Matthew vi. 31, 32, 33. Be not anxious, saying, What shall we eat?
or, what shall we drink, or wherewithal shall we be clothed? (for
after all these things do the heathen seek:) for your Heavenly
Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye
first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things
shall be added unto you.
We must first consider carefully what this text really means; what
'taking no thought for the morrow' really is. Now, it cannot mean
that we are to be altogether careless and imprudent; for all
Scripture, and especially Solomon's Proverbs, give us the very
opposite advice, and one part of God's Word cannot contradict the
other. The whole of Solomon's Proverbs is made up of lessons in
prudence and foresight; and surely our Lord did not come to do away
with Solomon's Proverbs, but to fulfil them. And more, Solomon
declares again and again, that prudence and foresight are the gifts
of God; and God's gifts are surely meant to be used. Isaiah, too,
tells us that the common work of the farm, tilling the ground,
sowing, and reaping, were taught to men by God; and says of the
ploughman, that 'His God doth instruct him to discretion and doth
teach him.' Neither can God mean us to sit idle with folded hands
waiting to be fed by miracles. Would He have given to man reason,
and skill, and the power of bettering his mortal condition by ten
thousand instructions if He had not meant him to use those gifts?
We find that, at the beginning, Adam is put into the garden, not to
sit idle in it, nor to feed merely on the fruits which fall from the
trees, as the dumb animals do, but to dress it, and to keep it; to
use his own reason to improve his own condition, and the land on
which God had placed him. Was not the very first command given to
man to replenish the earth and subdue it? And do we not find in the
very end of Scripture the Apostles working with their own hands for
their daily bread?
But what use of many words? It is absurd to believe anything else;
absurd to believe that man was meant to live like the butterfly,
flitting without care from flower to flower, and, like the
butterfly, die helpless at the first shower or the first winter's
frost. Whatever the text means, it cannot mean that.
And it does not mean that. I suppose, that three hundred years ago
(when the Bible was translated out of the Greek tongue, in which the
Apostles wrote, into English), 'taking thought' meant something
different from what it does now: but the plain meaning of the text,
if it be put into such English as we talk now, is, 'Do not _fret_
about the morrow. Be not anxious about the morrow.' There is no
doubt at all, as any scholar can tell you, that that is the plain
meaning of the word in our modern English, and that our Lord is not
telling us to be imprudent or idle, but not to be anxious and
fretful about the morrow.
And more, I think if we look carefully at these words, we shall find
that they tell us the very reason why we are to work, and to look
forward, and to believe that God will bless our labour.
And what is this reason? It is this, that we have a _Father_ in
heaven; not a mere Maker, not a mere Master, but a _Father_. All
turns on that one Gospel of all Gospels, _your Father in heaven_.
For our Lord seems to me to say, 'Be not anxious for your life, what
ye shall eat, or drink, or wear. Is not the life more than meat?
Has not your Heavenly Father given you a higher life than the mere
life which must be kept up by food, which He has given to the
animals? He has made you reasonable souls; He has given to you
wisdom from His own wisdom, and a share of the Light which lights
every man who comes into the world, the Light of Christ His Son; He
has created you in His own likeness, that like Him you may make
things, be makers and inventors, each in his place and calling, each
according to his talents and powers, even as your Heavenly Father,
the Maker and Creator of all things. And if He has given you all
these wonderful powers of mind and soul, surely He has given you the
less blessing, the mere power to earn your own food? If He has made
you so much wiser than the beasts, surely He has made you as wise as
the beasts.' 'And is not the body more than raiment?' Has He not
given you bodies which can speak, write, build, work, plant, in a
thousand cunning and wonderful ways; bodies which can do a thousand
nobler things than merely keep themselves warm, as the beasts do?
Then be sure, if He has given you the greater power, He has given
you the less also. And as for fine clothes and rich ornaments, 'Is
not the body more than raiment?' Is not your body a far more
beautiful and nobler thing than all the gay clothes with which you
can bedizen it? If your bodies be fair, strong, healthy, useful, it
matters little what clothes you put upon them. Why will you not
have faith in your Heavenly Father? Why will you not have faith in
the great honour which He put on you when He said at first, 'Let us
make man in our image, after our likeness, and let him have dominion
over all things on the earth'? Be sure, that God would not have
made man, and given him all these powers, and sent him upon this
earth, unless this earth had been a right good and fit place for
him. Be sure that if you obey the laws of this earth where God has
put you, you will never need to be anxious or fret; but you will
prosper right well, you and your children after you. For 'Consider
the fowls of the air, they neither sow, nor reap, and gather into
barns, and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them; and are ye not much
better than they?' Surely you are, for you _can_ sow, and reap, and
gather into barns. And if God makes the earth work so well that it
feeds the fowls who cannot help themselves, how much more will the
earth feed you who _can_ help yourselves, because God has given you
understanding and prudence? But as for anxiety, fretting, repining,
complaining to God, 'Why hast Thou made me thus?' what use in that?
'Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature?'
Will all the fretting and anxiety in the world make you one foot or
one inch taller than you are? Will it make you stronger, wiser,
more able to help yourself? You are what you are: you can do what
God has given you power to do. Trust Him that He has made you
strong enough and wise enough to earn your daily bread, and to
prosper right well, if you will, upon this earth which He has made.
And why be anxious about clothing? 'Consider the lilies of the
field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet
Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.' But
man _can_ toil, man _can_ spin; your Heavenly Father has given to
man the power of providing clothes for himself, and not for himself
only, but for others; so that while the man who tills the soil feeds
the man who spins and weaves, the man who spins and weaves shall
clothe the man who tills the soil; and the town shall work for the
country, while the country feeds the town; and every man, if he does
but labour where God has put him, shall produce comforts for human
beings whom he never saw, who live perhaps in foreign lands across
the sea. For the Heavenly Father has knit together the great family
of man in one blessed bond of mutual need and mutual usefulness all
over the world; so that no member of it can do without the other,
and each member of it--each individual man--let him work at what
thing he will, can make many times more of that thing than he needs
for himself, and so help others while he earns his own living; and
so wealth and comfort ought to increase year by year among the whole
family of men, ay, and would increase, if it were not for sin. Yes,
my friends, if it were not for that same _sin_--if it were not that
men do not seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness,
there would be no end, no bound to the wealth, the comfort, the
happiness of the children of men. Even as it is, in spite of all
man's sin, the world does prosper marvellously, miraculously; in
spite of all the waste, destruction, idleness, ignorance, injustice,
and folly which goes on in the world, mankind increases and
replenishes the earth, and improves in comfort and in happiness; in
spite of all, God is stronger than the Devil, life stronger than
death, wisdom stronger than folly, order stronger than disorder,
fruitfulness stronger than destruction; and they will be so, more
and more, till the last great day, when Christ shall have put all
enemies under His feet, and death is swallowed up in victory, and
all mankind is one fold under one Shepherd, Jesus Christ, the
righteous King of all.
But some may ask, What does our Lord mean when He says, 'That if we
sought first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, all these
things should be added to us?'
I cannot tell you altogether, my friends; for eye hath not seen, nor
ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive
what God has prepared for those who love Him. But this I can tell
you, that these things are taken _from_ men, instead of being added
to them, by their not seeking first God's kingdom and His
righteousness. I can tell you, as the Prophet does, that it is the
sins of man which withhold good things from him; because though, as
the Prophet says in the same place, God sends the good things, and
the former and latter rain in their season, and reserves to men
still the appointed weeks of harvest, yet men will not fear that
same Lord their God; and therefore those good things are wasted, and
mankind remains too often miserable in spite of God's goodness, and
starving in the midst of God's plenty.
If you wish to know what I mean, look but once at this present war.
I do not complain of the war. I honour the war. I thank God from
the bottom of my heart for this great and glorious victory, and I
call on you to thank Him, too, for it. I am none of those who think
war sinful. I cannot do so, for I swore at my baptism to fight
manfully under Christ's banner against the world, the flesh, and the
Devil; and if we cannot reach the Devil and his works by any other
means, we must reach them as we are doing now, by sharp shot and
cold steel, and we must hold it an honourable thing, and few things
more honourable on earth, for a man to die fighting against evil
men, and an evil world-devouring empire, like that of Babylon of
old, or this of Russia now, that he may save not merely us who sit
here now, but our children's children, and generations yet unborn,
from Russian tyranny, and Russian falsehood, and Russian profligacy,
and Russian superstition. I say, I do not complain of this war; but
I ask you to look at the mere waste which it brings, the mere waste
of God's blessings. Consider all the skilful men now employed in
making cannon, shot, and powder to kill mortal men, who might every
one of them, in time of peace, have been employed in making things
which would feed, and clothe, and comfort mortal man. Consider that
very powder and shot itself, the fruit of so much labour and money,
made simply to be shot away, once for all, as if a man should spend
months in making some precious vessel, and then dash it to pieces
the moment it was made. Consider that Sevastopol alone; the
millions of money which it must have cost--the stone, the timber,
the iron, all used there--in making a mere robber's den, which might
all have been spent in giving employment and sustenance to whole
provinces of poor starving Russians. Consider those tens of
thousands of men, labouring day and night for months at those deadly
earthworks, whose strong arms might have been all tilling God's
earth, and growing food for the use of man. And then see the waste,
the want, the misery which that one place, Sevastopol, has caused
upon God's earth.
