Running through this chapter are two lines of thought that become one in the deep underlying truth:
I. The Father's claim. Born of God, we are bound to Him in the deepest, closest, most abiding relationship. This great love of our Father has its claim upon us. His love would have us come close to Him, not as suppliants who knock at the outer door, not as strangers who tarry in the hall and stately courts of the king, but as His children who come right into the inner chamber of the Father's presence (Matthew 6:6). By these claims let us test ourselves and all the conditions of our life. We are the sons of God, and we have no business anywhere or in anything that conflicts with the will of our heavenly Father. Because we are sons of God we are to find in this relationship a power strong enough to order all our life's places for the service and pleasure of our Father. Surely it is not too much to demand that such a relationship, with all its glorious possibilities, should be able to inspire us with a purpose as steady and resolute as that which the student finds in learning, or the merchant in money-making.
II. The soul's supply. Thus our Lord bids us beware of what we may call a natural religious life a religious life that is born of self and sustained of self, that has no higher source and no other aim. It prays and gives alms and fasts; but all that is only the price it pays for the good opinion of others. It gives its gold to buy men's admiration, and has it; that is its reward. Very different, in all its course, is the life of holiness. It is born of God; we can only receive this life from Him, and we can only retain it by continually receiving of Him, for Him, to Him, is its ceaseless round. To all life as we know it, derived and dependent, there are the same wants, in plant and in animal, in body and soul air, warmth, exercise, food, light, society, sleep. There may be a kind of existence without some one or two of these; but the abundant life is only for him who will secure each. And these are the conditions of that healthy spiritual life which is holiness.
M. G. Pearse, Thoughts on Holiness,p. 89.
Reference: Matthew 6:1. J. Oswald Dykes, The Laws of the Kingdom,p. 135.