Jesus said, “...
your first priority is to go in search of God’s kingdom and his concept of what
is right, then all these things will be yours as well.”
—
Matthew 6:33 (USC)
One verse that ever endures with my wife’s maternal grandparents it’s
this!
And that’s why it’s
so incredibly foundational in my theology, especially when it comes to the
desires of the heart (Psalm 37:4) and God’s desires to enjoin his will with
ours. Simply put, if we desire the Kingdom and God’s righteousness, above all
else, we will most certainly get the desires of our hearts, for those self-same
desires will be God’s. Our fleshly desires fade from view into the background.
In the above
translation — the Australian English — faithful to the Greek — we have key
components with which to form a stable compound; a chemistry for fruitfulness.
If our first
priority is God, all else will be sorted. If that priority is correctly aligned
we will constantly be searching for the things and the substance of God’s
kingdom.
This will sort out
the true disciples from the also-rans, because God cannot help someone
supposedly committed to him who cannot keep his eye on the goal of the Kingdom.
Like James says in 1:7-8, we cannot expect our prayers to be answered if we our
faith is tossed about on the waves of mood and circumstance.
But how do we make
this work when life seems hard enough as it is?
Surely it’s more a
paradigm shift in our minds than any effort of Everest.
Surely we have only
a subtle movement to make — to seek, with a slight shift of focus, the Lord’s
way.
If we have been
taken all the way into despair we have been favoured — of a kind — to come to
the end of ourselves. The subtle shift required is to notice that at the end of
seeking our own will — when we know that doesn’t work anymore — is the
beginning of the seeking for God’s will.
Suddenly peace is
within the sight of our experience. No longer is anything as fundamentally
important. Suddenly the power of the risen Lord, through the Holy Spirit, has
come to reside through us.
When God comes first
in our deliberations we deliberate on what needs to come first. When God comes
first, all the needs around us are reordered by his wisdom, and everyone is
blessed. For God to come first is to put our world first; the recreation of God’s
original creational perfection.
***
QUESTIONS in REVIEW:
1. How have you experienced yourself
or others putting God first? What came of such a decision implemented?
2. What is God’s Spirit saying to
you, right now, in what to bring before him to surrender before him?
3. When you make God’s kingdom and
his righteousness first, consistently and implicitly, what changes do you
anticipate?
© 2015 S. J. Wickham.
Note: USC version is Under the Southern Cross, The New Testament in Australian English
(2014). This translation was painstakingly developed by Dr. Richard Moore, a NT
Greek scholar, over nearly thirty years.
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