[0:00]Your heavenly Father knows what you have need of, and guess what? He has no insufficiency problem. He knows your situation, he knows what you're needing. He is well aware of it. And he says, I don't want you to lose sleep over this. What I want you to do is put my rule first, put my righteousness first, and I got it from there.
[0:32]To love God first means to passionately pursue his pleasure. He does not want to be one thing among many. You say, but I really don't have time. Well, but you always have time for what's first. Because first things are put on the front. God has made a big deal about how he is positioned in your life, in my life, in our lives. And much that is wrong, much that is not where it ought to be, simply has to do with where we have located him. We have located him second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, last, we have positioned him to a place if we happen to get around to it. When he requests and requires first. We're introduced to this word and concept of first in our passage today where our focus will be on verse 33. It says, but seek first his kingdom and his righteousness and all these things will be added to you. He says, I want you to seek first, put in the primacy, priority, position, my kingdom. The Greek word kingdom, basileia, means rule or authority. I want to be in charge. God's kingdom is his rule. You and I grew up in school where we put our hands over our hearts and we said, I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. We, we pledged a commitment to a kingdom called the USA. Meaning that we would operate under its rules, under its laws, with the goal of pursuing as a citizen the American dream. And so, we placed our hands over our heart and every day in school we repeated a statement of allegiance. And the reason why that was done is so that we would always remember our commitment. When people become citizens from other lands of the United States, they learn our history, and they have to make a commitment, a public statement of declaration of their loyalty to a kingdom called the USA. What God is asking for is to pledge allegiance to his kingdom of which he is king, to, in a sense, place your hand over your heart and to say, I am willing to function under your rule and under your authority. I am willing to conform to you. And I am willing, here it is, to do it first. Seek ye first his kingdom. To seek God's kingdom first means that you are going to look at his decision before you ask everybody else what they think. It means you're going to pursue his perspective before you get everybody else's. We often run to God's perspective after everybody else's, especially if it didn't work. And then we want to know, what does God think, what does God say, how does God feel, what does God want me to do? Because his kingdom, that is his rule, his authority, his in chargeness, was not pursued on the front end. Much of what we want God to do in our lives is take care of our mess, take care of the things we have done because we have ruled ourselves or gotten other people to act like God in our lives, and we need God to fix it up. Because he was never consulted first. The Bible talks about this in a number of ways, the Lordship of Jesus Christ, his rulership, the fact that God is to be the authority, the King of a kingdom. When you trusted Jesus Christ, when I trusted Christ, we were transferred, the Bible says, out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. We were transferred into another realm over which he rules. And he rules it as a dictator, not as a democracy. Democracy is good for the US, it's not good for the kingdom of God. He is not open to competing perspectives. He is not open to a coagulation of ideas. God has spoken and he has not stuttered two answers to every question, God's answer and everybody else's, and everybody else's wrong when they disagree with him.
[6:11]Seek ye first the kingdom. Now, to seek something is to go looking for it. To go, to go searching for it, to seek something is to, is to go locate where it is.
[6:29]He says, I want you to go after my rule in your life. I want you to find out, pursue, run after, locate. People say, well, I don't know the Bible. Seek! I've never been to Bible class. Seek! I don't know the answer to that. Seek! Meaning, find it out.
[7:03]You can Google everything else. What do you do in life when you don't know a certain area that you need to know about? You find somebody who does. You search it out. None of us knows everything about everything, so we have to find someone skilled in that area to help us learn about the thing we don't know about. Seek ye first his kingdom. Yes, it's going to take a minute, it's going to take some time, it's going to take some effort, if you already don't know God's perspective on the matter. So he says, seek, but he says, seek it on the front end first. God wants you to be aware that you're part of something bigger. You're part of a kingdom with a king. That king rules, and he wants you to play his favorite song. And he wants you to take the time, if you don't already have his rule, his perspective, to seek it out, search it out, and he promises, he that seeks will find. He's not going to hide his perspective from you, unless his perspective is not what you want. You want everybody else's perspective and bring that to him like he needs a counselor. Because God's rule, governance, authority, rulership is not sought first. See, many of us wouldn't be dealing what we are dealing with today if he was checked ahead of time. To bail you out of your predicament, and in grace, he often does. But that's not the relationship he wants. He wants to be on the front end. I love it when members are seeking, what does God think about this before they made the final decision? Because that means they are seeking God first. This, the issue is first. Seek ye first the kingdom of God, his rule, his authority.
