'Be careful for nothing; but in everything by
prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let
your requests be made known unto God.'--PHIL. iv.
6.
It is easy for prosperous people, who have nothing to trouble them, to
give good advices to suffering hearts; and these are generally as futile
as they are easy. But who was he who here said to the Church at
Philippi, 'Be careful for nothing?' A prisoner in a Roman prison; and
when Rome fixed its claws it did not usually let go without drawing
blood. He was expecting his trial, which might, so far as he knew, very
probably end in death. Everything in the future was entirely dark and
uncertain. It was this man, with all the pressure of personal sorrows
weighing upon him, who, in the very crisis of his life, turned to his
brethren in Philippi, who had far fewer causes of anxiety than he had,
and cheerfully bade them 'be careful for nothing, but in everything by
prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, make their requests known
unto God.' Had not that bird learned to sing when his cage was darkened?
And do you not think that advice of that sort, coming not from some one
perched up on a safe hillock to the strugglers in the field below, but
from a man in the thick of the fight, would be like a trumpet-call to
them who heard it?
Now, here are two things. There is an apparently perfectly impossible
advice, and there is the only course that will make it possible.