Matthew 6

Today’s Passage: Matthew 6

In chapter five the King took the old commandments and drove them down into the heart, past the hands and the mouth and into the hidden places where anger and lust and revenge actually live. Now He turns and does the same thing to religion itself. Chapter six opens with a warning that governs everything after it: “Be careful not to perform your righteous acts before men to be seen by them.” Then He takes the three great practices of devout Jewish life, giving to the needy, praying, and fasting, and He treats each one in exactly the same shape. There are people who do it for an audience, and they get the applause they were after, and that is the whole of their wages. And there is the Father who sees what is done in secret, and He rewards. Three times the same warning, three times the same promise, with the Lord’s Prayer set down in the middle of it like a jewel in a ring. Then, having dealt with the eyes of men, He turns to the hands and the heart and deals with our possessions: treasures on earth that moth and rust eat and thieves dig up, against treasures in heaven that nothing can touch. The eye as the lamp of the body. Two masters, and only one of them can have you. And at the last, the long and tender passage about anxiety, where the King points at birds who do not farm and flowers who do not sew and tells you that the God who feeds and clothes them is your Father. It ends where the whole chapter has been going all along: seek first the kingdom of God, and leave tomorrow to Him.

As you read, hold this: The Father who sees what is done in secret is the only audience worth having, and He knows what you need before you ask Him.

Matthew 6:1–4 (BSB)

¹ “Be careful not to perform your righteous acts before men to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. ² So when you give to the needy, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. Truly I tell you, they already have their full reward. ³ But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, ⁴ so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Verse one is the roof over the whole first half of the chapter, and it needs reading slowly, because it is easy to hear it as a ban on being seen at all. It is not. Only a chapter ago the same Teacher said to let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven. The difference is not visibility. The difference is the little phrase “to be seen by them.” One man does good so that God gets the glory, and it happens to be public. Another does good so that he gets the credit, and the public is the entire point. The deed can look identical from the street. Only one of them is worship. And then the King says something almost frightening in its arithmetic: those who perform for men “already have their full reward.” The phrase behind it was a commercial one, stamped on receipts in the ancient world when a bill was paid in full and nothing further was owed. That is what the admiration of men is. A receipt. You wanted to be thought generous, and you were thought generous, and the transaction is closed. There is nothing left to come.

Then the picture, and you can almost hear the smile in it: do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites (ὑποκριτής) hypokritēs, pronounced hoo-pok-ree-TASE. Strong's G5273, hypocrite, actor, one who plays a part. The Greek word is hypokritēs, and it began life with no moral sting in it at all. It meant an actor, one who answered from behind a mask on the Greek stage, playing a part written by someone else for the benefit of an audience. Over time it came to mean anyone who plays a role that is not truly his own, and it is the word Jesus reaches for again and again in this Gospel. Hear what the image actually says. The hypocrite is not necessarily a scoundrel doing wicked things in private. He may be doing genuinely good things, real alms to real poor people, real prayers, real fasting. His problem is that he is performing. There is a mask, there is a script, and there is a crowd, and if you took the crowd away the performance would stop, because the crowd was the reason for it. That is a searching thought for anyone who has ever done a good thing well and then quietly checked to see who noticed. The remedy Jesus gives is not to try harder at sincerity, which only produces a more convincing actor. The remedy is to change audiences. Once you truly believe that your Father sees, the crowd shrinks to its proper size, and the mask becomes what it always was, a nuisance you no longer need. do. Whether men literally blew a horn to announce a gift, or whether the coins rang loudly in the trumpet-shaped chests in the temple court, or whether the Lord is simply painting an absurdity, the effect is the same. There is a way of giving that arranges for everyone to know. Over against it He sets one of the most memorable lines He ever spoke: do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. It is a deliberate impossibility, of course, and that is its power. He is not asking for a technique. He is asking for a heart so unconcerned with being noticed that it hardly keeps count of its own kindness. And then the promise, and it will come back twice more before the section ends, like a bell: “your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” Sit with that a moment. You are not unwitnessed. The quiet check written, the meal cooked, the bill paid for someone who will never know who paid it, the hours nobody counted: He saw all of it. Blessed be a God who watches in the dark.

