Matthew 6:26 You Are Valuable to God
“Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” (NIV)
God knows each of us much more thoroughly and intimately than this mother duck knows her chicks. And yet these baby ducklings trust their mother enough to follow her to a place they have never been, that blue stuff called water. Have you ever wondered how a duckling feels the first time it steps off solid ground onto something that moves, water? Is the duckling concerned or excited? Whichever it is, he trusts momma enough to follow her. He instinctively knows that she will not lead him into any danger. Our trust of our Lord has to become instinctive, making us willing to follow Him wherever He leads, without any concern, but with excitement for the journey He has prepared for us. We have to know in our “knowers” that He will not lead us into any danger that He is unable to guide us through. Life with our Lord is not necessarily always calm and quiet. He can and He does lead us into places where we need to stretch our wings and fly for the first time, to get our feet wet in the sharing of the Gospel with a stranger or perhaps a friend that is not a churchgoer. We need to trust Him enough to know that He knows that our wings can hold us in flight, and that we can speak His Word to others. We will never know unless we trust Him when He presents opportunities that we might think of as challenges. He will never put us in a position where He does not “have our backs.”
The ducklings also know that their momma will do everything in her power to protect them if anything threatens them. Is not our God more powerful that a mother duck? Does He not care for us more than the mother duck cares for her chicks? We need to take encouragement and comfort in knowing that the creator of the universe knows our situation every moment of every day, that He is watching out for us constantly. He does ask that we ask Him for help when we need it. We need to acknowledge that we need His help, that we are dependent upon Him. He is eager to give us all the good things He has in store for us, but we have to realize that we need them, that He is the source, and that we have to make our requests to Him.