Better Week 1: Better Priorities
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Sermon Series: Better
Week 1: Better Priorities
Introduction
Hello, Church!
It is such an honor to be with you this morning.
We gather today to be encouraged by one another and to learn more about the great love that God has for you and for me.
As you know, we have just entered a brand-new year.
Starting this week I want us to start looking ahead and ask ourselves if we are living the kind of life that God wants for us, or if we could do better.
With that said, today, we are beginning a new sermon series appropriately called Better.
We will look at four different areas of our lives that we could make simple changes to in order to experience God’s fullness and blessing.
We will evaluate our priorities, our relationships, our choices, and our witness.
So, let’s open our hearts and minds as we dive into our priorities and into the new year together.
Show Video “Jar of Life”
This Bible speaks to this need to order our lives well.
God knows that without keeping the main thing, the main thing, we can get lost in lesser things.
As we begin this new year, we must take an honest look at our lives and consider what priorities we have put first, what things matter most.
Main Sermon
SEEK GOD FIRST
Jesus’ most famous sermon in the Gospels is called the Sermon on the Mount.
In Matthew chapter 6, Jesus turns to preaching and teaching about how we have the tendency to worry about our lives.
Maybe some of you can relate to this right now.
We are worried about paying the bills.
We are worried about our children.
We are worried about our marriage.
We are worried about what this new year might hold.
Jesus states that trusting in God is the only way to keep us from being paralyzed by anxiety.
In verse 33, Jesus gives us the answer to our worry.
33 But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
We must seek God first.
Do you hear the language of priority?
Jesus tells us that when we seek after a life that pleases God, all the things that we have the tendency to worry about will fall into proper order.
So, let’s look at how this might practically work out day in and day out:
● When it comes to our marriages we might be worried about, when we put Jesus first, we might mature into a more gracious, loving, and kind spouse, which may in turn have a positive impact on our marriage.
● When it comes to our finances, perhaps focusing on God first may reveal to us how we spend too much on things that don’t matter.
● When it comes to our children, we may find that putting God first may make us more patient and understanding with our kids.
So, as we think about these priorities the question is, “are you seeking after God?
Is God at the center of these things?”
Or are you seeking after the smaller stones that don’t matter as much?
Is your attention and energy divided?
Now, in order to succeed in our families and our careers, we must seek God first.
How do we seek God?
We seek Him like we seek anything else.
We must spend a lot of time and energy in pursuit of Him.
Seeking God takes time.
It is a marathon and not a sprint.
We also seek God by knowing what it is that we are looking for.
Without knowing what we are looking for, we will never know when we find it.
When I seek God, I am looking to do things in my life that shape me into someone who looks more and more like Jesus Christ – loving, courageous, and sacrificial.
The only way that we make the effort to seek God first is by deciding to love Him more than anything else.
Jesus speaks to this as well.
In fact, there is this moment in the Gospels when the Pharisees and the Sadducees try to trap Jesus by asking Him a question about priorities.
As he travels along, he is cornered by a lawyer who asks him a tough question.
34 But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together.
35 And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.
36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”
37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.
38 This is the great and first commandment.
39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
Did you catch the question the man asks Jesus?
He says, “What is the greatest commandment?”.
He could have easily asked it this way.
“Jesus, what should I have as my greatest priority?”
Jesus quotes a command from the Old Testament when he tells him to love God with all his heart, soul, and mind.
This was Jesus’ way of telling him to love God with everything.
LOVE GOD WITH ALL YOU HAVE
How can you tell when you love something or someone?
The easiest way to tell is that you talk about it or them all the time because they are always on your heart and mind.
When a couple falls in love, it is almost sickening how much they talk about each other.
When someone really loves their sports team, they bring it up all the time.
The same thing should be true of us if God is truly our priority.
When we love Him with all we have, we can’t stop talking about Him.
He is regularly a topic of conversation. We look for reasons and ways to bring Him up.
I find this to be true in my marriage to my wife.
I love her with my whole heart.
I love to talk about her.
I love to brag about her.
I am always looking for reasons to bring her up.
As a result of my deep love for her, I want to do everything I can to please her.
My love for her makes everything else I do in my life more meaningful.
I look for how everything I do can help empower the love we share rather than being a hindrance to the love we share.
Loving God with all of our heart, soul, and mind helps us realize that every part of our life is incredibly meaningful.
How we do our life reflects how we love God.
This means how we handle our career is meaningful because it says something about our relationship with Jesus.
This means how we parent our children is reflective of our relationship to our heavenly Father.
Our love for God should be the motivation and inspiration every day over this next year.
We want to look back on December 31, 2024 and recognize all the ways we loved God with all that we have.
This is what I have found: God actually meets our needs in our lives most fully when we prioritize His needs in our hearts – that is a result of love.
Notice how Jesus ends this conversation.
He tells the man that the first and greatest commandment is to love God, but the second is just like it, we are to love our neighbor.
It seems that unless we get loving God right first, we have no hope of loving our neighbor well.
There is a prioritization that God lays out for us in this passage.
He even says in verse 40, all of the laws and the prophets depend on getting these first two right.
They are the big rocks, and the rest are the small stones. We cannot get them out of order.
FOCUS ON THE ETERNAL RATHER THAN THE TEMPORARY
One easy way to know where to put our energies this year is by asking a simple question.
Is this thing eternal or temporary?
To spend our time focusing on serving others is to focus on their eternal souls.
On the contrary, to spend our time focusing on building a massive 401K is to focus on something we cannot take with us when this life is over.
Which one is better?
I would argue it is the eternal.
The apostle Paul understood this important distinction as he wrote the early church in Corinth.
18 as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.
Paul says that we should not spend all our time focused on what is seen, rather, we should focus on what is unseen.
The things that we can see will one day pass away, while the things that are unseen will go on forever.
Which is easier to spend our energies on?
In my experience, it is the things that are seen because they are often more obvious to us.
This means it takes a more intentional effort to give ourselves to the things of God.
Conclusion
As I close today, encourage you to think about these things, and bring them before God in prayer;
What in your life could be reordered?
What could be reprioritized?
Make sure that the things that receive your time, attention, energy, and affection are things that will last.
Take a moment to pray and ask God to show you the big rocks in your life.
Place those on the schedule first.
The little stones need to come next, as a secondary priority… And if our priorities are centered around God, everything else has a way of working out (Matthew 6:33).
When we put the things of God first in our lives, the other things fall into proper order.
However, when we prioritize earthly things, we find ourselves anxious and full of worry.
God helps us have better priorities.
Let’s pray together.