A Devotion from George H. Morrison

“See how the lilies of the field grow. “—Matthew 6:28

“Open your Old Testament and tell me the aspect of nature you most often find there. It is not the world of sunshine and of flower. It is the world of vast and mighty things. We read of the waves that lift themselves to heaven and of the deep places of the unfathomed sea. The stormy wind is the chariot of God. Did thunder reverberate among the mountains? Did the earth reel and tremble in the earthquake? The Jew was awestruck, and worshipped and adored and said it was the voice of the Almighty.

Now turn to the teaching of the Man of Nazareth—“See how the lilies of the field grow.” The kingdom of heaven is like the crash of thunder? Not so; the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed. It is no longer the things that tower aloft, it is no longer the things that shock or startle—it is not these that to the Man of Nazareth are richest in divine significance. It is the vineyard on the sunny hill; it is the lily waving in the field. It is things common and usual and silent that no one had had eyes to see before.

Now do you see the meaning of that change? It lies not in an altered thought of beauty but in an altered thought of the character of God. Tell me that God is the almighty King, and I look for his power in the war of elements. Tell me that his voice is that of Sinai, and it takes the grandest music of the hills to echo it. But tell me that God in heaven is my Father—that I am his child, and that he loves me dearly—and from that moment I look with other eyes on the sunshine and the streamlet and the flower. It is not in terrible or startling things that love delights to body itself forth. Never is love richer in revelation than when it consecrates all that is quiet and lowly. And it was because God was love to Jesus Christ that, when he went abroad into the world of nature, he saw God and his kingdom in the birds and in the thousand lilies of the field. The kind of God you really believe in determines mightily your thought of heaven. And the kind of God you really believe in determines mightily your thought of earth. And this is the gladness of the knowledge of God that has been given us by Christ our Savior, that it sets every common bush afire with him and finds him in every lily of the field.”

George H. Morrison