The other day, I heard a sermon about the Kingdom of God and anxiety – specifically, seeking first the Kingdom will reduce anxiety. Now, I’ve heard that preached dozens of times, and 99% of the time, it does nothing more than add guilt or “to-dos” to the average churchgoer’s schedule because it gives you even more things that you should add to your schedule to “seek first the Kingdom.” It just doesn’t work.
However, this sermon took the idea a bit further. Instead of heaping on guilt (“If only you prayed more, you’d be peaceful”) or adding things to an already overcrowded schedule (“You need to build the Kingdom of God, so you’d better show up to the church work day on Saturday, not to mention Men’s Group and Kid’s Club and all the other events, as well as read your Bible every morning”), this preacher suggested that it’s not so much about adding things to your schedule as much as clarifying the priorities in your schedule that brings peace to anxiety.
Now, his sermon still focused on church-worthy examples. And I’ll agree to the point that seeking first the Kingdom should include regular Bible reading and seeking God – without that relationship with God, everyone else is just good works and self-effort. But if you read the Bible and pray in the morning and then spend the rest of your day fighting fires and running from thing to thing, that’s not going to do too much to reduce anxiety.
Seeking first the Kingdom of God has to extend to the priorities of your day. This isn’t just “being a good witness for Christ” or attending church meetings (if I can be super controversial for one second, any church meeting you attend that God has not called you to attend is not building the Kingdom; it’s good works at best and sinning at worse, if God has called you to do something else instead (Romans 14:23)). Priorities in the Kingdom don’t necessarily fit into a church structure or a spiritual-sounding mantra. They are simply knowing what God is telling them to prioritize now and then dealing with the fallout of what is not a priority right now because God has other things on their plate.
Priorities with God is being sure that you’re doing what God is telling you to do in this moment. God isn’t surprised by your boss’s demands or the fact that the kids got sick. He knows them and knows you need to meet those expectations. Priorities means sitting with God and asking Him what’s the most important thing right now. It does mean taking the kids to baseball practice as well as finishing up the report by the deadline. But it also means saying “no” to the good because it’s not the priority in this season. That may mean choosing baseball over football for the kids (hopefully they get a choice in this… I’m not asking you to micromanage their lives), or getting a different job where the deadlines aren’t always impossible. (In the last case, the solution may be asking God, “How do I do this?” and He either stretches time or else gives you a strategy for doing the impossible. It’s happened before.)
Determining your priorities can be as simple as knowing your family is the most important today (for example, my grandparents are currently experiencing health issues; helping them or covering for my mom so she can help them is a very large priority in my life right now). It can be sitting down with God and asking Him which of the twelve projects at work are the most important in the ten minutes before your meeting. It can also be specific – God suddenly saying, “Bake cookies for your friend at church” when said friend hasn’t necessarily been a known priority for a long time.
In the end, priorities can boil down to walking with God. There’s nothing quite as powerfully peaceful as knowing you’re doing what God has made a priority right now, and that He can take care of whatever else you might think is a priority – instead of being anxious about it all.
