_SECULAR ANXIETY._
"Take no thought for your life."--Matthew vi. 25.
"Take no thought for the morrow."--Matthew vi. 31.
Let us survey the entire passage of which the first of these texts is
the commencement, and of which the second is the close. It brings
before us a common evil, and for this evil it proposes a sovereign
remedy.
The evil is _secular anxiety_. Perhaps we need not be greatly
surprised at its prevalence, when we consider what the life-experience
of most of us is. Think of the uncertainty of almost everything we
know--life, health, friendship, domestic relationships and affections,
riches, commerce. Life has many sad surprises and disappointments. Our
own day is especially full of care. The age is mad with
speculation--thousands making haste to be rich, and so bringing upon
themselves many temptations. For many others, the time is full of
hard necessities, and the outlook is one of possible or even probable
poverty. The admonitions given by our Lord in the verses before us are
needed now more than ever.
There are persons who, under the influence of pride and false notions
of manliness, consider careworn Christians--Christians labouring and
struggling amid the difficulties of the way--undeserving of sympathy.
"After all," they say, "what are the ills of life, that we should make
so much ado? Be men!" Sometimes we meet with superficial Christians
who profess that this life is really so insignificant, that it shows a
low state of piety to be painfully affected by common ills. As to the
first, nothing but stoicism, or the hard-heartedness which is
sometimes the result of prosperity, can make the soul unsusceptible to
the ordinary troubles of life, or independent of the antidote which
the religion of Christ supplies. As to the second, do not let them
talk in a way which implies that they are wiser than their Lord. He
knew how heavily care pressed upon the hearts He loved, and
condescended to offer them the appropriate and all-sufficient relief.
And how does the great Teacher speak to the careworn in these verses?
Is it not unspiritual to take arguments for the comfort of our
Christian life from lower things? Must we go to the irrational and
inanimate creation for gospels of blessing for our spiritual need?
Christ drew His arguments from the birds and the flowers; clearly
showing that we should accustom ourselves to see God's hand, His love,
His teaching, in all things. Let Him not be excluded from the least
part of His creation. Every part of it may subserve the purposes of
His grace. "_Consider_" the fowls of the air and the flowers of the
fields; make them objects of study. To the thoughtful they often
suggest "thoughts that lie too deep for tears;" to the Christian they
may well suggest thoughts which shall inspire thanksgiving and prayer.
Note the condescension, the simplicity, and the power of our Lord's
argument. His appeals are homely. He seeks no far-fetched reasonings
or facts from antiquity. He points to birds and flowers; an argument
for simple people, but equally effective for the learned and the
refined. We have no need to go far for lessons of comfort.
We must not overlook the necessary limitations of our Lord's teaching
in these verses. Those limitations are found in the nature of things.
Observe, then,
I. Christ does not forbid all anticipations of the future. He cannot
mean so much as this when He says, "Take no thought for the morrow."
Man is an inhabitant of two worlds--one material, the other spiritual.
This being so, two distinct sets or classes of wants press upon
him--the wants of the body, and those of the soul. The wants of the
soul point to a future state of existence, for which we must prepare.
In relation to these, carelessness--the absence of forethought--would
be fatal. According to the state of our souls, the thought of the
future gives us terror or joy. To the Christian, the future is the
scene of his perfected spiritual growth, and of his consummated
happiness. Every aspiration of his soul bounds joyfully towards it,
and he instinctively leaves the things that are behind to press
forward. In the words before us, Christ does not touch such matters as
these. It is not fore-_thought_ which is condemned, but fore-_boding_.
II. Nor does He discountenance earnest activity in the duties of the
present. Work is God's oldest law. It is only in wilful blindness or
in unaccountable delusion that men can plead this teaching as an
excuse for indolence. "If any man will not work, neither shall he
eat." Work is often spoken of as a curse; but it is a blessing. With
a Christian spirit, it may be gloriously consecrated. It links us in
our activity with God who "worketh hitherto," and with Christ who
worked His full day.
