Life is a School.

SERMON IV. - GOD’S TRAINING 

by  Charles Kingsley

"Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD. Your clothes did not wear out and your feet did not swell during these forty years. Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the LORD your God disciplines you." Deuteronomy 8:2-5

This is the lesson of our lives.  This is training, not only for the old Jews, but for us.  What was true  of them, is more or less true of us.  And we read these verses to teach us that God’s ways with man do not change; that his fatherly hand is over us, as well as over the people of Israel; that we are in God’s schoolhouse, as they were; that their blessings are our blessings, their dangers are our dangers; that, as St. Paul says, all these things are written for our example. ‘And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger.’

How true to life that is!  How often there comes to a man, at his setting out in life, a time which humbles him; a  time of disappointment, when he finds that he is not so clever as he thought, as able to help himself as he thought; when his fine plans fail him; when he does not know how to settle in life, how to marry, how to provide for a family.  Perhaps the man actually does hunger, and go through a time of want and struggle.

 Then, it may be, he cries in his heart - How hard it is for me!  How hard that the golden days of youth should be all dark and clouded over!  How hard to have to suffer anxiety and weary hard work, just when I am able to enjoy myself most!

It is hard: but worse things than hard things may happen to a man.  Far worse is it to grow up, as some men do, in wealth, and ease, and luxury, with all the pleasures of this life found ready to their hands.  Some men, says the proverb, are ‘born with a golden spoon in their mouth.’  God help them if they are!  Idleness, profligacy, luxury, self-conceit, no care for their duty, no care for God, no feeling that they are in God’s school-house - these are too often the fruits of that breeding up.  How hardly will they learn that man does not live by bread alone, or by money alone, or by comfort alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.  Truly, said our Lord, ‘how hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of heaven.’

 Not those who earn riches by manful and honest labor; not those who come to wealth after long training to make them fit to use wealth: but those who have wealth; who are born amid luxury and pomp; who have never known want, and the golden lessons which want brings. - God help them, for they need his help even more than the poor young man who is at his wit’s end how to live.  For him God is helping.  His very want, and struggles, and anxiety may be God’s help to him.  They help him to control himself, and do with a little; they help him to strengthen his character, and to bring out all the powers of mind that God has given him. God is humbling him, that he may know that man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word which proceeds out of the mouth of God.

God, too, if he trusts in God, will feed him with manna - spiritual manna, not bodily.  He fed the Jews in the wilderness with manna, to show them that his power was indeed almighty - that if he did not see fit to help his people in one way, he could help them just as easily in another.  And so with every man who trusts in God.  In unforeseen ways, he is helped.  In unforeseen ways, he prospers; his life, as he goes on, becomes very different from what he expected, from what he would have liked; his fine dreams fade away, as he finds the world quite another place from what he fancied it: but still he prospers.  If he be earnest and honest, patient and God-fearing, he prospers; God brings him through.  His raiment doth not wax old, neither doth his foot swell, through all his forty years’ wandering in the wilderness.  He is not tired out, he does not break down, though he may have to work long and hard.  As his day is, so his strength shall be.

 God holds him up, strengthens and refreshes him, and brings him through years of labor from the thought of which he shrank when he was young. And so the man learns that man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God; that not in the abundance of things which he possesses, not in money; not in pleasure, not even in comforts, does the life of man consist: but in this - to learn his duty, and to have strength from God to do it.  Truly said the prophet - ‘It is good for a man to learn to bear the yoke in his youth.