Sermon Bible Commentary
Matthew 6:28,29
Consider the Lilies of the Field.
I. What has this text to do with Easter Day? Let us think a while. Life and death; the battle between life and death; life conquered by death; and death conquered again by life. Those were the mysteries over which the men of old time thought, often till their hearts were sad. And because our forefathers were a sad and earnest folk; because they lived in a sad and dreary climate, where winter was far longer and more bitter than it is, thank God, now: therefore all their thoughts about winter and spring were sad; and they grew to despair, at last, of life ever conquering death, or light conquering darkness. All living things would die. The very gods would die, fighting to the last against the powers of evil, till the sun should sink for ever, and the world be a heap of ashes. And then so strangely does God's gift of hope linger in the hearts of men they saw, beyond all that, a dim dream of a new heaven and a new earth, in which should dwell righteousness; and of a new sun, more beautiful than ours; of a woman called "Life" hid safe, while all the world around her was destroyed, fed on the morning dew, preserved to be the mother of a new and happier race of men. And so to them, heathens as they were, God whispered that Christ should some day bring life and immortality to light.
II. "So it pleased the Father," says St. Paul, "to gather together in Christ all things, whether in heaven or in earth." In Him were fulfilled, and more than fulfilled, the dim longings, the childlike dreams, of heathen poets and sages, and of our own ancestors from whom we spring. He is the Desire of all nations, for whom all were longing, though they knew it not. And now we may see, it seems to me, what the text has to do with Easter Day. Be not anxious, says our Lord, for your life. Is not the life more than meat? There is an eternal life which depends not on earthly food, but on the will and word of God your Father; and that life in you will conquer death. Consider the lilies of the field. All the winter they are dead, unsightly roots, hidden in the earth. What can come of them? But no sooner does the sun of spring shine on their graves than they rise into sudden life and beauty as it pleases God, and every seed takes its own peculiar body. Even so is the resurrection of the dead.
C. Kingsley, Discipline and Other Sermons,p. 168.
I. The lilies of the field, as God's workmanship, reveal the Fountain of life and being. Flowers show nothing of boundless might and of high wisdom, but they do reveal the calm beauteousness of the Source whence all living things flow.
II. The lilies of the field embody and express Divine conceptions thoughts of God. The image of every flower was in the mind of the Creator before creation. He designedthe lilies of the field and the glorious company of their kindred.
III. The lilies of the field are God's workmanship. In the fine arts the conceiver is the worker. In other departments one designs and plans, and others execute. Flowers are the work of God's fingers.
IV. The lilies of the field are God's care. This is not manifest to the eye of the body. No man, like Adam, has seen or heard the Lord God in any garden. In the providential sense there are no wild flowers. There are children without father and mother, or with evil fathers and mothers, but there are no flowers without Divine care.
V. The lilies of the field exhibit God's bountifulness. All flowers, alike of the field and of the garden, render some ordinary service are of some use. They furnish food, medicine, clothing, shelter, to innumerable living things. But are they not created, in part at least, to be pleasant to the eye? Surely they are made to be things of beauty and sources of joy.
VI. The lilies of the field are propagated and developed by the working of various natural laws. There is a tendency in some minds to look only on the hard and rigorous side of law. But law is good. The moral law of God obeyed will bring forth nothing but love.
VII. The lilies of the field are parts of a perfect whole.
VIII. The lilies of the field show us a sense of beauty in the nature of God, and a satisfaction in its expression.
IX. The lilies of the field are what they are through various affinities and relationships. They are the children of the sun, of the rain, of the dew, and of the air. In this condition of floral life we see one of the conditions of our own existence.
X. The lilies of the field are supposed to find in the nature of man that which will respond to their attractiveness.
XI. The lilies may teach us freedom from care, and from morbid self-consciousness.
S. Martin, Rain upon the Mown Grass,p. 28.
I. We know that at the creation of the world "God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good." Some of the works, then, of the visible creation were good because they were useful and necessary, and because the life of man could not be supported without them; others were good because they were full of beauty, and, as objects for the eye, imparted the greatest pleasure and delight to beings who were endowed with reason, and who were gifted with the perceptions whereby they could discern this beauty. It is of these latter objects of nature that our Lord speaks on the occasion mentioned in the text. We ought then to be able to rejoice in those parts of the creation which were designed especially to give us delight. The admiration of God's natural creation is not an earthly, but an exalted and a pure delight. It is a joy fit for spiritual beings, who are admitted to the knowledge of God and the adoration of His goodness and glory.
II. The lower kind of pleasure, which thoughtless and unreflecting people sometimes derive from the beauties of visible nature, is not accompanied by any thought about the human soul itself, which is the perceiver of it; it does not bring up any solemn thought about themselves as thus admitted to this insight into Divine order and beauty. The proper delight in visible nature sends men to the thought of themselves and their own souls. And this is the very direction taken in our Lord's observations upon nature as given in the text. He immediately goes from external nature to the human soul; He reminds us how precious a thing the human soul is, how high its rank is in God's sight, how vast its interests are, how glorious its prospects. "If God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall He not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?" This is the lesson in which His discourse upon nature ends the great truth of the worth and value of the human soul; its great superiority above all other things in this world; the supremacy it holds in the created universe.
J. B. Mozley, Sermons Parochial and Occasional,p. 151.
Consider the lilies. There is ample opportunity to do so. Flowers stay with us, rooted in the earth. Consider; that is, think of this beauty, see what you make of it. The word itself indicates at once the great stress laid by our Lord on the teachings of nature. Our text has two sides: a negative and a positive what the plant does not, what it does.
I. Negative:"They toil not, neither do they spin," etc. (1) Here is a wonderful and beautiful effect, without care or anxious toil. (2) The lilies do not attempt what is impossible. They do what they can; they were never made to toil or spin; yet wait a few months, and a blossom is quietly matured that all the striving and curious ingenuity of man can, at the best, but distantly imitate.
II. Consider the lilies, how they grow. (1) Growth, for the most part, is secret; it is work done at the heart of things work within, and not on the outside. (2) Growth is an unfolding. As the beauty of the flower is unfolded by the creating spirit from within, so all true beauty of heart, moral and spiritual beauty, so all real adornment of human nature, must unfold by the same almighty power from within.
G. Walker, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxi., p. 166.
References: Matthew 6:28; Matthew 6:29. J. P. Gledstone, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xviii., p. 37; E. R. Conder, Drops and Rocks,p. 199. Matthew 6:30. H. P. Liddon, Three Hundred Outlines on the New Testament,p. 11.