Reverend Jonathan Waits
Love God First (Matthew 6:33)
Date: January 26, 2025
We do a lot of building in my house. The exact thing being built varies, but the building itself is consistent. Perhaps the most common building that happens is with Legos. Now, of course, you can build anything you want with Legos if you have the right bricks. The sky really is the limit in terms of the creative potential of that particular medium. Most of the Lego building that goes on in my house, though, is with pre-designed sets. These sets come with all the pieces you need to build whatever it is, packaged neatly in numbered bags, and with a set of instructions that walks you step-by-step through the process of building. Pro-tip, though: Don’t open all the bags at once. That makes the building a lot more tedious. Depending on the complexity of the build, the instructions range from fairly short to book length. But however long they happen to be, the most important thing is that you follow them carefully. If you use the wrong piece or put the right piece in the wrong place, that’s going to cause trouble later on in your building process. I can remember some sets I got mostly built only to discover that I had placed a piece incorrectly dozens of pages before. I had to go back and systematically take things apart in order to get it straightened out the right way. It was not very much fun.
Well, while our lives don’t come with instructions the way Legos do, there are nonetheless some aspects of life that really should be done in a certain way if we want to experience success and enjoyment later on down the road. For instance, did you know that sociologists have discovered a path through life that all but guarantees a happy and thriving adulthood? Want to know what it is? It’s pretty simple: get an education, get a job, get married, buy a house, and have kids. Now, obviously, things can happen to throw everything off course. This pattern doesn’t guarantee a successful life independent of any other variables. But if you stick to these particular things in this particular order, and stick with them long term, your odds of success are much, much higher than if you get them out of order.
The middle item on that list may actually be the most significant of the bunch. Marriage is one of the basic building blocks of a society. Strong and happy marriages result in prosperous and successful societies. Weak and struggling marriages sow the seeds of all sorts of social chaos that can be pretty hard to manage once it has been unleashed. Because of this, marriage is something that affects all of our lives in one way or another, and that effect is far more significant than we might imagine. Used to be, we fairly well understood this as a culture and put some social and legal safeguards around it to both encourage its happening and to discourage its dissolution by divorce. But for a variety of reasons that we don’t have time to explore right now, we live in a day when marriage is not particularly celebrated. You can drive down the highway and see billboards for divorce attorneys that proclaim things like: “Life’s short. Get a divorce.” We don’t just eschew marriage, we’re self-destructive in our thinking about it.
None of this changes the fact, though, that marriage is still something all of us experience in one way or another. It’s something many of us are experiencing now. And for some folks, that’s a really good thing. For others, it’s…harder. For still others, it just kind of…is. But marriage doesn’t feel like it should be something that just is. It certainly shouldn’t be an active burden. And yet, when you put two broken people together, that brokenness has a tendency to multiply, not subtract. But that’s not what marriage should be. How do we know? Well…we just do. All of our stories insist otherwise. We’ve seen marriages that were really good before, and that tends to set a standard in our minds for what should be even if the reality of “is” doesn’t match up for us very well right now.
The question we really want answered here is how we can have the marriage we desire, the marriage we know we’re supposed to have. And this question matters whether you are currently married, not yet married, or not married anymore. The answer is going to be the same in every case. And the answer is this: by getting back to the basics. You see, just like when building with Legos and you skip a step or get a step wrong, you have to go back before you can move forward, if you are struggling with a marriage that isn’t everything you want it to be and more, it may be that you need to go back and make some adjustments to things you perhaps never knew needed to be a certain way in the first place. Over the next four weeks, in a new series called, Back to the Basics, I want to share with you four basic adjustments you can make that have the power to have a profound impact on your relationship. None of these are particularly difficult to grasp in terms of understanding them, but they do all require a pretty thorough transformation in our thinking about marriage if we want to get them right.
Let’s start this morning with what is perhaps the most foundational adjustment to make of all. This first adjustment is all about making sure that our love is pointed in the right direction.
When we think about marriage culturally, we imagine a relationship that is going to meet all of our needs. Our partner is going to be our soulmate, our best friend, our closest confidante. They’ll be our strength when we are weak. They’ll hold us up when we are faltering. They’ll be our biggest cheerleader. When we marry the right person, we are told to expect that everything is going to be easy. Things will just fall into place, and we’ll relish our way to our happily ever after.
Well, while none of those things are necessarily wrong, and they’re certainly not bad, if we put those things as first and foremost in our thinking about marriage—as our culture diligently instructs us to do—we’re setting ourselves up for an intersection with reality that could be pretty painful, and we’re getting things out of order in a pretty significant way.
In order to help us understand all of this, I want to take us to a passage of Scripture that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with marriage, and which I suspect you’ve never thought about when you were thinking about marriage. If you have a copy of the Scriptures handy, find your way with me to Matthew 6.
