Matthew 6:25-34 has been coming up a lot in my life lately. I was given the passage to preach as part of my examination to be licensed as a preacher back in August, and just last month it was the text my brother and his wife chose for their wedding. The Lord may just be telling me something.

So I thought I’d post the text of my sermon from last year here, for any of you who are in a similar place, struggling with the unknowns of today and tomorrow. It’s mostly a sermon to myself at the moment, but I hope it’s profitable for you in whatever small way.

-Ben

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I. What Is Jesus Really Saying?

Some things Jesus tells us are simple enough, but they don’t quite sit right. Don’t be anxious. Look to the birds and the lilies of the field. It doesn’t take too long thinking about these things for them to ring a little hollow, does it? Before long we find ourselves saying, “But what about…” What about the 16 million or so children—just in our own very wealthy country—who can’t be sure where their next meal will come from? What about their parents? Are we really supposed to just tell them not to be anxious? I’m sure there are people in this room who have known that kind of uncertainty as more than a statistic. My father was diagnosed with cancer when he was just about my age, with two small kids and no full-time job. His father was born into a Kansas farm family during the Dust Bowl years. What could this command have meant for them and their families?

But we can’t get around what Jesus is saying. Speaking from a mountain, in a way that deliberately recalls Moses, his words carry divine authority. And obedience that goes down to the depths of our thoughts and emotions is just the standard he sets. God forbids not just murder and adultery, but the anger and lust in the heart from which they proceed. His prohibition of anxiety is the same kind of command, forbidding the sinful attitude of anxiety that characterizes a heart sold to the mastery of the false god Mammon (vv. 25, 31, 34).

So the sin of “being anxious” is not a little foible that holds us back from reaching our full potential. It is a grievous offense against God—as one commentator puts it, a “practical atheism” that denies God’s ability to provide, or worse, a spirit of slander against God’s character that denies His willingness to do so.

And Jesus doesn’t seem to make any exceptions. He isn’t cautioning against fretting over things that are unimportant or wanting things that are bad in themselves. It’s clear (vv. 25, 31) that we are forbidden to be preoccupied with our very survival—the things that God the Father knows we need (v. 32). Don’t be concerned, Jesus says, about the very things it makes perfect sense to be concerned about. This is a hard saying; who can listen to it (John 6:60)?

Jesus explains this by using illustrations (vv. 26-30) that have become proverbial to our culture, shaped as it is by Scripture, and that familiarity dulls their very real difficulty and strangeness. The meaning seems obvious enough: God feeds the birds, even though they don’t know enough to worry about where the next meal will come from, and He clothes the flowers, even though they don’t worry about how they’ll dress themselves. If God takes care of so many familiar, mundane creatures, how can you think He won’t take care of you?

If you were raised as a first-century Jew, though, and the Old Testament was your Bible, these words might resonate differently. When we hear Jesus talk about birds, our minds are likely to go to sparrows, flitting around and pecking at birdseed. That’s certainly part of the picture, but when birds show up in the Old Testament, there’s very often another scene in mind: carrion birds picking the bones of those who are under God’s curse (David’s speech of defiance against Goliath; God’s curse against the Israelite royal houses of Jeroboam and Baasha). Luke’s version of this saying mentions ravens specifically, hinting that Jesus did have this picture in mind.

The illustration of the “lilies” and “grass of the field” also carries echoes of the Bible Jesus’ disciples knew. Lilies and Solomon go together very naturally; lilies are all over the Song of Solomon, perhaps connected to the fact that flowers were prominent features of Solomon’s temple furnishings (1 Kgs 7:19, 22; 2 Chr 4:5). The image of grass that’s here today and gone tomorrow calls to mind Isaiah 40:6-8, where God says that “all flesh is grass” and all its “glory” is “like the flower of grass,” which withers and fades, in contrast to God’s word, which stands forever. No earthly glory could compare in the mind of an Israelite with Solomon’s, but the Jews knew that for all his greatness, his unfaithfulness had set in motion a long decline toward his people’s exile and the destruction of that beautiful temple.

