FASTING
“Moreover when ye fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance: for they disfigure[66] their faces, that they may be seen of men to fast. Verily I say unto you, They have received their reward. But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thy head, and wash thy face; that thou be not seen of men to fast, but of thy Father which is in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret, shall recompense thee.”
Here, under the head of fasting, we may notice again—what applies equally to prayer or almsgiving—that our Lord is passing no slight on “common” or public religious actions. St. Paul tells us (1 Cor. xvi. 2) that we are to have church collections; and our Lord (St. Matt. xviii. 19–20) tells us we are to pray together; and He instituted the Eucharist, which is the Church’s chief social or public act of communion with God and mutual fellowship. So that it is ridiculous to suppose that our Lord is here slighting social religious acts—acts which are performed by the Church as a body, and in the performance of which we have the encouragement which comes of co-operation and the sense ofresponsibility to the community as well as to God. And most of all it is ridiculous to suppose that our Lord is discouraging common fasts, but not common prayer or almsgiving. In no case is our Lord undervaluing the common religious acts. But He is indicating the new motive of religious action, whether it be prayer or almsgiving or fasting. Its motive is to be God, and not man.
Once more, our Lord is not here saying anything against the manifestation of our religion by outward acts. We cannot pray properly—speaking generally—without adopting a fit attitude in prayer, that is on the regular occasions of public and private prayer. We should pray in an attitude which befits our relation to God, on our knees, humbly, devoutly, because we are creatures of soul and body, and we cannot express the religious feeling of the soul properly without its influencing the gesture of the body also. We are made up of soul and body, and a “spiritual” act of worship is one in which the spirit, that is the will, heart, and intelligence is engaged; not one in which the body takes no part. Then if we learn to pray aright, kneeling upon our knees,we can carry the habit of prayer into our common life. In the same way, if we are to fast, the act must have a definite and methodical outward expression. Do not let us be afraid of outward expressions of religion. Our Lord is emphasizing this, and this only, namely, the motive which we should have in all kinds of righteousness, whether it be worship or charity or self-subdual.
Thirdly, we shall do well to consider, what is the principle and meaning of fasting. Our Lord says less about it in the New Testament than about prayer;and you notice in the Revised Version that the mention of it has vanished from a good many of those passages where in the Authorized Version it stood side by side with prayer.[67] It is quite true, then, to say that our Lord says less about fasting than about prayer. It is quite true that fasting may be abused, and was in our Lord’s time abused, more easily than prayer; but it is a great mistake, because you have got a certain truth, therefore to exaggerate it. Our Lord Himself fasted, as He prayed; He fasted forty days and forty nights. Our Lordsaid the disciples should fast; that it would betoken the time when He was taken from them. St. Paul mentions fasting as part of his own practice—“in fastings often,”and he bids Christians “distress”[68] their bodies in order to reduce them to subjection. So again the Church from the first has fasted. And the great authors of religious revivals in our own Church—Simeon, and Pusey, and Maurice alike—practised and encouraged fasting. We may then depend upon it that we are foolish if we neglect it. And the object of it is this: it is the bringing the body under the spirit, whereas without it the body is apt to have the upper hand. It is not because our body is evil that we are to fast; but because our body is, or is meant to be, holy, and the effective instrument of the spirit. People sometimes talk about their body as if it were merely animal, and the spirit were only attached to it. That is not true. Our whole being is meant to be spiritual, as governed by the spirit. Just as when the principle of life takes hold on the inorganic world, it makes the whole nature organic of living; so whenthe spirit takes hold of the animal body, its work is to make the whole body spiritual.
It is worth while dwelling on this. People often justify sensual sin by saying it is “natural;” and the fallacy in this excuse lies in supposing that our body can be treated apart from our spirit. Nothing is natural to man in which his spiritual nature is not brought into play. This is the reason why Christian marriage is truly natural. It gives to the bodily relation of the sexes a spiritual purpose, and makes it serve high ends of the home and family. Thus in the same way eating and drinking is to serve spiritual ends. Everything that the true Christian does is part of a great spiritual whole; and it is, I say, because our body has grown lawless, and is apt to trample upon the spirit instead of being subordinate to it, that we have, as it were, to take revenges on the body and from time to time to harass it, as St. Paul says, and to hold it as a slave.
