| The Secrets of a Beautiful Life |
Chapter 19 |
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We have this teaching in plainest words in the Sermon on the Mount. Christ gives a number of strong reasons against anxiety.
One of the reasons is that anxiety about food and raiment and the world’s things is serving mammon, and we cannot serve mammon and serve God at the same time. It is trusting in money to provide for our wants instead of in god. When money fails, then we are in distress. George MacDonald says again, “How often do we look upon God as our last and feeblest resource! We go to Him because we have nowhere else to go.” We feel safer when mammon’s abundance fills the pantry and the wardrobe than when mammon threatens to fail and we have only God.
Another reason against worry is that God, having given us our life, is certainly able to provide for our life’s needs. The life is more than its provision. What a strange, mysterious thing it is, this thing which we call life! It is more wonderful than the mountains and the stars. Think of physical life, — that beats in the heart, and pulses in the veins, and stirs in all the fibres. Think of mental life, — that knows, and remembers, and feels, and chooses, and loves, and suffers; that can dart across seas and fly to the skies. Think of spiritual life, — that can climb the stairways of light and commune with God; that can worship; that can be fashioned into Christ’s image; that is capable of heavenly blessedness; and that shall live as long as God lives. God has made this wonderful life: can He not provide for it the piece of bread and the cup of water it daily needs for its daily sustenance? Why, then, should we be anxious for these things?
Another reason why we should not worry the great Teacher draws from nature. God feeds the birds and clothes the flowers. “Behold, the birds of the heaven, that they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns.” Is the teaching that since the birds neither sow, nor reap, nor gather into barns, therefore we should put forth no exertion to provide for our own wants? No; the birds do the best they know, but God has given us power by which we can gather for ourselves.
It is not an untoiling life that our Lord enjoins. Curse rests not upon work, but upon idleness. The lesson from the untoiling birds is, not that we are not to work, but that we are to fill our own place as the birds fill theirs, and that then God will take care of us. God’s children are better than His birds. Birds have no soul, no mental faculties. They cannot think nor reason. They do not wear God’s image. They are not God’s children. God is the birds’ Creator, but not their Father. An earthly father will do more for his children than for his fowls. A mother will give more thought to her baby than to her canary. Our heavenly Father will provide more surely and more carefully for His children than for His birds.
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