III. Christ does not even condemn a legitimate forethought in
connection with secular interests. There _is_ a legitimate forethought
such as this. Nature teaches it. We must sow in order to reap. We must
toil to-day for results which cannot come till to-morrow. "If any
provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he
hath denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever." The faith to
live by is that which prompts not to sitting down and doing nothing,
but to trustful and persevering enterprise. Keep in mind the
distinction between forethought and foreboding. It is forethought in a
man which leads him to sow for a future harvest; it is foreboding that
would fill his heart with fears that the harvest will be a bad one.
Forethought is the grand distinction between the civilized and the
savage; foreboding is the weakness of distrust.
What the Lord bids us guard against, then, is conjectural brooding
over the possible necessities of the future, and our possible lack of
the resources required for their supply. "Taking thought" means
giving way to anxiety--the constant occupation and worry of the heart
in looking forward, gazing into, and dreading the possibilities of the
days and years yet to come. "Sufficient unto the day is the evil
thereof." Be warned against forebodings of evil to-morrow. The lesson
is, "Do the day's work as it is appointed by God; accept the day's
mercy, bear the day's evil; and be not anxious about the evil which
to-morrow may bring."
How common a weakness--nay, rather let us say, how common a sin--this
taking anxious thought for the morrow is! We see the lines of care in
thousands of faces every day. Anxiety has marked its furrows round
lips which every morning say, "Give us this day our daily bread." It
is a calamity as well as a sin. It disturbs the heart, so that there
can be no enjoyment of present mercies. It adds to the present the
weight of an unknown but dreaded future. It paralyses religious
feeling, and checks religious activity. It defeats its end by
shortening the life it would fain prolong.
Now Christ shows that this kind of anxiety reckons falsely, because it
is founded on a false estimate of life; and He further shows that to
gauge our position aright we must reckon according to the Divine
thought respecting it. The whole of the teaching before us on this
subject is perfectly plain, consisting of a few simple and obvious
points. We cannot hope, indeed, to bring it within the understanding
of the mere worldling. The man who has no filial confidence in God has
no antidote for care. Anxiety can only be subdued in the heart of him
who can look upward, and say, "Father, I trust in Thee!"
What, then, is the first point? It is this, that God--the Author of
our life, the Creator of our bodies--will surely give that which,
however necessary, is yet less important and less valuable. In
bringing us into existence, He has done more than He can do in giving
to us any secular blessing which we can need. "Is not the life more
than meat, and the body than raiment?" We have our life from Him; our
bodies are His handiwork. Why should we suspect that He will be
indisposed to give us whatever may be needful for the existence thus
created? Will He, by neglect, frustrate His own purpose? The greater
gift can only be sustained and made valid by the lesser ones. Without
food and raiment the body must decay, and its life must perish. God
does not give imperfectly.
Another point is this, that anxious care answers no good purpose. It
is useless. If we could by means of it gain an exemption from future
evil, common prudence would dictate it as a wise expedient. But it is
not so. Christ puts this consideration very strongly. No amount of
foreboding can add a single moment to our life, for the boundaries of
our life have been fixed by God. The future is utterly unknown to us;
and foreboding will not help us in the least degree to forecast its
difficulties and its trials, though it may unfit us for the endurance
of them. Whether we are cognizant of it or not, God will take His plan
with us, and will carry it out. If we could not believe in the love
that He hath towards us, the thought of this would be a dark sorrow;
but, assured of His love as we _may_ be, we can also be assured that
He will do all things well. At any rate, no over-anxiety of ours will
facilitate the order of life we long for. "The morrow shall take
thought for the things of itself." It will have anxieties enough of
its own in spite of every effort of ours to set it free from them.
Every day, to the end, will have its own "evil," and the "evil" of
each day will require all our strength for coping with it. So that
anxiety _for_ the morrow will not remove care _from_ the morrow; it
will only take strength and joy from to-day. Trust in God, and all
that He gives you of trouble for to-day will be accompanied by the
gift of the strength necessary to enable you to bear it. But do not
expect Him to give you strength to bear unnecessary sorrows--sorrows
of your own making--the sorrows which spring from worldliness and
unbelief. "As thy day"--the day that now is--"so thy strength shall
be."
