Priorities

Priorities

What is the most important thing in your life?  What is your #1 concern?  What do spend most of your time thinking about and working towards?  Is it your family? Maybe sports, work, recreation, health, or your relationships with friends?  If you are a parent, what is your definition of success for your children, and what values and habits do you strive to teach them?

Let’s stop right here and think about the above questions for a few minutes before we move on.  Think through your day today, last week, this past year etc.

OK, have you thought about it?  Then let’s move on.

Today the word “religion” causes many people, even Christians, to cringe.  We don’t like the word.  It has restricting connotations, and a harsh authoritarian feel to it.  Non-Christians call Christians religious, but many Christians would rather say, “I’m in a relationship, I’m not religious.”  However, I would like to assert that all people, even atheists, are fully religious.

Religion: "That which is of [our] ultimate concern."

In Lewis Hopfe and Mark Woodward’s book, Religions of the World, they quote the Christian theologian Paul Tillich to define our English word religion as, “…that which is of [our] ‘ultimate concern.’”  Hopfe and Woodward go on to explain, “The intense patriotism one finds in many nations could be called religion.”

With this definition of religion, and after thinking about the above questions, what would you say your religion is? What is your “ultimate concern”?

I know for myself, I often chase after things that are temporary, and spend much of my time on things that are fleeting.  And if I examine my own life, are God and His desires really my ultimate concerns?  Or do I just say they are?

Over this next month let us chew on this meaty question together asking ourselves, “Is my ultimate priority God and his desires”?  And if we realize they are not, let’s think about what needs to change.

Here are a few verses to meditate on.

Matthew 26:39, Matthew 28:16-20; Luke 12:13-48, Luke 12:34; John 6:35-40; Philippians 1:21-30

~Trev