The disciples of Jesus have an access to God like the access He had with His heavenly father. He shares His birthright of prayer with those who belong to Him. Jesus shows us that in Christian prayer, our Heavenly Father hears, He answers, and He gives according to that which He knows to be truly good and according to His good purposes of His kingdom. May the Lord teach us to pray even as He prayed and may we exercise this right of prayer with earnestness to advance our Father’s purposes on earth. May His kingdom come and His will be done!

Leading others to Christ inevitably means confronting their sin and their need of the Savior. But there are many pitfalls in bringing correction to another sinner. The Lord gives us the wisdom to navigate this difficult task of exposing the darkness of this dying world. He teaches us the principles of reciprocation, double standards, and discernment. May the Lord enable us to be better instruments in His skillful hands to save souls and lead the converted to greater faithfulness and usefulness to Him.

What hinders us from serving the Lord as we should? Jesus pins down the common cause of this compromise: worry. What enables disciples of Christ to serve God heartily and seek His kingdom and righteousness first is our heavenly Father’s infinite love and care for us, His own spiritual sons. Thus, Jesus encourages us to look at nature, know we are not pagans, and see tomorrow as God’s business, not ours, so that our hearts would be unshackled from the worries of the world and be free to serve our heavenly Father as we should.

We are to live the Christian life with heaven in our hearts. We are to leverage all that the Lord has entrusted to us for eternity. We are to do so because our hearts follow our treasures. The Lord in this passage wises us up to the detriment and foolishness of storing up treasures on earth. He also prescribes for us the regimen for a healthy heart that invests toward eternity. May our hearts brim over with the joy and the wonder of heaven and our glorious God (the centerpiece of heaven), and may we, thus, earnestly use all He’s given us to bear much fruit for His name’s sake.

At the core of the Christian faith is a reconciled relationship with God. This means that for all who have truly received Jesus as Savior and Lord, there is a living relationship with God as their heavenly Father. Jesus addresses the hypocrisy of His day that revealed the tragic absence of this crucial core of Christian spirituality which the Jews of His day lacked. May the Holy Spirit keep us from the same hypocrisy and instead enable us to be a church of the children of God who know to connect with our heavenly Father in a true spiritual relationship with Him through Christ.

Jesus sees Christian integrity as simple and plain. Let your statement be yes yes or no no. The reason why people find this simple approach to honest challenging and unrealistic is that they have lost sight of why we exist and for what purpose God provided redemption for His people. Moreover, Jesus also reveals to us the deep spiritual issue that exists in the matter of dishonesty. He speaks the truth to us so that we would be absolutely sure that we are fighting on the right side of the spiritual warfare and that we are indeed advancing the cause of the Lord, the God of truth, not the cause of Satan, the father of lies. May the Lord evermore grow us in Christian integrity as we learn from Him and His book what it means to be honest men and women of God.