Matthew 6:5–8 (BSB)

⁵ And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites. For they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. Truly I tell you, they already have their full reward. ⁶ But when you pray, go into your inner room, shut your door, and pray to your Father, who is unseen. And your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. ⁷ And when you pray, do not babble on like pagans, for they think that by their many words they will be heard. ⁸ Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.

Now the same pattern falls on prayer, and it cuts deeper, because a man may fake generosity toward the poor without much cost to his soul, but to fake prayer is to use the very act of speaking to God as a way of speaking about yourself. They “love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men.” The place was not the sin; the synagogue was where prayer belonged, and standing was the ordinary posture. The sin was the corner, chosen because two streets meet there and twice as many people pass. And again the receipt is stamped: they have their full reward. So He says, go into the storeroom and shut the door. Understand that He is not forbidding public prayer, for He prayed publicly Himself and the church has gathered to pray from its first day. He is prescribing a cure. If you have never once prayed where absolutely nobody could hear you, you do not yet know whether you pray to God or to the room. Shut the door, and whatever is left is real.

Then He turns from religious showmanship to something gentler and just as common: “do not babble on like pagans, for they think that by their many words they will be heard.” The word He uses imitates the sound of empty chatter, and every reader of that century would have recognized the practice. Pagan prayer piled up divine names and formulas and repetitions, on the theory that the gods were distant, distracted, possibly asleep, and had to be worn down. You find the same instinct on Mount Carmel, where the prophets of Baal called on their god from morning until noon and nothing happened. And the instinct is not dead. It lives in every superstition that measures prayer by its length, its polish, or the number of times a phrase is repeated, as though God were reluctant and must be talked round. Against all of it Jesus lays down one of the most restful sentences in Scripture: “your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.” Now think for a moment about what that does not mean. It does not mean prayer is pointless. If it did, the Lord would hardly follow it with a prayer to pray. It means prayer was never information delivered to an uninformed God, and never persuasion applied to an unwilling one. It is a child, who is already known and already loved, coming to a Father who was ready before the child opened his mouth. That changes everything about how you approach Him. You are not filing a request with a stranger. You are talking to someone who has been waiting.

Matthew 6:9–13 (BSB)

⁹ So then, this is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name. ¹⁰ Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. ¹¹ Give us this day our daily bread. ¹² And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. ¹³ And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’

Here is the most famous prayer in the world, and we ought to slow down and take it phrase by phrase, because there is more in it than most of us have ever spent. Begin with how He introduces it: “this is how you should pray.” Not these are the words you must recite, but this is the shape. That reading is not a way of avoiding the words; the church has prayed them aloud for two thousand years and is right to. But notice where the prayer sits. It comes immediately after a warning against thinking we will be heard for our many words. To take the very next thing He says and turn it into a formula to be repeated without thought would be to walk straight into the ditch He just marked. It is a pattern, given to a people who do not know how to pray, by a Master who does, and a pattern can be prayed word for word with the whole heart or rattled off with none of it. He is teaching us what to want.

Our Father in heaven. Two words, and the whole distance between religion and sonship is crossed. Not “Master,” not “Judge,” though He is both, but Father, and the Aramaic word behind it was the ordinary word of the household, the word a child used. Yet it is not sentimental, because in heaven follows at once, and that keeps us from the great modern error of making God a comfortable old relative. He is Father, and He is in heaven, tender and enthroned in the same breath. And He is our Father, not merely mine, which means you cannot pray the first two words of this prayer without your brothers and sisters standing beside you. Hallowed be Your name. The first request is not for anything we need. It is that God’s name be treated as holy, set apart, honored as what it is, in the world and in the mouth that is praying. What a place to begin. Before a word about bread, we ask that God be known to be God.

Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. This is the great cry of the whole Bible compressed into a line. It looks forward to the day when the King returns and His reign is unmistakable, and it asks for that day to hurry. But it also asks for something now, today, in this house and this heart: that God’s will be done here in the way it is done there, where no angel hesitates, where nothing is grudging or partial or late. Pray that honestly and it will cost you something, for you are asking for a kingdom that is not yours and a will that may not be your own. The Lord Himself would pray this prayer in a garden with His face in the dirt: “Yet not as I will, but as You will.”