Matthew 6 sits right in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount. If the whole sermon is Jesus’ offering us a picture of what life in the kingdom of God should look like, this middle portion focuses its attention on the kingdom disciplines that inform our personal relationship with God. He starts with prayer and fasting, and then shifts gears to materialism and anxiety. It’s to the final section on anxiety that I want to direct our attention this morning.
Jesus starts here by laying out some of the most common triggers for anxiety. He specifically mentions food and clothing. To put it even more broadly, one of our biggest anxiety triggers is seeing our physical needs met. We want to know that we are going to be able to meet our basic essentials for life. In Jesus’ day, that was generally a much riskier proposition than it typically is today, at least in our cultural context. Still, the burden of having to pay for basic life essentials weighs heavily on the minds of many. Maybe it has weighed heavily on your mind before.
Listen to how Jesus puts all of this: “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.”
You see, into this tension anxiety creates in our lives, Jesus introduces us to the idea that there is a God who cares so much about us that we don’t have to worry about any of these things. Reasoning from the lesser to the greater, Jesus points to the natural world. Perhaps there were some birds flying overhead at that moment, and there were surely some wild flowers that were visible to much of the crowd. He argues that if God takes care of the world around us so well, by what rational argument do we think He won’t also take care of us. In the second to last statement in this little section, Jesus sets a principle before us that offers us a powerful antidote to the kinds of anxieties that so many of us feel. Look at this with me in Matthew 6:33. “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be provided for you.”
Got that? If you will seek God’s kingdom and His righteousness first—that is, the substance of a right relationship with Him—He’ll take care of the rest. Now, does that mean we just sit back, read the Bible, pray, and wait for Him to drop everything into our laps that we need to get by? That’s certainly an easy response from a cynic to what Jesus says here. But that’s not what He says, is it? Or at least, that’s not a very good understanding of what He says.
The real question to answer in order to understand what Jesus is saying here is what does it mean to seek God’s kingdom and His righteousness? Well, from a survey of the rest of the New Testament, it looks like actively loving others the way Jesus did—with a sacrificial and generous love. It looks like working hard using the gifts God has given us in ways that glorify Him. It looks like keeping His commands more generally. There’s nothing passive or idle about it. And, when we work hard like that and treat others with intentional, generous kindness, we’ll typically find our needs pretty well met. Of course, those aren’t all of the means God has to supply our needs. He’s not limited in terms of His ability to add all of these things to us. But when we are running around trying by ourselves to lay our hands on everything we need and maybe some extra to enjoy, we’re not going to be looking for ways He intends to provide for us. And when we’re not looking for them, there’s a good chance we’ll miss Him. God doesn’t tend to force Himself on us.
Okay, but what does this have to do with marriage? Well, let’s step back a bit and see if we can take in the big picture of what Jesus is trying to emphasize here. I’ll give you a hint: Jesus isn’t just talking about getting our basic needs met by God. This is bigger than that. That’s absolutely a part of it, but there’s something more going on here. Jesus is talking about our priorities. We can see this when we back up just a bit to add in the context of the section before this one where Jesus tells us to not store up for ourselves treasures on earth and warn us of the dangers of trying to serve two different masters. Jesus’ point is that when we put our priorities in the right order, things are going to fall into place for us in ways they just won’t when we don’t. And the most important priority is God’s kingdom. That priority is most important because it defines what is really real and what isn’t. It’s most important because it is the one thing that is eternal. Everything else is temporary. It’s most important because it sets the parameters for what is good and what is not. When we make that our first priority, and use that as the lens through which we engage with everything else in our lives, the foundation will be there for things to fall into place in ways they won’t when we don’t. To make this really simple: When we love God first, everything else is going to work or work out like it should.
Well, this principle of getting our priorities right applies to every single area of our lives. In case it isn’t totally clear yet, “every single area” includes our marriages. If we get our priorities wrong when it comes to our marriage, the consequences will be just as devastating as if we get them wrong in any other area of our lives. Actually, that’s not quite right. Because marriage is such a significant relationship not only for us but for the people who are affected by our marriage (including, most notably, our kids) the consequences will likely be even more devastating. If our first priority is our partner or even our marriage more generally and not our relationship with God, we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment and frustration, and we’re setting our partners up to fail. Why? Because God is the only one who can actually meet all of our needs; all of the needs we are set up to expect our spouses to meet when we put them first.
So then, does this mean we aren’t supposed to be so connected and committed to our spouses as we have always been led to believe? Absolutely not! And that’s the beauty of getting this right. When we love God first, we are freed to love our spouses with His love and not merely our own. We are freed from having to bear the weight of disappointment when they don’t meet a standard they were never going to be able to keep in the first place. We free them from the weight of disappointing us and knowing it.
