"Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all." - Matthew 6:31-32
How does that verse land when you look in your refrigerator and see only that seven-year-old box of baking soda and a moldy slice of pizza? Or when you check the pantry and come face-to-face with a cockroach that just shrugs in dismay? If we’re being honest, verses like this can make the Bible feel out of touch.
It’s estimated that about 18 million US households were food-insecure at some point during 2023.[1] If we look at the global population, some 673 million people will go to bed hungry tonight.[2] Statistics like this might lead us to wonder if Jesus isn’t just a bit insensitive to the plight of many in our world.
But if I could be so blunt, the reality is that the Bible isn’t as out of touch with modern-day hunger, it’s more that we are. The words of the Bible are set in a context in which food scarcity was woven into the fabric of their everyday existence. When Jesus spoke these words, He was speaking to people who likely had it worse than we do.
That doesn’t yet absolve Him from the charge of insensitivity, but it should make us pause on claims that He’s out of touch. A further look at the food scarcity in the Bible will confirm this.
Food Scarcity in the Bible
Food scarcity is not an occasional crisis in the Bible. It was part of the everyday landscape of human life. The Bible isn’t set in a time with stocked pantries, savings accounts, or guaranteed provision. In an agrarian society, the people were often vulnerable. They lived at the mercy of weather, harvests, illness, and political powers that determined whether they’d get a meal or not. Hunger is a recurring reality that shaped them.
This isn’t just an Old Testament, walking in the wilderness thing, either. In reality, most early Christians were poor. Many were day laborers, widows, slaves, or people pushed to the margins of society. When Jesus taught people to pray, “give us this day our daily bread,” they didn’t have to turn it into a metaphor. It was a real concern. You can see how normal food scarcity is across both Testaments:
-Famine repeatedly drives biblical action: Abraham goes to Egypt because of famine (Genesis 12:10); Isaac faces the same reality (Genesis 26:1); Jacob’s family survives only because grain is available in Egypt (Genesis 42–47).
-Israel’s wilderness life is defined by hunger and daily dependence, where food arrives one day at a time and cannot be stockpiled (Exodus 16:1–36).
-Ruth survives by gleaning leftover grain, a provision explicitly designed for the poor and vulnerable (Ruth 2).
-Elijah is sustained during drought, first by ravens and then by a widow whose own food supply is nearly gone (1 Kings 17:1–16).
-Jesus encounters hungry crowds repeatedly and treats hunger as a legitimate need, not a distraction from spiritual matters (Matthew 14:13–21; Matthew 15:32–39).
-The early church organizes itself around shared provision so that no one is left without basic necessities (Acts 2:44–45; Acts 4:32–35).
-Paul knows hunger personally, listing it alongside other hardships of ministry rather than as an anomaly (2 Corinthians 11:27; Philippians 4:12).
Jesus isn’t speaking like a king whose definition of hunger is that the local steakhouse ran out of prime rib and he’ll have to scratch by on the ribeye. This is a King who “has no place to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20). Jesus and the disciples aren’t distant observers talking about food scarcity. They are living it.
While that might free him from the charge of being out of touch, does it make Him insensitive? How can He tell hungry people not to be anxious about their hunger or to not worry about where they’ll get their next meal? I think before answering this, we need to briefly talk about the difference between fear and anxiety.
The Difference between Fear and Anxiety
Let’s imagine for a moment that you’re going for a happy little walk in the woods and come upon a hungry grizzly bear. What is going to happen within your body? If you’re a normal human being, every signal of fear fires at once. Your heart rate spikes. Your breathing shortens. Adrenaline floods your system. You are, in a word, afraid. Does this betray a lack of faith?
No. This shows that your body is working properly. God has given us the gift of fear to signal danger. Fear can recognize danger and name vulnerability. Fear might keep you from eating 7 slices of pizza, because you’re not sure what tomorrow will look like. And fear can motivate you to take steps to ensure that you’ll have more food tomorrow. In that sense, fear can be a good thing.
