Editor's note: Enjoy today's devotion from The Wisdom of Jesus by N. T. Wright.
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Let Me tell you: don’t worry about your life—what to eat, what to drink; don’t worry about your body—what to wear. There’s more to life than food! There’s more to the body than a suit of clothes! Have a good look at the birds in the sky. They don’t plant seeds, they don’t bring in the harvest, they don’t store things in barns—and your Father in Heaven feeds them! Think how different you are from them! Can any of you add fifteen inches to your height just by worrying about it?
And why worry about what to wear? Take a tip from the lilies in the countryside. They don’t work; they don’t weave; but, let me tell you, not even Solomon in all his finery was dressed as well as one of these. So if God gives that sort of clothing even to the grass in the field, which is here today and on the bonfire tomorrow, isn’t He far more likely to clothe you too, you little-faith lot?
So don’t worry away with your ‘What’ll we eat?’ and ‘What’ll we drink?’ and ‘What’ll we wear?’ Those are all the kinds of things the Gentiles fuss about, and your heavenly Father knows you need them all. Instead, make your top priority God’s Kingdom and His way of life, and all these things will be given to you as well. So don’t worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow can worry about itself. One day’s trouble at a time is quite enough. — Matthew 6:25–34
Has it ever struck you what a basically happy person Jesus was?
As we read a passage like this, we should see that it flows straight out of Jesus’ own experience of life. He had watched the birds wheeling around, high up on the air currents in the Galilean hills, simply enjoying being alive. He had figured out that they never seemed to do the sort of work that humans did, and yet they mostly stayed alive and well. He had watched a thousand different kinds of flowers growing in the fertile Galilee soil—the word translated “lily” here includes several different plants, such as the autumn crocus, the anemone, and the gladiolus—and had held his breath at their fragile beauty.
One sweep of a scythe, one passing donkey, and this wonderful object, worth putting in an art gallery, is gone. Where did its beauty come from? It didn’t spend hours in front of the mirror putting on makeup. It didn’t go shopping in the market for fine clothes. It was just itself: glorious, God-given, beautiful.
- Jesus had a strong, lively sense of the goodness of His Father, the Creator of the world.
His whole spirituality is many a mile from those teachers who insisted that the present world was a place of shadows, gloom, and vanity, and that true philosophy consisted in escaping it and concentrating on the things of the mind. His teaching grew out of His own experience. When He
told His followers not to worry about tomorrow, we must assume He led them by example. He wasn’t always looking ahead anxiously, making the present moment count only because of what might come next. No: He seems to have had the skill of living totally in the present, giving attention totally to the present task, celebrating the goodness of God here and now.
If that’s not a recipe for happiness, I don’t know what is.
And He wanted His followers to be the same. When He urged them to make God their priority, it’s important to realize which God He was talking about. He was not talking about a god who is distant from the world, who doesn’t care about beauty and life and food and clothes. He was talking about the Creator Himself, who has filled the world with wonderful and mysterious things, full of beauty and energy and excitement, and who wants His human creatures above all to trust Him and love Him and receive their own beauty, energy, and excitement from Him.
So when Jesus told us not to worry about what to eat or drink or wear, He didn’t mean that these things don’t matter. He didn’t mean that we should prefer (as some teachers have suggested) to eat and drink as little as possible, and to wear the most ragged and disreputable clothes, just to show that we despise such things. Far from it! Jesus liked a party as much as anyone, and when He died the soldiers so admired His tunic that they threw dice for it rather than tearing it up. But the point was priorities.
Put the world first and you’ll find it gets moth-eaten in your hands. Put God first, and you’ll get the world thrown in.
Living totally without worry sounds to many people as impossible as living totally without breathing. Some people are so hooked on worry that if they don’t have anything to worry about, they worry that they’ve forgotten something. Here, at the heart of the Sermon on the Mount, is an invitation that surprisingly few people even try to take up.
Why not learn how to share the happiness of Jesus Himself?
Excerpted with permission from The Wisdom of Jesus by N. T. Wright, copyright Tom Wright.
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Your Turn
Would you call yourself a happy person? Would others refer to you as someone who is generally happy? Take a note from Jesus and follow His lead. Instead of worrying, be happy! Trust in God because He loves you and will take care of you! ~ Devotionals Daily