Matthew 11:26

THE LESSON OF SUBMISSION

Even so, Father: for so it seemed good in Thy sight.’

Matthew 11:26

The greatest thing which you have to do in life is to learn to say those words.

I. God’s discipline.—Perhaps God found you a character proud in intellect, resolute in disposition, tenacious of dignity, selfish in temper. Now see a moment, how He deals. He will take that proud mind of yours and He will baffle it till He has brought it down to the ground. And He will cross that selfish temper of yours, and punish you by rods of your own making, until you are willing to put yourself at His feet. And He will visit you in those irregular and inordinate affections, and He will disappoint you, until you acknowledge that the heart is His, and that He has a right to reign in it alone. And in every thing He will be as a Sovereign to you.

II. Look at the real developments of life.—You begin and go on in wilfulness and sin, and one or other of two things will happen. Either your mind runs on in a channel which gets further and further off from the mind of God, until it is prepared and ready to go on without God for ever—as wide asunder as heaven is from hell; or your ideas, your desires, your tastes, your judgment, gradually flow more and more into the courses of the Divine, until your whole moral being assimilates to Him.

III. The lesson of submission.—It sometimes happens that a providence meets a man of which he is inclined to say—‘This is the most difficult trial which could have been sent me to bear.’ It is an occasion when no other words will do but,—‘Even so, Father: for so it seemed good in Thy sight.’ Or sometimes afflictions come, not in the ordinary way in which we are expecting them, but so very crowded together, and so very sweeping, and so utterly desolating that our minds are quite bewildered. Or, it may be that one has been taken from your side, who seemed, of all, to be the essential one. Yet there is nothing sublimer, even among the ranges of the blest, than when those simple words go up in their firmness, from one soul chastened—‘Even so, Father: for so it seemed good in Thy sight.’

IV. Two suggestions.—To cherish such a feeling in the heart, our Lord’s words give us two suggestions—

(a) Take fatherly views of the character of God; (b) remember that the measure of all good is the mind of the Almighty.

The Rev. James Vaughan.