Human Affection raised, not destroyed, by the Gospel.
I. The Apostle sets before us, in the text, two applications of the same human affection. He bids us not to trust in uncertain riches, but to trust in the living God. He assumes that there is in the heart of man the tendency to dependence upon something beyond itself, yet intimately connected with itself; and above all, upon that wealth, which is the pledge and representative of all earthly enjoyment, and which is thus the great mediator between the heart and the world that attracts it. He assumes that this trusting impulse exists, and He would not destroy but reform it. He would exhibit the true and eternal object for a tendency in itself indestructible; and would intimate that there is prepared for the just desires of the soul a sphere of being, adequate to these desires, and from which the present detains us only as the counterfeit and mockery of it. On the one hand, "uncertain riches"; on the other, the parallel announcement, that "God giveth us richly all things to enjoy."
II. Trust not in uncertain riches, but trust in the living God. Preserve unbroken every element of your affections; they are all alike the property of Heaven. Be ambitious, but ambitious of the eternal heritage. Let avarice be yours, but avarice of celestial treasures. Covet esteem, but esteem in the mind of God, of the circles of the blessed. Yearn after sympathy, but seek it where alone it is unfailing, in Him whose essence from eternity is love, and who became man that He might humanise that awfulness of celestial love to the tenderness of a brother's. "Charge them that are rich in this world" that they interpose not a veil between themselves and the Father of their spirits, or suffer the clouds and vapours of earth to sully or eclipse the beams of this eternal sun.
III. Our earthly objects of pursuit are themselves clad by hope with colours that rightfully belong only to their celestial rivals; our ordinary earthly longings themselves strain after a really heavenly happiness, while they miss so miserably the way to reach it. The votary of earthly wealth does, in fact, with all the energies of his nature, strain after that very security of unchangeable bliss which we preach; but, mistaking the illusory phantom, weds his whole soul to the fictitious heaven, which the powers of evil have clothed in colours stolen from the skies. The soul made for heaven is lost among heaven's shadows upon earth; it feigns the heaven it cannot find, and casts around the miserable companions of its exile, the attributes that belong to the God it was born to adore. Lay not out your rich capital of faith and hope and love and admiration, upon the poor precarious investments the world at best can offer you; impress upon your heart the conviction that not one of all this host of energies but was primarily designed for heaven to open the full tide of your affections to that world where alone they can find repose.
W. Archer Butler, Sermons,p. 270.
References: 1 Timothy 6:17. Spurgeon, Morning by Morning,p. 137. 1 Timothy 6:18. Homiletic Magazine,vol. xiii., p. 244. 1 Timothy 6:19. G. S. Barrett, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxxv., p. 179; Smart, Thursday Penny Pulpit,vol. vi., p. 105. 1 Timothy 6:20. Church of England Pulpit,vol. xx., p. 49.