Sermon: Worry and Seeking the Kingdom

Faith Is the Answer
#1717
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 08-Jul-23; 86 minutes 2023-07-08

description: (hide)

You know, we worry—we worry a lot. It is a very human thing to do because humans are so temporal, they are finite and unpredictable, and that makes us uncertain about everything. We cannot seem to trust anything to go right. We know the sun will rise in the morning and set in the evening. But after that, all bets are off, anything could happen. We expect that, from experience, one day is going to be a lot like the last one. But we can imagine all kinds of disasters, major and minor, that could happen. And that makes us worry.

I guess it all depends on whether we are optimists or pessimists. The pessimists thinks the sky is always falling, whereas the optimist thinks it falls only now and then. But that is how we are made. We are made to to worry, it seems. That is not really true, but that is the reality of life in this world.

Now, most of us—those in this room, most of you listening to me—we live in fairly wealthy nations so we suffer what are called "first world problems" and so we have mostly first world worries. These are things like we worry if Starbucks has the coffee flavor that we prefer. You know, people get the jitters (well, they have the jitters because they drink so much coffee), but they get the jitters in the fall hoping that pumpkin spice will come soon. And they worry if it does not come when they think it should.

We worry about whether our $60,000 car or truck is going to start. We worry about finding the right outfit for that particular activity despite having closets and dressers full of clothing and enough money to buy whatever it is we want. We worry about getting tickets to that concert or ball game that we would really like to see; and we worry about our kids getting into that premium class or that special sports program for which we have to pay top dollar.

The rest of the world, and the rest of mankind before the last century or two, worries about more basic things. Whether the drought or the flooding will ruin their crops and cause scarcity. They worry whether they can afford new pants for their growing boy or new shoes for their little girl. They worry whether the fanatical militia plans to raid through their area. They worry whether the latest animal disease will affect their cattle or sheep. They worry whether rising taxes and prices will completely impoverish them, and they worry whether they will survive the latest epidemic.

Worry is a problem. Worry is a natural product of sin. Because sin always results in negativity, in disappointment, in destruction, and ultimately in death. And the world is full of sin, so it is full of worry even if we do not have reason to worry. Let us say we live really well. We have everything that we need so we have no reason to worry—we worry. It is just the way it is. We have been conditioned all through our long lives to believe that nothing ever goes as planned. Something will mess matters up.

We are taught to be careful, which is a good thing. All these are good things because we live in a world in which bad things happen. But we worry. We are taught to be careful, to take precautions. Have a plan B, and C, and D just in case. We are taught not to get our hopes up because things always go wrong. Most of us have a pessimistic streak a mile wide because we have gone through some of these things. We have experienced the bad times. And that pessimistic streak is very much justified because we have learned that if something could go wrong, it will go wrong because in every human activity, sin is involved and sin messes things up.

Now, living with constant worry and stress is not a good way to live. Some of you know this from painful experience because pain has caused your stress to rise and stress has ruined your health. As a matter of fact, it kills us after a while. Over time, our bodies just cannot take it. Worry and the stress that it causes makes us old and tired and grouchy and depressed. You want to know why old people tend to be grouchy? Because they have lived a life of worry. They have lived a life of stress. And many people go around, having reached 60, 70, 80 years, thinking God, the universe, the stars, luck, fate, or whatever, is against them because they have not achieved what they wanted to achieve because they could never catch a break. Something always went wrong. And so many people die miserable because to them, nothing ever worked out. Nothing ever went right.

Our Savior agrees that the life of worry is a miserable way to live. Worry or anxiety or fear or whatever you want to call it, makes a hash of the kind of life He created human beings to live. In John 10:10, that famous chapter about the sheep, Jesus says that He came to this earth to give His sheep life, and that they may have it more abundantly. You know, He was not a worrier. He was one who thought life could be so much more and you could get so much accomplished in it.

Now, we know when He said this in John 10:10 that He primarily meant eternal life in the Kingdom of God. That is what He had come to provide. But His words do not exclude the life we now live in the flesh because when you apply the principles of God's way to human life, they work, they produce abundant good. So He wants our physical lives, our human lives, let us say, to be more abundant as well. He does not want us to just see all the good way in the future and not have some of the good in this life now to encourage us.

So He wants us to have an abundant life right here and now, and I do not mean this in the prosperity gospel sense, not at all. That is not what I am getting at. But what I do mean is that He wants us to have an abundant life in the sense of it being focused and satisfying and rewarding to us even now. He wants us to have a joyful life because, if done right, if we live according to the principles of God, that is what will be produced: goodness and joy and a sense of accomplishment. Because for God and for His people, life is not meaningless.

