Matthew 11:29

LEARNING OF CHRIST

‘Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me.’

Matthew 11:29

Just before our Lord spoke these words, He had declared His joy and thankfulness that intellectual eminence had nothing to do with the entrance into His school; that the mysteries of His teaching were hidden from the wise and prudent and revealed to babes. His Apostles maintain the same attitude. It might have seemed as though the triumph of Christianity must necessarily involve the depreciation of mental power. But in widest contrast with such a thought has been the actual course of the Church’s history.

I. No special privileges for intellect.—At the entrance into the Kingdom of God the human intellect is received now exactly as it was in the time of St. Paul. In and by itself, apart from the consideration of its use, it constitutes no claim to enter into the kingdom; it has no special privileges, no exceptions, no promise of a good place there. The intellect must be brought into captivity to the obedience of Christ; it must take His yoke upon it. And then it shall learn of Him.

II. Things to be learnt.—‘Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me.’

(a) Humility. The faith of Jesus Christ presses upon us the resolute cultivation of humility.

(b) Seriousness. Christianity bears a great part in the growth of the intellect by making it serious. To realise that our search for truth is conducted in the sight of God should lift us at once above the temptation to be ostentatious, or mercenary in the use and exercise of intellect.

(c) Unselfishness. The intellectual life will surely gain in purity and strength if the heart that animates it is unselfish. We are told that the besetting troubles of education and of learning in our day are ‘hurry, worry, and money.’ If so, what a career is open for minds that are raised by the obedience of Christ and the example of His Cross high above this wasteful strife of tongues.

III. The result—personal influence.—To be humble, to be serious, to be unselfish, these are the chief obligations which Christianity imposes on the intellect; these are the conditions of its entrance into the service of the kingdom of Almighty God: and when the highest gifts of intellect are consecrated by union with these graces, the result is a power of personal influence which it would be difficult to limit.

—Bishop F. Paget.

Illustration

‘ “The education which I advocate,” said Professor Faraday, “has for its first and last step—humility.” I well remember hearing Mr. Darwin say about a writer who was much talked of, and who is apt to be at once very positive and wide-reaching in assertion, “Ah! I never read a page of him without thinking—there’s five or six years’ work for any one to see whether that’s true.” Humility and patience; these are the unfailing and characteristic elements in the temper of those who have really most advanced the empire of human knowledge.’