It's interesting to me, in the short 21 years I have been alive, what priorities people have in their lives. I find I'm disappointed in what I see.
Instead of young men seeking God's heart, shaping their values, morals and habits to be pleasing to God, they are still concerned with frivolous things... non-eternal things.
Young women are no better, seemingly always being led by their emotions, they can't think logically enough to learn what it really means to be a woman of God.
Our priorities are mixed up. Our senses are gone. We have been desensitized to worldly things. We laugh at the things that should offend us.
What.
Has.
Happened?
Jobs, money, relationships, they are not bad things, but we seem to twist them into something they are not. We prioritize them wrongly. They become idols in our lives.
We talk about these things as though they are of extreme importance. Instead of realizing that the only thing of extreme importance is the Creator and Sustain-er of the universe in which we live.
We don't fix our eyes on the Author and Perfecter of our faith, and because we don't, we suffer. We suffer through our sin, we may not realize the suffering at first as we dethrone God in our lives, but we suffer through grieving the Holy Spirit and causing our relationship with Christ to dwindle.
It starts small and works its way into every area of our lives. When we don't have our priorities straight, things do go wrong.
Your boyfriend/girlfriend becomes higher on the priority list than they ought to, your job, friends, family, even church can become an idol.
All these things are not bad, but as we make them big in our lives, we also end up making God small.
The Bible calls us to love God and one another.
That is our first priority. When that gets out of whack, so does everything else.
When you love God, you want to obey him.
When you obey him, you don't want to sin.
When you don't want to sin, you want to live righteously.
When you want to live righteously, you want to continue to obey his commands.
Suddenly, you will find yourself not laughing at the things that should be offensive, because once again, they are offensive. Why are they offensive? Because they are not Phil 4:8. We alter our thinking so that we are no longer desensitized to worldly things. This is hard. It takes work. We have conditioned ourselves to think that so many things are okay, when in reality they are against God.
We live selfishly, we don't love others.
We don't think before we speak and we offend our brothers and sisters in Christ. We set a poor example to those around us, all because of our selfish tendencies.
Don't get me wrong, I write this as a sinner just like everyone else. My priorities are not always in the right order, but I become convicted every time I see this blatantly in others. Instead of judging them for their actions, I try to examine my own heart and life.
I encourage all of you to examine yourselves and to really see if your priorities are straight.
Signed,
gypsy girl
