Last year I took a General Psychology class as a per-requisite for nursing school. One of the things discussed in the class was a thing called "Maslow's Hierarchy of needs," which is a theory of psychological development. If you want more info on it, you can check out Wikipedia's page here. Here is the gist of it: you can't progress to being motivated to growing in certain areas until you have already achieved other areas. For example, you're not really gonna care about how many friends you have until you have already obtained the basic needs of survival such as air, food, and water. Here is a visual diagram of the theory:
This concept is apparently used a lot in the nursing process because I have already heard it referred to several times in just a few weeks of classes. And it makes sense when you are prioritizing care for a patient. If someone can't breathe...you probably need to work on that before working on a weight loss plan!
But even back in General Psych., I remember thinking when I first saw this pyramid that in a sense, Christianity takes the pyramid and flips it completely on its head....or at least Jesus did that even if we Christians are a little slow to follow!
You'll notice that morality is at the top of the pyramid in the self-actualization stage and food and water are at the base. In other words, we need to worry about food and water before worrying about morality. But Jesus knocks the base completely out in Matthew 6 when he talks about worry. "Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes?" Well...from an evolutionary standpoint, then the answer is definitely "no." Nothing is more important that survival!
But what if this world isn't actually the most real reality?
Let me put it another way: which has more substance, a flower that blooms for a few days and then wilts away or an oak tree that can live hundreds of year? Obviously they are both real, but if you had to answer which is most real, which would you say? You would say the tree because the reality of the tree will last for hundreds more years than the reality of the flower that will be nothing more than a memory within a month or two at the most and unless it is immortalized in poetry or song or picture, that memory won't even be a memory within a year or two and definitely won't last more than a generation or three!
This world is very easy for us to see, touch, taste, smell, and feel. It feels very real to us. And it is real. But it's not all there is!!! In fact, comparatively speaking, the spiritual world is much more real because it will last, not just hundreds of years longer, but infinitely longer. And that is why life is more important than food and the body is more important than clothing. Because those things are only tools for what is truly important...the unseen things that will last forever!
We are going to look at these worries in a little more detail in the next weeks as we continue through the passage, but I want to start this week by encouraging you to think about how Jesus asks us to turn our concepts of "needs" upside down. When we teach our kids about the difference between needs and wants, we typically classify food and shelter as a need. After all, we need it to survive. But what if we as Christian parents are missing a golden opportunity to teach them from a very young age that even our "needs" like food and water and clothing are things that God will provide, but there are even more important things to our survival than those.
Do you remember the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4? Jesus stayed at the well because he was tired and his apostles went into town to get food. While they were gone was when Jesus had the incredible conversation about living water with the woman who had been married 5 times already. In that conversation he revealed to her that he was the Messiah. When the disciples came back with the food and urged him to eat. And do you know what his response was? "I have food to eat that you know nothing about" (John 4:32).
I'll let you draw your own conclusions about what exactly sustained Jesus' physical body. If you have an answer for that, I'd like to hear it. What I do know is that Jesus didn't worry about his food, he worried about the things that his body were actually purposed for...revealing to a sinful person who the Messiah was and offering living water.
May we have the same attitude and singularity of purpose in our lives and may our worry over those things that we have always viewed as "needs" take their rightful second place in our thoughts.
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