FAITH & DAILY LIFE · NOVEMBER 8, 2026
Tomorrow Has Quite an Appetite
On treasure, trust, and the day we have actually been given
Primary reading: Matthew 6, New American Standard Bible 1995, with particular attention to verses 19–34.
Tomorrow has quite an appetite. It can consume an evening without having arrived. We give it a few minutes of sensible consideration, and presently it has eaten our attention at dinner, our patience with the people we love, and a considerable portion of the night. For something that does not yet exist as a day we can inhabit, it is remarkably expensive.
We seldom intend to be so generous. Usually we begin with something reasonable. There is a bill to pay, a decision to make, a conversation whose outcome we cannot predict. We consider the possibilities because some consideration is required. Then, almost without noticing, we pass from arranging what can be arranged to demanding an assurance that cannot be had. We have finished making the plan. We have not finished trying to make the future promise to behave.
Jesus addresses this familiar captivity near the end of Matthew 6. But He does not begin where we might expect, with advice about achieving a calmer state of mind. Before He speaks about tomorrow, He speaks about treasure. Before He speaks about treasure, He speaks about the Father. The order is worth attending to, because we are liable to reach for His words about worry while leaving behind the account of life that makes them intelligible.
The chapter begins among people doing respectable religious things. They give, pray, and fast. Jesus exposes the possibility that even these activities may be arranged around the admiration of an audience. A gift can relieve someone else’s need and simultaneously serve the giver’s appetite for recognition. A prayer can be addressed to God while being performed for everyone within earshot. The outward action does not, by itself, disclose whose approval governs the heart.
Through these scenes runs the presence of the Father, who sees without needing a performance and knows without requiring an explanation. When Jesus teaches His disciples to pray, He brings their ordinary bodily needs into that relationship. They are to ask for bread. The Father’s knowledge of their need is a reason for confidence in asking, not a reason to pretend they have outgrown hunger.
This is the Father who appears again when Jesus turns to food, clothing, and worry. He has not suddenly entered the chapter to provide a comforting conclusion. He has been there throughout. The question developing around Him is whether life can actually be lived in His presence: generosity without an audience, prayer without display, possessions without servitude, and a future without the frantic conviction that we must sustain it ourselves.
Possessions are a particularly persuasive rival. They have the advantage of being visible, countable, and occasionally available at a favorable rate of interest. Jesus names their vulnerability to decay and theft, but our confidence in them often survives our agreement with His warning. We know perfectly well that money cannot secure everything. We nevertheless find ourselves behaving as though a little more of it might.
The difficulty is partly that money really can do useful things. It pays the bill, repairs the roof, and buys the groceries. From these genuine successes we are tempted to promote it into a much larger office. Having helped us through one uncertainty, it is asked to abolish uncertainty altogether. Achievement undergoes a similar promotion. Having opened a door, it is asked to establish our worth. Neither appointment is fair to the candidate.
Jesus connects treasure with the heart. We are drawn toward what we prize, and our lives begin to take their shape around protecting it. His image of the eye and the light or darkness of the whole person deepens the concern. In this setting, the way we see cannot be separated from the way we live. An outlook governed by possessions can make generosity look reckless and endless accumulation look sensible. We may congratulate ourselves on clear judgment while our loyalties quietly determine what we are able to see.
Then Jesus makes the rivalry explicit: “You cannot serve God and wealth” (Matthew 6:24, NASB 1995). We would prefer to divide the duties. Wealth could attend to practical security while God supervised our religious interests. But a master does not remain politely within an assigned department. Eventually a choice arises in which obedience looks costly, and the arrangement reveals who has been giving the orders.
“For this reason” (Matthew 6:25, NASB 1995), Jesus goes on to speak about worry. The connection does not make every anxious feeling evidence of greed. His listeners are concerned with food and clothing, the necessities of life. It does mean that His invitation to trust belongs to His teaching about allegiance. We cannot understand the peace He offers while treating the Father as a useful supplement to whatever we have chosen as our actual security.
