Lastly, and very shortly. What was the third head? "Grammar."
Right.
Now, I require a clever boy to answer the next question. What
is the verb? "Seek." Very good: "seek." What mood is it in?
"Imperative mood." What does that mean? "A command." What is
the soldier's first lesson? "Obedience." Have you obeyed this
command? Remember the imperative mood of these words, "SEEK first
the Kingdom of God."
This is the command of your King. It MUST be done. I have been
trying to show you what a splendid thing it is; what a reasonable
thing it is; what a happy thing it is; but beyond all these reasons,
it is a thing that MUST be done, because we are COMMANDED to do
it by our Captain. Now, there is His command to seek FIRST the
Kingdom of God. Have you done it?
"Well," I know some boys will say, "we are going to have a good
time, enjoy life, and then we are going to seek--LAST--the Kingdom
of God."
Now, that is mean; it is nothing else than mean for a boy to take
all the good gifts that God has given him, and then give him nothing
back in return but
His wasted life.
God wants boys' LIVES, not only their souls. It is for active,
service that soldiers are drilled, and trained, and fed, and armed.
That is why you and I are in the world at all--not to prepare to
go out of it some day, but to serve God actively in it NOW. It
is monstrous, and shameful, and cowardly to talk of seeking the
Kingdom LAST. It is shirking duty, abandoning one's rightful post,
playing into the enemy's hand by doing nothing to turn his flank.
Every hour a Kingdom is coming in your heart, in your home, in the
world near you, be it a Kingdom of Darkness or a Kingdom of Light.
You are placed where you are, in a particular business, in a
particular street, to help on there the Kingdom of God. You cannot
do that when you are old and ready to die. By that time your
companions will have fought their fight, and lost or won. If they
lose, will you not be sorry that you did not help them? Will you
not regret that only at the last you helped the Kingdom of God?
Perhaps you will not be able to do it then. And then your life
has been lost indeed.
Very few people have the opportunity to seek the Kingdom of God
at the end. Christ, knowing all that, knowing that religion was
a thing for our life, not merely for our death-bed, has laid this
command upon us now: "Seek FIRST the Kingdom of God."
I am going to leave you with this text itself. Every boy in the
world should obey it.
Boys, before you go to work to-morrow, before you go to sleep
to-night, resolve that, God helping you, you are going to seek
FIRST the Kingdom of God. Perhaps some boys here are deserters;
they began once before to serve Christ, and they deserted. Come
back again, come back again today! Others have never enlisted at
all. Will you not do it now? You are old enough to decide. The
grandest moment of a boy's life is that moment when he decides to
"SEEK FIRST THE KINGDOM OF GOD."
The Changed Life: The Greatest Need of the World.
God is all for quality; man is for quantity. The immediate need
of the world at this moment is not more of us, but, if I may use
the expression, a better brand of us. To secure ten men of an
improved type would be better than if we had ten thousand more of
the average Christians distributed all over the world. There is
such a thing in the evangelistic sense as winning the whole world
and losing our own soul. And the first consideration of our
own life--our own spiritual relations to God--our own likeness to
Christ. And I am anxious, briefly, to look at the right and the
wrong way of becoming like Christ--of becoming better men: the
right and the wrong way of sanctification.
Let me begin by naming, and in part discarding some processes in
vogue already for producing better lives. These processes are far
from wrong; in their place they may even be essential. One ventures
to disparage them only because they do not turn out the most perfect
possible work.