Seek Ye First...

I am caught up on the book reading…really…and I have thoughts about it, to…but I don’t have my book with me today, so I’m not quite prepared to post my thoughts on that yet.

However, I was reading from “My Utmost for His Highest” this morning, and I thought it was really applicable to all we’ve been discussing and thinking about regarding God’s kingdom and how we live our lives. I’ve pulled the parts that I thought were most significant. (Well, it’s really most of it…)

Divine Reasonings of Faith, My Utmost for His Highest (May 21)

“But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” 

-        Matthew 6:33

“We look at these words…[and] we argue in exactly the opposite way – “But I must live, I must make so much money, I must be clothed, I must be fed.” The great concern of our lives is not the kingdom of God, but how we are to fit ourselves to live. Jesus reverses the order…

“Take no thought for your life…” Our Lord points out the utter unreasonableness from His standpoint of being so anxious over means of living. Jesus is not saying that the man who takes thought for nothing is blessed – that man is a fool. Jesus taught that a disciple has to make his relationship with God the dominating concentration of his life, and to be carefully careless about everything else in comparison to that…Some people are careless over what they eat and drink, and they suffer for it; they are careless about what they wear, and they look as they have no business to look; they are careless about their earthly affairs, and God holds them responsible. Jesus is saying that the great care of the life is to put the relationship to God first, and everything else second.

“It is one of the severest disciplines of the Christian life to allow the Holy Spirit to bring us into harmony with the teaching of Jesus in these verses.”

Isn’t this the constant pull we find ourselves in? Isn’t this what we started this blog about in the first place? What does it mean to seek after God’s kingdom? How are we to live in light of God’s kingdom? Where is the balance in focusing the attention of our lives, and how do we truly “seek God first”?

It truly is a struggle for me not to put myself first. There is not much in my life that prevents me from putting myself first. That’s why I love the last sentence of the passage from today, it is a discipline to allow God to change my heart about these things. I also love what he said about the man who takes thought for nothing being a fool – I think that so often this idea is romanticized in Christian culture today. I am more inclined to agree with Chambers in that it doesn’t mean to stop living your life, it means to rightly align your priorities in life. And maybe that means denying yourself certain things, but I think there is a fine line of being “careless” just to say you don’t care, and to put God and His kingdom and calling first in your life.

There was another section from My Utmost a couple of weeks ago that talked about habits, and making our habits with God unconscious. It’s hard to explain, but one of the examples he used was something like, “I don’t have time to do that, I have to spend my hour with God.” To which Chambers replied, “No, you have to spend your hour with your habit.”

As we look to change our lives to seek after God and His kingdom and His righteousness, let’s truly do that! Fix our eyes on HIM, not on the specific lifestyles or habits that we’re forming, or even the “good things” we’re doing. THEN everything else will fall in place.

I don’t really have any obscure or earth-shattering thoughts on this verse or the commentary. It just really spoke to me, and made me think twice (well, it’s been more than twice…) about how I live my life in relationship to God and His kingdom.