Behold the Fowls of the Air, and Also the Truck

I asked a man once whether he had prayed about his truck and he laughed at me for about ten seconds before he realized I was serious.

Then he stopped laughing, because he did the arithmetic that everybody does when the question actually lands.

That truck was how he got to work. Work was how the household ate. He had two hundred and ninety thousand miles on it and a noise it had been making since spring that he had decided not to think about. If that truck stopped, his whole week stopped, and about six other people's weeks would have stopped with it.

And he had never once said a word to God about it. He had prayed about his marriage and his boy and his mother's health, and he had never prayed about the single object the entire arrangement was balanced on.

He said, and I have never forgotten it: it feels like praying about a hammer.

Everybody has one. It is a truck or a knee or a laptop or a boiler or a phone, and it is the thing that if it fails on Tuesday, nothing else in the week happens. And in most people's praying it does not exist.

Look at what He points at

When Jesus teaches about worry, He does not go abstract. He points at things a person can see from where they are sitting.

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? (Matthew 6:26, King James Version)

Birds. And a few verses later, grass and flowers and a king's clothing. He is standing on a hillside pointing at the scenery and using it as the argument.

That is worth noticing on its own. He does not begin with a doctrine of providence. He begins with things a person can point at, and He builds the doctrine out of them.

And the people He was talking to were not comfortable. That hillside was full of day laborers and fishermen and people who owned very little, and He picked His examples for them rather than for an audience with a storeroom.

You are exactly the kind of person that teaching was aimed at, and the examples were chosen for somebody counting rather than for somebody comfortable, and Matthew 6 lists food and drink and clothing rather than anything abstract. The same Spirit is the one who lands an argument built for that hillside on a yard beside a workshop.

And then, at the end of that passage, He says something that settles the whole question of whether ordinary items are a legitimate subject.

For your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. (Matthew 6:32)

All these things. In context, that is food and drink and clothing, which are the three most ordinary categories a first century person had. He does not say your Father knows your heart. He says He knows about your needs, plural, physical, itemized.

You have a Father who is described as knowing about the items rather than only about the feelings, and Matthew 6 lists food and drink and clothing by name, and it is the Spirit who keeps the argument physical rather than letting it drift into abstraction.

The floating axe head

There is a small story in Kings that almost nobody preaches, and it is the strangest argument I know for this.

A group of men are cutting timber by a river. One of them is using a borrowed axe. The head comes off and goes into the water.

But as one was felling a beam, the axe head fell into the water: and he cried, and said, Alas, master! for it was borrowed. (2 Kings 6:5)

Alas, master, for it was borrowed. That is the entire crisis. A man has lost a tool that was not his and cannot replace it, and he says so out loud, and the prophet does something about it.

That story does nothing for anybody's theology of providence. It has no moral. It is in the Bible because it happened, and what it shows is that a lost piece of iron was a thing worth crying out about, and that God did not consider the subject beneath Him.

You are not below His notice with an object, and the Bible contains an entire episode about somebody's lost tool (2 Kings 6:5), and the Spirit is the one who keeps the ordinary from being ruled out of a person's praying.

What this is not

I want to draw a line clearly, because this is the exact place where teaching about provision goes bad.

Nothing here says that praying about the truck keeps the truck running. It does not work that way, and a truck with two hundred and ninety thousand miles on it is going to do what a truck like that does, and when it fails that will say nothing about the man or about God.

And nothing here ties a prayer to a supply. There is no arrangement in which asking correctly produces money, and this site will never suggest one, and anybody who does is selling something.

What is on the table is the smaller and truer thing: the object is allowed in the conversation. That is all. It stops being a thing a person carries alone and becomes a thing they have mentioned.

You are not being handed a mechanism, and the promise attached to Matthew 6 is about a Father who knows rather than about an outcome He owes (Matthew 6:32). The Spirit is the one who is with a person on the day the thing does fail.