Give us this day our daily (ἐπιούσιος) epiousios, pronounced eh-pee-OO-see-os. Strong's G1967, for the coming day, daily, the day's own portion. The word here, epiousios, is one of the strangest in the New Testament. It appears essentially nowhere else in all of surviving Greek literature apart from this prayer, so that the church has had to work out its meaning from the parts of the word itself, and honest scholars have offered more than one answer. It may mean necessary for existence, that is, the bread we actually need rather than the bread we would like. It may mean for the coming day, the ration a laborer was given at evening for the work of tomorrow, or that a housewife set aside at night for the morning. Either way the sense lands in the same place, and it is a humbling one. This is the language of people who lived close to the edge, day laborers paid at sundown because they had nothing to carry them past it, and it echoes the manna in the wilderness, gathered every morning and never hoarded, one day at a time for forty years. To pray it is to put yourself back in that dependence on purpose. Whether your cupboard is bare or full, you are confessing that you do not hold your own life up, that the next meal is a gift and not a guarantee, and that the God who fed a nation with bread from the sky every morning has not changed His habits. bread. Only now, in the fourth petition, do we ask for anything for ourselves, and what we ask for is astonishingly small. Not wealth, not security, not next year. Bread, for today. There is a whole doctrine of contentment folded into that. And notice that it is still “us” and “our,” so that even at the table a believer is praying for other hungry people. It is a prayer that quietly refuses the two great lies about money, that God does not care about ordinary physical needs, and that we may reasonably ask Him to make us safe forever.

And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. Sin is pictured here as debt, something owed that we cannot pay, and the request is plain: cancel it. Every believer needs this daily, which is why it stands in a daily prayer. But look hard at the second half, because it is where people stumble. It does not say forgive us because we have forgiven, as though our mercy purchased His. It says as we also have forgiven. The forgiven heart is a forgiving heart, and the prayer assumes that the one asking has already been letting go of what others owe him. More on that in a moment, because Jesus will not let it pass without comment.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. The last petition is a cry of self-distrust, and it is a healthy one. God tempts no one to evil; James says so plainly. But God does lead His people into testing, as He led Israel into the wilderness and His own Son into it after the Jordan, and a man who knows himself will pray to be spared the trial he might not stand in. It is the opposite of the swagger that goes looking for the edge of the cliff to prove it can keep its footing. And then the closing plea reminds us that we are not merely fighting our own weakness. There is an enemy, personal and real, and we ask our Father to pull us out of his hand. That is where the pattern ends: with a child who knows he is fragile, asking to be kept.

Matthew 6:14–15 (BSB)

¹⁴ For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. ¹⁵ But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive yours.

Of all the petitions He might have paused to explain, He returns to that one, and He says something we would rather He had not. Do not soften it. These are the words of the Lord Jesus, and He says flatly that if you will not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive yours. Now we must be careful in two directions at once. Nothing here teaches that our forgiving earns God’s forgiveness or pays for it. That would overturn the gospel, and it would overturn the very prayer we have just read, where forgiveness is asked for as a gift by people who have nothing with which to clear their own debt. Scripture is entirely consistent about the order: “Be kind and tenderhearted to one another, forgiving each other just as in Christ God forgave you.” His mercy comes first and ours flows out of it. What, then, does the warning mean? It means this, and it is sharper than the misreading: a heart that will not forgive is a heart that has not yet understood what it has been forgiven. Refusal to release a debt is evidence, and Jesus treats it as evidence, that the mercy of God has not actually landed. The man in His parable who was released from a debt he could never have repaid, and then took his fellow servant by the throat over a trifle, did not lose a salvation he had; he showed that the master’s mercy had never gone deeper than his relief.

"Then the master summoned him and said, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave all your debt because you begged me. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant, just as I had on you?’" Matthew 18:32–33 (BSB)

So let the verse do its work without letting it do the wrong work. If there is someone you have decided never to release, this is the Lord’s voice, and it is not to be argued with or explained away. But understand also what forgiveness is not. It is not pretending the wound was small, or telling someone who has been genuinely harmed that they must feel warmly toward the one who harmed them, or handing back the trust that was broken as though nothing happened. It is the deliberate surrender of the right to collect. That is hard, and it is usually not finished in one afternoon, and the only strength for it comes from the same place the debt was cancelled in the first place. Go and look again at the size of what God let go for you, and then look at what you are holding. Nobody who has really seen the first can hold the second for very long.

