Consider the Lilies

Consider the Lilies

A botanist named Clara spent her career studying wildflowers in Mediterranean regions — the same habitat Jesus would have known. She wrote: 'The anemone of the Galilee hillside is genuinely more beautiful than anything I have seen in any garden. It grows in thin, rocky soil with very little water and no cultivation. It simply opens what it was made to be, completely unself-conscious, for the three days it lives.' She had been a skeptic for thirty years. Reading this verse in the field changed something. 'An unsentimental fact,' she said. 'The lily achieves its glory by being completely, naturally itself. No striving. Just becoming.'

Jesus uses the wildflower as evidence for a claim about the Father's care. Solomon's glory — the most expensive, most impressive human display — is not as glorious as what God makes freely, without human effort, in a field no one visits. The implication is not that human effort is wrong, but that anxiety about provision is faithless: if God clothes the grass with this kind of beauty — grass that today is here and tomorrow is thrown into the fire — how much more will He clothe you? The word 'consider' means to learn thoroughly, to study carefully. Jesus is not saying 'don't worry'; He's saying 'study the flowers until your heart receives what your eyes can see: the Father provides.' Go outside today. Consider a flower.