The birds and flowers enter the argument here. Their place in the passage is more substantial than that of agreeable scenery. Jesus directs His hearers toward creatures sustained and clothed by God, then reasons from that care to the Father’s care for them. Their need has not escaped His notice. Their lives have value to Him.
It would be odd to turn the birds into an argument for abandoning work. Jesus is not offering an employment policy. He is challenging the conviction that our efforts are the only care operating in the world. We may work diligently and still receive our lives as gifts. We may make provision without mistaking ourselves for providence.
That mistake is easy to make because worry often feels like a form of diligence. We remain mentally on duty. We review the danger again, as though keeping it before us might prevent it from advancing. Eventually, to cease worrying feels almost disloyal to the people and responsibilities we care about. We suspect that a quiet evening would be evidence that we have failed to appreciate the seriousness of the situation.
Jesus asks what worry can add to life. The question is disarming because worry makes such large demands while possessing so little power. Concern may lead us to prepare a meal, make a telephone call, or ask for help. Repeatedly imagining the worst may leave us exhausted without making anyone safer. Our fatigue testifies to the cost of the exercise. It does not establish its usefulness.
Yet Jesus gives more than an argument from futility. He directs His hearers toward the Father’s kingdom and righteousness, with the assurance that their material needs are known and will be provided for. We ought to let the promise retain its force. He is speaking about food and clothing, not merely a consoling attitude toward their absence.
We must also hear Him within the sermon He is actually giving. These are disciples whom He has already spoken of as facing persecution. When the sermon reaches its conclusion, the house built on rock encounters a storm. And this chapter itself closes by acknowledging the trouble that belongs to each day. Trust in the Father cannot therefore mean possession of a trouble-free future. Jesus gives His followers reason to entrust themselves to God without handing them a timetable explaining how every hardship will be met.
That leaves us with less permission to judge another person’s suffering than we might suppose. An empty cupboard does not authorize a verdict on its owner’s faith. In a chapter that begins with giving to the poor, such a verdict would be particularly strange. The neighbor’s need may be an occasion for our generosity rather than our explanation. Nor does the passage supply a clinical account of anxiety, or warrant reducing persistent and disabling symptoms to a simple failure of belief. Receiving appropriate help can be part of the care a person needs.
What Jesus does take from us is the supposed necessity of admitting the whole imagined future into the present. “Each day has enough trouble of its own” (Matthew 6:34, NASB 1995). There is a bracing kindness in that admission. He does not soothe us with the claim that nothing difficult will happen. He recognizes the weight of the day we are living.
Some of today’s work will concern tomorrow. A parent saves for a child’s needs. A worker prepares for an uncertain season. Someone makes an appointment for a problem that should not be neglected. These actions can belong to faithfulness in the present. A plan can be made, a sum calculated, a decision taken. But none of them can extract from the future a guarantee that nothing will be asked of us beyond our present resources.
Perhaps that is why the return to today can feel so small, even disappointing. After the grand exertion of trying to secure an entire life, there is only a particular piece of work, a person to listen to, an honest word to speak. There is bread to receive and, sometimes, bread to share. The scale seems inadequate until we remember that this is the scale on which obedience becomes possible. We love actual people in actual moments. We cannot practice tomorrow’s faithfulness in advance, though we can miss today’s while trying.
The Father who knows our needs is the same Father to whom Jesus teaches us to bring them. We are permitted to ask. We are permitted to work. And when the work available to us has been done, we are permitted to be creatures whose lives depend upon a care they did not invent and cannot replace.
Tomorrow may still be hungry. For now, someone is sitting across the table. The meal is here. So is the day.
Sources and interpretive limits
This essay reads Matthew 6 in full, especially verses 19–34, within its teaching about the Father, prayer, generosity, and allegiance. The wider sermon supplies essential context: Matthew 5:1–12 includes persecution, and Matthew 7:24–27 depicts storms striking both houses.
The reflections on planning, security, and present responsibility are applications, not additional words attributed to Jesus. The precise nuance of the eye imagery in Matthew 6:22–23 remains beyond this essay’s scope. The essay does not attempt a complete account of providence, suffering, or clinical anxiety. All direct Scripture quotations are from NASB 1995; the analogies are original prose.
Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. www.Lockman.org