God's Provision and Obedience

God hit me upside the head with something obvious the other night. I was hanging out with a friend who is a youth pastor and his sermon was on worry. They were going through Matthew 6, the well-known passage about how God cares for birds and flowers. Then verse 33 caught my eye. "Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well." In the past when I have heard that, I just understood it to mean that we should be more worried about pursuing God than we are about meeting our own needs. This time a new nuance struck me. This time I read it roughly as follows:

IF you seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, THEN all these things will be given to you as well.

This is not a reward thing. This is a logical thing. Why would God provide the resources, circumstances, health, etc. for me to accomplish things contrary to His will? He has given me free will, so I can shun His path, but if I do so I would be foolish indeed to expect His resources to redirect themselves to match my blind and swerving course. That is just one more reason to constantly be checking my course with God to make sure that I am not wandering astray. And if I am not receiving provision, my first reaction should be to try to discover God's will. Sometimes I will find that I have strayed. Perhaps sometimes, like Job, I will discover that God has a greater purpose I can not understand, and His will is for me to rely solely on His grace in a time of severe hardship so that He may be glorified. Whatever the case, God cares more for me than for the birds, and He will provide daily sustenance for his child. As Solomon prayed, may God never give me too much, lest I turn away from Him, or too little, lest I be tempted to steal and ruin His name. Give me only as much as I need.