For the same reason we are foolish and un-Christian if we fast in such a way, either excessively or unwisely, as to unfit the body for spiritual activities. If youfast so that you cannot work, you are violating your duty. But many people eat and drink and sleep too well; their bodies have the upper hand; and they ought to fast, and to take the opportunity of Lent to fast, that their bodies may be brought under their spirits.
“The Scriptures bid us fast; the Church says, now:
Give to thy Mother what thou wouldst allow
To ev’ry corporation.”
Now we must return to consider the parenthesis about prayer which is to be found in chapter vi. 7–15, and which teaches us something more than that its motive is to be not vainglory, but God.
First, we are taught that prayer is not to be measured by length, but intensity:
“And in praying use not vain repetitions, as the Gentiles do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.”
If you were to go into a Buddhist country at the present time, you would find prayer there reduced to something so formal and mechanical that people do not need to say it themselves, but have prayer wheels and prayer flags to wind or spread out their prayers before the holy one. And I am afraid there has been agood deal of a like mechanical praying in the Christian Church. But the value of prayer, our Lord warns us, is not to be measured by its length, but the amount of will and intention we put into it. There is always need that we should remember this. There is always a danger that in praying dutifully and according to some rule our praying should be becoming mechanical, and that we should find ourselves measuring its value by its length.
Secondly, Christian prayer is not for the sake of informing God:
“Be not therefore like unto them [the Gentiles]: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.”
Why is it, then, that God requires of us to pray? The answer is a quite simple one. It is because God is our Father, and He wishes us to be trained in habits of conscious intercourse with Him. Therefore, just as many blessings which God wishes to give us are made dependent on our working for them, so many other blessings are made dependent on our regular and systematic asking. God wills to give them, but He wills to give them only if we ask Him; and this in order that the very necessity of continually holding intercoursewith a personal God and making requests to Him may train us in the habit of realizing that we are sons of our heavenly Father. The wisdom of this provision is best realized if we reflect how easily, when the practice of prayer is abandoned, the sense of a personal relation to God fades out of our human life. We are to pray then not to inform God, but to train ourselves in habits of personal intercourse with our Father who is in heaven.
CHAPTER VII
THE LORD’S PRAYER
OUR Lord is not satisfied with giving us abstract principles of prayer, but teaches us how to pray by giving us an example:
“After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven,” &c.
In regard to this great prayer, I would content myself with calling attention to the points of chief importance, and trying to explain some few difficulties, which lie in the separate clauses, and then very briefly indicating some of the principles which as a whole it enshrines.
“Our Father which art in heaven.”
The spirit of a prayer depends in great measure on whether the worshipper’s thought of God is true or false, adequate or inadequate. The Christian invokes God under the completest of all His titles, the title of Father, for “God hath sentforth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts crying, Abba, Father.”[69] And we call Him the Father which is in heaven, not because He is far off us—for in the Kingdom of Christ heavenly and earthly things are mingled and we“are come unto the heavenly Jerusalem,”[70]—but because He is raised far above all the pollution and wilfulness and ignorance of man “as the heaven is higher than the earth.” So we invoke our Father, infinitely above us yet unspeakably near. And the first prayer we offer is:
“Hallowed be thy name.”
What is the name of God? That is very well worth our consideration. The name of God in the Bible means that whereby He discloses or reveals Himself. You may indeed almost say that the name of God means God Himself as He is manifested. God has shown Himself to man; He has spelt out His great name, letter by letter, syllable by syllable, before the eyes of men or into their hearts, in nature, in conscience, by the voice of His prophets and in Jesus Christ His Son. Thus to hallow or sanctifyHis name is to set store by His revelation of Himself, as Father, Son and Spirit, one God. To pray that His name may be hallowed, is to pray that His revelation of Himself may be accepted of men, and His religion professed openly and secretly: that He may be acknowledged in conduct and worship, in Church and in State, on Sunday and on week-day.
“Thy kingdom come.”
