Matthew 6:34 — the problem cut back to the size of one day
34Therefore, do not be anxious about tomorrow; for the future day will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its evil.”
The last line is the most honest in the passage: every day has its own evil. Jesus does not promise good days, only that they arrive one at a time.
Short answer
Matthew 6:34 ends the discourse on anxiety with a question of scale: do not carry tomorrow today. The sentence does not forbid planning — it forbids moving into a day that has not arrived. And it closes by conceding that each day already comes with trouble enough.
- Written by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 2 min read
Anxiety is almost never about today. It is about the sum of all the days that have not arrived, lived through at once. This verse is about exactly that arithmetic.
Where this verse appears
It is the last verse of the block on worry, which began with the command not to fret about food and clothing and passed through the birds and the lilies.
The previous verse had said what comes first: the kingdom and its justice. This one says in what unit of time that gets done.
The audience is poor Galileans, and the tomorrow that worried them was not a career. It was harvest, illness and tax.
What it says
The command has a precise target: the next day. It is not a prohibition on forecasting, saving or organising — Scripture praises foresight elsewhere. What is forbidden is suffering today a pain whose date has not come.
The middle image in this edition is unusual and worth pausing on. Rather than saying tomorrow will take care of itself, it says the coming day will do its own worrying. The anxiety is not abolished; it is handed to the day that owns it. Your share of anxiety, on this reading, is strictly the amount today came with.
The final line is the most striking, and it is rarely quoted alongside. Jesus does not say the days will be good. He says each has its own evil, and that this is already enough. It is a realistic concession, and it is what keeps the verse from sounding like optimism.
What to do with it today
The practice it suggests is easy to describe and hard to do: when a worry shows up, ask whether it is a task for today. If it is, do it. If it is not, the verse is giving you explicit permission to postpone the suffering.
At night, when the arithmetic usually gets worse, it works better still as a question: what exactly can I do about this before sleeping? Almost always the answer is nothing, and the verse authorises closing the day with the matter unresolved.
A prayer to carry with you
Lord, I keep living days that have not arrived. Bring me back to the size of today, and keep tomorrow with you while I sleep. Amen.