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.