One of the biggest challenges we face as Christians today is becoming complacent or comfortable with our passions and sins, justifying or explaining them away as ‘necessary,’ logical, or ‘no big deal.’ What is behind such complacency varies: laziness, fear, lack of faith or lack of hope that God can change us for the better or that we can muster the effort to cooperate with the Holy Spirit and learn new ways of being and healing. Making it even more challenging, there’s also a prevalent Deism rampant in our culture that’s all but done away with the very notion of sin and its sad consequences on our lives.
Whatever our excuses or fears, whatever the prevailing heresy being taught around us, God calls us to entrust ourselves and all our ‘handicaps’ to Him, to have faith that He can and will work through our desire to cooperate with His healing work in our lives. And through this faith, we’re called today to have hope—hope for the change God would work in us, hope to grow in the knowledge and love of God and be deified so we can live this life to the fullest and be received into God’s eternal Kingdom, which is never an automatic, but, rather, a gift of God.
St. Paul reminds us today that we’re justified by such faith. This faith is life-saving for us because it gives us access into the deifying, life-changing, transformative grace of God, that empowers us to put our trust in God’s work in our lives and, as St. Paul reminds us elsewhere (Phil. 2:12), “work out our salvation with fear and trembling”—fear and trembling because we come to realize just what’s at stake in terms of our healing and salvation.
In this context, St. Paul also reminds us that in our efforts to live out the Gospel, we will certainly encounter, as he puts it, “various trials.” Don’t we know it! It seems that as soon as we start praying for more patience, we’re bombarded by all sorts of problems that test that patience. As soon as we begin to plead with God for more faith, we’re hit by trials that really challenge that faith. But we cannot grow in learning these virtues if they are not tested and refined. St. James reminds us in his Epistle, that “the testing of your faith works patience.” Many, if not most, of our sins can be traced to lack of faith in God’s power, love, healing, and salvation. Pride, the mother of all vices, has its root in this lack of faith in God, which is the opposite of putting our trust in God, relying on Him, confiding in Him, availing ourselves of Him, crying out to Him—all of which grows us in such faith and love of God.
We further experience and grow in faith by putting into practice the disciplines and frame of mind and heart that we need to persevere in Christ. Sadly though, we can also choose to shut out this work of God or put God on the periphery, preferring to put our trust in ourselves, or, as Christ warns today, “in mammon,” in our material resources, in reliance on one’s self, to surround ourselves with such temporal ‘security’ and forget our need for growth in unity with God. He never forces Himself on anyone; Instead, He invites us into is a synergistic relationship and communion with the life that He alone is.
So, if your hope is in God that He will deify you and continue to make you into the man or woman of God He’s created you to be, then, if this is your hope—what you desire above all else—then pray fervently, struggle to follow through, persevere in cooperating with the work of the Holy Spirit and entrusting yourself fully, 100 percent, to Him, His Church, His use of you in the world in such great need around us. St. Paul assures us today that if this is our hope it will “not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit…”
St. Paul’s words are an echo to our Lord Jesus Christ’s own words imparted to us today through His Holy Gospel, “Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Matt. 6:33). No, God keeps His word and He will never disappoint.
So ask yourself, in all honesty, is this really my aim, do I really desire salvation and eternal life with God? Do I want God, His peace, and participation in His life more than anything else or am I content to give God just the ‘left overs’ of myself, my time, my talents, my resources? In this sense, we cannot just be resolved to give a tithe of ourselves to God. If we are to grow in faith, we come to recognize that all we are and all we have entrusted to us is from God and finds its meaning and proper place in God, and, therefore, must be submitted to God.
Our temptation is to worry, to think that we can procure everything we ‘need’ in life on our own, to be independent, self-sufficient, “balanced” (not giving God too much of our time or energy), but this is false, illusory, and is certainly not Christianity, that is, the life in Christ God. For this reason, He admonishes us today, saying, “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?” As a Christian, we put our trust in God, not in the world, not in ourselves. We recognize that Christ is our life, the life of all.
Christ says further: “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.” No, double-mindedness will not grow us in communion or get us into heaven. As St. James says, the double-minded man is like “a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind… unstable in all his ways.” Such a man, he concludes, won’t receive anything from God.
St. Paul also warns us that conformity to the culture and its priorities and ideas through the pursuit of our own comfort and false sense of ‘security’ is, in reality, enslavement to ‘mammon.’ The alternative is our transformation through a life lived for and in Christ, which, by necessity means being open to continued growth in faith, entrusting ourselves more and more to His mercy, and not relying on ourselves or our perceived worldly success.
The world, our culture, will pull us in its own direction, may, in subtle ways, to try and convince us we don’t need God, or, that in our striving after mammon, and giving in to our desires and passions, and all our material provisions, we are somehow ‘safe’ or ‘prudent’. This is the lie fed to us by a materialist and secular culture, by the devil himself. Christ reminds us today, that “after all these things the Gentiles seek.” Instead, He urges us to “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness” and promises us that, “all these things” we need will be “added to you.”
And so, here’s our choice: we can either respond to our anxieties, our problems, our lack of faith, thinking that if we hold onto our time, our gifts, our pride, our material resources more tightly, then we’re more powerful, then we’re in control, or, we can realize that such projections are just a hollow façade, that truly we each one need God, that we need to put our trust, our faith and hope, in Him, who alone is eternal, who alone is worthy of our trust.
If we choose God, stepping forward in faith, we learn to submit all of ourselves, all we are and all we have to Him and His will. The choice is ours; what Christ makes clear today is that we cannot serve both Him and mammon.
When we choose to interject faith in Christ into our struggles, our fears, our desire for financial security or control issues, then they and we can become a means for our further growth in faith and God returns to us His spiritual blessings, which are beyond anything this world can give. In the midst of our trials and struggles to live this life for God and not for mammon, God fills us with His promise, hope, and peace, which as St. Paul assures us, “does not disappoint.”
So choose God, put your faith into practice: pray, repent, entrust yourself to His loving kingdness, open your hand to give back to God from what He’s entrusted and freely given you in His mercy. Step forward in faith and put your trust in Him. If you do so, He will free you from dependence on this world, from enslavement to mammon, from the despondency of trusting in yourself, from all that’s temporal and passing away, and He will grow you in the eternal life that He alone is—the well-spring of great joy, love, and peace. So, brethren, “seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”
Fr. Robert Miclean
Holy Archangels Orthodox Church
June 17, 2018 “Seek First the Kingdom of God…”
Epistle: Romans 5:1-10
Gospel: Matthew 6:22-33
