194 The First and Great Commandment
tion not originally meant as deliberate disobedience, the
preoccupation with earthly interests which leaves the spirit
inactive and unused; it is this submergence of the soul in the
visible and temporal against which just now I make appeal.
Christ, our Lord and Saviour, bids us to seek first the
Kingdom of God and His righteousness—and not what men
call the necessities of life. He does not mean that men shall
not labour; but that they shall labour first for the meat that
does not perish.
Confronting life, seeing the many objects, called by many
voices, drawn to the chosen toil for which we have been
equipped—shall we seek to walk with God as spiritual
beings created to share his character; or shall the vision of
the soul grow dim as the physical eye ranges the earthly
scene, and the citizenship in Heaven be abandoned as we
grow absorbed in the earthly environment? Whether to live
for the soul or for the body; whether to live for immortality
and eternal life or for the senses and the dissolution to which
they are destined; that is the question. Already we are
supernatural beings by the possession of souls; and no need
of bread for the body, no eagerness to take up the toil
selected, no allurements of earthly life—can be allowed to
deaden our spiritual consciousness, or entice us from devo-
tion to God and dependence upon Him. The fact that we
are immortal spirits, the self-realization to which we are
called as souls only temporarily employing physical bodies
and at work in this physical scene; these are not matters to
be thought out and decided about only after our barns are
filled with fancied plenty, nor after the shallow cups of
even innocent pleasure and still less the bitter cups of sin
have been drained.
Coming from the hand of God, led by the hand of God,
going unto God through Him who is the Way, the Truth