Matthew 6:16–18 (BSB)

¹⁶ When you fast, do not be somber like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces to show men they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they already have their full reward. ¹⁷ But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, ¹⁸ so that your fasting will not be obvious to men, but only to your Father, who is unseen. And your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

The third practice, and the same shape a third time. There is a pun buried in the Greek that does not survive translation: they disfigure their faces in order to make their fasting figure before men. They went about unwashed, with ashes and a studied gloom, and got exactly what they came for, and the receipt was stamped. Then comes the Lord’s instruction, and it is wonderfully practical: wash your face, put oil on your head, look like any other day. Oil on the head was simple grooming in a hot country, what a man did in the morning, not a luxury. In other words, do not advertise, and do not go to the opposite extreme of advertising your refusal to advertise. Just look ordinary.

Two things are worth holding here. The first is that Jesus plainly expects His people to fast. He says “when,” not “if,” and He never revokes it. Fasting is not a relic of an older covenant. It is the body’s way of saying with the stomach what the soul means, that there is something we want from God more than we want lunch. The second is that fasting, of all the disciplines, is the one most easily turned into a performance, because it is visible in the face and can be worked into conversation with very little effort. So He puts it under the same rule as the other two, and the promise falls for the third time, unchanged: your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. Three times in eighteen verses. Whatever else you carry away from the first half of this chapter, carry that. He sees. He is not indifferent, He is not distracted, and He is not stingy. The hidden life of a believer is the life He is watching, and He is a rewarder.

Matthew 6:19–21 (BSB)

¹⁹ Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. ²⁰ But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. ²¹ For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Now the chapter turns a corner. He has dealt with the eyes of men; He turns to the grip of things. And He argues, at first, on the ground of sheer common sense. Wealth in that world was held in three forms: fine garments, stored grain, and metal, and every one of them was vulnerable. Moths ate the cloth folded in the chest. The word behind “rust” is broader than corroded iron and covers the eating away of anything, the weevil in the grain as much as the tarnish on the silver. And since there were no banks for ordinary people, a man buried his coins in the floor or the field, where thieves who knew how to dig through a mud-brick wall could find them. Every strategy the ancient world had for security had a hole in it. So do our own, however sophisticated. The Lord is not scolding here so much as reasoning. Look at where you are putting it, He says. That is a poor vault.

Then the alternative, and notice He does not say do not store up. He says store it somewhere else. This is not a call to have no future, it is a call to invest in the only place where nothing can get at it. How a person does that He has already been showing us for eighteen verses: the gift nobody saw, the prayer behind a shut door, the fast nobody guessed at, all of it noticed and kept and rewarded by the Father. And then He gives the reason underneath the whole thing, and it is one of the truest sentences ever spoken about human beings: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Read that carefully, because the order surprises most people. We assume the heart goes first and the money follows it. Jesus says it is the other way round. Put your treasure somewhere and your heart will move in after it, like a family following its furniture. That is a solemn thing, and it is also a hopeful one. It means the direction of a life can actually be changed by deciding, deliberately and in secret, where to send its treasure. Your heart will follow it there.

Matthew 6:22–24 (BSB)

²² The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. ²³ But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness! ²⁴ No one can serve two masters: Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.

The saying about the eye sits between two passages about possessions, and that is not an accident. Ancient people spoke of the eye as a lamp letting light into the body, so that a sound eye filled a man with light and a diseased one left him stumbling in the dark. But there is a second layer here that the first hearers would have caught at once. In Hebrew idiom a “good eye” meant a generous person and a “bad eye” meant a stingy, grasping one; the book of Proverbs uses both. So Jesus is saying two things in one breath. What you look at determines what fills you, and the way you look at your neighbor’s need reveals whether there is any light in you at all. And then that terrible line: “If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” It is possible for the very faculty by which you judge things to be the thing that is broken, so that you are confidently, calmly, religiously wrong, and cannot tell. That is a condition to be feared, and it drives a person to prayer rather than to self-examination alone, because a bad eye is precisely the organ that cannot inspect itself.

