Christian Diligence.
I. The Christian sows to the Spirit, not to the flesh. Let us try to give a plain, practical interpretation to these words. The sowing being interpreted to mean the thoughts, words, and acts of this present life, the Christian thinks, speaks, and acts with reference to the Spirit; to his higher, his Divine, part; to that part of him which, being dwelt in by God's Holy Spirit, aims at God's glory, loves Him, serves Him, converges to Him in its desires and motions. Herein he altogether differs from the unchristian man, who sows to the flesh, consults in his thoughts, words, and acts, the desires of the body and the passing interests of the world. Now howdoes the Christian sow? In discouragement, in difficulty, with effort and with endurance, against nature and against temptation. His seedtime is a time of labour, not of repose; of self-denial, not of ease; of hope, not of enjoyment. But these seeds thus planted are, by the power of the same creative Spirit, in the ground vivified, and expanded, and made to yield a thousandfold, yea to bear unceasing fruit to all eternity.
II. If all our life be the seedtime of eternity, youth is, in a narrower sense, especially the seedtime of life, and thus of eternity too. Educate for God, in the wide sense which I would always give to those words; teach God's word, and God's works, and God's ways; and unfold God's powers which are latent in the living subjects of your teaching. Educate the young for God; teach them that their religious life is all their life, that thousands of thoughts and words and acts belong to God upon which His name is not ordinarily inscribed; that not only in the high culture of their spirits, but in the tillage of the underlying fields of the mind, of the judgment, the understanding, the imagination, the fancy, and in temperance, soberness, and chastity of the still humbler region of the body, they must be sowing to life everlasting.
H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons,vol. v., p. 122.
Sin and its Punishment.
I. Against all delusions about sin, St. Paul utters the solemn words of the text. The word for "mocked" implies the most unseemly and insulting gesture; and God is mocked when we pretend to be His while we cut our being in twain and give the better half to Satan, when we draw nigh unto Him with our lips while our hearts are far from Him, when we are externally scrupulous and internally filled with willing corruption. Before any of us fancy that, though fighting, we are always being defeated by sin, let us ask ourselves whether it really is the one dear, absorbing wish of our souls to stand, not approved to man, but approved to God, and to be pure with God and His own pure souls. Let us not be deceived on the very threshold about this matter, for the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.
II. Once again, test your sincerity by the manner in which you control or resist the beginning of all sin which is in evil thoughts. Do you suffer your thoughts to tamper with evil and to dally with wrong-doing? If so, you are not sincere. If you willingly sin in thought, if you are base and guilty there, then be sure that sooner or later the guilt that is imprisoned will break out into the outlets of word and deed.
III. To promise a certain ultimate victory if you be sincere in the struggle against sin is not the same thing as saying that you will never fall. By reason of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright; but if we be true fighters, when we fall we shall rise again: we shall not lie in the mire, but instantly, shamed into greater watchfulness, we shall make sure of the next victory, and each victory will lead to others until our enemies are all utterly routed.
F. W. Farrar, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxiii., p. 58.
I. It is not without a purpose that the solemn truth is so often repeated in God's word that we shall reap in the next world according as we have sown in this one. The foolish mortal who lives to self to self must die. God is not, cannot be, mocked. No one need expect, or even hope, to sow one thing and reap another. Those who recklessly sow to the flesh must reap their harvest: blighted fortune; shattered health; disappointed hopes and soured tempers; infamy and shame. God leaves us free to sow what sort of seed we will, and no one can blame the Almighty that, having chosen our own course, we reap our own harvest. The individual who indulges in one known sin is planting a seed, which will be sure to spring up and grow, and, perhaps, prepare the way for a wider departure from duty. A second and third temptation will prove more irresistible and dangerous than the first.
II. There is an amiable class of people who, without being addicted to any particular vice, are merely distinguished for the skill and success with which they devote themselves to worldly things. They have no doubt that death may soon come and summon them away, but, in spite of his fact, they are sowing no seed for a future and an invisible harvest. The gratification of having succeeded in their cherished plans, the pleasant assurance that the bodily necessities of the time of sickness and old age are provided for, and the admiration of those who have observed the tokens of their worldly prosperity these are their harvest.Is it enough?
J. N. Norton, Golden Truths,p. 425.
I. There is none to whom so much mockery is offeredas God. Men walk on His earth and deny His existence. Others acknowledge His existence, but by their lives defy His power. Men come to His house of prayer, and there, amidst the rising accents of supplication and praise and the descending message of His word, they think of their farm and their merchandise, or follow in fancy their worldly desires. They go thence, and not a word of that which they have asked is remembered with a view to its answer. And even to the spiritual ordinance of the body and blood of Christ do not men not unfrequently bring unclean hands and an unhallowed heart, and even when the signs of forgiveness and immortality are being administered to them are they not living in unrepented sin and the bondage of corruption? But with all this God is not mocked. His Divine majesty dwells in light unapproachable, far above any stain of pollution or danger of insult from us, the creatures of His almighty will. It is not God, it is our souls, that we mock when we thus tamper with their best and dearest interests. It is ourselves whom we expose to shame and everlasting contempt.
II. How this is the case, the second fact announced by the Apostle may explain to us: "God is not mocked; forwhatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." The present lifeis our seedtime. Our hearts and consciences are the field to be sown. By the seed are meant those living principles, whether good or ill, which sink down below the level of the surface, not what men profess, but what men follow. Those seeds spring up and bring forth fruit of one kind or other; that is, they become put into practice in men's lives by the words of their tongues and the works of their hands. The great harvest is the end of the world, when every man's principles shall be judged by every man's works, the seed by the fruit which it shall have brought forth. What he has sown, not what he has professed to sow, will then be seen. The great harvest day shall declare what each man's principles have been in the deep chambers of his heart, and according to that declaration shall his eternal lot be, for happiness or for misery.
H. Alford, Sermons,p. 113.
References: Galatians 6:7. T. J. Crawford, The Preaching of the Cross,p. 98; Homilist,2nd series, vol. i., p. 456; Christian World Pulpit,vol. xx., p. 253; T. Teignmouth Shore, The Life of the World to Come,p. 1; J. Vaughan, Children's Sermons,1875, p. 266; Outline Sermons to Children,p. 241.