You ask for money owed to be paid this very morning. Your son’s labor has been met with injustice, and the need is pressing. Yet consider this: the present life is a sleep, and the things in it are no way different from dreams. The one who grows rich in a dream is convicted of having been rich to no purpose when the day comes. The anxiety that grips you now over these six weeks' wages, is this not the very provision for the flesh that fulfills its lusts of fear and impatience? To make provision for the body is needful, for health, as even Paul counseled Timothy with a little wine. But this frantic demand that the money must be cleared this morning, this lighting up of the flame of worry, this is the furnace made powerful.
You must understand the way of God’s dealings. Consider the servant who owes a great debt to his master. If unjust men rob him, and the master counts what was taken away toward the debt, is the servant injured? By no means. What if the master repays him even more? Has he not gained more than he lost? Every one, I suppose, perceives it. This delay and this debt your son is owed may be the very means by which a greater spiritual debt is being reckoned and paid on your behalf by God Himself. Why do you seek to dictate the hour of its clearing? The disciples thought to hinder Christ, saying there was no urgent reason for going, until He made the necessity plain saying, “He is dead.” Your own urgency blinds you to what God is doing in this delay.
I exhort you, let us learn to be spitefully treated. Let us think lightly of money, that we may not think lightly of our salvation. For money is chastised and punished on earth, but the soul departeth yonder. Why, tell me, do you cut your own soul to pieces without perceiving it? The one who throws in two mites receives everything for a full purpose of mind, but ten thousand talents of gold will not buy the Kingdom without a right disposition. Do not, like the foolish women who give evil counsel in calamities, thrust your own soul into a pit. The wife who compelled blasphemy was rebuked, for a wife is a great good, yet also a great evil. Hear this, you who let this temporal lack compel you to demand of God a timetable for His provision. Evil communications corrupt good manners, especially in times of need. Do not let this loss produce that great effect the adversary seeks.
Seek instead one thing only: the health of your soul. The money will come if God wills it, not when you will it. The command is not to forbid making provision for the flesh for health’s sake, but to stop making provision to fulfill its lusts of impatience and fear. So cease from this urgent entreaty for a morning deposit. Let your prayer instead be that the purpose of your mind may be purified, that you may be found superior to earthly things, and that this debt of wages may be transformed into a treasure in heaven, of far greater worth than that which the Patriarch did. Do not despise the testing, for heavenly things are not bought with money, but by a purpose exhibited through trial.