Life does not have to be full of trials and bad things happening. Life, if done right, if lived the way of God, is onward and upward, is a time of blessing, is a time of great strides toward what is good and right. If we approach life correctly, it can mean something wonderful even now, before we receive the fullness of God's promises. Even now, while Satan is nipping at our heels; even now, while the world is crumbling around us and people are thinking strange things, things that are not true, but they have convinced themselves that they are. But if we want this, if we want that abundant life, we need to quit worrying.

In His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus spends a substantial ten verses on this subject of worry. I say substantial because if you add up the verses in the three chapters of His Sermon on the Mount and then take these ten verses, divide it by these ten verses, that is 10.9% of the Sermon on the Mount is about worry and not being worried.

Have you ever considered that Jesus Christ and His Father are this universe's most positive forward-looking Beings and that They want Their people to share this trait with Them. I think that is true. God has been looking forward to the culmination of His work for millennia and He keeps pressing toward it, using His servants to bring these things forward, not because He wants to accomplish a plan. He wants it because He wants us to be happy and to be fulfilled and to be His children forever in His Kingdom, so there will be joy forevermore.

Today, we are going to consider Matthew 6:25-34. And we are going to see that worry holds us back from wholeheartedly seeking God's Kingdom and His righteousness in faith. And the key for overcoming this is to rid ourselves of worry as much as possible.

Matthew 6:25-34 "Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? So why do you worry about clothing?

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not worry saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all of these things will be added to you. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble."

You may want to jot down Luke 12:22-31. That passage is Luke's version of the same thing. It says much the same as what Matthew did. We will see later that there is one significant change that makes us think a little bit.

Now, I hurried through this section last time in my last sermon and afterward I felt I had not covered it nearly well enough. If you recall in that sermon, I presented this section as one of four approaches or mindsets that can impede our progress toward pursuing holiness, and this was the fourth impediment to sanctification. I call it just simply, faithlessness, and faithlessness will definitely hinder us from growing in righteousness since God's work in us is essentially a work of faith. Certainly on our part, that is what we have to add to our contribution to what is going on, that we have to act in faith, live in faith.

Once we got to the end there, I did not even explore the last two verses of this passage. And I think I even said that that would just those two verses itself demands another sermon. So here we have it.

Now, I said then that the two major ideas in this passage are worry and faith, and they are set up as opposite impulses: the Gentile way, we could call it the world's approach, or as Luke says, the nation's approach, is to worry about physical needs and wants. And if people are not paralyzed by fear, then they will do whatever they can, they will take whatever time they need, they will put as much effort as they can muster to get their needs met or their wants met. That is, the Gentile way is to spend as much time, money, effort, or what have you to get what they think they need. This is the "get way" that Mr. Armstrong always talked about, as opposed to the "give way."

And as I mentioned earlier, even when their basic needs are met—food, water, clothing, shelter, job, transportation, those things that they believe are things that they need for life in this present age—even when they are there, even when they are tangible and they are living the good life—they seek other needs because soon those basic needs are forgotten. They are just there all the time and they are constantly being fulfilled because they are successful enough. And now they have new needs, needs that really are not needs, that really wants, they are luxuries. But they have recategorize them in their own minds as needs. And so they go seeking after those things too. So their hearts, their minds, their bodies are fully engaged in seeking treasures on earth, as Jesus called them earlier in Matthew 6.

Now, when it comes down to us, if we do this, if we seek our own basic needs and go beyond them into seeking all these wants, well, Jesus says in this passage here that it reveals we have little faith. It is a marker to Him that we lack faith. When we are spending all of our time pursuing those things that are of this earth, things for ourselves to make ourselves feel better, to feel satisfied, then we are showing little faith.

I am not talking about spiritual good things. I am talking about the physical things of this world that we think will make us happy, that we think will fulfill us in some way. But they are not the things that Jesus Christ wants us to pursue. And so He can look at us and say, "That person needs more faith," because they are pursuing the wrong things. What it shows when we are pursuing these things that will make us feel good, or we think will make will make us feel good, is that we are demonstrating very publicly that we trust ourselves and not God. We are trying to fulfill all these things for ourselves rather than trusting God to give us fulfillment in His own way, in the better way.

His illustrations in this passage that we just read highlights actual human needs, they really are necessary. It is necessary that we drink water, and frequently. It is necessary that we eat food, not as frequently and probably less frequently than we do. But it is necessary because we need food and water for energy to keep us alive so that we can do the things that are absolutely necessary. I am telling you right now, you need to wear clothes! I will just leave that right there. We need security, we need help. We need a lot of things, shelter, basic human needs, they are real. So our Savior in no way denies that we need these things. In fact, He specifically says, "the Father knows that you need all these things."

