Daily Manna · Day 208 · July 27
Better Than the Birds
“Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?”
Jesus asks a question in this verse, and then He does not answer it.
He says, "Behold the fowls of the air." He is not praising laziness, because a bird works hard for every seed and is busy from first light. He names three particular jobs that birds do not do: "they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns." Sowing and reaping are farming. Gathering into barns is storing up, and that one is aimed at the people listening, because earlier in the same sermon He has told them, "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth." A barn is a picture of trying to make the future safe ahead of time. "Yet your heavenly Father feedeth them." The food still comes through the bird's work, since seed does not simply appear in a nest. What is missing from the picture is the storehouse.
Then He asks, "Are ye not much better than they?" And He leaves it there. He does not supply the yes, which is unusual in an argument. That means only you can finish the sentence, perhaps sitting in a parked car, looking over your own numbers.
That is the truth of it, and it is less comfortable than the pleasant reading. Your worth is put to you here as a question, and you are the one who must answer it. The test is whether you can say yes and then live as though it were true before the money comes in. And you do not answer alone. Later in the same passage Jesus adds, "your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things."
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 208 is Even as Ye Do (1 Thessalonians 5:11).