Whatever we make of Jesus’ words here, they aren’t naive optimism. Jesus is speaking about life in the real world, the fallen world, a world with reminders of God’s curse and man’s sin everywhere.

There’s another problem with Jesus’ teaching: he seems to be promising more than we actually get. A glance through Proverbs ought to tell us we shouldn’t expect to eat without working for what we get—and Paul forbids it (2 Thess 3:10). Yet Jesus says: the birds eat well without working for it, and you’re more important than birds. How much less should we have to toil to keep food on the table?

As for clothing, I’ll confess that I personally wouldn’t want to be seen in Solomon’s court in anything from my closet. But again, Jesus says: the flowers are better-dressed than the great king, and what are flowers next to you? Shouldn’t we be expecting bigger and better things than what actually comes our way? Are we being shortchanged, or is Jesus just indulging in hyperbole? It’s a thought that we’re probably often too falsely pious to let ourselves think, but once it’s in play, it’s hard to stop.

What Jesus says next (Matt 6:33)—another line we all know (and can sing) by heart—feels like he’s rubbing it in. Seek ye first the kingdom of God… Prioritize the kingdom, and you get the rest thrown in! It sounds so wonderful, but if we call ourselves Christians and try to live up to what that means, doesn’t it ring a little hollow? Doesn’t it seem that either Jesus’ promises aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, or more likely, that our faith obviously isn’t what it needs to be in order for us to claim them? Give the health-and-wealth, prosperity-gospel crowd their due: even if they’re wrong about what he’s saying, they think Jesus means it. We are just not supposed to be anxious.

II. Why Is It So Hard For Us To Hear?

If you’re like me, you sense that you’re supposed to be comforted and strengthened by this passage, but it never seems to work that way when you read it. Either familiarity breeds contempt, and the sayings seem trite—Jesus’ version of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”—or they become a guilt trip, a wagging finger that makes you doubt your salvation whenever the bills stack up. Why is this? Why is it so hard to receive our Savior’s word with joy?

What we’re experiencing is the discomfort of God’s word shedding light on the condition of our inmost character: freedom from anxiety is the standard set by the first commandment, just as avoiding anger and being quickly reconciled with one another is the standard set by the sixth. And the problem Jesus exposes by setting forth the standard is the one that goes to the root of who we are as sinners: not just that we fall short of the standard, but we hate the standard.

We hate the standard, and we treasure our anxiety. Anxiety helps maintain the illusion that we, or something other than the living God, are in real control of our lives. Anxiety is the activity of a heart that has an escape hatch, a space within us that we think of as safe from God’s interference and a refuge to run to in the event we find Him untrustworthy.

When we hate the standard, our responses reveal our hard-heartedness. When I was a boy, being told to clean my room elicited at least one, and usually both, of two responses from me. One was to shove my various Ninja Turtles and Dino Riders into a pile under the bed and toss my clothes indiscriminately into the closet. Then, usually after this plan of action somehow failed to meet Mom’s approval, I would actually put everything where it went, but to do it while carrying on like I was the most mistreated child who had ever walked the earth.

I tried to pass off both of these responses as “obedience,” but neither was obedience. My first response amounted to lowering the standard until I could meet it without any more effort than I cared to expend. My second response amounted to despair at the standard, treating it as an impossible burden (and I was too self-absorbed to realize the absurdity of that at the time).

It’s the same way with this command, and I know it from recent personal experience. I’ve raised support for a two-year missionary term, and my wife and I are raising support now to serve long-term. When your ability to pursue what you believe is your calling, not to mention your ability to feed and clothe yourself and your family while living overseas, is wholly dependent on the generosity of people you ask for money, this command hits a soft spot. My reaction to Jesus’ words is still one of the same two: either I lower the standard and convince myself Jesus is telling me just to relax, stop thinking about things so much, and that it’ll all just work out; or I resent him for telling me that I shouldn’t fret and obsess over what I need to do to make sure it does work out.

