Episode 1. My Best for God
So much going on in life isn’t there? And the easiest thing to miss – is the great unseen reality – God Himself. As we contemplate the year ahead – how can we plan to live out our best for …
This is so incredibly hard to believe but here we are at the first full week of a new year. And you know what that tells me? It tells me that my parents were right when I was growing up. Life slips away faster and faster as you get older.
Last year I turned 50, this year I’ll be 51. And whilst none of us wants to wish our lives away, it’s a sobering thing to stand back and look at how quickly life slips by. Each day, when it’s gone it’s gone: another week, another month, another year, another decade.
That’s why, this week, we’re going to be continuing our look at living the best lives that we can possibly give, because I don’t know about you but I want to live my life to the full. I want to live all that God has got planned for me. And not just to experience it all for my own satisfaction but to give it all for other people’s satisfaction so that others will be blessed.
So this week on the program we’re going to be looking at living out our best into some of the most important relationships that we have here on this earth, beginning today with a single most important relationship of all, our relationship with God.
Problem is, in our relationship with God, that, well, you can’t see Him. You can’t touch Him or feel Him. Everything else in our lives tends to crowd Him out. I mean work and family and all the things we do and paying the bills and playing sport and watching television, even going to Church.
See all those things we can see and experience. So we deal with them and we experience them whether they’re good or bad, up or down. If we look over our last week and what we were doing: me, well a bit of a holiday down here in the southern hemisphere, being summer; time to rest down at the beach enjoying the weather. But a normal working week I would have been rushing around, writing radio programs, recording them, finishing off the latest book and getting that off to the publisher.
And it’s so easy for us to get caught up in things, even really good things. Even, let me say this, things that we’re doing for God and yet miss out on that most important thing of all, the most important relationship of all, our relationship with God Himself. If I’m going to live the best life I can possibly live then I have to sort out my relationship with my Lord and my God, first and foremost. That’s what Jesus said when asked, ‘what was the most important of all the commandments?’ He answered,
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and then your neighbour as yourself.” (Luke chapter 10, verse 27)
Question is, how do we do that? I mean amidst all the busyness of our lives. All the troubles and conflicts and the things that drag us off course, how can we live out our best in our relationship with God? It’s an important question and yet it’s so often a question we don’t ask.
You know what we do? When something’s not quite right in our lives we go looking for a solution for that one thing that’s not quite right. Maybe it’s in our marriage relationship. We’re going to be looking at that in a whole bunch more detail tomorrow.
Things aren’t going well so we try and sort that out. Or maybe it’s in our finances or maybe it’s in a situation or a relationship at work. And so what we do is we try and go and work on those things and fix them. We might pray about them from time to time but essentially we see this symptom and we try to deal with it without first and foremost dealing with the underlying disease.
And the disease is this. When we don’t honour God, when we don’t treat Him as Lord, what happens is that the blessings start to dry up. That’s because God honours those who honour Him. 1 Samuel chapter 2, verse 30:
“Those who honour Me I will honour’, says God, ‘and those who despise me shall be treated with contempt.”
See we want God to be someone who serves us, someone who blesses us when we ask, like a sugar daddy. And of course He does want so much to bless us but like any dad, that blessing involves honour. That’s why the 5th Commandment has a blessing attached to it. Exodus chapter 20, verse 12:
“Honour your father and your mother so that your days maybe long in the land that the Lord has given to you.”
My friend, unless we first and foremost live out our best for God, then we don’t have a hope of living the very best life that we can live. It makes sense doesn’t it? So the question is, as we stand here on the threshold of a new year, a new decade, how do we do that? I mean exactly how?
Well, the answer comes to us, of course, straight out of Gods word. It’s in a concept that we find throughout the Bible but most often in the Old Testament. It’s this notion of the first fruits. Have a listen to this. It comes from Exodus chapter 34, verse 26:
“The best of the first fruits of your ground you shall bring to the house of the Lord your God.”
See this idea of the first fruits is about giving to God the first and the best of what we have; the first and the best of the harvest: the first and the best of the flock. The first and the best of our time and our attention and our money and all that He’s made us to be. And all that we have. It’s about honouring God with our first and our best. Not with our loose change we have left in our pockets. Not with the dregs that we have left over at the end of the day, but with the first and the best.
So, as you and I contemplate the year ahead. As we think about getting our house in order, the first priority isn’t our marriage, as vitally important as that is. It’s not our children. It’s not our job. It’s not our finances. It’s not our mortgage. There’s nothing else but God. Our first priority is God.
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your will, with all your strength. This is the first and the greatest Commandment.”
So, as I reflect on that in my own life, getting my priorities sorted out for the New Year, there are 3 specific areas that I’m focusing on. My time. My talents. And my finances.
My time, because loving and honouring God involves time: time to pray, time to listen, time to read His Word, time to ponder what He’s saying. In any relationship, in any love, time is involved and isn’t that so often the one thing that we don’t give to God or if we do, it’s rushed. Or it’s not when we’re at our best.
If there were just one thing that I would encourage you to get sorted out this year, just one out of all the things that you want to get sorted out, it would be this: setting aside the first fruits of your time for God. That time when you’re at your best, unhurried, focused. That one thing, just one thing will radically transform everything else in our lives. This time of prayer and Bible reading, it is the most awesome thing.
The second thing is our talents: who we are; our abilities and our gifts. How can I use those? Not just for myself, not just for my family, not just to make money but use the best, the first and the foremost of who I am for God’s glory – the first fruits.
And finally, our finances. So many things God wants to do. He uses His people, generally, to fund His work on this planet and so many of those things are being held back because His people don’t give the first and the best of their finances – radically, sacrificially and missionally.
So there it is: our time, our talents and our finances; the first fruits given for God – the first and the best.
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