LESSONS FROM NATURE
‘Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.’
‘Take no thought, be not anxious’—strange exhortation! How many nominal Christians even pretend to follow it? Why is this?
I. The world in the heart.—Is it not chiefly because the world is in our hearts? Are we not ever, and almost exclusively, thinking of this world? Are we not mastered, most of us, by scrambling selfishness and the eager greed of our mere animal or earthly instincts? Whence has this blight of unreality fallen so densely over the fair fields of Gospel teaching?
II. The voice of nature.—This is partly due to the fact that we have become so dead to Nature; for the voice of Nature is none other than the voice of God. Our Lord Himself tried to teach us that God, Whom we call so far away and so distant from us, is very near, and is speaking to us all day long. ‘Why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies.’ Very beautiful, you say, very poetical! No, it is not pious extravagance; but if you will take it rightly and understand it wisely, it has for every one of us sweet, homely, practical truth.
III. Confidence in God.—You are not bidden, observe, to do nothing for yourselves; but you are bidden, while doing what lies in yourselves, to put your whole trust and confidence in God. You must till the earth, and sow, and reap, and toil; and, in one form or other, with your head or with your hands, you must earn your own bread by the sweat of your brow. That is God’s primary law; yet but for God’s gift, not an ear of corn would grow; and in giving you the corn, God would fain teach you at the same time that the living is more than life, and the body than raiment.
IV. The Divine Law.—Here, then, are some of the lessons of this passage: Do your work, but do it in quietness and confidence; do your duty, but do it without this corroding anxiety; and He who even in the desert spreads His table for the birds, He who clothes the flowers in their embroideries of beauty, will feed and clothe you. Let justice, goodness, kindness, purity, be your aim; not the selfish scramble of scheming competition, not the brutal appetencies of sensual desire. Do not let your daily necessities blunt the edge of your ideal aspirations: do not sink into grovelling appetites or money-making machines. Man lives indeed by bread, but he does not live by bread alone.
—Dean Farrar.