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Healthy priorities

Matt 6: 28 – 34

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 12 Jun, 2005

WHAT DO you expect of your religion? What do you want it to give you? It’s a question we all devote time to thinking about, and it’s something we need to consider on a regular basis.

SEEKING SELFISH GOALS

Here are a few different approaches I have heard of.

A colleague whose father is chronically ill and has often been rushed to hospital with health crises tells me that it is only his faith which has helped the elderly man and his wife cope with the stresses of life. That’s an interesting testimony from someone who does not share her parents’ faith.

Are you looking for a religion which helps you cope with crises and ill health?

Perhaps you are like the man who was at a healing conference I attended. He looked like a walking corpse. In fact, he wasn’t expected to last out the next week, with advancing cancer. He had come looking for healing.

But not everyone thinks in these terms. Another colleague used to attend church regularly as a teenager, mainly Baptist and Charismatic churches.

Piecing the story together, I get the impression that those teen years were very unhappy years for my friend. Perhaps all that church–going was an attempt to find a way of becoming happy.

In my later teens I did something similar. I didn’t go to other churches; I checked them out from afar to see if they could ease the unhappiness I felt. I can understand people who approach religion that way. But it is sad that my colleague has abandoned Christianity as an answer. Perhaps there wasn’t enough happiness there.

Of course, many people go to church looking for friendship or a nice person as a girlfriend or boyfriend, or even looking for reputation in the community, or a platform for political ambitions or who knows what else.

I have met young men who were hoping that they would find an answer to homosexual impulses by going to church — some have been very keen and active participants in Christian activities until they lost the battle somewhere and gave up altogether.

Jesus has an answer to all these people:

Seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness,and all these things will be added to you.

How can we ever assume that Christianity is about what I can gain? How can anyone think to himself, “This is about me?” Until you and I can deal with that temptation and that error, we will always lack the things we really do need.

One of the basic facts of human existence is that we are needy.

In a sense, that is just part of being alive. Abraham Maslow, a psychologist, suggests that we all have a hierarchy of needs. At the most basic level, we need food and shelter; at the highest level, we need to become what we feel we were made to be, we look for self–actualisation.

His thesis is that, once we get what we need at one level, we move on to the next level. That’s the basic principle.

For example, once we have the shelter we need, we begin looking for something more than a bigger and better house. We will move up the list. That’s why giving someone a pay increase will not satisfy that person very much once pay reaches a certain level.

Sometimes a manager will say, “So and so is grumpy and always complaining about work. But she is a good worker, and we don’t want to lose her, so I’ll arrange a pay increase for her.”

She gets the pay increase and resigns a month later.

The problem is that she was getting enough pay to satisfy her already, but she had no sense of being in control of her work, so she went where they offered her control over her own work. The pay had nothing to do with it.

What does this mean?

It shows us for what we are. We are constantly after something. If it’s not basic physiological needs — food, air, water and so on — it’s safety, or it’s belonging and love, or it’s satisfying our need for esteem, or our need for self–actualisation, our need to do what we do best.

Jesus contradicts our feelings. What we shall eat, where we shall live, what we shall wear — these things all cluster near the bottom of Maslow’s list — they are not the most important things in life. God’s kingdom is.

And, of course, how can we ever completely satisfy any of these things?

Maslow is right that people move on, that the more house we have the less enjoymnet we get from an additional room. But we can equally become emotionally dependent on getting more. Whatever we have will never seem enough to keep me content.

So, in our world, people constantly feel dissatisfied with what they have; it is never enough; yet, when they get more of what they already have, it can never satisfy them either.

That’s why we need constant reminding of what the highest priority has to be. It’s not esteem, and it’s not self–actualisation. Our highest priority always has to be the Kingdom of God.

WHAT IS THE KINGDOM OF GOD?

I know that even Christians who have been around for a long time can sometimes get a bit confused about the Kingdom of God. People have always been a bit muddled about it.

Jesus had to tell the Jews of his day,

The Kingdom of God is in your midst.

They were looking for the day when God’s appointed, anointed Messiah would suddenly appear, riding a white horse, a sword ready for battle. They were seeking the day when the unbelievers would be crushed, when the Romans would be driven out, and God’s rule would be perfectly realised.

Even today, you ask most Jews, ”Is Jesus the Messiah?” and they tell you, “The mark of the Messiah will be peace on earth and the rule of God over all of creation.That hasn’t happened, so Jesus can’t be the Messiah.” End of story.

When Jesus said,

The Kingdom of God is in your midst,

he was effectively telling them, “If you keep watching down the road for that King on his battle horse, you will never spot the arrival of God‘s Kingdom. You have to look for an army of spies and subversives among you if you want to see where God is really at work.”

Over the past 1700 years, Christians have also made a lot of mistakes.

At first, they knew that they were part of God’s kingdom. But they equally knew that Jesus was still to return and take that kingdom.

When the Roman State adopted Christianity as its official religion, Christians began to think less and less of Jesus’ return and more and more of God’s heavenly rule in heaven. They began to forget that Jesus taught us to pray,

Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven.

