Kingdom of Me

Matthew 6:33 But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

As I have said more than once, I have a lot of defects.  Here, though, I think Jesus exposes the root of all of my life struggles.  He says that my life is first and foremost to be about God and his kingdom.  I however, am all about the kingdom of Scott. In almost every situation, every conflict and every decision, my first impulse is to consider my own preference.  In theory, I follow God, but in practice, I follow me.

I tend to look to God for big decisions, begging him to let me in on his secret will.  Where should I go to college?  Where should I live?  I find my interest in God’s will increases when I do not know what to do.  In most of my daily decisions however, I know exactly what I want to do, so I do not really require God’s help.

The reality however, is that his will is not all that secret.  He has let me know in great detail what his will is for my life.  The words of Jesus repeatedly tell me how I am to live.  I however, do not really want to hear that I am to love my neighbor, feed the hungry, and visit those in prison.  I just want to do my own thing and then have a little divine help when I get stuck with big decisions.

I know how absurd it sounds to those who do not buy into it, but most of us live our lives radically upside down.  We want God, but we want him to know his place.  Jesus says however, our lives will always be out of order as long as we do not seek him above all.  This is not just a song we are to sing on Sunday morning. It is to be our way of life. I often wonder how much of our anxiety, agitation and lack of peace is caused only by our elevation of self above God.

My relationship with God is to be so intensely personal that it consumes me.  Knowing him is the entire purpose of life. I am to think of him when I awake and I am to pray to him as I fall asleep. I am to seek him above all.  Only when I do this does everything else exist in its proper order.  It is not that I abandon all else. It is just that the chaos of life falls into proper perspective when I have the faith to make God my God.

When our eyes are on God, though we stop making our own disaster, life does not suddenly become easy.  The trials of life are not just of our own making.  In putting God above all however, we have the proper perspective of those trials.  We can learn to walk on the waves of life instead of drowning in them as we keep our eyes on Christ.