Jesus Worldview: Enough Matthew 6:19-34

Jesus Worldview: Enough
Matthew 6:19-34
Rev. Dr. Rhonda Abbott Blevins
July 26, 2026

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness! “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 God and wealth. “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by worrying can add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the gentiles who seek all these things, and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.

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I bring you greetings from the 76th Annual Conference of the International Council of Community Churches (ICCC). The ICCC is a small network of churches—part of the National Council of Churches and World Council of Churches—through which Chapel by the Sea connects to the larger body of Christ. My youngest son and I spent the week with about 100 other ICCC delegates from churches across the USA in our nation’s capital, Washington D.C.

The theme for this year’s conference was “Rediscovering the Values of Jesus,” which sounds a lot like the theme for my summer preaching series, “Jesus Worldview.” The two-day Bible study intensive led by another council minister, Rev. Rock Fremont, was a deep dive into the beatitudes, which we explored a few weeks ago together in our sermon series. It seems like if you want to understand the values of Jesus—if you want to find a place in scripture that quickly distills Jesus’ worldview—the beatitudes of Matthew 5 is a great place to start.

The beatitudes of Matthew 5 is part of Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount,” what Matthew gives to us as Jesus’ inaugural sermon at the beginning of his ministry. With this sermon, he’s setting the stage for the rest of his ministry. He’s telling his followers what’s most important to him. And it’s upside-down in so many ways. Instead of hell fire, it’s a blessing. Instead of fear, it’s love. Instead of condemnation, it’s blessing after blessing after blessing. Can you remember a few? (Blessed are the ________.)

Well in today’s scripture lesson, we’re in the very next chapter of Matthew—Matthew 6. This is still a part of what we call the “Sermon on the Mount.” And Jesus turns his attention to a subject that he talks about a lot in the Gospels, more than just about any other subject. Can you guess what that subject is? Money.

Now don’t worry, Jesus didn’t ask for money in his sermon, and neither am I (to the chagrin of our church treasurer I’m sure!) Instead, Jesus is challenging his listeners’ worldview. You see, apparently things haven’t changed that much in the 2,000 years since Jesus delivered his “Sermon on the Mount.” If we read between the lines of his sermon, we can discern that Jesus’ followers thought about money . . . a lot. That hasn’t changed so much, has it?

Now, how many of you would say that you would like to have less money? Raise your hand. I don’t think I’ve ever met a single person who wished to have less money. Now, I’ve known some ascetic types who have chosen a simple life, “off the grid” if you will, with few needs and not driven by financial gain. But even those folks would happily take a “Benjamin Franklin” off your hands if you offered it.

You know they say money talks, but the only thing mine says is “goodbye.”
Did you know that my firstborn has gone off to college?
Yes, and I feel a great emptiness in my life.
Specifically, in my checking account.

So Jesus begins his money talk this way:

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 God and wealth.

Let’s read between the lines again, shall we? Apparently, his audience that day had an issue with two masters, didn’t they? God and wealth. And Jesus told them they couldn’t be double minded, serving both.

The thing is, this wasn’t a particularly wealthy crowd. This crowd that Jesus observed serving wealth—in the chapter before we hear him blessing them as the meek, the poor in spirit, the grieving. This wasn’t a crowd full of Elon Musks, ok? No, these were men who were worried about where their next meal was going to come from. These were women worried about how they were going to clothe their kids. These were people wondering if they would have enough to drink tomorrow. These weren’t folks with a robust 401k and money to spare. No, these listeners of Jesus’ first sermon in the Gospel of Matthew lived hand to mouth. It was a worry-filled, anxious existence. Maybe, like me, you’ve been there. Maybe you’re there now. Not sure where your rent money is going to come from or if you’ll life will last longer than your retirement account.

I wonder: how does it land when you hear Jesus say, “do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.”

I’ve got to admit, my inclination is to say, “Yeah, right Jesus. You didn’t have a mortgage payment and a kid in college. Don’t worry, you say? Ha!” Does my response sound familiar to you?

But what if Jesus’ words here are less admonition and more invitation? What if Jesus is inviting his followers into a peace that the world doesn’t know and can’t understand? What if Jesus is pointing his followers to a life marked by faith—the kind of faith that trusts that God will provide for all of our needs?

Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by worrying can add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?

What if these words from Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount” is an invitation into a worldview marked by abundance rather than the scarcity worldview our culture hands us? How free might we if we could muster the kind of faith that trusts that we’ll have what we need for tomorrow, and all of our tomorrows? How liberating might that be? Here are five practical ways our lives could improve if we could simply follow Jesus’ advice in this passage and stop worrying about money—if we could let go of the scarcity thinking that plagues our culture:

1. We would stop making decisions out of fear. So many of the choices we make—in our careers, our relationships, our daily lives—are driven not by what we genuinely want or value, but by what we’re afraid of losing. When we operate from scarcity, fear becomes the primary decision-maker. A worldview of abundance frees us to ask a different question: not “what might I lose?” but “what does love require of me here?” That is an entirely different way to move through the world.

