"What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but forfeits his life?" -Mt. 16:26

I had some thoughts on this verse this morning. It has been a struggle for me to amass hours at work lately. It's summer time and 30,000 students have left our small town; therefore, business is depleted. This is a bad thing seeing as how I am supposed to support a wife in the near future (12 days). The possibility of a second job is well within contemplation and my prayers have been filled with "Jesus, I trust in you to provide." And this is a good thing I suppose, for he does indeed promise to do so and by his grace he has given me faith in his promises.

However, I was thinking today about when he does provide, will it merely serve to meet my physical needs? Hopefully not, but I can see how I would let it do just that. God could provide in sovereign ways that astound me, yet I could reduce his actions to the base level of my met phyical needs, rather than seeing the provision and gazing upward into the eyes of my holy Creator and becoming enthralled with such a Being. If we reduce the provision of our God to its most base level, we miss out on meaning. And that is when the aforementioned verse applies I think: "What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and forfeits his life?" What good is it if our physical needs are met if we don't see meaning and love behind it? What good is the provision for our soul if we are not awestruck by the sovereignty of God in it? We must make the tranlsation from the physical level, to the spiritual in a very real and understandable way. Otherwise...I think we strip our soul of what it needs to survive.