I. Anxious thought is contrary to the teaching of nature. (1) You are obliged to trust God for your body, for its structure, for its form, for its habitudes, and for the length of your being; you are obliged to trust Him for the foundation trust Him for the superstructure. (2) God gives you the life of the body, and God's greater gifts are always inclusive of God's little gifts. When He bestows the thing, He bestows the consequences of the thing as well. (3) Look at God's way of doing with all His creatures. The flowers of the field are so clothed that we may learn the lesson that it is a fair Spirit and a loving Spirit and a bountiful Spirit, and a royal heart, that presides over the bestowments of creation and allots gifts to men. (4) Much of the force of what Christ says here depends on the consideration of the inferiority of those creatures who are thus blessed. (a) These creatures labour not, and yet are they fed. Much more may we, whom God has blessed with the power of work and gifted with force to mould the future, be sure that He will bless the exercise of the prerogative by which He exalts us above inferior creatures and makes us capable of toil. (b) These creatures cannot say "Father," and yet they are fed. (c) Today it is, and tomorrow it is cast into the oven. Their little life is thus blessed and brightened. How much greater will be the mercies that belong to them who have a longer life upon earth, and who never die!
II. Anxious care is contrary to all the lessons of religion or revelation, which show it to be heathenism. "After these things do the Gentiles seek."
III. Finally, Christ tells us that thought for the morrow is contrary to all the scheme of Providence, which shows it to be vain. Tomorrow has anxieties enough of its own, after and in spite of all the anxieties about it today, by which you try to free it from care when it comes. Everyday will have its evil, will have it to the end; and every day will have evil enough for all the strength that a man has to cope with it. So that it just comes to this anxiety. It is all in vain. It does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but it empties today of its strength. We have always strength to bear the evil when it comes; we have not strength to bear the foreboding of it. "As thy days, so shall thy strength be."
A. Maclaren, Sermons preached in Manchester,1st series, p. 243.
References: Matthew 6:24-34. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. i., p. 349; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. iii., p. 91; Parker, Inner Life of Christ,vol. i., p. 224; A. Whyte, Expositor,3rd series, vol. ii., p. 224.Matthew 5:25. A. Blomfield, Sermons in Town and Country,p. 137; J. W. Haffenden, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxx., p. 109; H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit,No. 1,783; F. D. Maurice, Sermons in Country Churches,p. 313.