January: New Beginnings
Day 12 — 12 January
Tomorrow Has Already Been Accounted For
Scripture: “Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” — Matthew 6:25–34 (NKJV)
Short Teaching
Twelve days into a new year, and somewhere in the back of your mind, a calculator is running. You may not be conscious of it. It operates beneath the surface, tallying what is owed, what is due, what might go wrong, what will cost more than expected. It ran last year too. It will run next year if you let it. The numbers change; the calculation never stops.
There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes not from working too hard but from calculating too far ahead. You know the feeling. You lie in bed and your body is still but your mind is three months into the future, running scenarios. If the contract does not renew. If the car needs replacing. If the rent goes up again. If the redundancy comes. If the savings do not stretch. You are not dealing with a present crisis. You are rehearsing a future one, and the rehearsal is so vivid and so consuming that by the time morning arrives, you are already exhausted, and nothing has actually happened yet.
Jesus knew about that calculator. He did not address it from the outside, as though worry were a character flaw that better people simply do not have. He addressed it from the inside, as someone who understood exactly why the human mind does what it does, and who offered not a scolding but a reorientation so thorough that if you receive it fully, it dismantles the entire apparatus of anxiety at its root.
Matthew 6:25–34 sits inside the Sermon on the Mount, the most concentrated body of Kingdom teaching in the entire New Testament. Everything Jesus says here describes what life looks like when a person is aligned with God’s original design: bearing His image, expressing His reign, flourishing within His purposes. This is not a collection of nice moral suggestions. This is a description of restored humanity. And in this particular section, Jesus takes on the single most common obstacle to living within that design: the fear that there will not be enough.
The real problem
Before we can hear what Jesus is actually saying, we need to identify the problem He is addressing, because it is not what most people assume.
The problem is not that people have material needs. Jesus acknowledges those needs openly: “Your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.” He does not pretend food, clothing, and shelter are irrelevant. He is not telling you to stop caring about whether you can pay the rent. If your fridge is empty and the bills are overdue, Jesus is not suggesting you smile serenely and pretend everything is fine. He knows you need these things. He says so explicitly.
Nor is the problem that people plan for the future. Planning is a function of binah, the discernment and understanding we explored yesterday. There is nothing in this passage that condemns responsible foresight. The birds Jesus mentions may not sow and reap, but they do build nests. The lilies do not toil, but they do grow. Activity is not the target here. Industry is not under indictment.
The problem Jesus identifies is something far more specific, and far more destructive. It is the mental posture in which the future becomes a source of dread rather than a sphere of trust. It is the inner habit of projecting yourself into a tomorrow that has not arrived, populating it with threats that have not materialised, and then living as though those imagined threats are already real. It is not planning. It is rehearsing disaster. And the difference between the two is the difference between a person using a map and a person being swallowed by one.
The question beneath the question
Jesus does not simply say “stop worrying.” He asks questions. And His questions are not rhetorical decoration. They are diagnostic. They are designed to surface the assumption that drives the anxiety so that it can be examined in the light.
“Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?” This is not a throwaway line. It is an invitation to examine what you believe life actually is. If life is reducible to material provision, if the purpose of your existence is simply to feed, clothe, and shelter yourself until you die, then anxiety about those things is perfectly rational. You should worry, because the supply is uncertain and the stakes are total. But if life is more than food, if you were designed for something larger than mere survival, if the purpose of your existence is to bear the image of God and express His reign on this earth, then material provision is real but it is not ultimate. It serves the larger purpose. It does not define it.
“Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?” This question is almost playful, and you can imagine the crowd smiling when He said it. Worry does not produce growth. Anxiety does not generate outcomes. The mental energy you spend rehearsing tomorrow’s crises does not add a single resource to your actual situation. It feels productive. That is the trick. The calculator in your head feels like it is doing important work, like the rehearsal is somehow preparing you for what is coming. But it is not. It is consuming energy that could be spent on the present, the only place where action is actually possible, and delivering nothing in return except fatigue and dread.
“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” Solomon’s wealth was legendary. The first-century Jewish audience would have immediately pictured the gold, the cedar, the imported fabrics, the court that dazzled the Queen of Sheba when she visited (1 Kings 10:4–5). And Jesus says a wildflower outstrips it all. Not because the wildflower worked harder. Not because the wildflower had a better strategy. But because the wildflower is simply being what it was designed to be, growing within the conditions its Creator established, and the result is a beauty that no human effort can replicate.
That is not a lesson about botany. It is a lesson about alignment. The lily flourishes because it has not tried to become something other than what it was designed to be. It has not leaned on its own understanding of how to survive. It has simply grown within the reality its Creator sustains, and that reality has proven more than sufficient.
The turn
And then Jesus makes His move. “But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.”
Most people hear “seek first the kingdom” and translate it as a transaction: put God first, and He will reward you with material provision. Spiritual obedience in, material blessing out. That reading turns the passage into a spiritual investment strategy, and it is wrong. It locates the change on God’s side, as though God is watching to see whether you prioritise Him and will then, in response, begin providing what He was not previously providing.
But God’s provision has never been absent. His sustaining character has always been operative, everywhere, in every life, at every moment. The birds of the air are not receiving special treatment because they performed a religious ritual. They are simply existing within the reality God sustains, and that reality meets their needs. They do not calculate the future. They do not rehearse scarcity. They live in the present, within the provision that is present, and it is enough.
