Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: Getting Priorities in Order (Matthew 6:25-34)
Date: August 4, 2024
One of my favorite observations about how much time we have in our lives is also one of the most challenging and uncomfortable I’ve ever heard. Are you ready for this? Are you sure? You might want to tuck your toes in just in case. Here goes: You have time to do everything you most want to do. Whenever you hear someone complain about how little time they have to do this or that, if you really want to get under their skin, gently offer this observation back to them. Then take a step back because they might take a swing at you. Better yet, the next time you start to complain about how little time you have to do this or that, bring this observation to mind. Trust me: You won’t like it. But that doesn’t make it any less true.
We have time to do everything we most want to do. If we aren’t doing something, the reason is not that we don’t have time for it, but that we don’t make or take time for it. Those are two different things. For instance, you may be tempted to complain that you don’t ever have time to take a real vacation. How silly. Of course you have time for that. You simply like eating food and living indoors more than you like going on vacation. As a result, you work hard to make sure you have those things before you think about making time for vacations. Or perhaps you don’t like telling your kids no when it comes to the activities they want to do more than you don’t like not being able to do something else you tell yourself you would rather be doing. The truth is that you wouldn’t rather be doing it at all. You would rather not tell your kids no.
For some of you, this next part may be the thing you came today to hear. (That doesn’t mean you can tune out the rest of the sermon, though!) Our lives, such as they are, are largely determined by our priorities. If you don’t like the outcomes you are experiencing in life, the solution is fairly simple: change your priorities. Of course, not all priorities are equal to one another. And the opinions of the culture around us aren’t always very reliable in terms of pointing us to the best priorities to prioritize. This morning, I’d like to reflect with you for a few minutes on which priorities are the best priorities.
Today we are in the fourth part of our teaching series, Who Do You Want to Be? For the last few weeks and with one more to go after this we have been talking about what our lives here and now should look like in light of the fact that Jesus is going to return one day to bring this world to a conclusion before ushering in a brand new world. As we put this tension in the first part of our journey, if this world really is going to end one day and give way to a new one, and if the choices we make now will have an impact on our experience with this new world, then how we live matters. Or, as the apostle Peter more directly worded the challenge: “Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be?” His answer was just as direct: “You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming.” Or, as we put it then, if Jesus is coming back, how we live matters. So, who do you want to be?
Over the last couple of weeks we have been talking about different lifestyle choices that we are wise and right to make as followers of Jesus in light of His forthcoming return. The first is that we need to be a people who are for our communities. Borrowing on some of the wisdom Jeremiah shared with the people of Israel living in exile in Babylon, we talked about the fact that even though we aren’t yet in our final home, our best bet is not to simply wait idly for the end to come. It is to commit ourselves to making our present communities as good as they can possibly be. Living with the end in mind means making our communities better now.
As we saw last week through the lens of Jesus’ tense conversation with the Pharisees and Herodians, though, this duty goes beyond simply making our local communities better. We need to be committed to making our present kingdoms better by being the best citizens we can possibly be. We do this through a variety of means, but they are all variations on properly loving our country. Living with the end in mind means being the best citizens we can be.
Well, if the last couple of weeks have had us looking at earth from the standpoint of heaven, for the final couple of weeks of this journey we are going to turn things around a bit and look at heaven from the standpoint of earth. As much as it matters a great deal for us to be properly committed to our present kingdoms wherever those happen to be, we cannot forget that we are nonetheless citizens first of a different kingdom. It is not a kingdom of this earth. Jesus Himself made as much clear when He told Pilate that His kingdom was not of this world. And because we are citizens first of that holy kingdom, we must abide by the rules and expectations that come part and parcel with membership in it. Far from being a burden or something that will take away from our being good citizens who are profoundly for our communities, though, remembering whose we are first will make us better at doing those things. More even than that, remembering which kingdom comes first will keep us ready for Jesus’ return at all times.
