Further, my text is a promise as well as a statement of a present fact.  Where your treasure now is there will your whole self one day be.  A man who has by God’s grace, through faith and love and the wise use of things temporal, chosen God his chief good, and possessed in some degree the good which he has chosen, even Jesus Christ in his heart, that man bears in himself the pledge and the foretaste of eternal life.  So the old psalmist found out, who lived in a time when that future world was shrouded in far thicker clouds of darkness than it is to us, for when he had risen to the height of saying, ’My flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever,’ he immediately sprang to this assurance—­an assurance of faith before it was a fact certified by Revelation—­’Thou wilt guide me by Thy counsel, and afterwards receive me to glory.’  The possession of Christ for our treasure, which possession always follows on our estimating Him as such, and desiring to have Him, that possession bears in its bosom the germ of the assurance that, whatever befalls my physical life, I shall not be less immortal than my treasure, and that where my heart to-day, by aspiration and desire and faith and love, has built its nest, thither I shall follow in His own time.  They that have laid up treasure in heaven will at last be brought to the enjoyment of the treasure that they have laid up, and to the possession of ’the inheritance that is incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away.’

ANXIOUS CARE

     ’Ye cannot serve God and Mammon. 25.  Therefore I say unto you.  Take
     no thought for your life.’—­Matt. vi. 24-25.

Foresight and foreboding are two very different things.  It is not that the one is the exaggeration of the other, but the one is opposed to the other.  The more a man looks forward in the exercise of foresight, the less he does so in the exercise of foreboding.  And the more he is tortured by anxious thoughts about a possible future, the less clear vision has he of a likely future, and the less power to influence it.  When Christ here, therefore, enjoins the abstinence from thought for our life and for the future, it is not for the sake of getting away from the pressure of a very unpleasant command that we say, He does not mean to prevent the exercise of wise and provident foresight and preparation for what is to come.  When this English version of ours was made, the phrase ‘taking thought’ meant solicitous anxiety, and that is the true rendering and proper meaning of the original.  The idea is, therefore, that here there is forbidden for a Christian, not the careful preparation for what is likely to come, not the foresight of the storm and taking in sail while yet there is time, but the constant occupation and distraction of the heart with gazing forward, and fearing and being weakened thereby; or to come back to words already