Do not worry, your father in heaven knows what you need.
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Sermon in a sentence: Do not worry, your father in heaven knows what you need.
Sermon in a sentence: Do not worry, your father in heaven knows what you need.
Take my lips, Lord, and speak through them;
Take my lips, Lord, and speak through them;
Take our minds, Lord, and think through them;
Take our minds, Lord, and think through them;
Take our hearts, Lord, and set them on fire with love for You.
Take our hearts, Lord, and set them on fire with love for You.
In Jesus name. Amen.
In Jesus name. Amen.
There are certain bits of the bible which are a pleasure to read and reflect on, and for many of us our gospel reading today is one of them. Jesus is teaching his disciples, and he’s telling them not to worry. Jesus tells his disciples not to worry about what they eat or drink, or wear because life is much more important than these things.
He points to the birds of the air, who don’t sow or reap, yet none the less find something to eat and he reminds his disciples that if God cares about the birds, all the more will he care for them, his followers, who are so much more valuable than the birds are.
And Jesus uses the flowers of the field to illustrate his point further, they neither toil nor spin yet are more beautifully dressed than Solomon himself; Solomon, Israel’s richest, wisest and most celebrated king.
If God blesses the flowers with such beauty, flowers which are here today and burned on the fire tomorrow, how much more would God ensure he clothed those that trust and follow him. So, don’t worry Jesus says, God will take care of you.
It’s a lovely passage, which is why I’m a little confused how much I have struggled with it as I’ve prepared for this sermon. And I really have struggled with it. I do think it is a consoling passage. I do think Jesus is making this point because he really wants the disciples not to worry, but I think that sometimes that we make this story a little shallow and I want to look at it a little deeper today.
One of the reasons I’ve struggled with this passage is because as well as consoling me, it rebukes me. It rebukes me because I worry, I do worry, and I expect I’m not the only one.
Last September, after decades of paid work I became a full time, and unpaid, student. I gave up a job which I still reasonably enjoyed and found fulfilling, which I was quite good at, and which paid a reasonable wage, to train as a minister; a job in which I need to be absolutely dependant on God in order to do it properly; and I worry whether I can do that.
I worry that I can protect and support my family, I worry that I’ve got the faith that I need to follow my calling properly. I worry whether I can be absolutely dependant on God. I worry. I worry; and maybe you worry too.
Let’s look at the context of the passage. It starts ‘therefore’; ‘therefore’ do not worry. What has Jesus just said that causes him to say ‘therefore’. Well, this passage is part of the sermon on the mount. The sermon on the mount wasn’t preached to the people in general. The bible tells us that Jesus left the crowds, went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them.
Jesus is talking to his disciples about life as his followers. He’s warned them that they will be insulted and persecuted because of their following him, but they are to rejoice, because their reward in heaven will be great.
And a little before this passage Jesus has warned his followers to store up treasure in heaven rather than on earth, where it won’t decay, or be stolen, because where their treasure is so will their hearts be. And immediately before this passage, Jesus says “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”[1]…Therefore, I tell you, do not worry.”
‘Therefore, do not worry’ is the bridge between Jesus warning not to trust in money and the reassurance that God will provide them with what they need.
If I was to ask you, or if you were to ask me, ‘Do you worship God or money?” I think each one of us, assuming we are Christians, would say “God, of course” and we might even be a little offended that we’d been asked. But if we were asked who or what we trusted to put food on our tables, and if we were very honest with ourselves, we might give a more complex answer.
I’m going to have my tea when I get home, and on a theological level I’m confident that it’s God who has put it there. But actually, I’m also confident that it will be there because there’s money in the bank, Kathryn or I have done the shopping, there’s food in the house and there’s more food in the shops if we run out. We’ve never gone hungry before. So is it God I trust, or is it the money I have in the bank? Or is it both, because It’s hard to stop trusting the things of this world
It’s easy to forget that the people who heard Jesus words that first time weren’t generally wealthy people, though there may have been one or two among them. There’s a reason why it’s easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into the kingdom of God; rich people find it harder to stop putting their trust in money rather than God.
It’s easy to misinterpret this passage, it’s easy to interpret it as saying that, if we go to church, and say our prayers and are good to people, God will give us what we want. There are Christians who believe that God wants us to be wealthy, and that if we give ten or twenty percent of what we earn to God, in faith, God will reward us by making us wealthy in return. It’s easy to scoff at such theology, but it’s actually very easy to make the unconscious assumption that God will bless us in financial terms for what we give him.
But that’s not what happened to the disciples who listened to this sermon on the mount. There’s no evidence that any of them went on to live comfortable, wealthy lives. Those that didn’t fall by the wayside lived lives that were characterised by the self-denial and suffering for God. The suffering that Jesus was talking about when he told them to rejoice and be glad when they suffered for his sake.
Almost all of Jesus disciples suffered for their faith. Many of them died for their faith. It can be convenient to forget that Jesus, the preacher of this Sermon, was penniless and remained that way until devotion to God led him to the cross.
Great would be their reward in heaven, Jesus said, not on earth. God does want us to be wealthy, but not in a way that makes sense to the world.
So, what else do I want to draw out of this passage.
Well firstly, a reminder that God does promise to take care of us. He promises to give us what we need, which is rather different from what we want. It’s a sad fact that many of us don’t really trust God until we need to.
When I was about thirty, I lost my job. I’d just moved to a new town to do that job and knew very few people and couldn’t afford to move back to where I had friends. I had just bought a house and taken out a mortgage and risked losing them. For about two years I survived on short term temping jobs. I kept my head above water, just, and I managed to eat and cloth myself, through the grace of God.
But it was also the most exiting time I’ve ever had spiritually. I started going to church again, because I’d turned my back on it a few years before. I had a real sense of depending on God and trusting him and experiencing his love. Eventually things worked out, I went back into nursing because I felt God was calling me back into it, but I’ve never forgotten that sense of being in God’s care. It wasn’t comfortable. Looking back, it was frequently quite scary, and I certainly wasn’t wealthy, but I had a real sense that through trusting God I was getting to know him better. I’m trying to recapture that now as I try to learn to trust God more deeply.
Because God is trustworthy. We can put our faith in God’s power, and God’s loving kindness.
Maybe you’re struggling now, because you’re no longer earning a salary, and because you are not as healthy as you used to be.
If so, remember that God knows our needs better than we do. Jesus doesn’t say that God will give us what we want, he says that our father in heaven knows what we need and will give it to us. What we need is to know God, to love him and to know his love.
And loving God means seeking God’s face and seeking God’s kingdom.
If this was a morning service, I’d have done a children’s talk and I’d probably have done my favorite one. It isn’t an original one. I saw someone else use it once and I’ve never forgotten it. So I’m going to describe it to you because it’s a physical illustration.
I bring a stick about a metre long and I ask a child from the congregation to balance it on their finger. They invariably look intently at their finger while they are trying to do it and struggle to balance the stick. To get the stick to balance you have to look up not down, up at the top of the stick not down at your finger. If you do everything balances automatically.
So, it is with life. Our tendency is to look down, at our problems, not up, at the God who loves us. To maintain a balanced life, we need to do the opposite; look upwards to God, to seek his face and his kingdom. The harder our life is, the more important it is to do so. Seek first the kingdom of God, and everything else will be given you as well.
Prayer.
Pray that we might have the perseverance to seek the kingdom of God, and the faith to believe that God will provide what we need in life.
[1] The New International Version. (2011). (). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.