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Today's Devotional

It is because of the hope of Israel that I am bound with this chain—Acts 28:20 (NIV).

Bound, yet with a heart enfranchised—so it may be with me. Circumstances may trammel and restrict me; but if I have been freed from the fetters of guilt and the burden of sin, through what Christ has done and is doing and will continue to do for me, I am a partaker of glorious liberty.

Bound, yet with a mind enriched and satisfied—so it may be with me. Prison walls, tangible or intangible, may shut me in; but if the treasures of God’s Word, and the teachings of the Holy Spirit, and the fellowship of the saints, and the thoughts which wander through eternity, are mine, I walk in a spacious room.

Bound, yet with love and lips unfettered and at the Master’s use— so it may be with me. In my sick-chamber, in my narrow place, there are letters I can write, there are words I can speak, whose influence may reach far and live long. Am I not a free man? Am I not a worker together with God?

Bound, yet with an imagination lighted up with the brightest hopes—so it may be with me. The sky in the west is rosy red. The crown of righteousness is waiting me. The towers of the New Jerusalem loom through the mists. Who is so happy as I?

This is indeed the blessed imprisonment. “The heart,” Martin Luther said, when he was speaking oi the seal he had chosen as his symbol, “is placed in a white rose, to indicate the joy and peace and consolation which faith brings. But the rose is white and not red, for the joy and peace are not those of the world but of spirits.”

About the author and the source

It is for his book Men of the Covenant (the story of the martyred Scottish Covenanters) that Alexander Smellie (1857–1923) is most remembered today. Nonetheless, his devotional Hour of Silence was so popular in its own day it had to be reprinted eight times in twenty-four years. He was a pastor in the Free Church of Scotland and an editor and contributor to Christian magazines.