God will not be outdone in protecting his servants
It may not always be in the form that we desire or expect, but that's because God's protection exceeds our limited ideas.
It may not always be in the form that we desire or expect, but that's because God's protection exceeds our limited ideas.
Editor’s Notes
The Gospel reading on the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost corresponds to three chapters of Fr Henry James Coleridge’s commentary. This mini-series consists of the first of these three.
This Gospel reading comes from Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, and recounts some of the most consoling words in the Gospels.
In this part, Father Coleridge tells us…
The context for the section read on the Sunday, and the three chapters addressing it
Why the soul must choose between two masters, and live wholly for one.
Why the refusal to choose leads not to freedom, but to spiritual enslavement.
He shows us that God’s dominion over us is absolute—but that His providential care is equally complete.
Single Service
The Sermon on the Mount (To the End of the Lord’s Prayer)
Chapter VII
St. Matt. vi. 24; Story of the Gospels, § 33
Burns and Oates, London, 1878
Connection of the passage
In the passage before us, our Lord seems to call before His mind one great truth after another, in order to draw from each a conclusion or argument for the main purpose of the teaching on which He is occupied.
He has already spoken of the store in Heaven which we all have the opportunity of laying up, day after day, and of the manner in which men commonly use their opportunities in this respect. The heaps of bad or good treasure seem to grow under His eyes, and then He turns to the truth which points out the reason why the store in the one case is good and in the other evil—namely, the power of the will in perverting the mind, and so making the light which is given to us to guide our choices the very cause of the folly and wickedness with which those choices are sometimes made.
And our Lord could see, as no one else could, the difference between these several issues—the perfect and fruitful beauty which He describes under the image of a body entirely ‘lightsome,’ the defacement of that beauty in the case of those in whom light and darkness alternate in their mastery, and the full hideousness resulting from the entire triumph of evil, where darkness is put in the place of light.
Man the servant of God - the two masters
Another and most momentous truth seems now to occupy Him.
Man is not really labouring in this world for himself, but for a Lord to Whom he belongs by as perfect a right of property as any slave to his master or any inanimate object to its possessor. He is not his own, and he is therefore not risking his own interests merely when he labours and stores up for evil, nor is he free to labour or not, nor is he to seek his own advantage only in all that he does.
Another part of the same truth is this—that man cannot emancipate himself from this law of his condition by throwing off, as his free will allows him partially to do, the blessed service which he owes to his Father and Lord. He must serve some one, and if he will not be the servant of God, he must become the slave of the devil, so that his choice is not whether he shall or shall not serve, but only which master of the two he shall make his lord.
The service of the one is incompatible with the service of the other. There can be no possible alliance or compromise between them. Moreover, the two services differ, not only in their legitimacy and unlawfulness, but in the happiness or misery which they entail on those who adopt them respectively.
God defending his servants
Again, the simple truth that we are the servants of God, while it imposes on us the duty of making the service to which we are bound the one single object of our cares, also secures us against all possible danger to our own interests in attending to it.
Such is the character of our Master, such the beneficence which He shows even to the least and most insignificant of the creatures whom He has made to have a place in His Kingdom, that no one can serve Him or belong to Him without having the full security of His infinite power and wisdom for the provision of every possible want and for the protection which may be required against any possible danger. Thus the argument for laying aside all anxiety and care for earthly things and temporal riches, which is first rested on the dominion and sovereignty of God, is grounded at last on His most tender and thoughtful care for those who belong to Him.
We are bound to serve Him, even if we lose all that is needful in this world for the sake of His service. This is the sort of service which the kings and great ones of the world exact of those over whom they rule. But when we do give ourselves to His service as to the one single object of our thoughts, then we find that He cares for us with a diligence such as He might use if we were really of vital importance to Him, and, more than that, He requires it of us as a part of our service, and as a proof that we belong to Him, that we leave to Him the care of all our interests as if they were His and not ours.
He does not even tell us to pray for these temporal needs, and then leave them to the providence of our Father. He bids us, on the contrary, abandon the care of them altogether, in order to devote ourselves and all our energies to the interests of His Kingdom.
God’s ‘point of honour’
It is, as it were, a point of honour with God never to let those who work for Him want for anything. Thus even when there are great interests at stake in the cause of truth, as when the Apostles had to stand before kings and princes to give an account of the doctrine which they taught, they are forbidden by our Lord to premeditate what they shall say,1 God reserving to Himself to put into their mouths the answers which no one would be able to gainsay or to resist.
If this is the case with regard to the defence of the truth in argument, how much more may God be expected to provide with all abundance for the mere temporal needs of those who give up all other cares in order to devote themselves entirely to His service!
Such is a general outline of the passage of the Sermon on the Mount now before us. We may devote the present chapter to the consideration of the first great truth which it contains—that of the dominion of God, of the extent to which we belong to Him, especially if we have any special commission to labour for His glory—and of the impossibility of any compromise between His service and that of the world.
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St. Matt. x. 19, 20.