“Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.” Matthew 6:33
What do you seek most in life? Often it is possessions….. things ….. that cause us distraction and become our mission. Our possessions require maintenance and steal our time and energy. When we own more than we need, we begin wasting our finite resources maintaining our stuff.
We clean, categorize, organize, rearrange them, lose, spend hours trying to find them, move them in and out of storage and work extra hours to make the payments on them. Physical possessions can take a toll on our lives before we even own them! We obsess over buying them, we spend hours researching and comparison shopping, and we go out of our way to find the best deal on them.
On the other end of the consumerism cycle, we spend time trying to sell our unneeded possessions, posting them on Facebook Marketplace, or driving them to local donation centers. Again, the more we own, the more of our lives we waste maintaining our stuff and diverting our attention from more important things.
These items take energy from us and our greater pursuits. Consumerism causes burdens in many areas of our lives: financial, relational, spiritual, and can also impact our health because of undue pressure.
But there is a better way to live. An intentional, minimalist approach to life provides the mind with the ability to focus more on the spiritual as our mission in life. It paves the way to less stress, more time, more focus, and more fulfillment and happiness.
Jesus told His disciples to seek first the Kingdom of God in contrast to those who are filled with anxiety over provisions for daily life, and therefore, focused on material, temporal things to the neglect of spiritual, eternal things.
What does it mean to seek first the Kingdom of God? It means putting Christ and the things of the Spirit first in our lives. Every day, we are faced with choices and opportunities to put our time and energy into temporal things that have no lasting spiritual value or to invest in things that are related to the kingdom of Christ.
There are only so many hours in a day. How many of those hours do we spend focusing on spiritual activities like meditating on God’s Word, prayer, worship, etc.? And how much energy do we expend in some way or another advancing the cause of Christ in the lives of others and in the world? Let’s be honest, too many Christians are putting way too much of their time and energy toward the things that, in the end, won’t matter in the least. Don’t let that be you.
Twenty centuries ago Jesus of Nazareth challenged His disciples not to worry about tomorrow, worldly possessions and provisions, or to seek the things that pagans seek. Rather to “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you” (Matthew 6:33).
By John Grant
Used by Permission
John Grant is a former Florida State Senator and is a practicing attorney
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