Jesus wanted people to take him seriously. His primary message was about the coming of God’s kingdom, and his Sermon on the Mount describes the nature of God’s kingdom, which turns the way that the world has operated on its head. The kingdom alters how we look at the value of other people and how we look at ourselves—children of the Father in heaven. A constant challenge of discipleship is to not exchange the message of the kingdom (the message of Jesus) for something lesser, even something as wonderful as “future life with God.”
In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice chases after a mysterious white rabbit, eventually leading her to a long, slow fall down a rabbit hole. Her tumble finally comes to an end when she lands in a small room with multiple locked doors and no easy way out. For many ministry leaders, discipleship is the proverbial white rabbit. And the quest to demystify and define discipleship feels like a freefall down a rabbit hole.1
Despite countless books, articles, and blog posts on the topic, the chase for clarity often seems to yield more questions than answers. What did Jesus mean when he called us to be disciples? What does it look like to seek the kingdom above all else? How much are we to concern ourselves with the right now as opposed to the not yet?
Is there a key that unlocks the door to the mystery?
Seek First the Kingdom
In Matthew 6:33, as part of Jesus’ famous Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told his followers to “seek first the kingdom of God” and all these other things (immediate needs like food, clothing and shelter) will be “given to you as well.”
With just one sentence, Jesus completely disrupts our conventional understanding of things. What we often consider to be an eternal reward at the end of days—the kingdom of God—becomes top priority right now. The promise of fulfillment of immediate physical needs is moved to the category of not yet. Being a disciple of Jesus seems to call us to a new kind of living in a topsy-turvy world where the first becomes last and the last becomes first. Why would Jesus call us to such an upside-down kind of living?
Meeting Needs Through the Kingdom
In his now famous “Hierarchy of Needs,” renowned psychologist, Abraham Maslow, lists basic physiological needs as the most foundational and therefore the most urgent.2 It’s not too difficult to understand why. If we don’t have our basic needs for survival, it’s difficult to think of anything else. As the popular saying goes, hungry bellies can’t hear the gospel. Meeting immediate needs for food, water, and shelter seems to be something a good disciple would prioritize.
Not only that, ignoring physical needs to prioritize spiritual ones can lead to a kind of gnostic evangelism wherein we disconnect kingdom living from an embodied way of life. Jesus is the intersection of both the human and the divine, which simultaneously dignifies both. Any form of discipleship that completely ignores the body seems to undermine the lengths Jesus went to integrate both the material and the spiritual worlds. We can also observe in his ministry of healing, touching, speaking, and feeding his honor of human existence and its need for both physical and spiritual sustenance.
So perhaps Jesus isn’t pitting the right now and the not yet against each other nearly as much as it might seem upon first glance. He does not tell his disciples to completely disregard earthly, material, or physical needs. Rather, he seems to be telling his disciples to prioritize the kingdom (seek first) as a means by which those physical needs might be met (and these things will be added). It’s not a matter of one replacing the other but a matter of which is most foundational.
The Kingdom Requires Transformation
It may be that those who are most kingdom-minded are the ones most likely to create a world in which physical needs are met. To be a disciple of Jesus is to apprentice him in his way of life. The Bible gives us good reason to believe this will require a heart transformation if we are to be successful. Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”
To follow Jesus means to become like Jesus. It means to become a new kind of human who sees what Jesus sees and loves what Jesus loves. In the full context of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus emphasizes this internal heart change over and above mere external performance.
In Matthew 5:20, he is emphatic—“For I tell you, unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” The righteousness Jesus is emphasizing here is an authentic living out of everything he’s laid out in the rest of his teachings.
To find our way to the kingdom requires our transformation.
The Frustrations of Kingdom Transformation
For Alice to escape the locked room she finds herself in, she must enter through a tiny door that leads to a beautiful garden. A bottle of magic potion shrinks her just enough to fit, but frustratingly, she is then too small to reach the key on the table. A special cake helps her grow large again, but it works too well, and Alice becomes even larger than her original size. This keeps her from fitting through the door, even though she can now reach the key. Eventually, she sits down and cries in despair. The deluge of water created by her oversized tears eventually carries Alice away to where she needs to go.
While Lewis Carroll did not set out to create a commentary on Christian discipleship, the parallels aren’t difficult to draw. To find our way to the kingdom requires our transformation. And that transformation will often be frustrating and difficult. But this kind of transformation leads us to the kingdom.
Disciples of Jesus who seek the kingdom first will be peacemakers, poor in spirit, merciful, and full of compassion. They will often feel heartbroken over their own sinful condition and the broken conditions of the world. Yet, the upside-down promise of Jesus is that these are the kinds of qualities that eradicate much of what leads to material lack in the world in the first place. Human greed, selfishness, and competition is what broke us. The way of Jesus helps put things back together. We need not despair. We need only to let our grief carry us.
Qualitatively Different
To be a disciple of Jesus is to keep our eyes on the garden and to submit to true heart change. As we follow Jesus, we will become qualitatively different. And this difference will change the world around us. The focus on the not yet will yield fruit—even in the right now. The kingdom of heaven will touch the kingdom of earth. Perhaps C.S. Lewis says it best in Mere Christianity:
“If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the NEXT. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven.”3
- Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (New York: Dover Publications, 1993). ↩︎
- Charlie Huntington, “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: Definition, Examples & Explanation,” The Berkeley Well-Being Institute, accessed November 19, 2025, https://www.berkeleywellbeing.com/maslows-hierarchy-of-needs.html. ↩︎
- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952), 42. ↩︎