God is not up there just dumbfounded while we are scurrying around like a nest of ants trying to get the things that we need for life. No, He knows that we need these things. As Creator, He knows what humans need to survive and to thrive. In fact, we can say with authority that He made us to need them. If He had not made us to need those things, He would have made us differently. But He made us flesh. He made us need to have water to drink and food to eat, and clothes to wear, and to be sheltered by a home of some sort. He made us this way because these things teach us a great deal that we need to know spiritually. It also allows us, as physical beings, to die if we do not get these things—and there is a purpose there as well. So He made us to need these things.

Even Adam and Eve needed these things. Now He provided them in the Garden. He provided them everything that they would need. They would have easy access to all these these, fulfilling all these needs so that they could spend more time on what is most important. But then they messed everything up by sinning. And God said, "Ok, you don't want the easy life where you could spend your time talking to Me and thinking about good things and pursuing what is right and good. Fine. Go wander in the land of Nod out to the east of the Garden. You're not coming back in here. Now, you're going to have to spend your time tilling the ground, making clothing, finding good pure water. You're going to have to work in your fields day and night. You're going to be spending all your time doing these things that I would have given you freely in the Garden."

So now men had to proportion their time in a way that God could say, "Hmm, that guy's got it. He's spending a lot of time pursuing what is right and good. Whereas this guy is pursuing riches, or he's pursuing ladies, or he's pursuing prestige, or he wants to be the leader of all the people in the world, things that are not good." So God made us this way, to have needs so that He could have a gauge on us. It is a gauge that He can read pretty clearly. Jesus was able to tell His disciples here, "Oh, you of little faith, because you're so worried about your physical life and not your spiritual life, which is much more important."

Getting back to God creating us this way. He, as a faithful Creator, supplies what is needed even for animals and plants. It is not just humans. Have you noticed? Have you ever thought about how He provides a lot of things? He provides for this earth, for the animals, for the birds, for plants, and for people a lot of basic fundamental things, basic-level things. He provides sun, He provides rain, He provides dirt to grow things in, He provides interesting things like seasonal change. He provides symbiotic processes where one organism supports another and by doing so they do a certain other thing.

He provides things like balancing factors. You see this a lot in climate. That if something seems to be out of whack, let us say we are getting way too much drought, it does not take long before the earth's natural processes which He created balance that out. We have La Nina and El Nino out in the Pacific Ocean and they provide certain balancing climatic factors some years on, some years off, but it helps move everything around and bring things back to normal. That is part of God's providence.

What about things like purification processes? It takes a couple feet of dirt to purify water. God did that. God made the dirt to be able to purify the water that we drink. This is just one thing that He does. It is a relatively small thing that He does, but He put it into His creation so that we can have pure drinking water. It may taste a little dirty if you only use 2 feet or whatever of dirt for that. But you get what I mean.

God requires, we will call them nonhuman organisms, things like the birds and beasts and such, to expend a little energy to seek, and to gather, and to hunt, and to kill, or otherwise consume, to maintain their lives. So even with them, it is a matter of God providing these basic-level things and then He makes them do a little bit of work to get what they need for their lives. And then the rest of their survival He has also provided because He put in them their instinctive behaviors that they function on. So He does not need to tell them anything; He has already programmed them, if you will, to do all the things that they need to survive. That is part of their instincts.

And He provides equally well for people, for human beings. But on our end, we have to supply things like hard work and intelligence to make the most of His providence. So He still provides what we need. It is there. It is very plain to see that He provides us everything that we need on this earth to have very nice lives, lives of luxury. I mean, we get to drink not just water, but we have the intelligence because He made available the things that allow us to drink wine and fruit juice, an occasional whiskey or whatever it happens to be, because we have applied our intelligence and hard work to take the things that He provided and make them into items that we enjoy, not just keep us alive. So we have to supply the hard work and the intelligence to make the most of what He has provided in the creation.

Now, there is a theological term for all of this. It is called common grace. That is an easy one. It is not one of these 15-letter long words that the theologians normally come up with. This is two very small words, common grace. You can define common grace very succinctly. How many words is this? Six words to define common grace: God's goodness in providing to all.

Let us go back a page or so to Matthew the fifth chapter. We will see that Jesus mentions this at the end of chapter 5. Here we will just read verses 44 through 48. This is talking about loving your neighbors and the Jews saying adding hating your enemy.

Matthew 5:44-48 [He says] "But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so? Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect."

So Jesus throws this theological concept of common grace into His exposition here of loving God and being like your Father in heaven because this is what He has done to all. He has shown love toward everybody on earth, and all the animals and all the plants by giving them sun and rain. It is a way that we can see God's love for us every day when we look outside and see the wonderful creation that He made, that provides so much for all of us. And so we are supposed to be doing the same thing in the way that we approach the world. That we should show the same common grace, if you will, toward all. Show them the love that God would show them.