A third point is, that, reasoning from analogy, we may be sure that
God will provide for us. He feeds the birds, and He clothes the
lilies. They can do nothing for themselves; yet how well are they
provided for! "Are not ye much better than they?" A wonderfully
simple, beautiful, and effective argument this! How grand the view it
gives us of God's position in His universe! What knowledge must be
His! What power! What vastness--what variety of resource! What
minuteness of kindly, loving interest! Who would not gladly entertain
such a conception of God and of His Providence as this, in preference
to the atheism and the materialism which have intruded so grievously
into the science of our times? "Behold the fowls of the air: for they
sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your
heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?...
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not,
neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his
glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe
the grass of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into
the oven, shall He not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?"
Thus, God is not content with giving what is simply necessary for
life; He gives for _beauty_ also. Showing His goodness in such a
manner to objects inferior to man, why should man suspect that the
same goodness will be denied to _him_? Observe, that Christ does not
teach that birds and flowers are better than men because of their
immunity from toil. His meaning is, that creatures which do not and
cannot toil--creatures which do not and cannot forecast the
future--are clothed and fed; will God neglect the nobler creatures to
whom He has given the power of thought, and whom He has put under the
obligation to labour? Even with these higher powers, man is still as
dependent as any of the inferior creatures around him. Will his needs
be overlooked, while theirs are supplied? Such a question is all the
more pertinent when we remember, that whilst they live for a day, he
was created for eternity, and needs the special gifts which can shape
his present life into a preparation and a discipline.
An additional point is, that unholy anxiety is essentially ungodly,
irreligious, unworthy of the position and the professions of a
Christian man. "Take no thought," no anxious thought, "saying, What
shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be
clothed? _For after all these things do the Gentiles seek._" Anxious
thought, therefore, is the characteristic of heathenism, and must be
excluded from the religion which is true. It is the spirit of the
world, not the spirit which is of God. We see this clearly enough when
we compare the amount of thought and care which we bestow upon our
earthly interests with that which we devote to the interests which are
spiritual and eternal. What anxiety we give ourselves about the future
of our health, the future of our business, the future of our worldly
position, the future of our children's secular education, the future
of their rank in society! Is it not ten times as great as that which
we bestow upon our Christian consistency, our religious usefulness,
our growth in grace? If we could hold the balance steadily, which
would prove to be the preponderating scale? Our Lord puts the case in
an indirect manner, no doubt; nevertheless, it is impossible to avoid
the implied conclusion. That conclusion is this: "If you suffer
yourself to be anxiously absorbed in earthly things, you rank yourself
with 'the Gentiles,' to whom this world is all."--Besides, such
anxiety is ungodly because it is _untrustful_. Heathens, who cannot
blind themselves to the fact that their gods leave them for the most
part, if not entirely, to themselves, may be excused if they feel that
there is room, yea even necessity, for anxious foreboding. But how
different should it be with those who know the one living and true
God, and who can recognize Him as their Father! Surely He may be
trusted as knowing His children, recognizing their needs, loving them,
and tenderly caring for them. Taking anxious thought implies the
weakness, if not the extinction, of faith.--Moreover, its impiety is
seen in the fact that it is a practical subordination of the spiritual
to the secular. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His
righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you." Let the
most important things have the first attention. Give due scope to the
higher aspirations of the soul, and the lower ones will shrink into
their due proportions, and will take their proper place. God will give
the earthly as it is needed to those who first seek the heavenly, and
the true spirit of religion will make us rich by making us content.
To Christians this teaching, taking it as a whole, covers the entire
ground of their secular life, and much more than that. Look at two or
three samples of the cases to which it applies.
1. To personal secular positions. "What will the future be? Shall I
live to be old? When I am old, shall I be provided for? Will health
and strength be continued to me according to my years?" Leave that! Do
your work _to-day_. For this you may have the needful strength from
God. Do not trouble about anything further. Use prudently the means
which God has put into your hands for providing for the future, and
then commit their safe keeping to Him. If you have no such means,
still trust. There are many promises on which you may implicitly and
calmly rely.