Then the verdict, laid down without an inch of room to negotiate. Not you should not serve two masters, but no one can. The picture is a slave, not an employee, and a slave belongs to one owner entirely; a man with two owners is a man with no owner, and both his masters know it. And then the Lord names the second master, and He does it in a startling way, because He does not say you cannot serve God and have money (μαμωνᾶς) mamōnas, pronounced mah-mo-NAHS. Strong's G3126, money, wealth, material riches personified as a rival master. Mamōnas is not a Greek word at all in origin. It came into the Greek of the New Testament from Aramaic, the everyday language of Jesus and His hearers, where it meant property, wealth, whatever a person had accumulated and could rely on. There is a real possibility that the root behind it is connected to the word for trust, so that mammon is, quite literally, that in which you put your confidence. What makes the Lord’s use of it unforgettable is that He does not merely mention money; He capitalizes it, so to speak, and sets it up as a person. God and Mammon, two masters, each wanting a servant. That is a shrewder picture of wealth than any economics has managed, because money really does behave like a master. It gives orders. It says where you will live and how you will spend your hours and what you may not risk and whom you must keep happy. And it promises, always, that a little more of it will finally make you safe. The Lord Jesus is not being harsh with us here; He is being honest, and He is being kind, because a man serving Mammon will work himself grey for a master who cannot keep a single one of his promises past the grave. There is only one Master worth having, and He has never yet failed to feed His servants. , nor even that you cannot serve God and be rich. He personifies it. He puts wealth on a throne opposite God and treats it as a rival lord with a claim on your obedience. Hear it plainly, and hear it without shame and without flattery. This is not a word aimed at people with much, as though a full bank account were sin, nor a comfortable word for people with little, as though being poor settled the question. Some of the most God-fearing people who ever lived have handled great sums as stewards, and some of the most money-ruled have never had any and have wanted it every waking hour. The question the Lord is asking is not how much do you have. It is who gives the orders.

Matthew 6:25–27 (BSB)

²⁵ Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? ²⁶ Look at the birds of the air: They do not sow or reap or gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? ²⁷ Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?

That little word “therefore” ties everything together. Because you cannot serve two masters, and because your treasure pulls your heart after it, therefore do not worry (μεριμνάω) merimnaō, pronounced meh-rim-NAH-oh. Strong's G3309, to worry, be anxious, be pulled apart by care. Merimnaō is built on a root that carries the idea of being divided, pulled into parts, and that is exactly what the thing does. The anxious person is not calmly considering a problem; he is being drawn in several directions at once, so that he is never wholly anywhere. Luke uses the same word of a woman “worried and upset about many things” while the one thing needful sat in the next room. And Paul, who knew what real hardship was, uses it when he tells the Philippians to be anxious for nothing but in everything to bring their requests to God, which shows us what the cure is meant to look like. It is worth saying clearly, because tender consciences hear these verses and add guilt to their fear: our Lord is not commanding an emotion here, as though a frightened person could simply decide to stop feeling frightened and be sinning until they manage it. He never once shames the anxious. What He does is give them somewhere to put it. Every single argument in this passage is about the Father, what He knows, what He feeds, what He clothes, what He values. Not one is about the strength of your own nerves. The word describes a heart pulled apart, and the remedy is not to grit your teeth and hold yourself together. It is to be held. . And now the tone of the chapter changes altogether. The warnings are behind us; this is the King speaking gently to frightened people about food and clothing, which are the two things human beings have always been most afraid of losing. Note first what He does not do. He does not accuse the anxious of being wicked, and He does not tell anyone that their fears are silly. Food and clothing are not trivial. He knows exactly how serious they are, and He will say in a few verses that the Father knows you need them. What He does is ask a question: “Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?” The God who gave you the greater gift, the life itself, is not likely to withhold the lesser one that sustains it.

Then He points out the window. Look at the birds. They do not farm, they do not harvest, they do not lay anything by in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Understand that He is not praising idleness; birds work extremely hard, from first light, and Scripture never blesses the man who will not labor. The point is that they cannot secure anything. There is no bird with a granary. And still they are fed, because God feeds them, and if He does that for a sparrow worth half a penny in the market, what is He to you? “Are you not much more valuable than they?” Then the plainest argument of all, and it lands like a hand on the shoulder: who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? Not one. Anxiety has never once produced the thing it was anxious about. It is expenditure with no return, a tax levied on tomorrow that buys nothing at all.

