Oswald Chambers Daily Devotional – Utmost for His Highest 21 May 2024 Topic: Divine Reasonings of Faith

Divine Reasonings of Faith

BY OSWALD CHAMBERS

But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.— Matthew 6:33

The words Jesus speaks here are the most revolutionary words human ears ever heard: “Seek first his kingdom.” Even the most spiritually-minded of us argue that we must do other things first. “But I must make money. I must be clothed. I must be fed,” we say. When we reason like this, we make it clear that the great concern of our lives isn’t the kingdom of God; it’s how we’re going to get by financially. Jesus reverses the order, telling us to get rightly related to God first. He asks us to maintain our relationship with our heavenly Father as the main focus of our lives, and to take the focus off all other concerns.

“Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear” (Matthew 6:25). Our Lord points out the unreasonableness of being anxious about how we’ll live. Jesus isn’t saying that the person who thinks of nothing is blessed—that person is a fool (Proverbs 19:2). Jesus is telling us to place our relationship to God at the center of our lives, and to be carefully careless about everything else in comparison. He’s saying, “Don’t make the main concern of your life what you will eat and what you will drink. Be focused on God.”

Some people are careless about what they eat and drink, and they suffer for it. Some are careless about what they wear, and they look as they have no business looking. Some are careless about their earthly affairs, and God holds them responsible. What Jesus is saying in these verses is that the great care of our life should be to put our relationship to God first, and everything else second. One of the harshest disciplines of the Christian life is allowing the Holy Spirit to bring us into harmony with this teaching of Jesus.

1 Chronicles 13-15; John 7:1-27

WISDOM FROM OSWALD

A fanatic is one who entrenches himself in invincible ignorance

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