What is Most Important?

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Then He (Jesus) spoke a parable to them, saying: "The ground of a certain rich man yielded plentifully. And he thought within himself, saying, 'What shall I do, since I have no room to store my crops?' So he said, 'I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build greater, and there I will store all my crops and my goods. And I will say to my soul, "Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years; take your ease; eat, drink, and be merry."

But God said to him, 'Fool! This night your soul will be required of you; then whose will those things be which you have provided?' "So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.” [i]

What are your priorities? If you were to write a list of the top ten most important things in your life, what would they be? You could start with the most important as number one and go on down the list in order of importance. Remember, this is not a list of how things should be but of how they really are. Then, you could write another list of how things should be. You would have to be brutally honest with yourself wouldn’t you?

How do I know if something is truly important or not? Here are some questions we should ask when we try to determine the true value of the things of life:

- What would I try to preserve in a fire or in a flood?

Have you ever spilled a cup of coffee all over your desk? It doesn’t take long to figure out what’s important and what’s not. I have scrambled so fast to clean things up that had to be saved, disregarding everything else. I had thought they were all important until the mishap occurred. Then there was a quick shift in my evaluation of them. I realized that I was just hanging on to many of those items and that all they were doing was just causing clutter on my desk.

- Will I be able to take it with me when I go? (when I die, that is)

- Does it help me build relationships with people, or does it deteriorate relationships?

- It is something I can be “proud” of? 

You have probably already heard this statement: Nobody ever says, when they get to the end of their life, “I wish I had spent more time making money.” or: “I wish I had spent more time watching television or messing with my computer.”

Most people, if they have any regrets, would say, “I wish I had spent more time with my family.” Or they might say, “I wish I had not squandered my time on frivolous things.” Many would say, “I wish I had not ignored my relationship with God.”

- Will it matter to those left behind? Who will care 100 years from now?

- Will my children and grandchildren or my friends remember me fondly for it?

- Is it worth the amount of time I am putting into it?

- What else or who else will suffer because of it?

- Does it have control of my life?

- Is it a need or a want?

- If it is a want, is it a selfish want?

- How does this priority affect those I love the most?

- How does this affect the work of God’s kingdom?

- Did I fix my focus on that which I do best in service to God and others, 

   or did I spend all of my time just doing “this and that”?

- Did I concentrate on the eternal or on the temporal?

The man in story Jesus told really did nothing wrong, it is what he didn’t do that caused him to waste his life. The world would have voted him as “The Man Most Successful” but God did not vote that way, and remember it is his vote that counts in the end. He laid up “treasure for himself but was not rich toward God.”

See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is. [ii]

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[i] Luke 12.16-21 – The Holy Bible, New Testament

[ii] Ephesians 5.15-17 – The Holy Bible, New Testament