The reason this matters so much isn’t just focused on such large-scale concerns, though. It gets entirely more personal than that. When we remember where our real and eternal home lies, afflictions that are a regular feature of life in this world lose the great power they would otherwise have over us. This becomes clear in something Jesus said in His most famous sermon. If you have a copy of the Scriptures handy this morning, find your way with me to Matthew 6, and let’s take a look at what Jesus had to say about our priorities and getting first things first.
The Sermon on the Mount is easily Jesus’ most famous block of teaching in any of the Gospels. Yet while it is perfectly acceptable to think that Jesus presented this whole sermon in one sitting up on a hillside in Galilee somewhere like Matthew presents it for us, this was by no means the only time Jesus said all of this. The Sermon on the Mount was like a collection of Jesus’ greatest hits. These were the ideas and themes He came back to again and again throughout His ministry. What we get in the Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’ most comprehensive vision of what life in the kingdom of God looks like and how it works. It opens with an ethical vision for God’s kingdom, and closes with an encouragement and exhortation to enter it, but right in the middle offers a remarkable picture of what it looks like to be a part of it. Right near the end of this middle part is where we are going to pick up this morning.
Starting in Matthew 6:25, Jesus helps us see why life in God’s kingdom is just so different from life in this one. Check this out with me: “Therefore I tell you: Don’t worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Isn’t life more than food and the body more than clothing? Consider the birds of the sky: They don’t sow or reap or gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you worth more than they? Can any of you add one moment to his life-span by worrying? And why do you worry about clothes? Observe how the wildflowers of the field grow: They don’t labor or spin thread. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was adorned like one of these. If that’s how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and thrown into the furnace tomorrow, won’t he do much more for you—you of little faith? So don’t worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. . . .Therefore don’t worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
Now, if you’ve been around the church for very long, I suspect you’ve heard these verses before. This is pretty remarkable stuff. Worry and anxiety have been problems plaguing humanity since time immemorial. We live in a culture now where we have all but eliminated even the language of hunger. We talk about food insecurity. Now, are there still people who struggle to find enough food to feed themselves each day? Unquestionably so. But that kind of a situation is a far rarer thing than it once was, and where those situations exist, they often exist in spite of plentiful and readily available sources of help to alleviate the problem. The problem of hunger today stems more from governmental mismanagement or corruption than a lack of resources. This global abundance of food, though, is a fairly recent historical invention thanks to electricity and the miracle of refrigeration. Before then, making sure you had the food you needed to eat each day was a daily task that came with few guarantees for most people. The same goes with access to clean drinking water. And the idea of closets full of so many clothes we can’t even wear them all was utterly unheard of when most people made their own clothes, and you had maybe one or two sets that you wore for years. How ironic it is that we are a society experiencing an epidemic of anxiety when we live in the midst of such abundance. Our worries and anxieties have not been alleviated by modernism and its luxuries. They have merely migrated and taken on different forms.
And if you think about it, in a world with no gods or gods who are untrustworthy, worrying about basic needs makes sense. If your daily sustenance is going to be comprised of whatever you can manage to grow or kill, most of us are going to be in trouble. Even if you assume a skill set necessary to acquire and process all the relevant resources, there’s still only so much you can do. You are going to wind up having to spend significant portions of each day focused solely on that one task. All the more so if you have a family to house and clothe and feed as well. And then there’s the added element of forces that are entirely outside your control. If the rains don’t fall or if animal populations migrate out of your area or if bugs or blight kill off your crops, you’re toast. The pressure of making sure you have what you need when having it entirely depends on you is immense.
What Jesus introduced here was a radically different way of thinking about all of these things. This actually falls in two different ways—one for Jesus’ original audience, and one for us. For Jesus’ original audience, they brokered no illusions that they could somehow make it on their own. The broader culture of His day was intensely aware that they couldn’t make it on their own. They were desperately in need of the help of the gods to get through life in some semblance of intact. The trouble was, the gods weren’t trustworthy. They were super powerful, yes, but they didn’t really care about the people. And they were capricious. Maybe they were having a good day and your sacrifice would be accepted, but maybe they weren’t and too bad for you. Of course, when you are really offering sacrifices to nobody and actually just playing the odds, that’s how things go. Sometimes they fall out in your favor; sometimes they don’t. You don’t know. Thus you worry about it—that is, you try to grab control of something over which you don’t actually have any control, which is what worry is in the first place.
