Rabbi Schneider - How to Experience so Much More!
I'm gonna be looking with you today, beloved one, at a very well known scripture, Matthew 6:33, but maybe you haven't heard somebody sing it in a little bit. So let me sing it with you. Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you. Allelujah. Well, I think it started off a little off key, but I think we found it in a few seconds there. I remember that chorus back in the 1980s where believe it or not, it was revolutionary when churches started singing choruses, because back in the late 1970s, early 1980s, there was such a strong church culture that the only acceptable instruments were the piano and you had to only sing hymns.
So when the church started introducing some of these scriptural choruses, it was a big deal and a lot of congregations really resisted them. Well, let's get back to the meaning of the text, seek first, His kingdom and His righteousness and all these things will be added unto you. Obviously the meaning seems plain and clear that if we seek the Lord first, He's gonna bring other things into our life. But what does it mean to seek His kingdom first and His righteousness first? The word righteousness, it oftentimes carries with it kind of a moralistic quality.
We think about, you know, being moral, a righteous person and that's true, but being righteous is most fundamentally just being rightly aligned with God, to live in harmony, to have our heart reflect His heart, to think like He thinks. And as we get closer to Him, by becoming more like Him, we experience his presence, His fellowship and the intimacy of Jesus, more and more satisfyingly in our lives till we begin to drink Jesus said of that river of living water, that the deepest longings of our heart slowly are fulfilled just in our relationship with Him.
As we discover how close to us He is, who He is to us and who we are to Him. And the icing on the cake is that when we put Him first and seek him first for His sake alone, to know Him, to love Him, to please Him, He brings so many other blessings into our life. So this is Rabbi Schneider saying to you, God bless you and may the promise in this scripture be your experience more and more every day.