The kingdom of God meant to the Jews, of course, the kingdom of the Messiah: that is to say that coming age, when heaven and earth shall be fused in one, when God shall be manifested in His glory, when all things shall be seen in their true light, and the reign of Christ in truth and meekness and righteousness shall be not only real but also manifest and indisputable. This is “the end of the world,” the “far off, divine event,” which is still future. At times, indeed, the Church as it already exists among us is called “the kingdom of God,” but at other times (as is implied here) the Church is regarded as a divine institution, representing indeed the kingdom here and now in the world, butalso preparing for its arrival in the future. To pray for the coming of the kingdom is therefore to pray for the spread and progress of the Church, and also for the diffusion in every way of all truth and meekness and righteousness and of all that can find its place in the city of God. It is to pray for the overthrow of every form of “lawlessness”—lawless lusts and appetites, lawless ambition and insolence and denial, godless worldliness and lies and vanities, cruelty, oppression and malice in every shape. For all these are forms of rebellion; and we know that they represent only a temporary usurpation. We are looking forward to, and would fain hasten, the coming of the King.
“Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth.”
This is a prayer against all wilfulness and also against all sloth: a prayer for the vigorous co-operation of all rational creatures in furthering the divine order of the world. And we should notice that the phrase “as in heaven, so on earth” refers probably to all the three preceding clauses: Hallowed be Thy Name, as in heaven, so on earth; Thy kingdomcome, as in heaven, so on earth; Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth. The Church of Rome, in the Catechism put forth by the Council of Trent, specially exhorts her clergy to call the attention of the faithful to this connexion of the clauses of the Lord’s Prayer.
“Give us this day our daily bread.”
Strangely enough, one of the most difficult words in the whole New Testament is this word translated “daily” in the Lord’s Prayer. Nobody can be quite certain what it means,but probably it means “the bread for the coming day.”[71] Give us to-day the bread for the coming day, is therefore a prayer that the bodily needs of the immediate future may be supplied for all members of the Christian family. It is a prayer which only those can truly pray who are contented with such satisfaction of their bodily needs as enables them to do the work of God, who will ask nothing for themselves that they do not askfor others, and who are content to wait from day to day upon the hand of God.
“And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”
We cannot do God’s work without the supply of our physical needs: therefore the last prayer was offered. But equally we cannot do God’s work unless we are at peace with Him: therefore this prayer follows. Sin may be regarded from many points of view—as a flaw or mistake in our nature or conduct: as a violation or transgression of a divine law (as in ver. 14): or (as here) as an act by which we have robbed God of His rights and incurred an obligation or debt which we cannot satisfy, and in regard to which we can only appeal to the divine pity. From the first point of view what is needed is nothing else than recovery and correction: from the second point of view we need forgiveness, but forgiveness of such sort as is only morally possible when our will is brought back into harmony with our Father’s will. Only from the third point of view is forgiveness the same as being let off. And the position which the petition to be forgiven holds in this prayer, preventsus from supposing that we can be “forgiven our debts” without having been brought into union with God’s will and into the fellowship of His Kingdom.
On the principle involved in this petition our Lord Himself immediately comments:
“For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
Here is the divine principle which, as we noticed before, is made so plain in the parable (St. Matt. xviii. 31), where the unthankful servant finds that all the debt which had been forgiven him has rolled back upon him because he in his turn has behaved himself unforgivingly, unmercifully, towards his fellow-servant. God deals with us as we deal with our fellow-men; and if we want to know how the face of God looks towards us, we must examine ourselves to see what is the aspect we present towards them.
“And bring us not into temptation.”
Now, this clause is intelligible enough to our hearts, but rather difficult to explain exactly. St. James writes, “Mybrethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations.” How can we pray not to be tempted or tried when we know that it is only through temptation that we can become strong? One explanation is to be got from our Lord’s words to His disciples at the time of His agony in the garden: “Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation.” If you fail to be on your guard, if you live carelessly, without watching or praying, God suffers you, as a punishment, to be brought within the scope of temptation, and you find it too strong for you. Therefore the prayer may be interpreted by expansion thus: make us watchful and prayerful, so that we never be suffered to fall into temptation as into a snare. But it seems better to interpret the prayer more generally as the expression of that self-distrust for which we have only too sufficient grounds, as a prayer like that of Christ’s,“Father, if it be possible let the cup of trial pass from me without my drinking it, nevertheless, thy will be done.”[72]
“But deliver us from the evil one.”
