A Fresh Start For Your Priorities // Spring Cleaning Your Life, Part 3

Balance – if only we could get some balance back into our lives.  It can be tough can’t it?  But the way we spend our time – well it comes from the priorities we set – deliberately, or unknowingly.

It’s just great that you can join me again today. I was driving along in my car just the other day. And I drove past a newsagent. You know how they have the newspaper headlines on the signs outside the store? One of the headlines said this ... “Money or family”. Ouch! That really hits a raw nerve with a lot of people. Balancing work and family.

Just after that I ended up having breakfast with a man visiting from another city and during the breakfast he received a phone call from his son’s teacher. There was a problem with his young teenager. You could see it on his face, as he talked. The tension, the feeling of being torn between being away from work and spending time with his family. He travels a lot you see. The balance can be so hard to get right.

Maybe we need to spring clean our priorities?

This week on ADP we are looking at spring cleaning our lives. I know it’s now spring, but it is kinda the beginning of the year and we are looking forward to all the good things that could be happening this year.

And I just wonder if it’s not a good time to look at some of the rubbish, some of the baggage that we carry around and say, "Why don’t I have a spring clean. Why don’t I get ride of some of this stuff, so that I’m not carrying its weight around all during next year.”

Today I would like to talk about spring cleaning our priorities. So many people are looking for a miracle from God. I wish God would do this, I wish God would do that. If there is a God why does he let this happen in my life. And yet they are not dong their bit in managing the basics, the mundane things that God leaves up to us.

They want to feel good about themselves yet their house is a pig sty. They wonder why when they walk in they feel depressed. They want to be a real giver and help the poor, but their finances are a disaster. Today I would like to look at getting some balance into our lives.

“But Berni you don’t understand, I don’t set my priorities, I have all these other things going on”. Don’t give me that. We can claim to be a victim of our circumstances. Or instead we can come to grips with this basic reality. My priorities in life are mine. And your priorities in life are yours. When our life gets out of balance, it’s because of the way that we are prioritising what we do.

It’s the setting of our priorities that dictates how we spend our time. After all, my diary is mine, I am the one that puts meetings and work and things into my diary. And you diary is yours. And we can claim to be victims, but the answer is it is up to us.

“But Berni you don’t understand, my boss expects me to work long hours and to do this and to do that”. Well maybe you need to educate your boss. Maybe it’s time to draw some boundaries and some lines and say, "Well you know, I have to have sustainable life. I have to spend time with my teenagers. I have to spend time with my wife or my husband”. And if your boss can’t be educated maybe it’s time to find a different job.

“No, no you don’t understand, I have a huge mortgage; I have this house that I am paying off. I need the money… I have to … ” Do you need the big house? Do you need the big mortgage?

You know we look at all these things in our lives and this is a given, the house is a given, the mortgage is a given, the job is a given. Maybe it is time to change jobs.

Maybe it is time to take control and set priorities and say, "My family is important to me. My kids are important to me, and maybe if I take a different job and earn a little bit less money, and maybe live in a house that is a bit smaller or closer to work, maybe I will have more time.” Maybe it is time to re jig the priorities.

“Ah but there is so many people that need my help you know”. Maybe it is time to learn to say, "No”. Maybe it’s time to ask God, “What do you want me to do? What have you got me doing, what are you doing?” it is interesting how Jesus said, and you can read this in John’s gospel chapter 4 verse 19, Jesus said:

Truly I tell you, the Son only does what He see’s the Father doing.

There were so many things that Jesus could have done when He was walking on the Earth, there was so many people He could have helped but He just listened to God. He listened to his Father talking to Him in His spirit. And He went and did the things that God was already doing.

I see so many people, running around doing dead works. Things in their lives that God never planned for them. God never anointed them to do, and yet they’re racing around doing them. And wondering why they’re getting burned out. Now there are times when we have to work long and hard and it can be tough.

When I took over the helm of this ministry, Christianityworks here in Australia, the ministry needed some serious work. There were some issues and they needed a lot of work and we were launching new radio programs. And so I made a conscious decision over the next twelve or eighteen months I was up at 4:30am. And they were long days, twelve, thirteen sometimes fourteen hour days, day after day, week after week.

Even in the middle of all of that, and still today, every morning when I get up, I spend somewhere between three-quarters-of-an-hour and an hour with God. And when I have worked 12 or 13 hours, I say at four or five in the afternoon, “That’s it, its time to stop. I am having my evening off and spending it with my wife Jacqui and my daughter Melissa.”

And even when I was working those long hours, mostly I had my weekends off. And there were people who consistently tried to intrude into those times. When I set those boundaries and said, “After 5pm that’s it. I have been working for twelve or thirteen hours, I now need to spend time with my family, I need to rest.”

People would try and ring. So this is what I did, I turned my mobile phone off, I turned my computer off, I didn’t go to my email and I created a space where my family and I could spend time together.

God doesn’t need me to burned out. You don’t need me burned out.

I have a dear friend a wonderful, wonderful man, been a Christian for many years. He is one of natures gentlemen, just a delightful human being. Was recently diagnosed with depression and I thought, “How can this happen to him.” It turned out he hadn’t taken a holiday for 4 years. We were sitting having a coffee the other day and he said, “Duh, I brought this on myself.”

He is absolutely right. Now God is helping him and dealing with him. And he is rearranging his priorities and his work life so that he has more rest. One of the things I always do in life is take a holiday, every year, a few weeks off, to rest the soul.

Time and time again you look at Jesus and He had sort of “rock star status” when he was wandering around Jerusalem and Judea. He was healing people, crowds, thousands of people, crowds of four and five thousand. When you recognise that the population of Jerusalem at the time was fifteen thousand it was like a third of the city coming out to hear him speak.

So he had this huge rally going on. A gruelling schedule. He came here to serve not to be served. But time and time again you read about him drawing away from the crowds, getting in a boat and going away and resting, spending time with God, spending time with just his closest friends.

Someone said to me recently, a dear friend of mine, Barry Chant, “You know Berni you can’t live your life on the front line. Sometimes you have to pull back and rest”. Now if Jesus did this as the Son of God, if it is good enough for Him, I figure it is good enough for me.
The problem is that when our life is out of whack we become weak. When our life is out of whack we become weak.

What are you priorities? God, family. Doing things for other people. What about you? What about rest? We neglect that and our life falls apart. As you and I look forward to this year, I believe God wants to bless your socks off. And I believe God wants you to bless other people’s socks off. If we are going to do that we need to have a cold hard look at our priorities.

What are yours? What’s some of the rubbish in your schedule and your time? That you need to throw out. Is it time to spring clean your priorities?

It’s worth a thought, isn’t it.