These responses have a common root: I want what God can give without desiring Him. As a child, I wanted credit for having a clean room (I wasn’t the sort to really want the clean room for its own sake); I didn’t really care what kind of son I was being to my mom. Today, I want assurance that the money will come in, without all the troublesome business of learning to pray and give thanks for the ways God provides it. What I want is freedom from anxiety without the Christ who says, “Come to me, and I will give you rest.”

III. How Do We Change?

Yet this same Jesus who tells us not to be anxious is the one who calls us with the offer of rest. He does obviously mean for what he commands us to result in our not laboring under the burden of our anxieties, for his word not to be choked by the cares of this world. How do we hear Jesus tell us not to be anxious and love the standard?

The key really is just that: to hear Jesus speaking in this passage. Jesus the Lawgiver sitting on the mountain is not a different person from Jesus the Suffering Servant or Jesus the Risen Lord. There’s a reason Matthew gives us Jesus’ teachings in the context of the story he is telling of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection: he means us to read these things together, and he means us to see the teaching embodied in what Jesus does, and to see the Good News about what he accomplished give meaning to what he teaches.

So when Jesus commands us to seek the kingdom, he is not only telling us what to do instead of worrying about food, drink, and clothing, but pointing us to himself. The kingdom isn’t something hidden away that we need to go look for; it’s a present, public reality: Jesus is, even as he commands this, announcing the arrival of the kingdom. He is the kingdom of God, and his righteousness is God’s righteousness.

Jesus shows us what it looks like to love the standard: when the devil tempts him to provide bread for himself, he knows what really sustains life; when the devil prompts him to demand a sign of God, he trusts without putting the Lord to the test; when the devil promises a shortcut to all authority on heaven and earth, he keeps his integrity.

In Jesus, we have an example for when the money isn’t coming in: where the disciples wonder how to feed a crowd of thousands, Christ knows that his Father is a God of abundance, counting on God’s generosity to surpass all natural expectation, providing not just what is needed, but enough for everyone with food to spare. He is an example for when the diagnosis is worse than you thought: in Gethsemane, he prays for the cup to pass, but chooses the will of the Father.

Jesus shows in his life what it means to seek the kingdom first: it’s trusting that the life our God promises to us far surpasses the life sustained by the things we need here and now.

This makes sense of the strangeness in Jesus’ illustrations. If God uses the curse laid on the earth to feed the birds, how much more will He use the redemption of the world from the curse to feast the redeemed? If the splendor of fading flowers surpasses the glory of Israel’s most glorious king, what kind of glory will the people born of the imperishable seed of God’s living and abiding word radiate?

And the good news is this: these promises are not possibilities held out to you if you will just “be like Jesus.” These promises have been kept. Jesus has received them; he lived by every word that comes from the mouth of God, drank the cup of God’s wrath, to be clothed in robes white as light in his exaltation. We love the standard because we love him, because he first loved us.

Jesus closes by telling his disciples not to be anxious about tomorrow (v. 34), and this saying too is transformed by what he has come to do. It seems cynical: don’t worry about tomorrow, because today’s bad enough. And there’s a truth to that in the present age. The miseries of this life are new every morning, and we never really anticipate the misfortunes that befall us, so it’s useless if not paralyzing to worry over them.

Yet Jesus speaks as the one who would endure all the “trouble,” all the evil of the present age, for our sakes. He passed through the worst that tomorrow can hold, and the Father raised him up in glory. Where the miseries of life are new every morning, the mercies of God have overcome them in him, forever and ever. The Father has given us Christ himself; how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? So don’t worry about tomorrow; live and work where God has called you, knowing that today and all your tomorrows will give way to the joy set before you, and that your heavenly Father will give you all you need to endure until that day.