That is “from the devil.” Modern society seems to be very unwilling to believe in the devil or diabolical temptation. It has been cleverly said, “Satan never did a more successful stroke than when he persuaded people to disbelieve in his own existence.” There is truth in that. It is a real hindrance to our spiritual struggle, and an increase of despondency, if we forget that evil solicitations come, not only from our own nature, but from evil spirits. Moreover, if Christ is a true prophet—if He discerned the conditions of our spiritual struggle—certainly diabolical temptation must be real, for He is always talking of it. When He sees evil at work, evil for body or soul, His mind penetrates behind the appearances and detects hostile willsworking to pervert the kingdom of God, hostile wills which He knows are to be at last subdued to God and are even now controlled by Him, but which He knows also to be at present active and malevolent. He looks forth upon the disorder of the world and says, “An enemy hath done this.” And He teaches us to pray for deliverance from the evil one.
The familiar doxology “For Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever, Amen,” which in our Church, though not over the greater part of Christendom, follows here, was not in the original Lord’s Prayer, though it was added to it very early. It was a doxology in use in the early Church, which was added at the end of many of the prayers, and which in very early times came to be attached to the Lord’s Prayer in some of the manuscripts. It was thus given a place which it cannot rightly claim, though it states, grandly enough, the reason why we thankfully worship the Father.
It remains for us to notice some of the great principles which are enshrined in the Lord’s Prayer as a whole.
1. The Lord’s Prayer is not one prayer among many, as you may have a number of collects for a number of different objects, and each particular collect is just one prayer among many. The Lord’s Prayer is rather the type and mould of all Christian prayer: “After this manner pray ye.” Understand the Lord’s Prayer, and you understand altogether how to pray as a Christian should. It is not really an exaggeration to say that the climax of Christian growth is to have thoroughly learned to say the Lord’s Prayer in the spirit of Him who first spoke it.
And this has been clearly recognized in the use which the Church in all ages has made of the Lord’s Prayer. Among human compositions there are hardly any more beautiful than the liturgies in which Christians, at the altar, have approached the Father of their Lord in the pleading of His sacrifice. Now, almost all the ancient liturgies, both Eastern and Western, are so constructed that the point upon which each service converges is the saying of the Lord’s Prayer. That is the point up to which they climb. That is their central act; becausethe highest thing in the way of worship that the Christian can do is to say Christ’s own prayer in the freedom of that approach to God once won for him by the Son of Man.
So, in our English Communion service, we put ourselves into the right frame of mind by saying the first Lord’s Prayer; and afterwards, in the power of His sacrifice and in the unity of His life communicated to us in His body and blood, we say again the Lord’s Prayer with its doxology as the highest point of our whole service.
Once more, in the daily offices of morning and evening prayer the Lord’s Prayer occurs at the beginning, and again in the prayers after the Creed. It occurs at the beginning to put us into the right frame of mind for praying; and at the end it sums up our petitions—all that we have learned to pray for in the Psalms and lessons. And to leave out the second Lord’s Prayer, as is sometimes done by way of shortening the service, is surely to betray ignorance of the structure of the service and of the use of the Lord’s Prayer.
This is indeed the way in which theChurch, catching the spirit of her Lord, has used the Lord’s Prayer; and, as individuals, it is a great happiness and power for us when we have learned to use it freely. Whatever particular object we may want to pray for, we have never prayed for it aright till we have prayed for it in the words and spirit of the Lord’s Prayer. That, I repeat, is not one prayer among many. It covers all legitimate Christian praying, and indeed the saying of it affords the best test whether our wants of the moment can become a prayer offered “in the name of Christ.”
2. I say “in the name of Christ.” The Lord’s Prayer is the great prayer in His name. You know how many people have a very strangely childish notion, that praying in the name of Christ means simply the addition of the words “through Jesus Christ our Lord” at the end of their prayers. But depend upon it they do not by adding these words, or any words, bring it about that their prayers should be in the name of Christ. To pray in the name of Christ means to pray in such a way as represents Christ. The representative always must speak in thespirit and meaning of those for whom he speaks. If Christ is our representative, that must be because He speaks our wishes, or what we ought to make our wishes; and if we are to pray in the name of Christ, that means that we are, however far off, expressing His wishes and intentions.
Therefore, as this Lord’s Prayer represents profoundly and perfectly the spirit of Him who first spoke it, and who taught it to His Church, it follows that it is, beyond all other prayers, the prayer in Christ’s name. Do you then want to know whether this or that thing can be prayed for in Christ’s name? The answer is to be found in another question, Can it be legitimately covered by the clauses of the Lord’s Prayer?