Matthew 6:28–30 (BSB)

²⁸ And why do you worry about clothes? Consider how the lilies of the field grow: They do not labor or spin. ²⁹ Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his glory was adorned like one of these. ³⁰ If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?

Having pointed at the birds for food, He points at the flowers for clothing, and the word He uses means to look at something closely and learn from it. Go and study the wildflowers, He says. In spring the Galilean hillsides run with anemones and poppies and crocus, and they neither labor in a field nor spin thread at a loom, which were the two great occupations of men and women in that world. They do nothing whatever to clothe themselves. And yet Solomon, in the days when the queen of the south came from the ends of the earth and lost her breath at the sight of his court, never wore anything as fine as one of them. That is a marvelous thing to say about a weed. It tells you what sort of God this is, that He lavishes such artistry on something no one may ever see, on a hillside where perhaps only He is looking. The same God who sees what is done in secret also paints in secret.

And then the argument closes with a note that stings a little and comforts a great deal. Those same flowers, magnificent as they are, last a matter of days, and then the dried stalks and grass are gathered up and shoved into a clay oven to bake the bread. God spends that kind of glory on fuel. “Will He not much more clothe you?” Then He names the real problem, and He names it with a tenderness that we lose if we read it as a rebuke: “O you of little faith.” It is one word in the Greek, and it is a favorite of His in this Gospel, used every time of His own disciples, men He is keeping and not casting off. He never says “O you of no faith.” Little faith is still faith, and He speaks to it as a Father speaks to a child who is frightened of the dark in a house where he is perfectly safe. The trouble is not that you are wicked for being afraid. The trouble is that you have a great Father and a small view of Him, and He is enlarging it here with birds and flowers because He wants you to be able to sleep.

"As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear Him. For He knows our frame; He is mindful that we are dust." Psalm 103:13–14 (BSB)

Matthew 6:31–34 (BSB)

³¹ Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ ³² For the Gentiles strive after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. ³³ But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you. ³⁴ Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Today has enough trouble of its own.

He gathers it all up now. The three questions He puts in our mouths are the questions of people who genuinely do not know where the next meal is coming from, and there are readers of this page who have asked them in earnest. He is not mocking those questions. He is saying that they are the questions of a world without a Father. “The Gentiles strive after all these things,” which is to say, the people who do not know God run after food and drink and clothing because running is all they have; there is nobody over them who has noticed. And then, for the second time in this chapter, the great settling word: “your heavenly Father knows that you need them.” He said it about prayer in verse eight and He says it about bread and clothes here, and both times it is the same medicine. He knows. Not He will find out if you explain it well enough, and not He may be persuaded to care. He knows already, and He is your Father.

So comes the command that has organized ten thousand lives: “But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.” Seek is a strong, continuous word, the pursuit that shapes a day. And what is sought is not a comfortable life with God attached, but His kingdom and His righteousness, His reign honored and His character formed in us. Everything in the chapter has been aiming here. The secret giving, the shut door, the unadvertised fast, the treasure sent ahead, the single Master: all of it is what seeking first actually looks like on a Tuesday. And the promise attached to it must be handled honestly, exactly as He gives it. He does not say that the believer who seeks first will be prosperous, or spared hardship, or given the specific outcome he is praying for. The apostles who first heard these words were hungry and cold more than once, and the writer of Hebrews speaks of saints who went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute. What He promises is that His children will not be forgotten by their Father, that what is truly needed will be added by the hand that feeds the birds, and that no one who put the kingdom first ever found God in arrears.

And then the last line, which is one of the kindest in Scripture and is almost never quoted in full. “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Today has enough trouble of its own.” Notice that He does not say there is no trouble. He says today has enough of it. That is a frank admission from the mouth of the Lord Jesus that life in this world contains real hardship, and it should keep us from ever using this passage to tell a struggling person that their difficulties are imaginary. What He forbids is the borrowing. Anxiety takes tomorrow’s trouble, which may never arrive at all and which will come with tomorrow’s grace if it does, and drags it into a day that already has its own load. He is not asking you to be brave about the next ten years. He is asking you to receive today, with its bread and its burden, from a Father who gives both one day at a time, as He did in the wilderness. That is all any of us was ever given strength for.