Matthew 6:34 closes Jesus's teaching on anxiety with a sentence of remarkable compression: "Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take of the things for itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." The verse ends the longest passage in the Sermon on the Mount about a single topic, the relationship between human beings and material worry. Jesus has argued that God cares for birds and flowers without their anxious self-provision; that seeking the kingdom is the organizing priority that makes other provisions possible; and now, finally, that even granting the reality of daily trouble, there is no point in pre-loading tomorrow's suffering onto today.
The phrase "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof" is a particularly memorable formulation because of its slightly paradoxical structure. "Sufficient" usually means enough of something good; here it means enough of trouble. The verse acknowledges that each day contains genuine difficulty, genuine evil in the sense of harm or misfortune, without minimizing this or promising it away. The counsel is not that life is painless but that today's difficulties are exactly enough to engage today with; adding tomorrow's anticipated difficulties is both unnecessary and harmful.
The phrase entered English as a proverbial statement about limiting one's anxiety to the present rather than borrowing trouble from the future. "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof" is used to counsel against rumination about future possibilities that have not yet occurred, against the kind of anticipatory anxiety that inflicts the suffering of imagined future disasters long before they may arrive, and against the planning that extends so far ahead that it prevents genuine engagement with what is actually present.
This counsel intersects with a significant contemporary psychological concern: the management of anxiety about the future. Cognitive behavioral therapy identifies rumination and anticipatory anxiety as major contributors to depression and anxiety disorders; mindfulness-based approaches counsel attention to the present moment rather than preoccupation with the future. The biblical verse expresses in a single sentence what these therapeutic traditions elaborate in considerable clinical detail: tomorrow's problems should be engaged when they arrive, not before.
The verse does not counsel against planning, prudence, or foresight. The Sermon on the Mount does not describe an irresponsible attitude toward the future; rather, it describes a reorientation of the motivational structure of life from anxious self-provision to trusting engagement with present reality. Planning can be done calmly, without the emotional weight of anxiety, when it is not driven by the fear that the future is fundamentally unsafe.
The phrase has appeared in literary contexts as a statement of stoic acceptance, a recognition that life is genuinely hard but that its hardness is distributed through time in a way that makes it bearable day by day in ways it would not be if experienced all at once. Samuel Johnson, who suffered from severe depression and wrote extensively about time and anxiety, would have found in this verse confirmation of his own hard-won wisdom about the management of temporal suffering.
The verse has also influenced Christian approaches to time and planning. The monastic tradition, which structures the day into canonical hours of prayer, embodies the principle that each period of time has its own integrity and demands, and that attending to the present period is the fundamental spiritual discipline. The Benedictine motto ora et labora (pray and work) describes a life structured around present engagement rather than anxious calculation about future provision. The Rule of Benedict, which governed monastic life across Western Christianity for fifteen centuries, can be read in part as an institutional embodiment of Matthew 6:34.
Contemporary mindfulness practices, which derive primarily from Buddhist sources but have been widely adopted in secular therapeutic contexts, articulate a very similar principle to the one Jesus enunciates in this verse. The emphasis on present-moment awareness, on the futility of mental time travel to anticipated future difficulties, and on the adequacy of engaging with what is actually present rather than what is merely anticipated, converges with the teaching of Matthew 6:34 across very different cultural and philosophical traditions. The fact that a therapeutic tradition derived from an entirely different source arrived at a nearly identical conclusion suggests that the verse captures something accurate about how human minds manage temporal experience most effectively.
The verse has been translated in many ways across different Bible versions, and the variation is instructive. The NIV renders it "Each day has enough trouble of its own," which is more literal but loses the King James compression and paradox. The ESV has "Sufficient for the day is its own trouble," which preserves the inverted syntax. The KJV version, "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof," with its archaic "unto" and "thereof," has a memorability that more idiomatic translations cannot match. This is partly why the KJV formulation, rather than any modern equivalent, is the one that survived into common idiom.