And consider, too, the souls of mortal men, who have been wasted
there--no man knows how many, nor will know till the judgment day.
Two hundred thousand, at the least, they say, wasted about that
accursed place, within the last twelve months. Two hundred thousand
cunning brains, two hundred thousand strong right hands, two hundred
thousand willing hearts: what good might not each of those men have
done if he had been labouring peacefully at home, in his right place
in God's family! What might he not have invented, made, carried
over land and sea? None dead there but might have been of use in
his generation; and doubtless many a one who would have done good
with all his might, who would have been a blessing to those around
him; and now what is left of him on earth but a few bones beneath
the sod? Wasted--utterly wasted! Oh, consider how precious is one
man; consider how much good the weakest and stupidest of us all
might do, if he set himself with his whole soul to do good; consider
that the weakest and stupidest of us, even if he has no care for
good, cannot earn his day's wages without doing some good to the
bodies of his fellow-men; and then judge of the loss to mankind by
this one single siege of one single town; and think how many
stomachs must be the emptier, how many backs the barer, for this one
war; and then see how man wastes God's gifts, and wastes most of all
that most precious gift of all, men, living men, with minds, and
reasons, and immortal souls.
And whence has all this waste come? Simply because these Russian
rulers have chosen to seek first, not God's kingdom, but their own.
Instead of behaving like God's ministers and God's stewards, and
asking, 'How would God our King have us rule His kingdom?' they have
laboured for their own power, conquering all the nations round them,
removing their neighbour's landmark, and wasting the wealth of their
country on armies, and fortresses, and fleets, with which they
intended to conquer more and more of the earth which did not belong
to them. Because, instead of seeking God's righteousness, and
saying to themselves, 'How shall we be righteous, even as our
Heavenly Father is righteous, and how shall we teach this great
people to be righteous likewise?' they have sought their own
pleasure, and lived in profligacy, covetous and cheating almost
beyond belief; and instead of behaving righteously to the people, or
teaching them to be righteous, they have crushed down the people,
stupefied and corrupted them by slavery, and maddened them by
superstitions which are not the righteousness of God, till they have
made them easy tools in their unjust wars, and are able to drive
them, even by force, like sheep to the slaughter, to die miserably
in a cause in which, even if those unhappy slaves conquered, they
would only rivet their own chains more tightly, and put more power
into the hands of the very rulers who are robbing them of their
earnings, dishonouring their daughters, and driving off their sons
to die in a foreign land. Ah, my friends, if these men had but
sought first the kingdom of God and His righteousness; if the great
wealth, and the wonderful industry and prudence of Russia had been
but spent in doing justly, and loving mercy, what a rich and
honourable country of brave and industrious Christian men might
Russia be; a blessing, and not a curse, to half the earth of God!
Let us pray that she will become so, some day; and we may have hope
for her, for she is but young, and has time yet for repentance.
But some may say--indeed, we are all ready enough to say--'Then the
evil of this war is the Russians' fault, and not ours; and so in
every other case. In every other evil and misery they are rather
other people's fault than ours. If we do our duty well enough, and
if other people would but do theirs, all would be well.'
We are all apt to say this in our hearts. But our Lord does not say
so. His promise is to all mankind: but His promise is to each of
us also. When He says, Seek ye first God's kingdom and
righteousness, He speaks to you and to me, to every soul now here.
Believe it, my friends. The more that I see of life, the more I see
how much of our sorrow is our own fault; how much of our happiness
is in our own hands; and the more I see how little use there is in
finding fault with this government, or that, the more I see how much
use there is in every man's finding fault with himself, and taking
his share of the blame.
I do not doubt that if the whole people of England, for the last
forty years, had sought first God's kingdom and God's righteousness,
and said to themselves in every matter, not merely 'What is
profitable for us to do?' but 'What is _right_ for us to do?' we
should have been spared the expenses and the sorrows of this war:
but as for blaming our government, my friends,--what they are we
are; we choose them, Englishmen like ourselves, and they truly
_represent us_. Not one complaint can we make against them, which
we may not as justly make against ourselves; and if we had been in
their places, we should have done what they did; for the seeds of
the same sins are in us; and we yield, each in his own household and
his own business, to the same temptations as they, to the sins which
so easily beset Englishmen at this present time. I say, frankly, I
see not one charge brought against them in the newspapers which
might not quite as justly be brought against me, and, for aught I
know, against every one of us here; and while we are not faithful
over a few things, what right have we to complain of them for not
having been faithful over many things? Believe, rather (I believe
it), that if we had been in their place, we should have done far
worse than they; and ask yourselves, 'Do _I_ seek first God's
kingdom and God's righteousness; for if I do not, what right have I
to lay the blame of my bad success on other men's not seeking them?'