[9:24]Pledge allegiance to that kingdom and seek it first.
[9:30]But he tells you to seek another thing in relationship to his kingdom. Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. Righteousness is the standard that God has established by which his people are made acceptable to him. Seek what is right based on his standard, not the standard of the society in which you live. Cause his standards and society standards are often a world apart. What he says is right, and what society says is right, often don't match. And the more secular the society becomes, the less matching that will occur. He says, seek my righteousness and do it on the front end. Why? Because the righteousness is the way you practice his rulership. His rulership is his authority, his righteousness is the practice of that authority. He says, I want you to seek what I declare is the right way to maneuver, to act, to talk, to walk. We're living in a day where you and I are witnessing the dumbing down of decency. We have left his righteousness and gone to a lower standard because everybody else happens to be there. He says, seek ye first my kingdom, his kingdom and his righteousness, his standard. Here, here's how this works. The body, your physical body needs food. You need food for, food is the fuel of the body. So you, you need food for the physical man to function. What food is to the body, righteousness is to the soul. The soul needs righteousness in order for the soul to be what the soul was redeemed to become. Without righteousness, the soul starves. But just like you can trick the body, you can trick the soul. Because the body can't use it. The soul of the believer has been constructed or engineered to receive righteousness from God, and it feeds on it. It feeds on righteousness. What we do is we fill ourselves with unrighteousness. We fill ourselves with worldliness. We fill ourselves with sin, but because it's sugar, it smells good and tastes good and fills us up. We think our souls are okay. When it was absolutely no nutritional value. And we find out that instead of growing spiritual muscle, we're accumulating spiritual flab. Because his righteousness is not the standard by which decisions are made.
[13:07]He wants you to implement his perspective on the front end. Not, not after everything else has been done. His standard, his righteousness. And you will never, we will never, I will never, individually or collectively, experience the God of the Bible when it's not his kingdom and his standard, and all we're doing is mimicking their kingdom and their standard while using his name. Thanking Jesus and praising the Lord doesn't equal operating by his standard and operating under his rule. Those are not the same thing.
[13:52]What God wants you to do is impress him with his kingdom, his standard, his righteousness, and that may or may not bring the crowd. Sometimes with the secularization of God and the marginalization of God, you don't get the applause, recognition, and appreciation. That, that is suffering for the gospel's sake. Sometimes that doesn't come or doesn't come then.
[14:26]But that's the identification God wants. And guess what? He wants it first. Jesus put it this way in the Beatitudes, Blessed is the one who hungers and thirst after righteousness. Oh, he wants you to be hungry for it. And you know, when you get hungry, you're going to find yourself something to eat. You're going to make a way out of no way. You know why we don't pursue righteousness? Cause we're either not hungry or we've been filled with the wrong stuff. And because we're not hungry or we've been filled with the wrong stuff, there is no prioritization of his standards. And so we spend most of our time asking him to bless our standards, or the standards that come from a society that has rejected him. And so, the challenge is to begin feeding the soul under the rule of God with the standards of God. He says, seek ye first my standard and my righteousness.
[15:39]So we've established the point. Let's find out the payoff, because the verse says, and, and all these things will be added to you. Put me first, put the stuff second.
[16:00]Don't put the stuff first and get around to me. Put me first, and then we'll deal with the stuff. But seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and you don't have to worry anymore.
[16:55]The reason why we're worried is because God is not in first place.
[17:03]Therefore, because God is not in first place, we have to take care of us. Because he bears no responsibility for your second place location of him, or last place, or whatever. The antidote to worry is repositioning. Now we worry about people, money, health, terrorism, circumstances. I mean, we worry. Worry is concern on steroids.
[17:46]Worry is where concern controls you. Concern is where you control the issue. Worry is where the issue controls you. It tells you if you're going to sleep or not. It tells you if you're going to have a headache or not. It tells you if you're going to be nervous all day or not. It's controlling you, that's worry. Concern is not ever condemned, we are human. Worry is where the situation is dictating your well-being. He says, do not worry, do not worry, do not worry when I have been repositioned. He uses a couple of illustrations in those verses. He says, look at a bird. Have you ever seen a bird with an ulcer? An ulcerated bird because they burned a hole in their stomach cause of worry.