3. The knowing and saying of the Lord’s Prayer, as the prayer in Christ’s name, was in the early Church regarded as being, like the knowing and saying of the Creed, the privilege of those only who were members of the Christian family. It was the prayer of the family because of its first words, “Our Father.” The Christian creed, we know, would teach us to believe that God is the father of allmen, and that He wills all men to realize their sonship. They cannot reach true manhood till they have come to know themselves to be, and to realize what is involved in being, sons of God.
But since sin has separated men from God, it is through Christ and by the partaking of His Spirit that they enter or re-enter into the privileges of sonship. Thus the right of calling upon God as “Our Father” was believed to have come with the coming of the gift of the Holy Ghost: “God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.” We are apt to have rather “free and easy” notions of the divine fatherhood. And it is important to be reminded that to call God our Father, we must ourselves be sons, and it is they who are led by the Spirit, they and they only, that are the sons of God.
This Lord’s Prayer then is the prayer of the great Christian family; the prayer of the whole Catholic Church; the prayer which, though it may be spoken by a single member in a quiet corner, yet is instinct with the aspirations and needs and wants of all that great society which represents all nations and kindreds andpeoples and tongues in this world and in that which lies beyond the grave.
4. There is a searching lesson which lies in the order of the petitions in the Lord’s Prayer; for in praying much depends on the order in which we rank the objects of prayer.
There is a saying, not recorded in our canonical Gospels, but which yet the very earliest traditions of the Church treasured, and ascribed to our Lord; the saying is this: “Ask for great things, and the small things will be given unto you. Ask for heavenly things, and the earthly things will be given unto you.” Now, that is exactly the spirit of the Lord’s Prayer. It puts our wants in the right order. It puts first the heavenly things, the great things, and not the little things, the earthly things, the things that seem to touch us closest.
We know that it is not easy to adopt this order in our prayers. There are many who have lost altogether the habit of praying and who are won back to it by some anxiety or trouble that touches them nearly. Some son or daughter perhaps lies dying, and the father and mother, who long have been alien to thehabit of prayer, are driven back to it by the very stress of their pressing need. Or some calamity is threatening to overwhelm ourselves, and we fall on our knees, after a great interval of prayerlessness, to implore that it may be averted. And, of course, we must bless God that anyhow men should be brought to pray: and God can lead us to higher things through things which touch our flesh and blood, from earth to heaven. But the point is that that is not the right order of prayer. The true Christian does not pray first for the things that most nearly touch himself. That impulsive prayer which springs simply out of our own needs is not the prayer “in the name of Christ.”
We remember what our Lord said to the disciples in those solemn hours in the upper chamber before His passion: “Hitherto ye have asked nothing in my name.” They had presented all kinds of petitions and requests; but in their own name. So it is so often with us. Hitherto have we asked nothing in His name. But that of course is a fault to be altered. We must let our prayers be in Christ’s name: that is to say in the order reflected in the Lord’s Prayer.
Now, let us examine it. The prayer of human instinct runs: My Father, give me to-day what I so sorely require. But the Lord’s Prayer begins with “Our Father”—not “my,” but “our.” I must begin with losing my selfishness, with recollecting that I am only one of the great body of God’s children, of the great mass of humanity. Thus I cannot ask for anything for myself which conflicts with the interests of others. And the invocation proceeds, “which art in heaven.” It places us in a reverent way at the feet of God. “God is in heaven, and thou upon earth: therefore, let thy words be few.”
“Hallowed be Thy name.” It puts God’s revelation of Himself to men above all human needs. We are so apt to think last of the glory and honour of God; but here as we pray we are forced to exalt it into the first place; and next, “Thy kingdom come.” That is—May that divine order which, point by point, in many parts and many manners, through all the great web of history, has gradually to be woven out—may that great purpose of God find at last its fulfilment. Thus we are forced as we pray to merge ourown narrow interests and schemes till they are lost in the largeness and wisdom of the divine method.
“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Here we are forced to bend our stubborn or short-sighted wills to conformity with the divine will and to make the law of heaven the pattern for earth. Only then, when we have exalted God’s glory above man’s need, when we have subordinated our little designs utterly to the great purpose of God, when we have bent our little wills under the great and divine will—only then are we allowed to express our wants for ourselves.
