Bible Text: Matthew 6:24-34 | Preacher: Pastor Christian Preus | Series: Trinity 2021 | Which of you can add an hour to his life? But your heavenly Father gives you endless days, eternity. If you call on God as your Father realize that it makes no sense to worry about tomorrow. How did God become your Father? You were bought at a price, St. Paul says, not with gold or silver, St. Peter tell us, but with the precious blood of Jesus. Your Father gave up His Son for you. How could He show you more clearly that He will care for you? Time passes by and day by day you come closer to death. But your heavenly Father controls time – it’s His creation no less than anything else you see, He is the Maker of things visible and invisible. Time is in His control; it’s His creature. He shaped it to bring about the incarnation of His Son, to have Him crucified under Pontius Pilate, to raise Him from the dead and send His Gospel into all world. He shaped time to bring you about, to bring you here, to make you His child by water and His word, to have Christ preached to you and formed in your heart. So why worry about time? Your heavenly Father controls it, and you are His and He is yours. Why worry about death? Your Lord Jesus has passed through it, conquered it. And you are His body. [Shall I fear, how could the head, rise and leave His members dead?]
Look at the birds of the air and see what the unbelievers can’t see. This is one of the great privileges of being a Christian. Things don’t happen randomly. A bird doesn’t fall from the sky without your heavenly Father knowing it. And the birds, generation after generation, know to fly south for the winter, know what to eat and what not to, because your heavenly Father cares for them. This is why, by the way, teaching science, biology, zoology, geology, whatever the subject, without teaching God is not to teach science at all. To remove the Creator from the study of creation is to engage in the absurd. And this underlines once again that a good education is a Christian education. Here is a truth far more fundamental to life than any scientific theorem – your heavenly Father cares for the birds of the air. And if he cares for them, how much more for you? All history has been shaped to bring about the incarnation of the Son of God. And He became a man, not a bird. He redeemed men. He spilt His blood for men. This was the plan of your heavenly Father, to give His greatest treasure for you. What value could be greater than this? Than what your heavenly Father has placed on you, than what He puts into your mouth?
Jesus tells us to learn from the lilies of the field, how they grow. The word Jesus uses here for “learn” is the same word for disciple. This is what it means to be a follower of Jesus. To learn to see everything from the Christian perspective. The fields groan, St. Paul says, all creation groans under the corruption of sin. It’s all been subjected to futility and corruption. But look at this creation! God clothes it with flowers. He beautifies corruption. And this to teach us that if He has not given up beautifying this earth, which will be destroyed on the Last Day, how could He possibly give up on us, leave us unclothed and uncared for in this world? The lilies spoken of here are not our lilies of today. The word could be better translated wildflowers. Something we in Wyoming should know a thing or two about. No human plants them. They grow up every year because God wants them to. And no human picks them, at least not for any practical purpose. They exist purely to beautify our hills and our mountains. I don’t know how many different kinds there are, but if you walk our mountain in the spring you’ll see a new one every day. They are an excess. Unneeded. God just wants them there to beautify His creation. This is our heavenly Father’s care for this corrupt world.
So you, whom He has already clothed with Christ’s righteousness, who are beautiful in His sight because all your sin has been washed away by the blood of His Son, how could He fail to clothe you and take care of your body? It is simply impossible. Faith knows it.
And this is why Jesus tells His Christians to act differently from the heathen. Jesus is preaching to us here, to those who call on His Father as our God through faith in Jesus’ blood. And He is speaking to a fundamental difference between how we see things and how the unbelievers see things.
Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be added to you. If your heart is set on heavenly things, on your God’s love for you, on the eternal and sinless life He has prepared for you, then you build life on a sure foundation. Jesus compares it to a man building his house on a rock. He doesn’t need to worry when the storms come, when the wind and the waves batter his house, he knows it will stand. So we build on what is not only priceless, but completely certain. Jesus will not fail us. His blood will always cleanse our conscience. His Word will always teach us what is right. His Father will guide our way to everlasting life, no matter what trials attack our bodies and souls here on earth. Even when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, our Shepherd is with us.
