Seek Ye First

Seek Ye First
by Sylvester Hassell

THE GOSPEL MESSENGER
Devoted to the Primitive Baptist Cause
Sylvester Hassell, Editor.



Williamston, N.C., 1921


SEEK YE FIRST THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND HIS RIGHTEOUSNESS.
God is not only our Creator, Preserver and Benefactor, but, if we love Him, He is our Father. He will provide for our bodies which He has made, and for our souls which He has renewed, both for time and for eternity. He rightly requires the first and highest place in our minds and in our hearts. Having graciously and almightily brought us out from the bondage of sin, He righteously requires us to have no other gods before Him. He commands us to love Him with all our heart and mind and soul and strength. We may be naturally inclined to think that we can serve both Him and Mammon (or wealth, which may obtain for us ease and pleasure and honor). But He declares that this is impossible; the two services are irreconcilable. The worldly man seeks only after worldly good; he cares only for the natural and the temporal; he does not consider whence he came, nor why he is here, nor whither he is going. He is wholly absorbed with the things of time and sense--the concerns of the passing world. Ignoring God and conscience, he lives only for the present momentary life, and fails and dies like the withering grass and the fading flower, and utterly unprepared, he flies, a poor, naked beggar, into the terrible presence of a righteous, forgotten, and off ended God, who will justly consign him to the everlasting fires prepared for the devil and his angels. But the child of God, knowing that material things, when wholly desired and pursued, are unsatisfying, degrading, and perishing, loves His Divine Redeemer, who has bought him with His blood, far better than all earthly objects, even better than his nearest and dearest relatives and friends, and desires, above all else, the reign of His grace in his heart, and a conformity to His perfect righteousness; and it is his chief delight to serve devotedly the God of his salvation, to obey lovingly every one of His holy precepts, and to be entirely resigned to His righteous dispensation. He believes and trusts in Him to provide for all his necessities. While he honestly and diligently and economically labors to provide for the needs of himself and of those who are dependent upon him, he feels that his Heavenly Father who feeds the wild, care-free, happy birds, and clothes, in living beauty, the flowers of the field, without any labor upon their part, will, as He has promised, bless him and those with him with food and raiment; and so he is not burdened with distressing anxiety about his earthly needs. He may never see the morrow; and if he does, His Father whom he loves to serve, will give him grace and strength to support him. Christ is his treasure, and He is in heaven, and his heart is there, and, at the end of a life's short journey, the dear Lord will come and take him to Himself in a better and brighter, a heavenly and eternal home, where all will be purity and peace and love and glory. This is his assured hope, and it will be perfectly realized.

Elder Sylvester Hassell