“No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and wealth” (Matthew 6:24). That’s what Jesus taught, and you might think we would have gotten it by now. But we are slow to learn: we go on worrying about whether we will have enough.

So Jesus went on to talk about worry. “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear” (6:25). And yet worry is one of the things we do best, isn’t it?
There are many things in this world that you can not change, Jesus said, no matter how much you worry at them (6:27). And so he gave us this command, which is really quite simple and straightforward: “Do not worry” (6:31). Yet we are reluctant to take that command seriously.

Deciding that we will serve God with full loyalty means that we will no longer worry our lives with the quest for wealth. It means that we will believe that Jesus was right when he said, “Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness,” confident that the Lord who knows what we need will take care of those needs, and all these other things will be taken care of, too (6:32-33).

And we do believe Jesus was right about that, don’t we?

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Ah Lord God: we confess that we are worriers. It is hard for us to let go of those worries. Yet our hearts’ desire is to trust in you. You are the one who knows our needs. We set ourselves to follow you, setting aside the worry, setting aside the quest for wealth: confident that you will care for us, each step of the way.