Today, we generally don’t imagine that the success or failure of our lives are dependent on a divine being of any kind. At least in the cultural West, we are pretty thoroughly secularized. Even where we claim a religious identity or some level of religious devotion, we still think largely in secular terms. Our pantries are large enough, our freezers are stocked enough, our closets are full enough, and our houses are sturdy enough, that we easily and understandably operate from the standpoint that we are just fine on our own to get through life. That’s wrong on two fronts, of course. First, most of us are possessed of frighteningly few of the skills we would need to actually get by with anything like the standards of living to which we are accustomed. Take away the enormous and complex social web supporting us, and we would be in real trouble in a real hurry. Second, while the actual and metaphorical walls we erect to block out the literal and existential storms are much firmer than those of our ancestors, a big enough storm can still blow down our castles. I suspect that our inherent awareness of this plays into the anxiety plaguing us. On the other hand, the very strength of our walls has allowed us to find all sorts of new things to worry about that weren’t even on the radar of our forebears.
What Jesus offered us here was a way through all of this. He assured us that we aren’t on our own. There is a God who is sovereign over this world. The evidence of both His ability and willingness to provide for His creation is all over the place. We can see from the Genesis account of creation that God values us most of all out of everything He made. Well, if He so splendidly cares for the rest of creation, it is an entirely logical and rational conclusion to make that He will take even better care of us if we will let Him. Indeed, He knows what we need before we even ask about it. All the various things that cause us to worry don’t have to play that role in our lives any longer. We can simply trust in Him. Of course, this trust isn’t a passive one. It is one marked by our actively obeying His commands by fulfilling the mandate He gave us in creation to steward His creation carefully and well. When we are willing to accept Him for who He is and us for who He made us to be, He will take care of the rest.
But there’s a catch here. That thing I just said about accepting Him for who He is and us for who we are points toward this catch. If we are going to benefit from God’s ability and willingness to provide for us such that we can focus our attention on enjoying His creation rather than worrying over how we can get our hands on the most of it possible, we have to be willing to take Him on His own terms, not ours. We have to be willing to accept Him for who He is. Or, as Jesus put it in the verse we skipped earlier when reading through the passage, we have to “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be provided for [us].”
Okay, but what does it mean to seek first God’s kingdom and righteousness? Much ink has been spilled over that phrase, but let me see if I can put it very simply for us. It means we need to be willing to put His priorities ahead of our own. Not only is this a good and necessary thing to do if we want to experience the kind of abundant life He desires for us, it is a thing that makes perfect sense to do. If God is who the Scriptures, rightly understood, proclaim Him to be, then this world is really His. He made it to work a certain way—a way defined by His character. When we are willing to operate on those terms, then we get to enjoy the world as He designed it. When we don’t…well…we don’t. Instead of enjoying the abundance of His majesty, we are stuck trying to get by on our own with whatever we can accomplish. As compared with what He can do, our efforts are rather meager.
Let me add one more element here. While it is undeniably true that the world doesn’t often operate on God’s terms and suffers through all the attendant consequences of such a state of affairs, there is a day coming when God is going to restore things to their rightful design and operation. If we are going to be a part of that world when it arrives, then we need to start preparing for it now. We need to begin living now as if that day were already here. Actually, let me put that a bit more positively: We get to start living now as if that day had already arrived. We can start living with God’s priorities now. When we do that, we’ll be ready to receive Him both now and in the end. Living with the end in mind means putting God’s priorities first.
