Chapter VIII: Unworldliness

THE keynote of St. Matthew vi. is, as we have seen, this: that the true motive of the religious life in all its activities is simply the desire for divine approval. It owns one only master, God, whom it trusts with an absolute confidence. There results from this a complete freedom from the anxieties of the world. It is then an unworldly disposition, as the result of simplicity of motive, that our Lord proceeds to enjoin:

“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the earth, where moth
and rust doth consume, and where thieves dig through and steal:
but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither
moth nor rust doth consume, and where thieves do not break
through nor steal: for where thy treasure is, there will thy
heart be also.”

In the days when our Lord spoke these words people mostly preserved their money and other treasures by concealing it, as in many parts of Europe they do still. Thus the task of thieves was, in the main, to “dig through” into places in houses or fields where treasure was likely to be hidden. This is the meaning of our Lord’s metaphor. We are to lay up our store in heaven, where no thief can get at it, and where no natural process of corruption can affect it. Now heaven is God’s throne. It is where His will works centrally and peacefully; and the kingdom of the Christ is the kingdom of heaven, because, though a visible society in the world, God is there specially known and recognized, and His good will towards man is consequently at work with a special freedom and fullness.

If then you are asked, what is it to lay up treasure in heaven, I think you may answer with great security: To lay up treasure in heaven is to do acts which promote, or belong to, the kingdom of God; and what our Lord assures us of is that any act of our hands, any thought of our heart, any word of our lips, which promotes the divine kingdom by the ordering whether of our own life or of the world outside――all such activity, though it may seem for the moment to be lost, is really stored up in the divine treasure-house; and when the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem, shall at last appear, that honest effort of ours, which seemed so ineffectual, shall be found to be a brick built into that eternal and celestial fabric.

And our Lord gives the answer to a difficulty continually perplexing honest Christians――How am I to learn to _love_ God? I want to do my duty, but I do not feel as if I loved God. Our Lord gives the answer, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Act for God: do and say the things that He wills: direct your thoughts and intentions God-ward; and depend upon it, in the slow process of nature all that belongs to you――your instincts, your intelligence, your affections, your feelings――will gradually follow along the line of your action. Act for God: you are already _showing_ love to Him and you will learn to _feel_ it.

“The lamp of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be
single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye
be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore
the light that is in thee be darkness how great is the darkness!
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one,
and love the other; or else he will hold to one, and despise the
other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”

The question of vital importance is therefore simply this: are we single-minded in seeking God? Single-mindedness is what gives clearness and force to life. Put God clearly and simply first in great things and in small. Then your life will be full of light, full of power. And, in fact, you must put God first, or nowhere. Examine any man’s life, of what sort it is. Cross-question it. You will find at last that one motive is dominant. Either, at the last push, he will do God’s will, or he will do that by which he thinks to serve his interests in the world. Now, what a man does at the last analysis or when pushed into a corner, that is what reveals his real motive. The motive on which he then acts is his only real master-principle. There can be only one such in a life. At the bottom it is either God which rules a life or mammon, i.e. money. Thus you must put God first, or, in fact, you are putting Him nowhere; if He is not first, then He can be no more than the superficial decoration of a life really devoted to something else.

But how can it be, we ask, that the exclusive service of God in all things will not narrow our life? How can God be so “jealous” without restricting our legitimate freedom of expansion? For this reason: that God contains everything in Himself, the whole sum of being; so that there is no beauty or truth or goodness in the world which does not fall to you to delight in as part of your love and service of God. Loving God and serving Him should lead you to watch for and respond to all the truth and beauty that there is in God’s world, all the traits of excellence in human character, and to own your allegiance to your family, to your friends, to your country, to your Church, and to humanity as a whole. “All things are yours, whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours,” if “ye are Christ’s,” as “Christ is God’s.”[73]

Never let us fear then that to put God first and serve Him utterly will narrow any faculty or dwarf any capacity. It can but fill with an evergrowing largeness every vital force of our being, every instinct of our life. “If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.”

But we must notice the warning which our Lord gives us as to a possible condition of our conscience. The light that is in us may be darkness. We so often talk as if we were only obliged to “follow our conscience:” as if no one could lay anything to our charge unless we were acting against the present voice of conscience. But this is a very perilous error. We are also obliged to enlighten our conscience and to keep it enlightened. It is as much liable to error as our uninstructed intelligence, as much liable to failure as our sight. Probably of every ten criminals brought up before judge and jury on account of some crime the majority were not, at the time of its commission, acting against their conscience. They had stifled or darkened that long ago. There is, I believe, nothing to which in our time attention needs to be called more than to the fact that conscience is only a _faculty_ for knowing God and His will. It is certain, unless it is educated, to give wrong information. And the way to educate it, is to put it to school with the “Light of the world.” Alas! there must be multitudes of respectable and self-enlightened people of whom it is true that the light which is in them is darkness.

