What are our priorities?  How would we list them… what is the top priority?

A priority is something that is truly important to us, much like a “value”.  Our values are the things in life that are really important to us; they define who we are and what kind of person we are.  For example, if we hold that morality and ethics are values that we prize, we will give them a high priority which usually will result in our being moral people.

So, what are our priorities in our lives?  Jesus gave us a good idea of what His priorities were.  In Matthew 12 He gave us some insight that may run counter to many of our priority lists when He was told that His mother and brothers were waiting for Him in vv. 46-50.

“Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?”  Pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers.  For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”

(Matthew 12:48-50)

His reply may seem harsh at first glance, but if we read it carefully we will see that He was not disrespecting Mary and His brothers, but rather that He was demonstrating His priority for God’s purpose: those who do the Father’s will are my brother, sister and mother.  We often say that our highest priorities are ‘God, family, country.’  Do we really mean it?  Jesus was more than willing to let the family wait for those who were doing the Father’s will, because the purposes of God come first and foremost.

We know what the will of the Father is, for Jesus gave that instruction to all of us in Matthew 28:18-20 and that can be summed up in two words: Make disciples. Is making disciples our highest priority?  If not, we should go to the Lord in prayer about it to be sure that we are serving Him according to His will…