The Word: Matthew 6: 25(KJV)
25 Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?
Dig Deeper: Matthew 6: 33 – 34 (KJV)
33 But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. 34 Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
Think about it
SETTING PRIORITIES
In our text today Jesus gave us a rule on how he expects his followers to live: He wants us to PRIORITISE.
What do we mean by that?
So many distractions compete for our attention every minute, every hour. Some of them may actually appear like good things. Some of them has to do with our job, some of them them has to do with our spouses and children. In other words can our job, children, spouses be a distraction?
The answer is: unfortunately YES occasionally. The problem is not with our job, manager, spouse, children or church. We are the ones to be firm and set our priority and be disciplined enough to follow it. If we do not have priorities, we are going to follow any new assignment that comes along. Eventually it will lead to non effectiveness because we can’t focus.
What is a distraction?
It is anything that just leads around in circles, without any concrete, productive result at the end. It is anything that causes precious time wastage but without any tangible end benefit.
So a good thing, noble endeavour, fantastic idea, can be a distraction. Why would it be a distraction? It is because the timing of it is wrong, so it is not what we ought to be doing at that time. It’s like doing the right thing at the wrong time. We can get sucked up into all these demands around us especially of things we consider good and noble and yet these may become a distraction because we can’t focus on what we ought to do at the right time.
Jesus’ advice is simple:
33 But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness;
This is not only seeking church things…. This is also prioritising only the right things at the right time. There is a time to pray, there is a time to rest. In God’s eyes if we are praying when we ought to be resting, then we ‘ve got our priorities wrong.
Prioritising will require discipline, saying NO and almost being seemingly harsh atimes because we can’t allow precious time to just fritter away like that. But that is the only way to be effective managers of our time. Jesus was a good manager at prioritising his time
Nuggets:
Time is one of the most precious resources we have. An effective Jesus’ follower will need to learn to manage it
Our memory verse for March 2018
Luke 9: 23
23 And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.
Let’s take a few moment to learn our memory verse for this month by heart. It can be memorised in 3 lines:
Line 1: And he said to them all,
Line 2: If any man will come after me, let him deny himself,
Line 3: and take up his cross daily, and follow me.
Once you say it a few times it will stick.
Prayer focus: Our next level prayers:
Lord help me to effectively prioritise in my life
On Grace:
Masterlife Workbook: The Church is embarking on weeks of discipleship workbook study: Masterlife now on the 2nd workbook: The Disciple’s personality
