25 “So I tell you, don’t worry about the food or drink you need to live, or about the clothes you need for your body. Life is more than food, and the body is more than clothes. 26 Look at the birds in the air. They don’t plant or harvest or store food in barns, but your heavenly Father feeds them. And you know that you are worth much more than the birds. 27 You cannot add any time to your life by worrying about it.
28 “And why do you worry about clothes? Look at how the lilies in the field grow. They don’t work or make clothes for themselves. 29 But I tell you that even Solomon with his riches was not dressed as beautifully as one of these flowers. 30 God clothes the grass in the field, which is alive today but tomorrow is thrown into the fire. So you can be even more sure that God will clothe you. Don’t have so little faith! 31 Don’t worry and say, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ 32 The people who don’t know God keep trying to get these things, and your Father in heaven knows you need them. 33 Seek first God’s kingdom and what God wants. Then all your other needs will be met as well. 34 So don’t worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will have its own worries. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Read Matthew 6:25-34 in context and/or in other translations on BibleGateway.com!
In Jesus’ discussion about worry, He shares a phrase that I think many people have trouble understanding, or at least applying into their lives. At about the height of Jesus’ message to His followers on this subject, He shares this: “Seek first God’s kingdom and what God wants. Then all your other needs will be met as well.” (v. 33)
What makes this difficult for us to understand and apply is not the idea of seeking God first. That part is easy to understand even if it is hard to apply. The most challenging part of this verse is trusting Him to fill in the second half, where Jesus clearly says that all our other needs will be met as well.
Our lives are filled with so many “what if” style questions, and so many things that mask themselves as needs. Ultimately, we need Jesus. That is a given for those who understand what Jesus really offers us. Aside from Jesus, we need food, shelter, and loving connection with other people. This last part can be fulfilled through relationships with friends and/or family.
That pretty much sums it up. When we start quantifying what food looks like, the size of our shelter, or who our friends are, then things break out of the need category and into the want category.
There is a phrase that has appeared in recent years called “First-World Problems”. This phrase, while oftentimes unappreciated, draws our attention to what we truly need, and what we actually have been blessed with. It points us to realize that there are people living in other parts of the world who don’t have what we have been taking for granted, and they have survived. There are people who have raised huge families in single room buildings. People who don’t know what their next meal will look like, and people who live in fear for who they can trust. Those are real problems. The model of your cell phone, or the number of minutes or data your plan has is not a “real” problem.
The key for me in Jesus’ promise here is in the phrase, “Then all your other needs …”
This stands out to me because our first need is God. Jesus frames God as a need in this statement – specifically as our most important need. Then Jesus goes on to tell us that our other needs will be met as well. Perhaps some of our wants will get satisfied, but if that happens, think of it as a blessing or bonus.
God is looking at the really big picture of life in this passage about worry, and His big goal is not what you will wear, what you will eat, where you will live, but where you will spend eternity. God promises to meet all your needs in this life when you are focused in on placing Him first. It is only through what Jesus did for us that we are saved, and God has given us everything we truly need in the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross for our sins.
This thought was inspired by studying the Walking With Jesus “Reflective Bible Study” package. To discover insights like this in your own study time, click here and give Reflective Bible Study a try today!
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