The result of singleness of mind in seeking God is to be a complete freedom from worldly anxiety. The keynote, as it were, of the passage which concludes this chapter is the phrase, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all the rest shall be added unto you.” Look to God first. Obey God. Enthrone Him in unique supremacy in your heart. He is your Father, and as such you can trust Him. If day by day you do His will simply, and cast your care on Him, then you can have a wonderful freedom from anxiety as to your future, and can live at peace――the sort of peace which finds its illustration in the fascinating tranquillity of the flowers of the field, and the light-heartedness of the birds of the air. These are our Lord’s words:

“Therefore I say unto you, Be not anxious for your life, what ye
shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what
ye shall put on. Is not the life more than the food, and the
body than the raiment? Behold the birds of the heaven, that they
sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; and your
heavenly Father feedeth them. Are not ye of much more value than
they? And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit unto
his stature? And why are ye anxious concerning raiment? Consider
the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither
do they spin: yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his
glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God doth 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? Be not therefore anxious, 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; for
your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these
things. But seek ye first his kingdom, and his righteousness;
and all these things shall be added unto you. Be not therefore
anxious for the morrow: for the morrow will be anxious for
itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”

Anxiety――that is what we are to be freed from. It is not forethought, or “carefulness” in that sense, against which our Lord is warning us, but anxiety. We are to trust God. To do daily the duty of the day, and then trust God for the consequences.

Our pattern in this freedom from anxiety is, of course, our Lord Himself. You notice that through all His ministry He looked forward, and lived His life as a whole, on a certain plan; but there was no anxiety as to results. It is a sort of symbol of this attitude of mind that once, amidst the howling storm on the lake, the Master was found asleep on a pillow. It is, as it were, an object lesson of what is said in Psalm cxxvii; which more than anything in the Old Testament expresses our Lord’s meaning in this passage:

“It is vain for you that ye rise up early, and so late take rest,
And eat the bread of toil:
For so he giveth unto his beloved sleep.”

That is the motto to write under the picture of Christ in the boat on the stormy sea.

Our Lord here, as elsewhere, is manifestly expressing Himself in the proverbial manner. It is the proverbial manner to express a thing by an extreme one-sided instance. We have noticed this repeatedly: and that, for this reason, one proverbial utterance may need to be balanced by another contrary one. Thus, on another occasion our Lord bids us take thought of what His service will involve, looking towards the future like a man who is about to build a house or a king who is preparing for a campaign. Here He is putting the other thought, that we are to cast all our care upon God our Father, who careth on our behalf.

But indeed if taking this passage alone you think of the metaphors which our Lord employs――metaphors of the flowers of the field and the birds of the air――you will see that what He means to warn us against is anxiety, not prevision. For think of the growth of the plant; it is always looking towards the future in its own instinctive way; the process by which it grows is a gradual process; all its activity is directed towards the preparation of the seeds by which the permanence of the species is secured. And so with the birds when they build their nests: they are making provision. Everything is done by bird and plant in view of the future, but done with a tranquillity which reposes unconsciously upon the purpose of God. What they do unconsciously we are to do consciously.

Here, then, is a lesson specially necessary for our time. There is no greater plague of our generation than the nervous anxiety which characterizes all its efforts. How many people are there who make their health much worse than it would naturally be, because they are always morbidly anxious about their symptoms or some possibility of infection. Again and again it is anxiety about health which is a main cause of our unserviceableness in doing our duty. We ought to be reasonably careful and to go boldly forward in the peace of God.

Again, how many good schemes fail because people are so nervously anxious about their success that they never reach that condition of peaceful persistence in work which is necessary if it is to be fruitful. “Semper agens, semper quietus”――“always at work, always tranquil”――that is the right motto.

Once more, as to holidays. What a vast mistake people often make in turning a holiday into an occasion of solicitude; seeking for distraction at the expense of repose, and forgetting that the only central repose for wearied or jaded faculties is the reposing upon the Eternal. There alone is “the central peace subsisting at the heart of endless agitation.” People would get much more even of physical good from Sunday and holiday rests, if they used them first of all as occasions for returning to God and finding rest in Him. And this applies to the clergy no less than to the laity. “Be still, then, and know that I am God.” That is what we are to learn. Repose upon God quietly, and do daily the duties of the day, and bear daily the evils of the day, and, like Christ our Lord, though it be through cross and passion, we shall come to the glory which is predestined for us by God.

And observe the phrase, “Sufficient unto the day is the _evil_ thereof.” Our Lord is not in any sort of way promising us that we shall not suffer trouble if we put our trust in God. What He tells us is simply that “According to thy day, so shall thy strength be.” We are in God’s hands. God gives us the evil and the good. We are only, like our Lord, to trust in His divine fatherhood; and doing our best to-day, exercising our judgement to the best of our power, we are to repose in His love.