The connection with the previous part is twofold.

The warning against hypocritical fastings and formalism leads to the warning against worldly-mindedness and avarice.  For what worldly-mindedness is greater than that which prostitutes even religious acts to worldly advantage, and is laying up treasure of men’s good opinion on earth even while it shams to be praying to God?  And there is a close connection which the history of every age has illustrated between formal religious profession and the love of money, which is the vice of the Church.  Again, the promise of rewarding openly naturally leads on to the positive exhortation to make that reward our great object.

The connection with what follows is remarkable.  The injunction and prohibition of the text refer to two species of the same genus, one the vice of avarice, the other the vice of anxiety.

I. The Two Treasures.

These are—­on earth, all things which a man can possess;—­in heaven, primarily God Himself, the reward which has been spoken of in previous verses, viz.  God’s love and approbation, a holy character, and all those spiritual and personal graces, beauties, perfections and joys which come to the good man from above.

This command and prohibition require of Christ’s disciples—­

1.  A rectification of their judgment as to what is the true good of man.

(a) Sense and flesh tend to make us think the visible and material the best.

(b) Our peculiar position here in a great commercial centre powerfully reinforces this tendency.

(c) The prevailing current of this age is all in the same direction.  The growth of luxury, the increase of wealth, and set of thought, threaten us with a period when not only religious thought will fail, but when all faith, enthusiasm, all poetry and philosophy, the very conception of God and duty, all idealism, all that is unseen, will be scouted among men.  Naturalism does not fulfil its own boast of dealing with facts; there are more facts than can be seen.  So the first thing is to settle it in our minds, in opposition to our own selves and to prevailing tendencies, that truth is better than money, that pure affections and moderate desires and a heart set on God are richer wealth than all external possessions.

2.  Desire that follows the corrected judgment.  It is one thing to know all this, another to wrench our wishes loose from earth.

3.  A practical life that obeys the impulse of the desire.  Christ’s command and prohibition here do not refer only to a certain course of action, but to a certain motive and purpose in action, and to actions drawn from these.  If we obey Christ we shall lead lives obviously different from those which are based upon an estimate which we are to reject; but the main thing is to live and work with an eye to the eternal, not the temporal, results of our doings.  We are to administer our lives as God does His providence, using the temporal only as means to an end, the eternal.  We are to live to be God-like, to love God, and be loved by Him.