Let us go to Acts 14. Paul mentions it here. We are going to read verses 15 through 17. This is when Paul and Barnabas were in Lystra and the people thought that they were gods. Paul had to figure out a way to explain this to them and so he uses this particular theological concept of common grace to help them understand.

Acts 14:15-17 "Men, why are you doing these things? [They were trying to sacrifice to them.] We also are men with the same nature as you, and preach to you that you should turn from these vain things to the living God, who made the heaven, the earth, and the sea, and all things that are in them, who in bygone generations allowed all nations to walk in their own ways. Nevertheless He did not leave Himself without witness, in that He did good, gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness."

So he uses this idea of common grace to show them that this God that they could see in creation was the One that had sent them to preach the gospel to them. And the proof was in the fact that He gave good things to everyone, that He was the great Overlord and Creator of all things and that He was still doing good to humanity. And He wanted His people, those whom He was calling out, and eventually all people, to come to the knowledge of the truth and quit doing vain things. It is amazing!

This is what God has done. He has enacted His common grace and provided for everyone. And think of it. The productive ability of this earth, designed and created and shared by our loving God, is amazing. It is able to feed billions of people; and not just the present 8 billion people that we have on this earth, but all the many billions who have existed since the time of Adam. It keeps on producing and regenerating its ability to produce. What an awesome God whose mind is able to create processes that keep on fulfilling His will year after year, after century, after millennia, and everyone benefits. That is His common grace.

It is an amazing thing to think about. And it is not just food and water, but He also provided all the materials that we need for our clothing, for our shelter, for our great businesses, our communications, our transportation, everything that we have, all of our medicines ultimately come from something that He created. That is part of His common grace that He provides for all of us.

The problem is that, even knowing this, even going through the thought process of figuring all this out and knowing how much God has supplied, we do not believe it. We may believe it intellectually, but practically, no, we do not believe it.

When was the last time you worried about something? Probably within the last hour or two. You were worried about getting hit by another vehicle on your way here, or you were worried that you forgot something, or you were worried about this or that thing. You were worried about being bored to death in the sermon and falling asleep.

We worry, and the worry shows that we do not believe that God will provide. I am not saying we are supposed to be Pollyannas, thinking that all is good all the time and everything is just getting better. That is not at all what I am saying. But if we really trust God to know that He will provide for us like He provides for everybody else, and because He loves us He will provide even more, then we should worry less. Those things should not hang over our head. We should not be so pessimistic, but we are. We just fail.

We do a lot of that, a lot of failing. We fail to see God at work. And so we lack faith even in His common grace, even while seeing abundant proof of His providence everywhere we look, we reject it. We do this through selfish worry. We scoff at His Word, we scoff at what our own eyes see, and we convince ourselves that He will fail to give us what we need. This happens in the blink of an eye, in a microsecond, in our consciousness, in the way we think about things. We can go from just being in awe of His creation to flat-out worry in a half a second—because we lack faith.

We think our minds are geared toward believing (that is a good word there), we are geared toward believing that we have to do everything ourselves. If we want it, we have got to get it and expend the energy to get it. And we know because we know our limitations that we cannot get the things that we want. Not without a lot of work, not without overcoming a lot of hardship, not without elbowing out somebody else for it. And so we worry.

We become so self-concerned, so self-focused, we make ourselves the exception to God's promise of providence. We say things to ourselves that, if you strip out all the excuses and the justifications, sounds more like God cannot do it. This case is just too hard. And what it ends up, as I said last time, being nothing more than a pathetic pity party because we are exposing our selfish concern and our dreadful lack of faith when we think that God will not provide.

Let us go back into Matthew 6 and look at Jesus' rhetorical question in verse 25. This is the last sentence of the verse. "Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?" This is an important point. Yes. The answer to the question is yes. Rhetorical questions are said in such a way that the answer is obvious, that it just begs the answer and we can easily supply it.

Yes, food and clothing are important but hardly the most important things in life. Yes, we need food and clothing, but there are things that are far more important.

Now, remember food and clothing in this paragraph, this passage, stand for earthly things, treasures, earthly values. Jesus here, by asking this rhetorical question, is bringing our thoughts back to priorities, values. What is important? He wants us to make a value judgment about things, about how we spend our time, about how we spend our energies, our money, our attention, all the things that we have that we can use to pursue something or to get something.

