So one of the things is your money will always have a message. It'll be generous or stingy. If you've got stingy money it means money rules you, and you're a stingy person inside and money is fleeing from you and you've never got enough. But if you're generous in your heart your money will be generous. I'm not saying be extravagant or anything like that, but there'll be a generosity to people that'll come in every part of your life and that reflects that you're serving God, or that you've got free of serving money. There's a lot of stuff on that. I don't want to go too far into that. Anyway let's go back a bit further. So Jesus said don't be anxious or don't be wound up. Don't worry or be anxious about daily needs. Now everyone worries about the same things. They worry about food, they worry about their clothes, they worry about where they're going to live, the worry about next week. They worry about basically daily living, and Jesus said the world does that. Don't do that as a believer.
You say well I need all those things. Yeah, but He says don't worry about them. Don't make that the focus of your life and attention. The word worry means to be divided to distracted, so you're anxious and you can't focus and enjoy your life, so He says don't be uptight and worried. What is the key to not being uptight and worried? The key is set your priority on something else; then when you set your priority on something else not only are you not worried but actually the other things start to come into your life. See what He's saying? So He says seek first the kingdom of God. So that word seek, pursue after or make a diligent effort [to get to - for 00.39.03] the kingdom of God. So what is that kingdom and what is this righteousness? I'll explain it more at another time, but let me just give you this. The kingdom of God is all about a king and what He rules over, so to seek the kingdom of God is to seek to know God's values, God's ways, God's protocols, and to connect with Him in such a way that you purpose in your heart you're going to make this the way you'll run your life.
So God's got something in His word about how marriages work, how families work, how your finances work, how relationships work. The Bible is full of instructions of how the kingdom operates, see? And so to seek first the kingdom of God means you make it a priority to deepen your walk with God, and apply His will to your life so you can be an influence on others. See the problem with religion is people talk but they don't actually live it, but with the kingdom you make it a priority to allow God's rule, allow the ways of God to become your ways of living. And then you've got power in your life to help others. See, quite simple isn't it? So like the principles of God are really simple, like for example in the kingdom it says love. It says forgive, it says walk humbly, it says - there's a whole heap of things it tells us to do. So it says first of all place your first priority on pursuing knowing God and applying His ways to every area of your life.
Now the dilemma comes if we have a division between our Sunday life and then all the rest of our week. Then you become religious. Any person who divides up their life Sunday is God day, God/church stuff, and the rest of the week I just do other stuff; they are actually religious. Why are they religious? Because they haven't really understood it's never about coming into a meeting. It's all about the kingdom coming into the earth, and that's a daily pursuit; daily prayer, daily in the word of God, daily looking to apply God's word to my life. Okay, here's the second one. Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, so what does it mean to seek His righteousness? I'll just put a very simple definition, because when you look at it you think oh, I've got to be a do-gooder and got to be so good, and it's so hard to be good. No, it's not really - it's more than that. It says His righteousness. Now religion will always be working hard to try and get God to accept me. That's why the majority of religious people never feel they're good enough for God, see?