Worries will come to Christians. Of course they will. Otherwise Jesus wouldn’t bother to warn us against them. And bad things will happen to Christians. Loss of job. Loss of health. Pain. Death of loved ones. Things that prove to the unbeliever that God doesn’t care, things that make the unbelieving flesh demand of God what it thinks God owes us. But no pain and no temptation, no loss of bodily good, can shake our confidence if we are seeking first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. It can’t be that there is poison in the cup our Savior gives us. It can’t be that our heavenly Father will not restore health and fortune in His good time, whether now or in the resurrection. Only if we were living life imagining that this sinful world and its stuff were all there is could we be so foolish as to think a little temporary loss meant our God had turned His face from us. No, our heavenly Father is so gracious that the only thing that keeps Him from showering every earthly blessing on us in this life is His care for our eternal life. If in His goodness He sends cross and pain to body and soul, He does it because He wants us to find our peace in the righteousness of His Son, for this to rule our hearts, so that we can obtain still greater joys from our heavenly Father.
And here there is no worry. But to those who worship mammon, stuff, career, money, house, health, of course they’re going to worry! It’s like those who are watching the news all the time and then wondering why they’re so depressed. Stop watching the news so much! It’s depressing, because this world is depressing. If your heart is set on earthly things, you’re going to be worrying constantly and causing yourself so much pain. Because you can lose it all. All of it. You’re putting your stock in what is obviously going to fail. And then things will seem so random, not guided by God’s good hand, but subject to an arbitrary fate. This is why evolution is the religion of mammon worshipers. No one’s in control of time in evolution. Nothing is guided to any purpose. Instead it all begins and ends in meaninglessness. This is the life of the mammon-worshiper. Worry and worry about making sure you have stuff. And everything’s going well and then, boom, your health fails or your retirement crashes or you lose your job or death strikes. And worse than this, if you’ve put all your stock in mammon, in this stuff, you won’t have the virtue that could have made you happy even in the bad times, the self-control, the contentedness in every situation, the love for reading and hearing God’s Word and praying to Him. It’s these things that make for the good life, and it’s these things that will never be taken away, forever.
This is why we need to live our daily lives as if God exists, and not just God, but our God, our heavenly Father, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who loves us as His own children and has given us His Holy Spirit and sincerely promises us eternal life with Him. If He is our God, it’s not only that we will overcome the worries that afflict us, it’s that we’ll learn to direct our decisions in life in order to seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, where all worry is taken away.
I’ve heard it said a lot lately, especially by conservative Christians who are worried at the way the world is becoming increasingly hostile to the Christian faith, that it’s a bad time to be raising children. That’s total nonsense. Only if you are worrying about earthly things would you think that it’s a bad time to raise children. The economy might fail, the church may be persecuted, it may be hard for a Christian to get a job and still openly confess his faith – these are all worries about the body. But if our goal for our lives and for our children’s lives is not comfort and prosperity in this world but that we remain Christians and seek first the Kingdom of God and Christ’s righteousness, then who are we to deny what Jesus says – that all these other things will be added to us? There simply is no disappointment in God’s Word. It doesn’t fail. If it is our treasure and we hand it down to the children of this congregation as their treasure, why would we worry about tomorrow? Tomorrow’s in our heavenly Father’s hands and He’ll bless those who love His Son.
So this is our goal. It’s very simple and beautiful and divine. It’s not to have a few million in the bank when we retire. It’s not that our kids get successful jobs. It’s not that we live to a good old age. It’s not that we keep up our lifestyle and are able to do everything we’ve always wanted to do on this earth. God will grant earthly blessing and far more to those who seek first His Kingdom, who could just as well live without riches in this world so long as they have the riches of Christ’s righteousness. And God’s Kingdom will never disappoint. Christ’s righteousness will never disappoint. You won’t live with regret that you don’t have this or you didn’t do this if you realize that in Christ you have everything. God created time for you to come to know His Son. So with St. Paul consider all things rubbish in comparison to having Christ and His righteousness, to being and living as a child of your heavenly Father. And all other things will be added to you. And in Christ, none of it will be rubbish. It will all be sanctified by faith in His blood. Spend your time now seeking and receiving righteousness from Him, handing it down to the next generations, so that we all will live without regret and without worry under our heavenly Father’s grace, now and forever. Amen.