I. The comparison is between the householder and the disciples. If they understood these few and seemingly simple analogies which He had unfolded to them, they were instructed unto the kingdom of heaven. Reflect first on the importance to us of this declaration. Jesus had given these men no creeds, in systematic shape. He had not given them doctrines, in holding which they should be models of Christian orthodoxy. He had told them a few stories taken from every-day life and the familiar occupations of the husbandman and the fisherman. All that we have learned of any worth has been by the simplest of analogies by parable, that is to say and by the same path as the simplest and least learned of our kind. Our Lord Himself tells us that the instructed scribe is he who has mastered these few parables. These disciples, understanding and living upon the truth, were in the position of owners of treasure. But why of things new and old?
II. In the first place, all truth is of necessity old as well as new. The truths Christ taught were only new truths, because men from sin and neglect had overlooked them.
III. Again, as things new are in reality old, so things old the things of the Spirit of God never become obsolete, take new life, and are seen in new developments day by day.
IV. Every man's experience is a treasure-house of old and new things, by which it is allowed him to profit. The past is a precious possession of every one of us. There is a wisdom of the past which we are apt to underrate because it is old, forgetting that truth is neither old nor new. There have been truth and falsehood in antagonism from the beginning. Every day and hour they wrestle in our souls as they contended in our first parents, and we pass our lives, now conquering, now being defeated; and our help is in the truth which does not roll round in earth's diurnal course, and is unaffected by earthly change.
A. Ainger, Sermons in the Temple Church,p. 254.
References: Matthew 13:51-58. Parker, Inner Life of Christ,vol. ii., p. 272.Matthew 13:52. H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. i., p. 184; Ibid.,vol. xxv., p. 177; R. Thomas, Ibid.,vol. ix., p. 193; W. Gladden, Preacher's Monthly,vol. ix., p. 15; Thursday Penny Pulpit,vol. ii., p. 97; R. Lee, Sermons,p. 451.Matthew 13:54. H. Wonnacott, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xiv., p. 46.