What ambitions do you have for your life?
Here are a couple of mine. I’ve never been to Australia, but I’d love to go. I’d particularly like to go to Sydney, to see the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge. I have no aspirations to climb the Harbour Bridge.
One day, if I live long enough, I will retire. I’d love to have a comfortable house, and a good enough income for that to be an enjoyable phase of life.
What are your ambitions?
Worry
If you wanted a headline for the reading we had from Matthew chapter 6, it would be this: Don’t worry. Don’t worry.
How that relates to the question of ambition is something we’ll come back to.
Jesus gives us two areas of life where we are not to worry. Verse 25: Do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Food and drink. Clothing. Don’t worry about those, says Jesus.
And to press his point home, he gives us a couple of examples from the natural world.
First, he talks about the birds. They are a good example when it comes to food and drink. They don’t sow, or reap, or gather in barns. They don’t worry where their next meal will come from. They are simply looked after by God, our Father. Which is not to say that God just drops the food into their beaks; they have to collect it, and they have to eat it. But what they don’t do, is worry about it.
There’s a little two verse poem about this verse. It was written by someone called Elizabeth Chaney in the year 1859, and was entitled “Overheard in a garden”.
Said the robin to the sparrow:
‘I should really like to know
Why these anxious human beings
Rush about and worry so.’
Said the sparrow to the robin:
‘Friend, I think that it must be
That they have no heavenly Father,
Such as cares for you and me
Now, we have to be a bit careful, because Jesus doesn’t say that the birds have a relationship with God whereby he is their Father. That is a privilege for the human people of God alone. But he does say that our Father cares for the birds, so how much more will he take care of us, his children.
Jesus’ second example are wild flowers. You can wander on the downs in May and find the most beautiful orchids everywhere. Or the bluebells in the woods in April. Each one is absolutely stunning in its beauty. And yet, once you start finding these orchids and bluebells there are millions and millions of them. If there was only one in the whole world, it would be extraordinarily valuable. But they’re everywhere. It’s almost as if God has made too many. Like snowflakes.
The birds were an example of survival; God keeps them alive. The flowers are a good example for the opposite reason; they’re so transient. Here today, gone tomorrow. And yet, God clothes each of those flowers with the most exquisite beauty. If he does that, how much more will he make sure his dear children are clothed.
Now, I’m well aware that what Jesus says makes all kinds of questions pop into our heads, and we’ll come to those.
For now, he’s using the birds and the wild flowers to make his appeal to us not to worry about food, drink and clothing.
Out of what he says, there are in fact three reasons why we shouldn’t worry.
Firstly, worrying is not needed. Verse 32: Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. Or verse 8, that we looked at a few weeks ago: Your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Worrying is not needed. Not because we don’t have needs, but because the God who made the universe is our personal Father in heaven, who knows what we need, loves us dearly, and is more than capable of taking good care of us.
Second worrying does not help. Verse 27: Which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life. Worrying doesn’t make things any better. You don’t live longer by worrying. If anything, too much anxiety probably shortens your life expectancy. It certainly makes you go grey faster. Worrying does not help.
Third, worrying is not trusting. Jesus is very cutting at the end of verse 30, when he says O you of little faith. Faith here is not any kind of technical term. It just means trust. When we worry, that is living as though the whole thing rested on our shoulders alone. When you sit in an Airbus on your way to Tenerife, and watch the wings flap in the turbulence, it makes some people worry. If you designed them, and hadn’t seen this coming, you’d have good cause to be worried. But if there is a team of experienced engineers who have tested everything carefully, you may not understand the physics of an aircraft wing, but you can trust them. Worrying is not trusting.
Not necessary. Not helpful. Not trusting God. Bob Marley didn’t quite put it as well as Jesus did, but he was spot on when he said: In life you may have some trouble, but when you worry, you make it double.
That’s Jesus headline in this passage. Don’t worry.
Ambition
But behind this issue of worry is the bigger question of ambition. Our anxiety betrays our ambitions.
Ambition is about what you’re living for. None of us just lives life one day at a time with no purpose or direction. We all have things we’re aiming at, chasing after, hoping for. The question is: What?
And Jesus gets right to the heart of that in verse 31. Having said not to worry, he goes on like this: Do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things. The Gentiles, those who do not know God, seek after these things. That’s what they live for. It’s what their lives are about.
If that is what your ambition is focussed on – food, drink, clothing, that reduces us to little more than animals. That’s what animals live for. You can talk about pets, you can talk about livestock, you can talk about wildlife – they live for their stomach, their comfort and their reproduction.
For a few years, I used to have to walk across London Bridge at the time of the evening rush hour. The thing was, I was heading north, and everybody else was leaving the City to London Bridge or Waterloo East – it was home time. I’ll never forget the pavements on the bridge. Just a teeming crowd of city workers, pouring over the bridge, moving as one. But many of those workers are living for nothing more than their job, their salary, their retirement, their comfort at the weekend – at times it looked a little like a herd of cattle.
Jesus says that if we are his people, if we know our God, then we can live for more than that.
Verse 25 asks the question: Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Is there not more to life than this? And verse 33 then tells us what that more is. Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. We don’t need to live just for food, drink and clothing. There is more to life than providing for our daily needs. That more is God’s kingdom, and his righteousness.