There’s more. When we love God first, we free ourselves from the temptation to have our needs met by a source other than our spouse, namely a hobby, a career, or another person. This makes sense, I hope. Because your spouse is not equipped to meet all your relational and emotional needs, they will invariably fail to do so. If you are expecting them to do it, once they’ve failed, you’re probably going to process your disappointment in part by seeking to have those needs met by something or someone else. This will necessarily move you away from your spouse in ways that will unavoidably weaken the very foundation of your relationship. This is how marriages wind up coming to a premature end. But if you are going to God to meet those needs, because He is uniquely the one who can, that whole situation can be avoided.
When we love God first, we free ourselves from these kinds of unhealthy and irrational expectations. You realize that it is irrational to expect one single person to be able to meet every emotional and relational need we have, right? As popular Christian marriage guru, Gary Thomas, puts it, “While it makes perfect sense to look to our spouses for answers, to put our trust in a mortal man or woman rather than the immortal God is to spurn the one who rules heaven and earth in favor of one whose body will, sooner or later, become part of the earth.”
Unencumbered from such terrible weights, when we get our priorities right in marriage, we can love each other the way God designed and intended for us to love each other, as a reflection of our love for Him. And if for some reason we don’t feel like they are returning the love the way we want them to in a given moment, that’s okay. The marriage won’t hinge on that happening consistently or in alignment with our expectations in a given moment. This is because we aren’t looking to them to provide for us emotionally and relationally what only God really can. This doesn’t mean a person should stay or should keep kids in a situation of abuse. Loving another person like God does means in part helping to prevent them from doing unjust harm to others. Safety is a priority. We are still loving them, though, even if temporarily from a distance, because that’s what God does for us. It’s what God did for us in Christ. Remember the whole “while we were still sinners Christ died for us” thing?
It’s not fair to our partners to expect them to do for us what only God can. There is no relationship that will work well when we place expectations on our partner in it that are unfair and irrational, and marriage is not an exception to this. If we want our marriages to be fully what God intends for them to be, He’s got to have first place. He’s got to be our first priority. He’s got to be the one we love most. He’s got to be the one we look to in order to meet our deepest needs. Everything else comes second to that. Properly loving your spouse means loving God first.
But what about our needs? Because we have relational and emotional needs. And there’s this other person to whom we have committed our lives and who has committed their life to us who is supposed to meet them. At least, that’s what we are told. But are they really?
Let me ask you something: Do you know every emotional and relational need your partner has? You don’t, do you? And if you don’t know theirs, what do you think the odds are that they know all of yours? Not very good, right? Now, sure, you could communicate these all to them, but how effective of a communicator of all your needs are you really? Perhaps you’re a sufficiently self-aware and gifted communicator that you’re actually really good at it, but if you’re at all like me, you’re probably really just okay at best. And, while we’re at it, just how good of a listener are you? How sensitive of a perceiver of non-verbally communicated needs are you? Yeah…me neither. And I suspect your partner’s not all that much better…which means that even if you’re a superlatively great communicator, your communication may still fall on deaf or otherwise clueless ears leaving you in the same place either way.
Think back to what Jesus said here in Matthew again for a second. What did He say about eagerly seeking “all these things”? He told us that our heavenly Father knows that we need them. God knows what you need. And if you seek Him first, He’s going to provide it. Now, some of it He just may provide through your spouse. As we said a second ago, He’s not limited in terms of His ability to provide for His people. But if your spouse is like me—that is, not perfect—then when we are seeking Him first, He can pick up the slack they leave. And because we are loving Him first and loving others in light of that, we’re far more likely to receive our partner’s failings with humility and graciousness just like He does ours. And instead of insisting all the same that they perfectly do what they’re just not capable of perfectly doing—and sometimes what they are not capable of doing very well at all—we’ll look to our heavenly Father as the source of “all these things” being provided to us. Properly loving your spouse means loving God first.
So, if you want the kind of relationship that sees your needs perfectly met in every single instance, marriage isn’t where you are going to find it. And if you look to it for that anyway, you’re going to wind up frustrated and disappointed. You’ll be far more likely to bail on it whether emotionally or physically or legally, so that you can look somewhere else for what you need instead. But as long as you are looking in the wrong places for it, you won’t find it there either. People can’t meet all your needs. God can. Properly loving your spouse means loving God first.
When you seek first God’s kingdom and His righteousness, then, and pursue your marriage as a joyful function and reflection of your love for Him, then you will find that all these things will indeed be added to you. Instead of a marriage that is just about you and what you need, you’ll have a glorious relationship that is about loving another person like Jesus loved you and in a way that demonstrates to the rest of the world just how good a relationship with God really is. You’ll love from the overflow and won’t be limited by however much your partner happens to be able to pour into you at any given moment. More than that, you’ll be an integral part in helping another person become more fully who God designed them to be to His glory and their joy, which will just happen to bring you a whole lot of joy too. Properly loving your spouse means loving God first. If He’s not first, it’s time to go back to the basics and put Him there. Properly loving your spouse means loving God first.