But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be provided to you. Matthew 6:33
When I was growing up, we always said the same prayer before we would eat. Jesus bless what Thou hast given, feed our souls with bread from heaven, lead and guide us all the way, in all that we may do and say. Amen. It’s a good God honoring prayer. The only problem was we said it so often we didn’t even think about what we were saying. We even said it so fast that a pastor friend visiting us said after we prayed, he thought we were praying in tongues. The sad truth is this doesn’t only happen with prayers, it also happens with Scripture verses, like today’s. Do we really consider what each statement means?
Seek first His kingdom, the place where He reigns supreme. Where His will and His ways are the standard to attain, because they are the principles to a fulilled and abundant life. Since God is telling us we need to seek His righteousness, why are we so often seeking our own and calling it His? After all we are told all our righteousness is like filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6). How our lives are transformed when we truly embrace His righteousness, remembering that all that we now are in Him is nothing of ourselves. His righteousness means we accept what He did for us on the cross as payment for our sins and our forgiveness. It means that we can rest in all that He accomplished there and accept them as gifts that we don’t deserve, but that Jesus made available to us to live out lives of victory. No wonder it then says, that when we seek His kingdom, where His righteousness reigns with all our hearts everything else in life then is provided for us.
So then why do we wear ourselves out trying to accomplish things in this life in our humaness that often ends in temporary success or failure, when we could be living the abundant life Jesus died to give us? Now more than ever we need to live by the power of Holy Spirit and remembering we are the righteousness of God but only through Jesus.
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