Let’s talk about what that means. This means, first and foremost, that we prioritize God’s priorities over and above our own. It’s perfectly okay to have priorities. These can even be strong priorities. But we can make these higher than God’s priorities. If we do, then we’re not working with Him to advance His kingdom any longer. We are working against Him to advance our own. Given that His kingdom will be realized in the end, this is always and only a losing proposition on our part. Not only is it a total waste of time, it sets us on a path for judgment because in working against God’s priorities, we are pursuing an end that is ultimately not good however it may seem to us in a given moment.
Living with the end in mind means putting God’s priorities first. Well, the priorities of God, His kingdom, and His righteousness aren’t always ours. They aren’t always the interests of our present kingdom. Because of this, putting God’s priorities first will occasionally—and even often—put us at odds with the world around us. It will even put us at odds with ourselves. It was not for no reason that Jesus warned that those who desired to follow Him would have to be prepared to deny themselves and take up their crosses before getting to the following part of that equation. If we are going to put God’s priorities first, we have to be prepared for the pushback and even persecution that will come from those who don’t understand what or why we are doing what we are doing. Talking about our pursuit of God’s priorities in contrast to the world’s pursuit of its own priorities, the apostle Peter said that “they are surprised that you don’t join them in the same flood of wild living—and they slander you.” Earlier in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said we are blessed when we are persecuted because of His name. As a ministry whose work I follow pretty closely likes to say, we need to develop a theology of getting fired. As our culture continues to pursue God’s priorities less, our stubborn pursuit of them anyway will make us stand out more and more in a culture that doesn’t reward different. Yet we do this because we know that in the end, God’s priorities will win out. Living with the end in mind means putting God’s priorities first.
Putting God’s priorities first means fundamentally that we trust in Him for our daily needs and not in ourselves and what we can accomplish on our own. Now, this doesn’t mean we don’t still work. We do. We must. God designed us to work and work hard in our role as stewards over His creation. Rather, we work with the recognition that the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it. He is the one who sustains it. Creation holds together in Him, not because of something we do or don’t do. Our provision ultimately comes from Him because even our ability to work comes from Him. This is part of the wisdom Paul shared with the Philippian believers in Philippians 2:12-13. He told them to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” which sounds very much like we’re the ones who have to do everything, until you read the next part: “For it is God who is working in you both to will and to work according to his good purpose.” We don’t even want to do it unless He helps us want it in the first place. Because of this, it’s always best to seek Him first. Living with the end in mind means putting God’s priorities first.
Speaking of those priorities, since we have been for a while, what are they anyway? Well, they are first and foremost for the advancement of His kingdom. That’s always His top priority. That, though, just begs the question as to what exactly is His kingdom. God’s kingdom is present anywhere His rule and reign are recognized and received. Okay, but what does that look like? Well, God’s kingdom is defined by His character, so it looks like His character’s being reflected through the lives of people who have placed their faith in Him. It looks like love being extended through us to those around us. It looks like compassion being shown to the hurting and the vulnerable. It looks like kindness being lavished on the broken. It looks like justice being achieved for the oppressed. It looks like mercy being shown to the suffering and the grieving. It looks like selflessness and gentleness and humility flourishing. It looks like joy and peace and hope blooming. It looks like forgiveness being sought and granted and relationships that were once broken being restored. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Living with the end in mind means putting God’s priorities first.
Seeking God’s priorities first means pursuing all of these things and more not only in our own lives, but through our lives into the lives of those around us. It means pursuing them in our families. It means pursuing them in our communities. It means pursuing them for our nation as a whole, and even in the world around us to the extent we are able. The world won’t always understand this, and we won’t always want it. But it will always be right. It will always make the world around us better and us better for the world. And, when the day finally arrives that Jesus returns to restore all things, we’ll be ready. We’ll be well-practiced. We’ll be already accustomed to life there, and the transition from here to there will be seamless and easy. This is really a no-lose prospect. We make this world better and get ourselves more ready for the next. What’s not to like? This is the kind of people we want to be. This is living in a way that matters. This is living with the end in mind. Living with the end in mind means putting God’s priorities first.