How easy it is to drift into the class of the profane, the secular persons as Esau, to have our spiritual sensitivities blunted, to lose our appreciation of things unseen, to be so taken up with the means of living that we forget life itself and the things that alone give it security and dignity! How easy, when soul wars with sense, to depreciate everything that is beyond sense and let the moral tone be relaxed! There is much cause for the apostle to warn us, “See that no one … is godless like Esau.”
We too can despise our birthright by living far below our privileges and far below our spiritual opportunities. We have our birthright as children of God, born to an inheritance as joint heirs with Christ. We belong by essential nature not to the animal kingdom but to the kingdom of heaven, and when we forget it and live only with reference to the things of sense and time, we are disinheriting ourselves as Esau did. The secular temptation strikes a weak spot in all of us, suggesting that the spiritual life, God’s love and holiness, the kingdom of heaven and his righteousness, the life of faith and prayer and communion are dim and shadowy things, as in the land that is very far off.