2. WE would be genuinely, freely generous. Scarcity thinking makes generosity feel dangerous—as if every dollar given away is a dollar subtracted from your security. Abundance thinking reframes giving entirely. When we trust that we have enough— and that God’s provision doesn’t run out—we can give without doing the math first. We can tip extravagantly, give spontaneously, and share without calculating what’s left. Generosity stops feeling like sacrifice and starts feeling like participation in something larger than ourselves.

3. We would stop competing with the people around us. Scarcity thinking turns neighbors into rivals: if they have more, somehow we have less. It’s the zero-sum game our culture plays constantly, and it is exhausting. An abundance worldview recognizes that someone else’s success, happiness, or blessing doesn’t diminish ours. We can celebrate other people’s good fortune without the quiet sting of comparison. We can cheer loudly for someone else’s raise, someone else’s beautiful home, someone else’s thriving kids—because their abundance and ours are not in competition.

4. We would sleep better. This is not a metaphor. Scarcity thinking keeps us awake—running the numbers, rehearsing the worst-case scenarios, catastrophizing about futures that haven’t arrived yet. Jesus asked: “Which of you by worrying can add a single hour to your span of life?” The answer, of course, is none of us. Worry has never once solved a financial problem, extended a life, or improved a situation. But it has stolen countless nights of sleep from people who had, by any honest measure, enough. Trusting that tomorrow’s needs will be met by tomorrow’s provision is not naivety—it is the deeply countercultural practice of resting in what is, rather than dreading what might be.

5. We would know who we actually are apart from what we own. Scarcity thinking ties our identity to our net worth. When we have enough, we feel like enough. When we don’t, we feel like we are not enough. The result is that our sense of self rises and falls with our bank balance—which means we are never truly secure, because there is always the possibility of losing what currently defines us. A Jesus Worldview decouples identity from accumulation entirely. We are not what we own. We are not our portfolio, our square footage, our wardrobe, or our retirement account. We are, as Jesus reminded this crowd of hand-to-mouth listeners, of more value than the birds of the air and the lilies of the field—and those, he pointed out, are doing just fine.

That’s just five ways our lives might improve if we could abandon scarcity thinking, I’m sure there are more. If we truly want the freedom, the liberation that comes with the Jesus Worldview on wealth and money, we’ll work to cede our scarcity mentality and embrace the abundance that Jesus invites us to consider, how the birds of the air and the lilies of the field always have enough.

And that’s the title of today’s message: “Enough.”

If this idea of “enough” would take root in the hearts of all people, think about how many of the world’s problems we could solve. Mahatma Ghandi supposedly once said, “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.”

So how do we get there? How do we actually move from scarcity thinking to the abundance mindset Jesus is describing? Here are a few practical starting points:

Practice gratitude before you practice anything else. Not the greeting-card kind . . . the deliberate, daily discipline of naming what you already have before you reach for what you don’t. Before you open your bank app in the morning, try naming three things in your immediate field of vision that represent provision. The coffee in your hand. The roof over your head. The person sleeping down the hall. Gratitude is the gateway drug to abundance thinking. It interrupts the scarcity narrative before it gets going.

Do a generosity experiment. Pick one week and give something away every single day: money, time, attention, a meal, a compliment, a parking spot. Nothing dramatic. Just one thing, each day, that costs you something. Notice what happens in you. Most people who try this report the same surprising result: they feel richer at the end of the week, not poorer. Generosity has a way of persuading us, from the inside, that we have more than enough.

Interrupt the comparison loop. When you notice the sting of comparison rising: when someone else’s vacation photos or new car or thriving career triggers that familiar pinch of not-enough, try naming it out loud to yourself. “That's scarcity thinking.” Not as self-condemnation, but as recognition. You can’t change what you can’t name. And once you name it, you can choose a different response: “I’m glad for them. And I have enough.”

Learn to notice. This is the simplest and perhaps the deepest practice of all. Jesus pointed to birds and flowers—the most ordinary things in the world—and said: look. Just look. Pay attention. The provision is already all around you. The beauty is already here. The enough-ness is already present. We miss it not because it isn’t there, but because we are so busy cataloguing what we lack that we forget to look at what we have.

These are four practical ways to follow Jesus’ advice, to give up worry and embrace the life abundant he came to offer us. You don’t have to practice all four, but I challenge you to practice at least one of these throughout the week and see how your life opens up.

I close with a poem entitled “Abundance,” by a poet named Amy Schmidt. It’s short. But I want you to really hear it.

It’s impossible to be lonely
when you’re zesting an orange.
Scrape the soft rind once
and the whole room
fills with fruit.
Look around: you have
more than enough.
Always have.
You just didn’t notice
until now

You just didn’t notice until now.

That is what Jesus was saying to that crowd on the hillside two thousand years ago. Not: you are wrong to have needs. Not: stop caring about your life. But: look around. Look at the birds. Look at the lilies. Look at what is already here, already provided, already enough.

The abundance has always been present.
The provision has always been real.
The God who clothes the grass of the field
has not forgotten your name.

You just didn’t notice until now.

May we notice.

In this world, may we be like Jesus.

Amen.

Matthew 6:26-30

“Abundance” by Amy Schmidt

Carla CreeganJuly 29, 2026