“Seek first the kingdom of God” is not a transaction. It is a reorientation. The word “seek,” zeteo (ζητέω, meaning “to seek,” “to search for,” “to strive after,” or “to desire earnestly”), describes an active, deliberate, ongoing pursuit. And what is being pursued? The basileia (βασιλεία, meaning “kingdom,” “reign,” “rule,” or “dominion”) of God: not a distant location, not a future destination, but the present expression of God’s reign in your daily life. To seek first the kingdom is to orient your primary energy, your first attention, your foundational posture, toward alignment with God’s design, the design in which you bear His image, express His purposes, and flourish within His intentions. And “His righteousness,” dikaiosyne (δικαιοσύνη, meaning “righteousness,” “right relationship,” or “alignment with God’s standard”), describes the restored relationship from which all else flows.
When Jesus says “all these things shall be added to you,” He is not describing God switching on a supply line that was previously switched off. He is describing what the person who has reoriented discovers: that the material provision they were so anxious about was never the thing they needed to chase, because it was always embedded in the larger reality they had been overlooking. The person who seeks the kingdom first does not receive provision as a reward. They discover that provision was always part of the design they had been too distracted by anxiety to inhabit.
The word that changes everything
Now we arrive at the word that sits at the centre of this entire passage, the word Jesus uses three times and that most English translations render simply as “worry.” The Greek is merimnao (μεριμνάω, meaning “to be anxious,” “to be troubled with cares,” or “to be divided in mind”), from the noun merimna (μέριμνα, meaning “anxiety,” “care,” or “distraction”). And the etymology of this word reveals something striking.
Merimna is related to the verb merizo (μερίζω, meaning “to divide,” “to separate,” or “to distribute into parts”). The root idea is division. Partition. Fragmentation. When Jesus says “do not worry,” the word He uses does not primarily describe an emotion. It describes a divided mind. A mind that has been split between the present and the future, between what is real and what is imagined, between the life you are actually living and the life you are afraid you might have to live.
That is what worry actually is. It is not concern. Concern looks at a real situation and responds appropriately. Worry is the fragmentation of attention across timelines that do not yet exist. It is the mind attempting to live in two places at once: here, where you are, and there, where you fear you might be. And the result of that division is exactly what the word suggests: a fractured inner life. A heart pulled in competing directions. A person who is technically present but mentally elsewhere, rehearsing, calculating, bracing for impact against threats that may never arrive.
And Jesus’ command, “do not be merimnao,” is not a command to suppress an emotion. It is a command to stop dividing yourself. To stop fragmenting your attention between the present and the imagined future. To stop splitting your leb, your command centre, between the reality you are standing in and the catastrophe you are projecting onto a tomorrow that has not yet been given to you.
“Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.”
There is a rugged honesty in that closing line that I find deeply comforting, and if you are someone who has had smooth-talking preachers tell you that faith eliminates all difficulty, you should find it comforting too. Jesus does not say tomorrow will be trouble-free. He says today has enough trouble of its own. He is not painting a fantasy. He is saying: the trouble that belongs to today is real, and it is yours to face, but the trouble you are importing from an unlived tomorrow is borrowed weight, and it will crush you if you carry it. Face what is in front of you. Leave tomorrow where it is.
If you are carrying financial anxiety right now, and I suspect more people reading this are than would comfortably admit it, let me speak plainly. I am not going to tell you the bills are not real. They are real. The overdraft is real. The conversation with the bank that you have been avoiding is real. The tightness in your chest when you open the post is real. None of that is imaginary, and none of it is a sign that you lack faith.
But there is a difference between facing a real financial pressure in the present and mentally rehearsing six months of worst-case scenarios at three in the morning. The first is binah: understanding applied to a concrete situation, seeking solutions, making decisions. The second is merimna: a mind divided between the present and an unlived future, exhausting itself against threats that have not yet materialised. The first is wisdom. The second is fragmentation. And you cannot solve today’s problems while your mind is shattered across tomorrow’s.
The birds do not have savings accounts. The lilies do not run cash-flow projections. And yet they are provided for, not because they performed a spiritual transaction, but because they exist within a reality sustained by a God whose character has not shifted since the day He spoke the first feather and the first petal into being. You exist within the same reality. The same sustaining character encompasses your life this morning as encompassed the sparrow’s life yesterday and the lily’s life last spring. The question is not whether that character is present. It has always been present. The question is whether you are going to keep dividing yourself between the present where it operates and the imagined future where your anxiety insists it might not.
Seek the kingdom first. Not as a bargain. Not as a transaction with a guaranteed payout. But as a reorientation, a gathering of your divided mind back into the present, back into the reality where God’s reign is expressed and His design is operative. And discover, not because God has started doing something new, but because you have stopped fragmenting yourself away from what was always there, that there is enough. There has always been enough. And tomorrow, when it arrives, will have enough too, because the God who sustains today does not clock off at midnight.
Declaration
So this is where the calculating stops. Not because the numbers are not real, but because I have been running them in the wrong department. I have been asking my anxiety to do the work of wisdom, and it has delivered nothing but exhaustion and a tightness in my chest that was never part of the design. So today, I gather my divided mind. I pull my attention back from the six scenarios I was rehearsing at three this morning, none of which have happened, and I plant both feet in the only day I have actually been given. The God whose sustaining character was operating before my first bill arrived has not recused Himself from my financial reality. He has not stepped back. He has not looked at my bank balance and decided this one is beyond His scope. He is as present in the unpaid invoice as He is in the sunrise, and His design for my flourishing was never contingent upon my net worth. I am not going to pretend the pressure is not real. It is real, and I am facing it with open eyes. But I am done importing tomorrow’s hypothetical crises into today’s actual hours. Tomorrow will bring what tomorrow brings, and the God who holds today will hold that too, because holding is what He does, and He has never once taken a day off from doing it. My mind is no longer divided. My attention is no longer fragmented. I seek first. I seek now. And what I find, here, in the present, is more than sufficient.
Strength for the Day: A Year of Encouragement for the Soul © 2025 Promise Ave. All rights reserved.