But we need to get back to basics.

Perhaps this doesn’t apply so fully to Neph and Divina or to Neci, who grew up in a Republic, but, for many of us, the kingdom we know best is the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

We tend to think of a kingdom as being a defined piece of territory. It’s as though most of us own or rent our 650m² with a house on it, but Kings or Queens own a big block of land, exactly the same size and shape as the UK, and they have a palace on it instead of a house.

So the idea of a kingdom to us is very much tied up with a king's territory.

But that would have seemed a very strange idea to, say, King Henry I back in about 1100. His kingdom included large slabs of France. Traditionally, a kingdom wasn’t about the territory but about the authority to rule.

When a prince returned to his home to receive his kingdom, what it meant was that he was receiving the right to be the king.

In some cases, he might have no territory under his control. For example, in mediaeval times, there were often battles between brothers over who would get to be king. The one chosen by his father to receive the kingdom might get a crown and a few loyal retainers and nothing else, because his brother had taken over. But the king still received the right to rule, even if he had to defeat his brother to take up that rule.

When we talk about the Kingdom of God, we include wherever God has extended his rulership to. If he rules over you through Christ, then you are part of the kingdom of God. When you wait for your train on Town Hall Station, dotted among the people on the platform are people like you who are under Christ’s rule. So it’s there, secretly simmering under the surface, the greatest and the best conspiracy of all — the conspiracy to bring all of creation back under the control of the Lord Jesus Christ, so that he can hand that control back to his heavenly Father.

Where satan had gained a foothold, Jesus has come to take it back to its rightful owner.

That’s why Jesus said,

Seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness,and all these things will be added to you.

The supreme goal of the Christian is to see that rulership established on the earth.

I should just make a brief comment about the Kingdom of Heaven.

Some Christians see the Bible talking about the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven, and they assume they are two different things. They aren't. It’s just that Matthew, being very Jewish, prefers to avoid speaking God’s name or title, while the other Biblical writers aren’t so touchy. Matthew is the only one who fairly consistently speaks about the Kingdom of Heaven. He uses the term in the same settings where other gospel writers speak of the Kingdom of God. The two expressions are interchangeable — they mean the same thing.

SEEKING THE KINGDOM

So, what does it mean to ”seek first the Kingdom of God?

When Jesus told us to

Seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness,and all these things will be added to you.

he was simply telling us that God’s rule and God’s purposes have to take precedence.

I mentioned those two Moravian missionaries in a recent sermon. They went to Jamaica as missionaries to the slaves, but the slaves didn’t want to hear their message. Even though these two men were kind and caring, they were men who cared for the sick and ministered to the needy. But, until they really knew the life of a slave, the slaves were not interested.

Those two men showed what it is to seek God’s kingdom first.

A slave has lost control of the most basic things in life.

In theory, a servant can choose to work for his employer or not to work for him. A slave has no such choice. A slave has no award wages or conditions. A slave has no power to control even the more basic of those needs in Maslow’s list.

But these two men chose slavery so that they could bring about God’s will on earth.

Sometimes I pass on to a couple facing marriage the wise words I once heard in a wedding. The celebrant told the couple, ”Find an important, world—changing goal to share as a couple, a project so difficult that it will collapse if either of you pulls out. Centre your lives on that, and your marriage will be safe.”

Of course, there are no absolute guarantees in marriage or in life; but that is not a bad piece of advice.

The minister didn’t go so far as to tell them to seek first God’s Kingdom, but it was a very similar piece of advice.

If a couple build their marriage around getting the very best house, or having the smartest kids, or having jobs where they can control their own lifestyle, they will never be satisfied, and the dissatisfaction they feel in their neighbourhood or their new car will reflect on their marriage.

But if they build the marriage on something beyond the couple, beyond what they can achieve for their own personal interests, then the ups and downs of daily life will seem less, and will impact less, because there are more important things in life.

CONCLUSION

That man who has often been rushed to hospital with health crises -— it is only faith which has helped him and his wife cope with the stresses of life.

But don’t look for a religion which helps you cope with crises and ill health:

Seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness,and all these things will be added to you.

The man at the healing conference, the one with advanced cancer, was right to come looking for healing. We should take it all to the Lord in prayer. But don’t come for healing and forget the goals:

Seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness,and all these things will be added to you.

Unhappy people who go to other churches or check them out from afar to see if faith can ease their unhappiness: they need to

Seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness

and they will begin to discover that happiness is a byproduct of doing things Jesus’ way.

People do find friendship or a life–partner, and a whole lot else through religion, they do even find a solution to their sexual crises. But the goal, above all else, must be to

Seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness,and all these things will be added to you.

As the writer to the Hebrews puts it,

2 Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. 3 Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.

There is no better example than Jesus!

Chase things that don’t last, and they will crumble as you grasp them; pursue the only lasting thing, and it will satisfy you forever more!

AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2005. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)