The tears shed by Christ are a part of the manifestation of God to man.

Tell me, pray, who taught the mother her pitifulness? who introduced that wondrous feeling of kindness into her heart? Who constituted her in so admirable a way, that, though in all other relations she might be selfishness itself, yet in this she is compelled, as by the instinct of her own good, to hang in patience, in pity, and in love, over the cradle of her little one? Who hath made her maternal ear of such sensitiveness, that the faintest cry of her babe shall smite piercingly upon it? Behold her! she is wholly dedicated, - her ear, eye, tongue, her hands, her feet, her body and soul, her wealth, her all, - to a conflict with the sorrow of her infant, to the accomplishment of its utmost welfare. Through this glass, then, gaze upon the perfections of thy God. The pitifulness in the mother’s heart bespeaks a greater pitifulness in the heart of him who made her thus. He that made her lips so that gentle and heart-affecting accents might fall from them, is one that knoweth exquisitely how to caress, to solace, and to bless. Where however, is the infant whose sorrows are all overtaken by the solicitude of the parent? But the believer has no experience of suffering, great or slight, common or peculiar, for which there is not some special and some gentle word of God, with a medicinal virtue only limited by his want of faith.

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