Seeking What Lasts Beyond the Spotlight
But seek first God’s Kingdom, and his righteousness; and all these things will be given to you as well.
There's a quiet moment before any of us know who we're going to become. A talent show, a diagnosis, a marriage on the edge—these are the hinges on which a life turns, and we rarely see them coming. Montell Jordan's story carries that same thread: a kid who never expected to be noticed, let alone to spend decades chasing a calling that would take him through fame, cancer, and the hard work of helping other marriages survive what his own barely did.
Jesus' words about seeking God's Kingdom first aren't a rejection of ambition or gifting. Jordan didn't bury his talent; he played it in front of the whole school and it changed how people saw him. But the trajectory of his life suggests that the hit single and the Grammy nomination were never the real substance of what he was building. Somewhere between the charts and the chemo, the pursuit shifted. What endured wasn't the applause—it was the calling underneath it.
That's the quiet invitation in this verse. Success, recognition, even survival itself can become the things we chase directly, hoping they'll hand us meaning. But meaning doesn't seem to work that way. It tends to arrive as a byproduct of a deeper pursuit—one aimed at God's purposes rather than our own applause. Jordan's path from piano bench to pulpit to marriage ministry reads less like a plan he engineered and more like a life that kept reorienting itself toward something unseen at the time.
There's something steadying in that for anyone mid-chapter in their own story, unsure what the diagnosis or the hard season or the unexpected turn is building toward. The invitation isn't to abandon the gifts or the dreams, but to hold them loosely enough that they can be shaped by something larger. If you want to sit with how that unfolded in one marriage, through fame and illness and the long work of staying together, RELEVANT Magazine's full conversation with Montell and Kristin Jordan, "This Is How They Do It Now," is worth the read.
Read the source: RELEVANT Magazine →