To each of us, as much as to our government, or to the Russian
empire, is Christ's command; and each of us must take the
consequences, if we break it. Let us look at ourselves, and mend
ourselves, and try whether God's promise will not hold true for us,
each in his station, let the world round us go as it will. Be sure
that God is just, and that every man bears his own burden: that the
righteous should be as the wicked, that be far from Thee, O God!
Shall not the judge of all the earth do right? Be sure that those
who trust in Him shall never be confounded, though the earth be
moved, and the mountains carried into the midst of the sea, as it is
written, 'Trust in the Lord, and be doing good; dwell in the land,
and work where God has placed thee, and verily thou shalt be fed.'
But have we done so, my friends? have we sought first God's kingdom
and His righteousness? have we not rather forgotten the meaning of
the text, and what God's kingdom is, and what His righteousness is?
Do not most people fancy that God's kingdom only means some pleasant
place to which people are to go after they die? and that seeking
God's righteousness only means having Christ's righteousness imputed
to us (as they call it), without our being righteous and good
ourselves? Do not most of us fancy that this very text means, 'Do
you take care of your souls, and God will take care of your bodies;
do you see after the salvation of your souls, and God will see after
the salvation of your bodies'? a meaning which, in the first place,
is not true, for God will do no such thing; and all the religion in
the world will not prevent a man's having to work for his daily
bread, or pay his debts for him without money; and a meaning which,
in the second place, people themselves do not believe; for religious
professors in general now are just as keen about money as
irreligious ones, and even more so; so that covetousness and
cunning, ambition and greediness to rise in life, seem now-a-days to
go hand in hand with a high religious profession; and those who
fancy themselves the children of light have become just as wise in
their generation as the children of this world whom they despise.
No, my friends, that is not the meaning of the text; and when I ask
you, Have you obeyed the text? I do not ask you that question; but
one which I believe is something far more spiritual and more deep,
something at least which is far more heart-searching, and likely to
prick a man's conscience, perhaps to make him angry with me who ask.
Do you seek first God's kingdom, or your own profit, your own
pleasure, your own reputation? Do you believe that you are in God's
kingdom, that He is your King, and has called you to the station in
which you are to do good and useful work for Him upon this earth of
His? Whatever be your calling, whether you be servant, labourer,
farmer, tradesman, gentleman, maid, wife, or widow, father, son, or
husband, do you ask yourself every day, 'Now what are the laws of
God's kingdom about this station of mine? what is my duty here? how
can I obey God, and His laws here, and do what He requires of me,
and so be a good servant, a good labourer, a good tradesman, a good
master, a good parish officer, a good wife, a good parent, pleasing
to God, useful to my neighbours and to my countrymen?' Or do you
say to yourselves, 'How can I get the greatest quantity of money and
pleasure out of my station, with the least trouble to myself?' My
dearest friends, ask yourselves, each of you, in which of these two
ways do you look at your own station in life?
And do you seek first God's righteousness? There can be no mistake
as to what God's righteousness is; for God's righteousness must be
Christ's righteousness, seeing that He is the express image of His
Father. Now do you ask yourselves, 'How am I to be righteous in my
station, as Christ was in His? how can I do my Heavenly Father's
will, as Christ did? how can I behave like Christ in my station? how
would the Lord Jesus Christ have behaved, if He had been in my
place, when He was on earth?' My friends, that is the question, the
searching question, the question which must convince us all of sin,
and show us so many faults of our own to complain of, that we shall
find no time to throw stones at our neighbours. How would the Lord
Jesus Christ have behaved, if He had been in my place when He was
upon earth?
My dear friends, till we can all of us answer that question somewhat
better than we can now, we have no need to look as far as Russia, or
as our forefathers' mistakes, or our rulers' mistakes, to find out
why this trouble and that trouble come upon us: for we shall find
the reason in our own selfish, greedy, self-willed hearts.
Oh, my friends, let us each search our own lives, and repent, and
amend, and resolve to do our duty, as sons of God, in the station to
which God has called us, by the help of the Spirit of God, which He
has promised freely to those who ask Him. And now, this day, as we
thank God for this great victory, let us thank Him, not with our
lips merely, but with our lives, by living such lives as He loves to
see, such lives as He meant us to live, lives of loyalty to God, and
of usefulness to our brethren, and of industry and prudence in our
calling, and so help forward, each of us, however humble our
station, the glory of God; because we shall each of us, in the
cottage and in the field, in the shop and in the mansion, in this
our little parish, and therefore in the great nation of which it is
a part, help forward the fulfilment of those blessed words, Our
Father which art in heaven; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on
earth as it is in heaven; and therefore, also, the fulfilment of the
words which come after them, and not before them; Give us this day
our daily bread.