We can seek after God’s kingdom. Jesus is God’s king, so when he arrived so did God’s kingdom. But not everybody realises this. Not everyone knows that Jesus is the best king the world has ever known. Plenty of people try to run their own lives, and do not enjoy the forgiveness he offers either. So we can seek after the growth of God’s kingdom, using our lives to see more and more people acknowledge Jesus as God’s king and committing to following him. That gives you something lasting to aim your life at.
And we can seek after God’s righteousness. God is perfect and just and good, but we are not. My life is full of flaws; I make mistakes every day; I don’t live as Jesus would want me to. And it’s not just my life; the world is full of injustice, things that aren’t right. People are taken advantage of; the poor don’t have enough to eat; and so we could go on. If we want to make our lives chase after something worthwhile, that could be God’s righteousness. Seeking to grow more and more like Jesus in the way I live, and doing all I can to make the world a more just, a more righteous place.
That’s the choice. Live for food, drink and clothing. Live for God and his righteousness. It’s about our ambitions.
We make that choice every time we pray the Lord’s prayer. We ask God to give us the bread we need for today. We ask him to look after our basic needs. And we ask God to bring about his kingdom, to advance his will and to honour his name. Whenever we pray the Lord’s prayer we are putting God’s kingdom as the reality dearest to our hearts, and leaving whether we have enough to eat to him.
Some Tough Questions
So, Jesus tells us not to worry about food, drink and clothing. Because if we do, we’re exposing our ambitions. Our life is a chasing after our physical needs, rather than living for God and his purposes. He invites us to live for something that is really worth living for.
But as I said earlier, all this raises some pretty big questions as to whether Jesus has his feet firmly on the ground.
The first thing we could say is that it sounds as if Jesus has never heard of a recession. Doesn’t he realise that at the moment jobs are in short supply? Doesn’t he know that paying all the bills and putting food on the table gets harder every year? Doesn’t he know that we live in times that are – frankly – worrying?!
The answer is: Of course he does. That is when his teaching comes home to roost.
During more normal times, when things are a bit stable, he doesn’t need to tell us not to worry. We’d have nothing to worry about. It’s a bit like the private in the army who’s always thought his sergeant’s orders were an excellent idea. He’s never disobeyed an order. But that’s not particularly praiseworthy, because he’s only been given orders that were exactly what he would have done anyway. The proof of whether he’s an obedient soldier comes when he’s asked to do something he doesn’t want to do.
Jesus isn’t asking us to trust God to provide for us, to avoid worrying, only in those times when there’s nothing to worry about. The proof that we are living this out comes when there is plenty to worry about. Like at the moment. When the heat is on. That’s when our real ambitions in life float to the surface, like the impurities do when you heat up some meal to refine it.
In troublesome times, lots of us have to put in more hours. We see colleagues made redundant when we narrowly escape. Or we don’t narrowly escape. But it remains the case that worrying about everything doesn’t help, and God remains our loving heavenly Father who knows about all these pressures and has good purposes for us in them somewhere.
You can respond to a recession in two ways. You can draw inside your shell, and use the economic downturn as a reason to live for nothing other than your own survival. O you can ask the question what kind of lifestyle most honours God, and then go for that.
There is another question I find myself wanting to ask Jesus at this point. If he sounds like he’s never heard of a recession, it also sounds like he’s never heard of poverty. Jesus, have you ever actually met anyone who was poor? I mean really poor? A bit sheltered were you? A bit of a toff? You do realise that Christian people around the world will die of hunger today?
Of course we want to ask those questions of Jesus. Although if we do that, it might be we who are in the dark. Jesus was very well acquainted with poverty. He spent most of his time with the poor and disadvantaged of his day, and those were not flush times. And remember what Jesus said to the person who wanted to follow him? Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.
Jesus knew poverty far better than most of us ever will. He knew it first-hand, and he knew it in the lives of those he met.
But even when times are so hard that each day is an exercise in survival, there are still two ways to go about life as you live at a subsistence level. You can say “I am poor. I live to eat. There is no more to life.” Or you can say. “I am poor. God is my Father. I don’t understand why he lets me be so poor, but not a sparrow falls to the ground apart from his will, so I will use the strength I do get each day to live for him.”
Jesus is not saying that his followers will always have an easy ride. In asking us to trust God to provide. In comparing us to the birds and the flowers. He’s not promising us that we will never have hardships.
In fact, the last verse of this chapter points in the opposite direction. Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.
The one thing you can be sure of, says Jesus, is that today and tomorrow will both be full of trouble. But the answer is not to worry about it. The answer is to trust God with it, which means sorting out today, and leaving tomorrow to him.
Conclusion
So Jesus is asking us all: What are you living for?
Are you on the rat race, the treadmill? Is your life driven by trying to secure the comforts that you want for tomorrow? Or is life further back, and you’re driven by trying to secure what you need for tomorrow?
Or are you living for God? Do you know him as your heavenly Father, because Jesus died and rose again to make this possible? And then are your ambitions channelled into seeing his kingdom spread, and his righteousness reflected in your life and in the society around us?