Matthew 6:23

But if thine eye be evil--distempered, or, as we should say, If we have got a bad eye. thy whole body shall be full of darkness--darkened. As a vitiated eye, or an eye that looks not straight and full at its object, sees nothing as it is, so a mind and heart divided between heaven and earth is all dark. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!--As the conscience is the regulative faculty, and a man's inward purpose, scope, aim in life, determines his character--if these be not simple and heavenward, but distorted and double, what must all the other faculties and principles of our nature be which take their direction and character from these, and what must the whole man and the whole life be but a mass of darkness? In Luke (Luk 11:36) the converse of this statement very strikingly expresses what pure, beautiful, broad perceptions the clarity of the inward eye imparts: "If thy whole body therefore be full of light, having no part dark, the whole shall be full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee light." But now for the application of this.

Christ having, in the former chapter, armed his disciples against the corrupt doctrines and opinions of the scribes and Pharisees, especially in their expositions of the law (that was called their leaven, Mat 16:12), comes in this chapter to warn them against their corrupt practices, against the two sins which, though in their doctrine they did not justify, yet in their conversation they were notoriously guilty of, and so as even to recommend them to their admirers: these were hypocrisy and worldly-mindedness, sins which, of all others, the professors of religion need most to guard against, as sins that most easily beset those who have escaped the grosser pollutions that are in the world through lust, and which are therefore highly dangerous. We are here cautioned, I. Against hypocrisy; we must not be as the hypocrites are, nor do as the hypocrites do. 1. In the giving of alms (Mat 6:1-4). 2. In prayer (Mat 6:5-8). We are here taught what to pray for, and how to pray (Mat 6:9-13); and to forgive in prayer (Mat 6:14, Mat 6:15). 3. In fasting (Mat 6:16-18). II. Against worldly-mindedness, 1. In our choice, which is the destroying sin of hypocrites (Mat 6:19-24). 2. In our cares, which is the disquieting sin of many good Christians (Mat 6:25-34).