[18:43]Have you ever seen a nervous bird? Because your heavenly father created them for worms, God makes the worm findable by the bird without a bank of worms. He says in verse 32, after all these things the Gentiles seek. After all these things the Gentiles, meaning non-Christians eagerly seek. Passionately seek. Come on, let's look at, look at your non-Christian friends or some of your carnal Christian friends. Oh, yourself. Whatever works.
[19:26]Look at all the effort we put in to getting stuff.
[19:35]Look at the energy we, the energy we put out, they, we eagerly seek it. Cut the deal, work the deal. We, we, we're going out, we're trying to make it happen. He says that's what, that's what the non-believer does. And he gets stressed out trying to make it happen so they have the stuff.
[19:59]But then he closed the verse by saying, but your heavenly father knows you have need of these things. He says, your heavenly father knows what you have need of, and guess what? He has no insufficiency problem. He wasn't like me on earth, he had no limitations. And your heavenly father knows what you have need of. He knows your situation, he knows what you're lacking, he knows what you're needing. He is well aware of it. And he says, I don't want you to lose sleep over this. I don't want you to get an ulcer over this. What I want you to do is put my rule first, put my righteousness first, and I got it from there. But see, most folk don't believe that. So what we do is we opt for the Gentiles. We opt for verse 32, cause we don't buy verse 33. So we opt for verse 32 and what God says is, we'll let the Gentiles take care of you. Since you opt for them. You opt for the ungodly to be your source. Since you opt for them first, their kingdom, their ways, their methodologies, well, you got it then.
[21:32]I love the word all. He says and all these things.
[21:39]You know what he's inviting you to do? He's inviting you to relax. He said, I need to relax. Notice the closing verse. Verse 34. So do not worry about tomorrow.
[22:01]For tomorrow will care for itself.
[22:07]Each day has enough trouble of its own.
[22:17]Let me get something straight. God never condemns planning. In fact, over and over again, the scripture encourages planning. But it does condemn worrying. He says in verse 34, do not worry about tomorrow.
[22:41]Cause when you get there, I will have already been there.
[22:48]Okay, is a little theology here. God is eternal in his nature. Okay? Now, what does that mean? I know the common statement is, well, it means forever. Okay, forever. Okay. Well, no, that means a little bit more than that. When Moses asked God, what is your name? Who should I tell them sent me? He said, you tell them I am that I am sent you. I is a personal pronoun, M is present tense. I am that I am. Now, what kind of name is that? The personal God who exists in the present. See, God has no past, and God has no future. When we enter into eternity, you will discover what that feels like, because when you enter into eternity where God already exists, there will be no yesterday and there will be no tomorrow. In other words, in eternity all you will know is now. That's why the Bible says, a day with the Lord is at a thousand years and a thousand years is as a day. Because time becomes meaningless. When you are living and operating from an eternal perspective. So when you and I have been in heaven 100 quadrillion years, we will have been in heaven the first second. So when he says, don't worry about tomorrow, the reason that you don't have to worry about tomorrow is that what you're waiting for is now with God. And watch this, and your ruler, the King is also your daddy. Your heavenly father knows you have need of these things. So he not only is the one in charge, he's the one in charge who's also your daddy. And if your daddy loves you, and your daddy's in charge, and your daddy is infinite, uh, what'd you say you were worried about?
[25:03]The other reason he tells you not to worry is today has enough trouble of its own. So if you just have to worry about something, if you just can't help yourself, and you said, I got to worry about something cause I don't know how to live about without worrying. He said, okay, worry about today. Cause trust me, if you focus on today, you're going to have enough to keep you busy.
[26:01]A man one day was rushing to catch an airplane. He was on his way to catch his flight, but he was late. He looked like he was going to miss his flight. While running with his briefcase to catch his flight, he bumped into a man who had a pilot's uniform on. Said, I'm sorry, sir. I'm rushing to catch my flight. The man said, which flight? He told him which flight.
