June 21, 2022
The Almost Daily will be on Summer Vacation until August 8th. But fear not! You will receive a devotional each Monday through Friday from the excellent Mockingbird Devotional entitled Daily Grace. Enjoy! - Paul Walker
“And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry...” (Matthew 6:28-31)
I worry about literally everything. I worry about finances, my health, my safety, my future, keeping the house spotless (though we have three kids), making sure I parent perfectly, whether we’ll have enough money when we retire, whether we will ever be debt-free, etc.
And when I read this passage, it doesn’t alleviate my anxiety. It heightens it. This word comes to us for one specific purpose: to definitively diagnose that we are, in fact, of little faith and can do nothing about it. Note that Jesus nowhere in this passage tells us how we can remediate our sad condition.
We who are of little faith have yet a greater hope: one who was belittled on the cross and raised to become our faithfulness. We can’t not be what God tells us not to be, and neither can we not be who he says we are in Christ.
If God’s care for us were contingent on our faithfulness to Him, we would all be in serious trouble. The law of God essentially declares, “Be faithful to God or die.” A better word, though, informs us that Jesus was faithful to the point of death, and therefore God cares for us more meticulously than He does for the individual blades of grass, more gracefully than He does for the birds of the air.
The good news is that our capacity to worry can never exceed His commitment to us. Christ was condemned for our anxieties that we might be credited with His faith in God.
[Jason Thompson, Daily Grace - Mockingbird Devotional Vol. 2]
