all to follow Him.

But the literal abandonment of life to the ideal of poverty is clearly
not what our Lord contemplated for the universal practice of His
followers. He nowhere indicates that all gainful labour is to be
abandoned, or that having gained enough for food and raiment we are to
idle thereafter, or even give ourselves to some ungainful work. The
Kingdom of heaven does not appear to be society organised on the lines
of socialism or otherwise. Our Lord contemplated life going on as it is,
only governed by a new set of motives. It has as the result of the
acceptance of the Gospel a new Orientation; and as a result of that it
will view "possessions" in a new way. The acceptance of the Gospel means
the self surrendered utterly to the will of God, and all that self
possesses held at the disposal of that will. We may expect that God's
will for us will be manifested in the events of life and its
opportunities, and we shall hold ourselves alert and ready to embrace
that will. It may be that the call will come to sell all, and we need to
beware lest the thoroughness of the demand terrify us into the
repudiation of our Lord's service; lest the thought of the sacrificed
possessions send us away sorrowing. Ordinarily the call is less
searching than that; or perhaps the mercy of God spares us from demands
that would be beyond our strength. In any case, the truly consecrated
self will regard luxury as a dangerous thing, replete with entanglements
of all kinds, that it were well to avoid at the expense of any
sacrifice. One does well to hold "possessions" in a very loose grip,
lest the hold be reversed, and we become their servants rather than
they ours. And it is well to emphasise again that the mere size of
possessions is of small importance. There is a not very rational
tendency to think of this as being a matter of millions, for the man of
moderate income to think that there is no problem for him. The problem
is as pressing for him as for any man. His minimum of comfort may be as
tightly grasped as the other man's maximum. The only solution of the
problem will be found in the converted self. Those who have really given
themselves to God hold all things at His disposal. They are not thinking
how they can indulge self but how they can glorify God.

Egypt to many will stand for another sort of abandonment which much
perplexes the immature Christian: that is, the sort of isolation in
which the new Christian is quite likely