As we are led aside by the powerful workings of our corrupt nature, we are often seeking great things for ourselves.
Riches,
worldly comforts,
respectability,
to be honored, admired, and esteemed by men are the objects most passionately sought after by the world. And so far as the children of God are under the influence of a worldly principle, do they secretly desire similar things.
Nor does this ambition depend upon station in life. All are more or less deeply infected with it, until delivered by the grace of God.
The poorest man has a secret desire in his soul after "great things," and a secret plotting in his mind how he may obtain them.
But the Lord is determined that His people shall not have great things.
He has purposed to pour contempt upon all the pride of man. He therefore nips all their hopes in the bud,
crushes their flattering prospects, and
makes them for the most part poor, needy, and despised in this world.
Whatever schemes or projects the Lord's people may devise that they may prosper in the world, God rarely allows their plans to thrive. He knows well to what consequences it would lead that this ivy creeping round the stem would, as it were, suffocate and strangle the tree.
The more that worldly goods increase the more the heart is fixed upon them,
the more the affections are set upon idols,
the more the heart is drawn away from the Lord.
He will not allow His people to have their portion here below. He has in store for them a better city, that is a heavenly one and therefore will He not allow them to seek great things in this poor perishing world.
A child of God may be secretly aiming at great things, such as respectability, bettering his condition in life, rising step by step in the scale of society. But the Lord will usually disappoint these plans,
defeat these projects,
wither these gourds,
and blight these prospects.
God may reduce him to poverty, as He did Job.
God may smite him with sickness, as He did Lazarus and Hezekiah.
God may take away his wife and children, as in the case of Ezekiel and Jacob.
Or God may bring trouble and distress into his mind, by shooting an unerring arrow of conviction into the conscience.
God has a certain purpose to effect by bringing this trouble, and that is to pull him down from "seeking great things for himself." For what is the secret root of this ambition? Is it not the pride of the heart? When the Lord, then, would lay this ambition low, He makes a blow at the root. He strips away imagined hopes and breaks down rotten props. The great things sought for previously, and perhaps obtained, then fall to pieces.
[J.C. Philpot]
Jeremiah 45:5 ... And seekest thou great things for thyself? seek them not: for, behold, I will bring evil upon all flesh, saith the Lord: but thy life will I give unto thee for a prey in all places whither thou goest.
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