Make God’s Priority Yours This is what the Lord Almighty says: Give careful thought to your ways. Go up into the mountains and bring down timber and build the house (the temple) so that I may take pleasure in it and be honored, says the Lord. Haggai 1:7-8 Sometimes I use the excuse for not getting some things done of “I have been so busy I haven’t had time.” I have a list of odds and ends that need to be done always. There ar3e items on that list that have been on that list for quite some time now. Number thirty on the list used to be number 20. What used to be number one has been accomplished as well as number three and four. It seems that some items never seem to make it anywhere near to the top of the list. They just never seem to be the priority on the list. Some of those items down on the list would only take about ten minutes to accomplish but there just never seems to be time to take care of them. Busy, busy, busy, seems to be the way the world revolves in our lives. Never seems to be enough time to accomplish all that I need to accomplish. I get up every morning with a plan of action for the day and by noon I am a half day behind on those plans. There is always something come up that I had not planned on taking care of. As Israel returned to Jerusalem they found much destruction including Solomon’s temple. They immediately began to restore and rebuild the temple. They got as far as to lay the foundation then some opposition came against them. They stopped building the temple and started taking care of their homes and their property. For years the foundation of the temple laid idle. They got busy taking care of their own lives and list and the temple just did not take priority over the other things on their list. It just never made it to the top. Their lives started to become difficult. They had planted much but harvested very little. They never seemed to have enough to eat although they ate. They earned wages but had holes in their purse. Life was not very fulfilling for them. Life was hard and times were tough. They could not understand why things were bad. Even though they were taking care of things on their list, nothing seemed to be working for them. What is on top of your priority list? What should really be on top of that list? The Jews had returned to the city of God but they had not made God a priority. The Lord had work for them to do but their attention turned toward their work for themselves. God’s priority for them was to rebuild the temple for them to come to worship Him. God had made a way for them to return to their home land, the Promised Land, from captivity in Babylon and Persia. His intent for them was to turn their affections back to Him. Instead they allowed their attention to be turned to themselves because of obstacles to obeying Him. There are obstacles every day in our lives to being obedient to the commands of Christ. Satan likes nothing better than to turn our attention away from the priorities of God to ourselves. The work of the Lord we are to do becomes something down in our list of priorities of things to do. Every time we get close to God’s work on the list for us we seem to place something new higher on the list and He never becomes the number one priority. I have heard people say that they want to have a family but they want to wait until they can afford a family. Well we will most likely never have a family if we truly wait till we can afford one. I have also heard we will do what God want us to do when I have time, when I retire or when I don’t have to work so hard to take care of my family. That day never seems to come because something always comes up that seems to move God back down in the list. Make God a priority today build His temple. Paul says, “Don’t you know that you, yourselves, are the temple of God?” Build that temple today!
Posted on: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 16:36:16 +0000
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