The One Asks to Be the Number One Priority
Most of us meet this line sung rather than read. It has a gentle tune, it turns up in services and on car radios, and it goes past sounding like good advice — the sort of thing you might try if the week allows. It is not advice. It is a claim about where everything else in your life goes.
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The verse, and its twin
But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.
— Matthew 6:33 (KJV)
Luke keeps the same instruction in a shorter form, in the middle of the same argument about worry:
But rather seek ye the kingdom of God; and all these things shall be added unto you.
— Luke 12:31 (KJV)
Matthew adds and his righteousness, which is worth noticing: the thing to be sought is not only a realm but a way of being right with the King who runs it. Neither version offers it as one option among several.
Is the kingdom now, or later, or both?
Both — and Luke answers it himself, one verse after telling us to seek it:
Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.
— Luke 12:32 (KJV)
That is a present gladness about a present gift. Yet the same Lord taught his disciples to pray thy kingdom come, which nobody prays about something already finished. So both are true at once: there is a King whose rule you can live under starting today, and a kingdom not yet arrived in full.
That matters for what seek first asks of you. If the kingdom were only later, seeking it first would mean waiting well — holding on, keeping your nose clean until the real thing arrives. Because it is also now, seeking it first means living under that rule in this week, with this calendar and this bank balance.
What “first” is not
Here is the way it quietly goes wrong. You hear seek ye first, and you take it on — genuinely, not cynically — as something to try. It might steady things. It might help. And underneath, without ever saying it out loud, you keep hold of one small right: the right to set it down again if a better offer comes along.
That is not putting God first. That is adding God to a list you still own. The list may be sincere, the entry may be near the top, and you are still the one holding the pen.
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
— Matthew 6:24 (KJV)
Notice that the problem there is not divided affection but divided service. Two masters is not a hard arrangement to manage; it is an impossible one to hold. One of them is going to be obeyed when they disagree, and whichever that is was the real master the whole time.
There is only one top spot
This is simple arithmetic before it is theology. If I treat myself as number one — my preferences, my comfort, my plans — then God is not number one, because the position is taken. If I treat other people as number one — their approval, their needs, their opinion of me — the same thing is true. A list can hold a great many things. It can only hold one of them first.
What makes this hard is that almost nothing in that paragraph is wicked. My plans are not sin. Other people’s needs are not sin; a good deal of Scripture is about attending to them. Comfort is not sin. These are mostly good things, and good things sitting in a chair that was never theirs are exactly what idols are made of. That is why the question is never is God important to me — nearly everyone says yes — but is anything more so.
Sought with the whole heart
Scripture is insistent on how this seeking is done, and the qualifier is always total:
And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.
— Jeremiah 29:13 (KJV)
Blessed are they that keep his testimonies, and that seek him with the whole heart.
— Psalm 119:2 (KJV)
Moses says the same to a nation that had not yet failed (if thou seek him with all thy heart and with all thy soul, Deuteronomy 4:29), and Chronicles records a generation that actually did it — they sought him with their whole desire; and he was found of them (2 Chronicles 15:15). All and whole are not decoration in these sentences. Half a heart is the thing being ruled out, over and over, by writers separated by centuries.
What is actually promised
The young lions do lack, and suffer hunger: but they that seek the LORD shall not want any good thing.
— Psalm 34:10 (KJV)
Read that one carefully, because it is easy to hear as more than it says. The promise is not that you will get everything you want; it is that you will not lack any good thing — which leaves the judgment of what is good where it has always been. The young lions are in the verse for a reason: strength and self-sufficiency run out, and this does not.
The same restraint sits inside Matthew 6. The all these things that get added are, in the surrounding verses, food and drink and clothing — provision, not luxury. And the line just before the famous one says your Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things already. So this is not a transaction where putting God first buys you the rest. It is the opposite of a transaction: the One asking to be first is not careless with you, and knew what you needed before you thought to rank Him.
The question
So the question the hymn leaves behind is not whether God matters to you. Almost everyone reading this would say that He does, and mean it. The question is whether anything else matters more — because there is only one first, and it is not a position He asks to share.