And even so how modestly, how restrictedly. “Give us,” we pray, not anything that we may want, but “to-day the bread for to-morrow:” enough to do God’s work upon in God’s way; and so that our eating may not involve others’ hungering. And then, because we cannot do God’s work unless we are in His peace, “Forgive us our trespasses”—not anyhow; but according to that necessary law by which God deals with us as we deal with others; “as we forgive them that trespass against us.” And, because we areweak and frail, “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.”
Is there not then in this prayer the whole philosophy of praying? And when we come to think of it, we shall find that the philosophy or secret of prayer lies in the recognition of the same law of correspondence, which has been the secret of scientific progress in the development of the resources of nature, and which, in that department, Francis Bacon has the credit of teaching men, or of putting into words for them. Before his time men had been trying to get extraordinary good things out of nature in accordance with the whims and fancies of astrologers and alchemists: they had dreamt of making gold, or finding the elixir of life. But all this was profitless because it was done in ignorance of nature’s actual laws. And Bacon spoke a prophetic word when he said “Nature can only be controlled by being obeyed;” that is—in reverent correspondence with nature as it is, is the secret of power. Now, in the higher region, that is what our Lord taught us about prayer. Man had been offering all sorts of prayers, sacrifices, propitiations. That God mercifully regarded such ignorantworship we cannot doubt: but it was ignorant of God’s character and method. Now, so far as is good for us, our Lord has enlightened us about the nature and method of God: and He has shown us that prayer should not be an attempt to impose our own whims and fancies on the wisdom of God, but a constant act of correspondence by which we bring our short-sighted wills and reasons into correspondence, the intelligent correspondence of sons, with the perfect reason and will of God, the all-wise Father of all human souls and of the great universe.
5. Here finally we find an answer to all our manifold questionings as to what we may pray for, and what we may not.
Our Lord gave us that answer also in another way at another time—in the prayers of His passion. In His passion He prayed for the coming of the kingdom, in that great prayer recorded in St. John’s Gospel. He prayed then without qualification. Similarly, He prayed for those rough soldiers who were unwittingly doing Him such awful wrong: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” But when, in the garden, He asked to be Himself delivered from the coming agony,in the true humility of His manhood He prayed conditionally, “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.”
Now, that is exactly the lesson of the Lord’s Prayer. There are many things which God has revealed to us that He intends to give us. He has promised that He will give us all those things which belong to His kingdom and its righteousness. For these things we can pray, not only urgently, but with the certainty of faith that we must win them for ourselves and others by importunate asking. We cannot, of course, force the will of others, but we can with the assurance of faith win for others, as for ourselves, the spiritual opportunities, resources, and advantages of God’s kingdom.
There are also many things God has revealed that He does not mean to give us, and there are laws of His ordering, spiritual and physical, that by revelation or natural investigation He has made known. For these things, then, or against these laws, we must not pray; we must not ask that God will violate His general laws in our private interest.
But there is a great mass of things which lie in between these two regionsof certainty. We do not know if it is God’s will that this or that person should recover from sickness, or this or that calamity should be averted. God is wiser than we are. We do not know whether it is God’s will that we should have the rain that is so necessary for our crops. There are things like these that lie in a region of uncertainty into which the intelligence of man cannot penetrate. So then as the object of prayer is not to bring the divine will down to the human, but to lift the human up into correspondence with the divine, for all these uncertain things we can pray indeed, but uncertainly—“If it be possible, let this or that come to pass; nevertheless, not my will, but Thine, be done.”
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. Thusthe 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 divinetreasure-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 conditionof 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 Solomonin 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 thananything 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 flowersof 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 reasonablycareful 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 ourLord, 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.
CHAPTER IX
CHRISTIAN CHARACTERISTICS
THE seventh chapter—the last which belongs to the Sermon—is occupied with a number of accessory topics. The character of the citizen of the kingdom of God has now been portrayed for us; the relation of this character to the old law has been explained; its main motive or principle has been described. Now there follow some characteristics which flow naturally from the relation in which the citizen of the kingdom stands both towards God and towards man. The first of these is the uncritical temper. “Judge not and ye shall not be judged.”