2. "How about my children? Will they grow up to be manful, good,
godly; a seed to serve the Lord, and a generation to call Him
blessed; my comfort, my pride? Or will they take evil ways; prove,
like so many more, vicious, ungodly, and bring down my grey hairs in
sorrow to the grave?" Leave that! Do your duty to your children
to-day. Train them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Use a
wise and godly forethought on their behalf. Pray for them. Instruct
them. Set before them a Christian example. You may trust the rest with
God, calmly and thankfully expecting the fulfilment of the words:
"Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will
not depart from it."
3. "What about my religious future? If I make a Christian profession,
shall I be able to live consistently with it? Shall I have strength to
resist temptation? What if I should fall? Can I so live as not to
dishonour the Church and the cause of Christ?" Leave that! Nurse your
Christian graces to-day. Lay up spiritual strength in reserve. That is
required by a wise forethought. But having done so, leave the rest.
God will take care of it all. You may stedfastly trust that He will
gloriously complete the work which He has graciously begun.
4. "My Christian work--what about that? Shall I be permitted to go on
with it for a few years longer, and thus to have some opportunity of
realizing my ambition as a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ? Or shall
I be called away comparatively early? And if so, what will become of
all the plans and projects upon which I have expended so much thought
and prayer and toil?" Leave that! Do your work to-day, and be not
anxious about the rest. When to-day merges into to-morrow let the new
to-day bring its own work with it, to be done in the day. Nothing more
of solicitude than that is needful. You are not indispensable to God;
nor are you essential to the work which by His will you are doing. If
it be worth doing, and you be separated from it, He will find a
suitable successor, or as many successors as the accomplishment of the
work may require.
5. "How about the prosperity of the cause of Christ in the world? Will
it go steadily forward, or will new and fiercer foes rise up against
it?" Leave that! Do all you can for it whilst you are here, and
entrust the rest, as you entrust your own work, to God. Do not hinder
it by wasting time in forebodings which ought to be spent in service.
6. "What of death--my own death? Shall I have grace enough to support
me when the time comes?" Leave that! No doubt you will; but do not be
anxious about it. To-day you are "the living;" be "the living to
praise the Lord," and trust the needs of your dying hour to Him.
The words of Christ recorded in these verses must have startled His
hearers. They taught new truth concerning life, and, beautiful as they
were, the truth they taught was strange. It would have been so strange
as to be without weight, if He had not first taught equally new and
equally beautiful truth concerning God. How does Christ here speak of
God? "Your heavenly Father." The heathen instructors had not taught
that! Pharisees and Sadducees had not taught that! But Christ was now
in the world; He had come forth from the Father, and He could say to
men: "Your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of these things."
Thus the whole teaching of these verses on the subject of Providence
and of Faith becomes plain and demonstrative. The great requirement is
for us to love Him filially as He loves us paternally; and then, from
that point, all is clear. We are dependent, but He will provide. There
are present difficulties, and probably there will be future trials;
but all takes the form of wise and holy discipline under His guiding
and beneficent hand.
How do we arrive at the conviction of the Fatherhood of God? Sin
stands in the way, and conscience craves something more than a mere
authoritative announcement. Sin is the forfeiture of all claim to the
Divine favour. What right have we to expect that His providence will
be to us a providence of love? There is but one answer: to trust a God
of providence, we must believe in a God of grace. Paul puts the whole
philosophy of this in a single sentence: "He that spared not His own
Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also
freely give us all things?" Our present subject, therefore, calls for
the gospel, and cannot be completed without it. "Behold the Lamb of
God that taketh away the sin of the world." "He that hath seen me hath
seen the Father." And, "If ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts
unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven
give good things to them that ask Him?" But let us ever remember that
we have higher wants than those of the body. The soul needs food, and
God has supplied "the bread of life"; it needs raiment, and God has
given to us the robe of righteousness wrought by Christ; it needs a
home, and we have "a house not made with hands, eternal in the
heavens." With these provisions, then, shall we forecast the future
with fear, or with hope? Which shall it be?
O holy trust! O endless sense of rest,
Like the beloved John,
To lay my head upon the Saviour's breast,
And thus to Journey on!