Seek First His Kingdom: Finding Meaning in a Restless World – Matthew 6:31-33

Commentary

Verse 31, he says, “Don’t worry saying, what shall we eat or what should we drink, or what shall we wear? For the Pagans run after all these things and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well.” It is never enough to simply look after yourself. We need to be working to build a better and more just world. You know the Bible’s diagnosis, the human condition, is that we have each individually gone our own way.

We have collectively rejected God as king. And the brokenness of our world is the result of that. And this church isn’t just a loving community. It is also a place where we declare that God is king and that is seeking to see that kingdom come to bear on our lives and on our world. And if that diagnosis is correct, it is no surprise that to be in this world is to find ourselves restless and unhappy.

As Augustine says, our hearts are restless till they find their rest in God. As someone said, there is a God-shaped hole in the human heart. Which brings us to the final thing that those who report higher levels of happiness have in common, and that is faith. So that doesn’t mean faith in a very specific way, although we may choose to interpret it that way, but it simply does mean a belief that you are not the last word and the final authority, and all of this doesn’t rest upon you.

People who believe are simply happier than those who do not because they’re able to put their trust in someone greater than themselves and admit that they can’t do it all by themselves. I’m struck that faith is an action. It’s not an abstract belief. It is a choice that I make to prayerfully say I put my life in God’s hands and to trust that he’s good and that he has my best interests at heart.

And that is the hard thing. We are so autonomous. We want to make our own decisions. We want to believe that we know best, but sadly, all the evidence would point to the fact that we don’t know best. Saint Ignatius of Loyola once said: “Sin is unwillingness to trust that what God wants for me is only my deepest happiness.”

Isn’t that marvellous? We find it so hard to trust, to put our lives in God’s hands and to accept his purposes, because we find it so hard to believe that actually his only goal is our greatest happiness. C.S. Lewis puts it this way. “If you want to get warm, you need to stand near the fire. If you want joy and peace and life, you must get close to the source of those things.”

God cannot give us joy and peace apart from himself because it is not there. There is no such thing.

Life is hard. It is a long journey through a barren land, but there is joy to be found. And that joy is a signpost. It is a joy which is deeper and more resilient. It is a light in dark times that sustains us in the hardships and endures even into eternity. And all of our experiences of joy, all of our glimpses of it, point us onwards.

It’s like a compass, which always points to the true north because all joy comes from God. He is the source of it, and if we pursue it, it will lead us to him. The idols of our world will never bring us satisfaction. Be ambitious for the things that will really bring happiness. Seek a better world, a more just kingdom.

Commit yourself to building communities of faith and serving others. And as Jesus says, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these other things will be given to you as well.” Amen.