If we spend all of our time and our energy and our money and attention on physical pursuits of needs, even if they are legitimate needs, that is, on our material fleshly desires, the things that we need for the body, this means that we are neglecting more vital spiritual pursuits. We have to choose. What are we going to? What are we going to pursue? What are we going to chase after? What are we going to look for? And if we spend all of our time pursuing, fulfilling our own needs, physical needs, material needs, then we are not going to have the time that we need to pursue the more important, more vital spiritual needs that not only fulfill us but then can be used to help fulfill others, to serve others.

We are in essence doing what Esau did. Remember what he did? "Oh, I'm going to die, Jacob! I need that bowl of stew, please. I'll sell you my birthright just to keep going another half hour. And then a few hours after that, I'll eat something else." A perfect illustration of somebody choosing his own needs before his greater need, the greater reward, the greater spiritual thing of the birthright. We could now be talking about Father Esau rather than Father Jacob if he had chosen properly, if he had prioritized right. I doubt it. He was a scoundrel. So it was Jacob. But Jacob repented, and he thought, he saw, he understood what was more important.

That was one of his big advantages over his brother. Jacob had foresight, he could see and prioritize what was more important even though he was a scoundrel. And then God changed his heart and he became a person of foresight who was no longer a scoundrel and had learned vital lessons and he became Father Jacob, the progenitor of all the tribes of Israel, holder of the blessing and the birthright, because he could see what was important and he chose to do that more important thing. And that is what Jesus wants us to do. He wants us to take a very serious, sober look at what we consider our needs and choose the more important needs to pursue.

Let us go to Colossians 3, one of my favorite sections of scripture. Paul does something very similar here in this chapter as Jesus has done at the end of chapter Matthew 6. We are starting at the time of our baptism here.

Colossians 3:1-2 If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is [in heaven], sitting at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on things of the earth.

Once we went through baptism, once we were converted, the difference between heavenly things and earthly things became greatly magnified. The breach, if you will, the chasm between the earthly things and the heavenly things widen so much and we can now see, with God's Spirit, the difference. It is very obvious what God wants us to do. And Paul puts it so plainly here, "seek those things which are above," seek those heavenly things, not the things on the earth.

Colossians 2:5 Therefore [concluding statement] put to death your members which are on the earth:

He is telling you that your body, your physical body, your arms, your legs, and all those body parts, are to be put to death. Now, we can look at this in a stark way, but I do not want to do that. I do not want to go that far. But what he is saying is we have to look at them as if they are dying. That we have to refuse to feed them anymore.

Colossians 2:5 Therefore put to death your members which are on the earth:

Your body is not as important anymore as it was to you before because your outlook has now flipped to the spiritual. Now, I do not want to get into any kind of Gnosticism here and say that your body means nothing. (Thank you, Austin, for bringing that up. It gives a good way to connect the sermon in the sermon here.) That is how the Gnostics took it. They took it that the body meant nothing and so we could do whatever we wanted to with our body because God did not care about that anymore. And so knowledge became the great thing, the spirit, the soul became the great thing, and that is what they put all their attention on.

That is not what I am getting at. The difference here is relative. That your physical body is not as important anymore as your spiritual relationship with Jesus Christ. So our focus has to change and using an extreme metaphor here, Paul talks about putting it to death because that is ultimately what is going to happen. Ultimately, our bodies are going to die. But in that process between now and then, we have got to "make hay while the sun shines." And I do not know (I am mixing my metaphors), but we have got to make sure that we use the time wisely to focus on the important things and the important things are not physical, not on this earth. They are the spiritual things.

Colossians 2:5 Therefore put to death your members which are on the earth [then he says]: fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.

He is saying here that it is our members on the earth, it is our physical bodies that drag us into these sorts of sins because we are so concerned about physical things, fulfilling our physical wants and drives that we allow ourselves to do these things: fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, covetousness, and idolatry. These are things that we do because we follow our bodily impulses, the things on the earth.

And so what Paul does here is he sets up this dichotomy between earth and heaven just like Jesus did. Jesus does the same thing in Matthew 5. And then he begins to add other of these opposites to help us get a better idea of the thing he is talking about. So he adds these things like death and life. Death is equal to earth. Life is equal to heaven. They are on those the same scales. One is at one end, one is at the other. He brings in in a few verses, the old man and the new man. The old man is on the earth and is going toward death. The new man is that one that is sitting at the right hand of the Father in heaven. And that is life, if we follow Him.

He talks about taking off the bad things and putting on the good things. One is an earthly action. The other is a heavenly action because we are taking off those things of the earth and we are putting on those things of heaven, of the Spirit. He talks about disobedience. That is what earthly things do. Earthly humans disobey God. But heavenly Christians, if you will, the ones who are trying to be godly, he says you guys do all things in the name of the Lord.

