Jesus concludes His comparison of treasures in heaven and treasures on earth with a simple statement – you cannot serve God and wealth. He then goes on to challenge the pursuit of wealth by saying, “Do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” (Matthew 6:25) Interestingly, the life Jesus is speaking of is not the day-to-day life which would have been rendered in Greek as zoe (the totality of life) or perhaps even bios (physical life) but rather psyche (the soul, the inmost being of an individual.) Jesus is addressing the spiritual and eternal aspect of life found only in human beings. And what He is saying is to not worry about the things of this world but focus on the things of God.

The Greek word usually translated as being worried or anxious – merimnao – actually means, at its root, divided, distracted, or torn apart. And therein lie our anxious thoughts and worries. Worry is when our minds are torn apart, divided, and pulled in different directions by a situation or circumstance or thoughts that don’t align with our expectations. Lack of information, poor information, past experiences that have shaped our thinking processes, and a host of other variables cause our brains to kick into overdrive trying to make sense of the nonsense or, at the very minimum, look for the best path to mental and emotional peace and safety. However, peace is NOT the ultimate result of worry.

Peace comes when we focus totally and completely on Jesus. As we read in Isaiah 26:3, “You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on you,

because he trusts in you.” Jesus said it this way in Matthew 6:33, “But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”

So, how do you find peace in a world of worry? Follow with wisdom and understanding Matthew 6:33-34. First of all, focus your full and undivided attention on Jesus and His Kingdom through His righteousness and all of the things that might distract you will no longer be your concern, but God’s and He will provide the things you need.

Secondly, don’t be distracted by the things that are looming large on your horizon. They may or may not come, but that’s not your concern because

you’re not staring at them – you’re eyes are focused on Jesus, the author and finisher of your faith, and He will provide all you need today AND tomorrow.

Pip: From The Back Porch, where the Sermon on the Mount gets a hub-and-spoke diagram and a three-times-a-day prescription — welcome back.

Mara: Today Bob takes us deep into the Lord’s Prayer — what it actually is, where it sits in the Sermon on the Mount, and why the early church treated it as a daily discipline rather than a ceremonial recitation.

Pip: Let’s start with the prayer itself and what it was always meant to be.

Mara: The post opens with a placement question: where does this prayer live in the Sermon on the Mount, and why does that matter? The answer shapes everything that follows.

Pip: The post puts it plainly: “The Model Prayer is not only in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount — it is the hub of the sermon.” Every topic Jesus raises in the sermon connects back through this prayer.

Mara: So the upshot is that the prayer is not decorative — it is structural. Every life application in the sermon, the post argues, can only be realized through prayer. The prayer is the mechanism for actually living the sermon out.

Pip: Which reframes what most people think they’re doing when they recite it in a pew.

Mara: Exactly — and that tension is where the post spends real time. Jesus prefaces the prayer in Matthew 6:7 with a warning against “thoughtless repetition,” the kind of praying where volume substitutes for sincerity. The irony the post surfaces is that the prayer itself has become one of those repetitions.

Pip: The Didache gets a starring role here — a church handbook from roughly AD 80 to 120 that told members to pray the Lord’s Prayer three times a day, deliberately and reflectively.

Mara: And the post lists what that practice would accomplish each day: remembering who God is, what He wants, who meets our needs, how to relate to Him, how to relate to others, who the enemy is, who our defender is, and who receives glory in daily living.

Pip: That is a lot of theological freight for something most people get through in under thirty seconds.

Mara: The post also flags a textual detail worth knowing — the closing doxology, “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever,” does not appear in the oldest manuscripts of Matthew. Its first known appearance is in the Didache itself, which drew on 1 Chronicles 29:11. The post isn’t arguing against using it; it’s asking listeners to know what they’re saying and why.

Pip: And the postscript the study closes on is the forgiveness clause — pray it three times a day, and you cannot avoid the condition attached to it.

Mara: The post puts that condition with no softening: if you aren’t willing to forgive someone else, the prayer you’re asking God to answer is the one you’ve already violated. That’s the real reason the early church made this a daily practice — not ritual, but accountability.

Pip: Pray it carefully, and it changes what you can honestly ask for.

Mara: The thread running through all of this is that the prayer was never meant to be background noise — it was meant to be a daily reckoning with who God is and what that asks of you.

Pip: Pray it three times a day like it means something, and by sundown you’ve already been asked to forgive someone. More to come from the back porch.