Our Lord points out the utter unreasonableness from His standpoint of being so anxious over the means of living. Jesus is not saying that the man who takes thought for nothing is blessed – that man is a fool. Jesus taught that a disciple has to make his relationship to God the dominating concentration of his life, and to be carefully careless about every thing else in comparison to that. Jesus is saying – “Don’t make the ruling factor of your life what you shall eat and what you shall drink, but be concentrated absolutely on God.”

-Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest

I’m not as into him now as I was for a couple of decades. I read that devotional at least three times through. I have one tattered copy and another newer one. I also read his other two that were put together. This is my favorite quote of his.

I care too much about many things I shouldn’t care about. So I say that I should really care less.

Jesus does not say, Blessed is the one who does not think about anything–that person is a fool. He says be carefully careless about everything save one thing–your relationship to God. That means we have to be studiously careful that we are careless about how we stand to self-interest, to food, to clothes, for the one reason only: that we are set on minding our relationship to God…

Do not make the ruling factor of your life what you shall eat, or what you shall drink, but make zealous concentration on God the one point of your life.

Matthew 6:33-34

Oswald Chambers sums up what the Sermon on the Mount is all about.

“He came to make us what He teaches we should be.”

The teaching of the Sermon on the Mount produces despair in the natural man–the very thing Jesus meant it to do. As long as we have a self-righteous, conceited notion that we can carry out Our Lord’s teaching, God will allow us to go on until we break our ignorance over some obstacle, then we are willing to come to Him as paupers and receive from Him. ‘Blessed are the paupers in spirit,’ that is the first principle in the Kingdom of God. The bedrock in Jesus Christ’s kingdom is poverty, not possession; not decisions for Jesus Christ, but a sense of absolute futility–I cannot begin to do it. Then Jesus says–Blessed are you. That is the entrance, and it does take us a long while to believe we are poor!

Matthew 5:3