He also talks about wrath and glory. Wrath is where the people of the earth are going to have to end up, under God's wrath because of disobedience. But if we are obedient and do the things of God, we are going to end up in glory. He also makes a very stark contrast between humanness and Christ-likeness in this chapter.

So he makes sure we understand that all of those negative things on the one side are the things of the earth and all those positive things on the other end of the ledger or the spectrum are the things of the Spirit, are the things of heaven. And we have got to make sure that we move our lives, once baptized, once converted, we need to move our lives from one end of the spectrum all the way to the other. And to do that, we have to make good, proper decisions. We have to prioritize the Spirit, the heavenly, the good, the Christlike, over all those other things. Pretty simple. It is not a hard concept at all, but we have to make sure we do this all the time.

Now verse 5, here, where I talked about those sins, they describe the tenor of pursuing only earthly things, only earthly needs. So if we pursue only earthly needs, then our pursuit turns inappropriate, impure, obsessive, covetousness, and they become idolatry, ultimately. Most people begin to pursue those things very benignly. They are for good reasons. They want to do these things maybe for good, but they often at some point turn out ugly and sinful because carnal human nature is never satisfied. Solomon says that in Ecclesiastes 1:8.

It is a foundational principle of wisdom. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, the ear with hearing, the mouth with food. It does not matter. Our fleshly bodies get used to the amount of whatever we are doing. And in order to satisfy us, we need more. So we may pursue food and drink but soon we are deep into gluttony and drunkenness. Because that is just the way the fleshly body is, it always wants more. It is never satisfied with just this much unless a very strong mind is guiding the pursuit of these things—self-control, the fruit of the Spirit.

That is what I just said, right here in my notes. The desire for more erodes self-control leading to increased sin. So if we aim low, that is, if we aim for merely earthly things, our fleshly nature takes us lower, eventually, because it is never going to be satisfied. And so it becomes a vicious downward spiral into sin. It is just the way it works. It is the way our carnal nature is.

Let us go back to Matthew 6. I do not want to do like I did last time and not finish what I had put down here (and I still might not do that). Here is another rhetorical question in verse 26. He is talking about birds of the air.

Matthew 6:26 "Are you not of more value than they?"

Here is another rhetorical question. The answer of course is, yes. Humans are incredibly more valuable than birds. We know that, as it said in Hebrews 10:4, that no animal can pay for human sin. Paul, or whoever the author is, says, "It is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins." No animal, no bird, nothing created like that could pay for human sin. God recognizes that, it is part of His Word. So if God recognizes the high value of human life, will He not then care for us humans even more than He does for animal life? The answer is pretty clear. Of course, He does.

And another little bit on the end of this are two of the great reasons why He values us more highly is because, 1) we are in His image and, 2) each of us has the potential to be a child of God. So He looks upon us as the pinnacle of His creation, far higher than any kind of animal. In fact, you go through Genesis 1 and you find that He gives man dominion over the rest, saying, "You're the top of the creation. You work with what I've given you here and you control the cattle, you control the geese, you control all the fish," whatever. You have dominion over what I've created and make the best of it."

Jesus says something similar to this in Matthew 10, verses 28 through 31. He uses it in a slightly different context, but the context is still worry. But here He uses the word fear, just flat-out fear.

Matthew 10:28-31 "Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell [in Gehenna]. Are not two sparrows sold for a copper coin? And not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father's will. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Do not fear therefore, you are of more value than many sparrows."

He does not tell us how many. I do not know if it is 100 or 1,000 or whatever, but we comparatively are of much higher value than any bird.

What Jesus tells us here is that we have little need to fear for our lives because God values us, and He because He values us, He watches over us. If not even a sparrow could fall to the ground in death without Him knowing it and passing on it, how much more is He going to watch over us and allow us to die without saying, "Well done, good and faithful servant." Or "You've had enough." Or somehow judging that the time is right. He is not going to end our lives precipitously before He is done with us because He values us.

So we do not need to fear. We do not need to fear that the boogey man out there is going to come get us. God has got us. And if God has got us, we are safe until He says, "Ok, your time is through." We need to hear more about displeasing God than about men coming and taking our lives. God is the One that we have to please. So if we honor God, if we have faith in Him, He will keep us safe even in a completely antagonistic world because He paid a high price for us.

We are very valuable to Him. Did He not sell all that He had? He gave His life to buy us. Is that not what the parables tell us? In Matthew 13, He saw this beautiful pearl of great price and He sold all that He had so He could possess that pearl. Or even the great treasures; He sold all that He had so that He could buy the field in which the treasures we are hidden. He gave it all and He wants to keep His investment and receive a high return in the end. And that high return is sonship in His Kingdom. Life forevermore with Him. He wants to enjoy life with us. He is not going to throw us away as if we are of no value. So we do not need to fear.

