"But seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness, and all these thing will be given to you as well."

In one of my quiet times, I happened to stumble into this passage telling us to seek God first before all else. My first thought was that I had already mastered this, so let's move on to something else. I thought of myself as God was first, family second, and work and everything else third. But then, something struck me to analyze my life to prove I was right. As I began to think about where I spent most of my time, it began to make me uncomfortable. I asked myself such daring questions as - What consumes most of my thoughts? On what do I spend most of my free time? Then I got to the real hard question; if someone spent the day with me, what would they say was the real and true purpose in my life? 

This caused me to question why Jesus had placed this in his message in the first place. I went back up a few verses and found that Jesus was talking about the treasures we build up in our life. The summary of Jesus' comments over several verses was to challenge us to store up treasures in Heaven rather than the treasures here on earth. It seems that our treasures are determined by what lies deep within our hearts. Jesus then takes a microscopic look deep within our hearts as to what may be the real treasures holding first place in our life. 

Our lives are composed primarily of three compartments - our business, personal, and spiritual. For most of us, our business life takes up the majority of our time. We spend 40 - 60 hours a week concentrating on work. The balance of our time is consumed with family, personal, and spiritual. What Jesus was saying is that the spiritual should be above all other areas of our life. But, how can we place the spiritual above an area that consumes most of our time and thoughts? We can thus conclude that we divide our life into a secular life and a sacred life. But as we do this, have we not just violated what Jesus is trying to teach us? Do we not end up with one foot in the secular and one foot in the sacred? If we are truly seeking God first, this life style would have to lead to a life of confusion, tension and frustration. We may not recognize it, but according to what Jesus is teaching, we are living a life out of kilter.        

My assumption that I was in line with the teaching of Jesus began to fade away. As I continued to read further, I noticed that it was only a few verses between Jesus condemnation of us worrying over material things and His command for us to seek Him first. That was where I made my second assumption mistake. I figured I could make this same jump in the same short time it took Jesus to get to the command. But then I began to look at what Jesus was telling us through this entire chapter and that short jump has now become a long journey - a journey with many lessons, a lot of heart searching, repentance, and at the same time, a new peace and joy as my journey leads me closer to the goal. All in the effort of moving the secular life to the sacred life.