the Third Week after Easter
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Daily Devotionals
Bowen's Daily Meditations
" The Lord will perfect that which concerneth me." - Psalms 138:8.
He will perfect my happiness. " My people shall be satisfied with my goodness." He will perfect his own image in me. He will make me perfect in wisdom; perfect to know and to do his will; perfect to glorify the Redeemer; perfect in beauty and in strength.
The thought of humanity being again clothed with perfection is something altogether wonderful. It was a light thing to call a world into existence out of nothing; but to take a nature that had become earthly, sensual, devilish, and so refashion it that it should be transparent to all the rays of the Godhead, is what a mere finite conception would never have shadowed forth
Man is engaged in perfecting himself. From the very beginning he has insisted upon it that all he wanted was room and time and liberty, and he would make of humanity some thing very admirable. He has had all the opportunities and advantages he could desire. Sometimes, in some little corner of the world, God has permitted him to clothe himself with literary and artistic glory ; to surround himself with beautiful statues and paintings; and to rise to the heights of a sublime eloquence. But Greece and Rome in their palmiest days, only afforded new evidence of the depravity and spiritual blindness of man, and what he was, only came out the more opprobriously by the intimations of what he might have been, and all succeeding cycles have shown his expectation of self-wrought perfection to be utterly delusive. In this our boasted day the most frightful immorality in the most favored places under the sun, shows anew the utter vanity of this most baseless hope. And all this time there has been present with man a heaven descended system, pledging him perfection in the truest and amplest sense of the word. What need we talk of the perfectibility of man? It is impossible with man; most possible with God. There are in the midst of us men and women whom God is engaged in carrying to perfection. Let us join ourselves to their number. They are despised by the world; so was Christ. The world sees in them indeed what it could not see in Christ; much imperfection; but it might see something else if it would; namely, a germinate perfection.
It was because Christ was made perfect in suffering, that we have this hope. In the day of sorrow and of calamity, do I bear well in mind that God is perfecting that which concerneth me?
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