Seek First — A quiet daily practice of prayer and reflection
Matthew 6:33
Seek first
the kingdom of God and his righteousness
and all these things will be added to you.
Matthew 6:33
Voices on the verse
Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
Augustine
Sin is disordered love. To seek first is to put your loves in order, with God the first of them.
Teresa of Avila
Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you. Whoever has God lacks nothing. God alone suffices.
Sarah Coakley
To seek first is to let prayer slowly reorder every desire, until what you want and what God is are no longer at odds.
Maximus the Confessor
Everything that moves is moving toward an end. The kingdom is the only end in which the soul finally rests.
N.T. Wright
Make God's kingdom and his way of life your top priority. A reign and a way of living, not a place you go.
Lesslie Newbigin
The kingdom is already breaking in. A people living under God's reign becomes its sign and foretaste, here and now.
John Calvin
Righteousness is not our own. It is Christ's, given to us and received by faith.
John Stott
More than a private affair. Righteousness is a whole way of living: legal, moral, and social at once.
Tim Mackie
Righteousness is the way of right relating: with God, with one another, and with all creation.
Chrysostom
He calls it added. The small thing set beside the great one, never the prize itself.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Earthly possessions dazzle us into thinking they can keep us safe. All the while, they are the very source of our anxiety.
Tim Mackie
The anxious question goes back to Eden: what must I secure, or whom must I defeat, to make it through another day. The birds and the flowers are the answer. They receive.
Turn — the invitation
He said this on a hillside, to people worried about bread, and clothes, and the day ahead. He pointed to the birds, and to the wildflowers, and said only: look. They gather nothing, and they are fed.
What did you seek first today?
seek first