When something’s keeping you up at night—an unexpected bill, a looming deadline, a need you can’t see your way through—it’s easy to wonder whether those worries are too ordinary to bring to God. Jesus is clear in the next part of the Lord’s Prayer that simply isn’t the case.
We can do the right thing and still face an uncomfortable question: are we doing it because God called us, or because we want people to notice? In Matthew 6, Jesus assumes his people will give to those in need, then warns that even this good act can become a way of practicing righteousness “to be seen by others.”
We think status, heritage, and credentials make us a somebody or a nobody, yet those are not what God values. In Matthew 8 a Gentile centurion—nobody by race—approaches Jesus with a suffering servant, forcing the question of what actually makes anyone able to approach God’s kingdom.
When wise men arrive in Jerusalem asking where to find the one born king of the Jews, Matthew 2 says Herod was deeply disturbed—and all Jerusalem with him. It's a strange reaction to the fulfillment of a centuries-old promise, and it looks a lot like what we do when God's work threatens the status and stability we've been quietly building our joy around.
Even after turning our lives over to Christ, we can still pray as though God were there to serve our wants and protect our plans. In Matthew 7, Jesus says, “Ask, seek, and knock,” raising a searching question for daily prayer: When we belong to Him, what should we be asking our Father to give?
In our sinful human nature we’re all hypocrites—quick to see the masks on everyone else, almost never on ourselves. Jesus meets that very tendency in Matthew 7:12 with a rule most people already know by heart: whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them.
We’ve all wanted to write that resignation letter—to let the world know the hurt isn’t our fault. Joseph faces that exact urge in Matthew 1, betrayed and confused after he finds out Mary, the woman he is betrothed to, is pregnant — forced to choose between saying his peace and keeping it.
Most of us have never gone without a meal, yet Jesus in Matthew 5:6 calls us to feel that ravenous, stomach-aching hunger—not for food, but for righteousness. Do we feel that craving?
How you respond to Jesus depends entirely on whether you’ve truly grasped who He is—and in John 6, as Jesus walks across the sea to His disciples in the dark, He makes that question impossible to dodge.
Jesus warns in Matthew 7 that the most dangerous kind of false teaching comes from one dressed like a sheep. By the time you realize there’s a wolf underneath, it’s frighteningly close. How do we keep alert when such sounds deceptively good?
