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Bristol SDA Church

Garhett Morgan

Priorities

Father, Lord, we just want to thank you that you are an awesome God and you have called us to be your people.

And Lord, as we open your holy word today, may we remember what a privilege it is to have your word.

What a privilege it is to come to you in prayer.

Lord, may we always understand what you've come and done for us so our priorities may be right.

And it doesn't matter how busy you are or how busy your work week is or your family or everything that may be in your schedule, But the things that we enjoy doing, we always find time for, don't we?

It doesn't matter how many hours of overtime we put in, we always make time for those certain things.

Now those things might be good, and those things might be our guilty pleasures, but we all have time.

It might be that there's a certain TV show that you really, really want to watch, but you're at work, so You DVR that thing, don't you?

You record it and you wait until you have that 1 hour or that half hour or that 40 minutes and you might sacrifice a little bit of sleep so you can watch that show, that football game, whatever it might be.

We make time for our priorities, don't we?

But sometimes it seems like the things that we know that we should do, we don't prioritize.

We see that a lot during our, to start the new years, don't we, with the New Year's resolutions.

Maybe your priority was I'm going to work out 4 days a week every week.

And I'm going to prioritize that and make the time.

And the first week, man, you're doing good.

You might have even gotten yourself a personal trainer, right?

Third week, you feel a touch of the sniffles, and you wouldn't want to work out when you have the sniffles.

And slowly, your priority starts to fall.

But we all have those priorities, And we all have a certain amount of time.

I was reading a few articles this week on this subject, and there's a few that talk about this.

The average human being in the United States of America, we live about 80 years on average.

Now some of the Adventists should live a little bit longer, right, but 80 years is about the average.

A few mathematicians and some statistics people got together and they learned and studied what the average American spends their time on.

Of your 80 year average life, we spend 26 of those 80 years sleeping.

Maybe the Church of Laodicea was accurate, I don't know.

In fact, we don't just spend 26 years sleeping, but on average, get this, we spend 7 years trying to fall asleep.

So we spend 33 years of our 80 in bed on average, okay?

That's almost half of our entire lifetime.

Now, some of us might have more, some of us might have less.

But the next thing that takes up a lot of our time is work or the office, right, whatever your office might be.

But we spend on average, and some of you this might be a lot more, some less, but on average we spend about 14 years of our life at work.

With a year added on to that of unpaid overtime.

You can also add on to that about 1, the average American has high school plus 1 year of college And if you add up all of that class time, it only amounts to 1 year.

So add in that 1 year of school, we normally spend about 1 year of our lifetime in exercise and all of these things.

However, there's 1 thing, and you probably know where I'm going with this, that the average American spends in his life doing.

The average American spends 8 years of his life watching television.

So of our 80 years, 11 of those 80 years on average we spend in front of a screen.

Then we spend another few with work, a little bit with school, sleep, and by the way, you got to throw in eating.

After everything is added up, work, sleep, food, school, we have 8 years left of our 80.

And by the way, I didn't count commuting, grocery shopping, cleaning the house, raising a family, and I didn't mention God either.

Those are pretty sobering stats, aren't they?

Now 80 years in the eternity of God is just a drop in the bucket, isn't it?

Because the fact of the matter is, God did not create us to live just 80 years.

God created us to live for eternity and by God's grace these 80 years here on this life aren't going to be our last.

We are going to live eternally someday if we accept Jesus Christ as our Savior.

But let me ask you, with all of this time that we put into social media, television, work, sleep, eating, all of these things that are often important, how much time do we spend with God?

Now I don't know what the average would look like and maybe I don't want to know, But what's your priority?

We make time for the things that we prioritize.

That's what we're going to be talking about today.

We're going to go to a place in the Bible that talks about this, and it's probably not a place that you're expecting us to go, but it's in the book of Matthew, if you turn there with me.

And Jesus spoke in stories and parables quite often.

And the reason that Jesus spoke in parables, number 1, is because people remember stories, don't they?

If I gave you 10 verses, by next week you probably wouldn't remember any of them.

But if I gave you a really good story you might remember that the rest of your life.

Jesus spoke in parables and stories for a reason.

They're easy to understand and also it was a code so the Pharisees couldn't say that he said something blasphemous.

But Jesus, look what he says here in Matthew 13, verse 1.

It says, The same day went Jesus out of the house and sat by the seaside.

And great multitudes were gathered together to him, so that he went into a ship and sat, and the whole multitude stood on the shore.

So here's Jesus, and let me ask you, did people love to be around Christ?

The middle class, they all thronged around Him.

And there were so many people that Jesus had to get on a boat out in the sea so they could all see him.

Spirit of prophecy tells us that some of the people got in their own boats to get closer to Jesus on the sea.

Jesus was a popular man because he wasn't just a man.

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Priorities

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