What it costs to put the kingdom before the plan

Seek first His kingdom sounds like advice about priorities. It turns out to be about who decides.

I make plans for a living. Law, finance, business, the digital work I do now. All of it is planning. As an advocate I planned arguments. As an entrepreneur I planned companies. A good plan has a goal, a timeline, and a name at the top. For most of my life the name at the top of mine was my own.

So when I first took Matthew 6:33 seriously, I read it the way a planner would. Put God at the top of the list. Pray before the board meeting. Give something away. Then carry on with the plan as before, now with a blessing on it. That is not what the verse says, and it took a long collapse for me to find that out.

What Jesus was actually talking about

The verse comes at the end of a passage about worry. Jesus has just told a crowd of ordinary people not to worry about food, drink or clothes, which for most of them were not small concerns. Look at the birds, He says. Look at the flowers. Then this:

Two church words need unpacking. The kingdom is wherever God is king, wherever what He wants actually gets done. Righteousness is living rightly with Him, His way rather than mine. So seek first His kingdom and His righteousness means: before anything else, go after what He wants done, and go after doing it His way. The all these things that follow are the things the crowd was worried about. Food. Drink. Clothes. What you need. Not what you planned.

It is not about priorities. It is about who decides.

A priority list still has me at the desk deciding the order. Seeking first His kingdom takes me out of that chair. The question stops being what do I want and how do I get it, and becomes what does He want and what is my part in it. That is a different question, and it produces a different life.

I did not get here by being wise. I got here because everything I had planned came down, and I was left holding a very good plan with nothing underneath it. I have written about that in The story. What I learned in the rubble is that a plan with my name at the top was never load bearing, however well I drew it.

What it costs

The credit, first. When the plan is His, the results are His, and there is no quiet corner where I get to think it was me. For a man who built his life on being clever, that costs more than money.

The timeline, second. He is not slow, but He is not on my schedule either. I have watched Him let a thing sit for years that I would have finished in a month, and I have watched Him do in a day what I could not do in a decade. The kingdom moves at His pace. Seeking it first means giving up the right to hurry Him.

The plan itself, third. When God called Abraham He told him to go to the land I will show you. Not the land I have shown you. Abraham left without the address. That is what putting the kingdom first looks like in practice: saying yes before you have seen the details, because you trust the One who has.

I still make plans. I no longer make them alone.

It is my job and I am good at it. I just hold the plans loosely enough now that He can take the pen, and I have stopped being surprised when He does.

What you get

Here is the part I can say with some authority, because I have sat at both tables. I have eaten with billionaires and I have gone hungry. Neither one held me. All these things will be given to you as well is not a promise of wealth. It is a promise that the Father who knows what you need will see to it, and that you can stop running after it. The running is what He is offering to take. I did not know how tired I was until He did.

It is a decision I have to make more than once a day. Some mornings I wake up with my name back at the top of the page and have to hand the pen over again. He has never once refused to take it.

This week

Take the one plan that matters most to you right now. Sit with it and ask Him one question: is this Yours, or mine? Do not answer for Him. Wait, then write down what you hear. Then read Matthew 6:25 to 34, slowly, and notice who is doing the deciding in it.