Now, this idea of His divine valuation of us parallels the divine purpose. Remember what Jesus said in Luke 12:48? He says there, "For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required." Since God has given His elect His favor, faith, knowledge, forgiveness, grace, the promise of eternal life, and gifts upon gifts upon gifts, He expects more of them—us, that is—than the normal human fear-driven pursuit of material things. He has invested a lot in us. He has given us everything that we need to pursue what is right and good. But He has called us to a higher purpose so He expects more from us.

As I said, He values us more and He correspondingly expects more for us. He expects us to pursue or to seek divine things. He is our Master. We are slaves of righteousness so we have to do the things that He wants us to do. And that is, He wants us to learn how to live like Him so we can live like Him forever.

Let us go back to Matthew the sixth chapter. We have another rhetorical question in verse 27. "Which of you by worrying could add one cubit to his stature?" I would like to amend that, "Which of you by worrying could add one millimeter to your stature?" It is never going to happen whether it is one millimeter, whether it is a centimeter, an inch, a foot, foot and a half (like a cubit), you cannot do it. Worry, if you want to put it in a kind of punny way, is a no-growth strategy. It will not elevate us, it will not make us bigger, better, stronger, or greater by any means.

Remember, earlier I said the fruits of worry, or stress, or anxiety, or fear, or whatever you want to call it, are overwhelmingly negative. They tear down, they do not build up. So why do it? That is what He is asking here. Why are you engaging in an activity that is going to give you only negative results? I could put it much more bluntly. Why are you being so stupid? You are engaging in something that is vanity. How much does God rail against vanity in the Scriptures? It is useless. It is futile. It is not going to get you where you need to go so why engage in it if the returns are not going to be helpful? Why are we cursing ourselves or at the very least wasting our time?

He is also very much against wasting time. Use the time, redeem the time, make the most of the time. There is a time for this and a time for that, but you only have so much time so you better get busy. And if you are going to get busy, be busy doing what is going to be profitable eternally, not unprofitable even in this life.

Matthew 6:30 "Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?"

Another rhetorical question. This one is an argument from lesser to greater or, as we have seen over the past few minutes, from valueless to valuable. How much value do you place in grass? Now, I know some of us have paid a lot of money for some good turf and we spend time watering it and weeding it and all that stuff, and feeding it. But really how much in the greater scheme of things is grass? How much value do you place on it? Probably not very much.

But if God exercises care for something as worthless as grass; He makes it beautiful, He clothes the fields like Solomon in all his glory, will He not lavish far greater care on something He values exceedingly more? If He makes grass beautiful, will not He make you glorious? The answer obviously is, yes. That is a rhetorical question. So if He works so hard to bring beauty to grass, which withers quickly in days under the Middle Eastern sun, will not He take the time and care to make sure that you come to the fullness of glory just as that grass did at its peak? Yes, God will do that.

Jesus is telling us right here that that is what He is engaged in. He is bringing glory to you and all you have got to do is prioritize the right things and stop worrying about stupid things, things that He has already provided if we would just recognize that He has.

Jesus' repetition of this argument hints at the sad fact that most people never consider these simple but powerful and logical conclusions. We reject them because we are so self-centered. We think that God has forgotten us or God does not care about us or God will not provide for us because we are just seeing ourselves, we are not seeing Him.

Now, Jesus here brings faith into the argument. "O ye of little faith," He says in the King James version. You know the definitions for faith. Let us go to Hebrews 11.

Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

Hebrews 11:6 But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.

Let us also read James 2. Keep that in mind.

James 2:19-24 You believe there is one God. You do well [that is a good thing]. Even the demons believe—and tremble! But do you want to know, O foolish man, that faith without works is dead. Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered Isaac his son on the altar? Do you see that faith was working together with his works, and by works faith was made perfect [or complete]? And the Scripture was fulfilled which says, "Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness." And he was called the friend of God. You see then that a man is justified by works, and not by faith only.

The classical biblical definition of faith there in Hebrews 11:1 tells us that faith is the concrete conviction that the unseen God is real and that He will do as He promises. Faith, then, is the basis for all we think, say, and do as Christians because God has entered our lives and provided a goal. So we have to have faith that what He has presented to us and offered us is real, is true, and so we act accordingly.

Now, James adds the essential element of action. Faith is not passive or static or inert, it must manifest itself in behavior to be effective. We can believe all we want, just like those LGBTQ+ alphabet soup people, who believe that there are more than two genders. You can believe that, you can convince yourself of the truth of that or whatever it is, but that is as far as things go. Those people, the LGBT people, they have acted on their belief, they have faith in what they have convinced themselves of and they will reap the consequences of that.