It’s important to make this distinction, because it’s possible that what you’re saying is “how do I keep from having feelings of fear” when I don’t know where my next meal will come from. And it’s possible that this is a legit fear. And you ought to be working and planning to ensure that you don’t starve.
Anxiety, which Jesus addresses, is different. Anxiety is what happens when fear settles in and begins to organize how you see the world. It’s fear that has been given interpretive authority. Fear deals with what is, and anxiety deals with what could be. Anxiety tells you that you’re all alone and that the future is narrowed by what you can control. That is what Jesus confronts in a passage like this.
When Jesus tells people not to be anxious about what they will eat, he’s not telling people not to make considerations for how they’ll feed themselves or their family later in the day. He’s encouraging people to view God as the one who defines reality. He knows that anxiety will take a real threat and turn it into a totalizing story. And those stories usually have God as distant, unreliable, or absent.
This distinction also keeps Jesus’ teaching from becoming cruel. He is not commanding emotional numbness or unrealistic calm. He is calling people who are afraid to remain open and trusting in God. Trust God with your need, rather than your own abilities. Give your ache to God. That’s what Jesus is telling them.
But he also acknowledges that anxiety is a real thing. What can you do to battle anxiety when you aren’t sure where your next meal comes from? Here are a few tips.
4 Biblical Truths to Cling to When Battling Worry
Thankfully, Jesus gives us a bit of help in Matthew 6. He tells us to “look at the birds”. What do we learn from the birds?
1. Live with real dependence.
There aren’t bird warehouses. They are marked by daily vulnerability. And yet, we don’t see a bunch of dead birds on the ground. God is providing for them.
2. Remain active.
Birds gather, search, and work. Jesus isn’t commending passivity or irresponsibility. The birds don’t sit still and wait for food to drop in their mouths (unless they are baby birds). Trust doesn’t eliminate effort.
3. Remember what has happened.
If you see a two-year-old bird, that means that they’ve been able to find food for over 700 days. That history says something. The same goes for you. You have a history of God providing for you, whether you see it or not. Rest in God’s provision. That is what Jesus is telling His disciples. If God has a history of taking care of birds, He’s going to come through for you, too.
4. Trust in God's sovereign ability to sustain.
Birds aren’t in control, and they don’t pretend to be. They don’t manage weather, ecosystems, or the schedule of worms. But they don’t have to be in control to be provided for. The same is true for you.
I want to make one final point here about birds. But I want to pull it out of those bullet points because it’s kind of a sensitive one. Birds do die. They starve in droughts, freeze in storms, and get eaten by predators. Even in Jesus’ own teaching, creation is not a Disney cartoon where nothing bad ever happens; sparrows do fall. Yet he still says, “not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care,” and then adds, “you are of more value than many sparrows.”
Jesus is saying that even the death of a bird is part of a larger story. It’s not really the end of the story. The death of a bird doesn’t get the last word, but Jesus, who makes all things right, is the One who gets the last word. He’s saying you are much more valuable than sparrows. And so if their life has meaning, even if it ends in death, so too does yours.
When you’re wrapped up in that larger story, we realize we’re not just talking about food scarcity but life and death and eternity. God has solved, in Christ, our greatest problem—separation from God. How will He not give us all things? And that’s true even if you and I die from hunger.
But the more likely scenario is that up until the moment when God calls you home, you’re going to experience a thousand mercies. And you’re going to experience God somehow miraculously providing food for you—maybe just enough to get you by until tomorrow, when “manna” will appear again. Your security isn’t in having a barn or a fridge full of goodies. It’s found in the hands of God. And that’s a great place to rest…even if you’re stomach is growling today.
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-us/key-statistics-graphics
[2] https://www.actionagainsthunger.org/the-hunger-crisis/world-hunger-facts/
Photo Credit: ©Unsplash/ Matthew Osborn
Mike Leake is husband to Nikki and father to Isaiah and Hannah. He is also the lead pastor at Calvary of Neosho, MO. Mike is the author of Torn to Heal and Jesus Is All You Need. His writing home is https://mikeleake.net and you can connect with him on Twitter @mikeleake. Mike has a new writing project at Proverbs4Today.
