Look Around—the eternal God Provides for You
Daily Scripture
Matthew 6:25-34
25 “Therefore, I say to you, don’t worry about your life, what you’ll eat or what you’ll drink, or about your body, what you’ll wear. Isn’t life more than food and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds in the sky. They don’t sow seed or harvest grain or gather crops into barns. Yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you worth much more than they are? 27 Who among you by worrying can add a single moment to your life? 28 And why do you worry about clothes? Notice how the lilies in the field grow. They don’t wear themselves out with work, and they don’t spin cloth. 29 But I say to you that even Solomon in all of his splendor wasn’t dressed like one of these. 30 If God dresses grass in the field so beautifully, even though it’s alive today and tomorrow it’s thrown into the furnace, won’t God do much more for you, you people of weak faith? 31 Therefore, don’t worry and say, ‘What are we going to eat?’ or ‘What are we going to drink?’ or ‘What are we going to wear?’ 32 Gentiles long for all these things. Your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 Instead, desire first and foremost God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore, stop worrying about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Daily Reflection & Prayer
Most of us know today’s reading’s basic message. We can, of course, miss the point, and spend energy worrying about whether we worry too much! But because it tends to be more familiar than most of the Bible, it’s easy to ignore Jesus’ advice to learn from birds or flowers, parts of our world we may shrug off as “just natural.” “He had watched the birds wheeling around, high up on the currents of air 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…. Where did its beauty come from?…. It didn’t go shopping in the market for fine clothes. It was just itself: glorious, God-given, beautiful.” *
- Scholar William Barclay said even the earliest English versions grasped today’s reading clearly. “Wyclif had it: ‘Be not busy to your life.’ Tyndale, Cranmer and the Geneva Version all had: ‘Be not careful for your life.’ They used the word careful in the literal sense of full of care…. It is not ordinary, prudent foresight… that Jesus forbids; it is worry. Jesus is not advocating a shiftless, thriftless, reckless, thoughtless… attitude to life; he is forbidding a care-worn, worried fear, which takes all the joy out of life.” ** How can you, in good times or bad, learn from the birds (and other animals) and flowers to avoid being “full of care”? “Jesus’ audience would have been ordinary peasant people who had to worry about their next meal all the time, yet Jesus tells them not to worry about anything. He asks them instead to view the world with new eyes, to see all around them evidence of God’s care and provision.” *** How does your God’s eternal provision reach beyond the challenges of this earthly life?
Prayer
Lord Jesus, you modeled a life of peace and trust. Help me to keep learning how to live a life in which my energy can focus on your purposes rather than my fears. Amen.
GPS Insights
Bill Gepford
Bill Gepford , who serves as the location pastor for Resurrection West, wrote today's Insights. He has served churches in three states, and in roles as a youth pastor, associate pastor, solo pastor, lead pastor and location pastor. Bill loves to create spaces where emerging generations can experience joy. He is the husband to Melissa, the daddy to Finn and a huge fan of the K-State Wildcats and the Kansas City Chiefs. Some of his favorite hobbies are powerlifting, hiking, and camping with his family.
I should have known that drinking espresso before a silent meditation retreat was a bad idea, but I did it anyway. I was in a seminary course designed to help us foster internal peace–but I was also a full-time student/full-time youth pastor/part-time college pastor. I needed the internal peace… but I had spent years in a worldview where the only solution to a problem was to just work harder. My goal was to White knuckle my way into relaxation.
Not a great strategy. Have you ever felt like that?
Life is fast-paced-and yet many of us try harder and harder to find ways to worry less. We take classes. We listen to podcasts. We stress ourselves out finding ways to de-stress. But telling an anxious person ‘Don’t Worry’ is probably about as effective as telling a sad person to ‘just be happy’ or an angry person to ‘just calm down’ (married folks, take note here…). Yet how many of us try to work/earn/achieve our way into relaxation?
I read a quote that stuck out to me as I was preparing my last sermon on animals: “If you are that zebra running for your life, or that lion sprinting for your meal, your body’s physiological response mechanisms are superbly adapted for dealing with such short-term physical emergencies. For the vast majority of beasts on this planet, stress is about a short-term crisis, after which it’s either over with or you’re over with. When we sit around and worry about stressful things, we turn on the same physiological responses—but they are potentially a disaster when provoked chronically. A large body of evidence suggests that stress-related disease emerges, predominantly, out of the fact that we so often activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies, but we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages, relationships, and promotions.” *
I’m grateful for the message of Jesus here. He doesn’t give us a list of things to do-this is the same Jesus who tells us his yoke is easy and his burden is light. Instead of shaming people for being stressed, Jesus draws our attention to the birds of the field, soaring up in the clouds, to help us understand something about worry.
Birds generally achieve flight not by lifting more, but by carrying less. A bald eagle’s talons can generate over 400lbs of force… but eagles rarely carry more than 10lbs when they fly. Just because you can hold onto something doesn’t mean you can fly while carrying it.
My life is better when I remember the words of Jesus: Isn’t life more than food and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds in the sky. They don’t sow seed or harvest grain or gather crops into barns. Yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you worth much more than they are? Who among you by worrying can add a single moment to your life?
The solution to worry isn’t stressing out and working harder. Sometimes it’s letting go–of the desire to be in control, or the craving to know what will happen, or the need to have things our way. After all, you are also one of God’s creatures–and God cares for you more than you can possibly imagine.
* Robert M. Sapolsky: “Why Zebras’ Don’t Get Ulcers”
© 2025 Resurrection: A United Methodist Church. All Rights Reserved.
Scripture quotations are taken from The Common English Bible ©2011. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
References
* Wright, N. T., Matthew for Everyone, Part 1: Chapters 1-15 (The New Testament for Everyone) (p. 65). Westminster John Knox Press. Kindle Edition.
** William Barclay, The Gospel of Matthew—Volume 1 Chapters 1–10 (Revised Edition). Westminster John Knox Press, 1976, p. 255.
*** Eugene Eung-Chun Park and Joel B. Green, study note on Matthew 6:25-34 in The CEB Study Bible. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2013, p. 17 NT.