But notice that James says that even the demons believe and tremble. But they are still demons, are they not? The belief is not enough. The belief in God is not enough. A person with real faith, like Abraham, displays his faith in acts of obedience and love. Faith must live. Roderick Meredith frequently taught us at AC of the living faith. It is not dead faith, it is living faith. Faith works. Faith acts. So a person with real faith like Abraham displays that faith in acts of obedience and love. Those are called works.

Now by calling His disciples, you of little faith, back in Matthew 6:30, Jesus is telling them—and us—that our faith is weak because we are not acting or behaving or conducting our lives in a way that corresponds to our profession of belief in God. If we are worrying, we are kind of like the demons that believe and tremble, but we are not acting on the belief by doing what God wants us to do. And you know what that produces? Sin! What do the demons do? Sin!

So you can believe that God exists. But if you do not act on it and do what God wants you to do, well, I am sad to say it, but you are no better than what the demons are doing. I mean, maybe that is a bit harsh. I think it is. But you have to think this through. If faith is mere profession of a thing that you believe is a fact, it is weak. That is what Jesus says here. It has no real substance. It is just words. It is mere agreement with the program without putting in the work to bring the program to fruition.

That is Protestant theology. Their faith, their profession of belief in God does not go anywhere because they will not do works. They think they are earning salvation. No, not at all. That is not what God means by works. They have got the wrong definition of works. Works are showing God that we are in the program and we are trying to grow to be like Him. They do not earn us anything but they make our faith real and active. So what we see out there in the world is in James' words, a dead faith. It is a lifeless faith because it has not produced works that fulfill God's will. That is why works and faith must go together hand in hand.

Let us go back to Matthew 7. Jesus says this very clearly in the Sermon on the Mount.

Matthew 7:21-23 "Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, 'Lord, Lord, have we not prophesized in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?' And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness."

They never got with the program. They heard what He said. They professed a belief, "We did all these things in Your name." "But you never did the work. You never followed My will. In essence, you practiced lawlessness all your life because you didn't keep My commandments." You cannot just profess and be saved. You have to get with the program and do what the teacher says must be done to pass the test.

What this is, this profession only, is a faith that will not conform to God's standards, which Jesus calls plain lawlessness. It is sin and it is proof (putting this back into the end of chapter 6) that we have not come out of the world but are living a life of mockery of the kind of life God expects of us.

So what is the remedy here? The remedy is Matthew 6:33. "Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you." The solution is getting our priorities straight. It is that simple; but it is that difficult. Notice that Jesus does not say profess the Kingdom of God or believe in the Kingdom or even proclaim the Kingdom, but seek it. It is an action verb, it is a behavior.

The Greek word for seek here is zeteyo. It means to seek or look for or desire. It can be translated endeavor, not the noun, the verb, endeavor to do something, which adds an element of effort and labor and strain, even rigor. It pictures a person completely absorbed in looking for something that is difficult to find. Or a person who is constantly pursuing a goal that is challenging to achieve. They are always trying to reach it, they never give up, they never give in, they just keep going. I mean, if the Kingdom of God were not arduous and require our full attention, everyone could accomplish it!

But that is not true. It is difficult, the way is narrow, it requires us to spend a lot of time and effort so that we can be there. And so Christ says, the first step that we need to do is set our minds that His Kingdom and His righteousness are our first priorities. We will never reach it if it does not consume the greater part of our lives. Once called, remember, Paul puts it there, "when we were raised with Christ," our lives are to be completely absorbed in the pursuit of preparing for the Kingdom of God and putting on the new man, which is the character of Jesus Christ. That is what Paul means in Romans 12:1-2 when he tells us to be living sacrifices and put our all into being transformed into the image of God. It is a life-consuming task of faith.

He concludes here in verse 34, "Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble." And in Luke 12:32 He concludes it a little differently. He says, "Do not fear, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." Kind of contrasting ways to finish off His instruction here.

It is enlightening because it highlights a tension present in our human lives as opposed to our Christian lives. In Matthew, Jesus admits that as fleshly human beings, we still have worries and we are going to have worries, but He advises us there to limit them to today. In other words, stay in the present, work on what is in front of you. Do not get ahead of yourself and fear the uncertainties of the future. You cannot control them. Leave them in God's hands.

In Luke, He follows His command to seek the Kingdom with the declaration that you have no need to fear because God will give you the Kingdom. That is, our efforts will be successful if we put our all into them, and seeing our desire and commitment, God will make up for what we lack. As Paul put it in Philippians 2:12-13, "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure."

So, no worries! If we are fully engaged in our calling, we will never walk alone. God is present, working beside us every step of the way. He will provide everything we need to enter His Kingdom.

RTR/aws/drm