“Dear Pastor Tim, What a soft gentle reminder that it’s easy to get caught up in getting bills paid off, doing business year end taxes, raising new babies, keeping kids at college and getting another into the air force. It’s enough to keep me busy 24/7 with no break in sight!!! Every day is just like the next! What is this rat race for? What really matters? I already know the answer, but your e-mail reminded me.”
How about you? Are you feeling like you are a part of the rat race? It can be easy to feel like that, and it gets worse when things aren’t good. I think most people have been touched and affected in some way by the downturn in the economy. The rat race is bad enough but a bad economy really magnifies it. Then there is the home front and all the demands that go with it. We all find little pleasures and ways to help us escape but they don’t last. It doesn’t take long to feel overwhelmed again.
Jesus compared it to being hot and thirsty. When you take a drink of water it will bring refreshing only until you get hot and thirsty again. And so you go through that again and again – much like a rat race. But, to the one that received Jesus and let their life and purpose become living for Him, that drink would be different. He said, “People soon become thirsty again after drinking this water. But the water I give them takes away thirst altogether. It becomes a perpetual spring WITHIN them, giving them eternal life.” (John 4:13-14)
Life isn’t about existing in the rat race. It’s about learning to live for God. Doing so reminds you and magnifies what is truly important in life and helps put real life from God’s view, back into perspective. Your life is about becoming His mouth and hands in this earth and about reconciling others to Jesus. When that becomes true for you, then you’ve left the rat race and entered the God race.
Once you’ve put God back on the throne of your life and are truly living for Him as the center of your existence – then build and simplify your life thinking through these things:
First, identify what is most important to you. Build a list (not too long) and prioritize what you are most passionate about and most responsible for. Secondly, eliminate from your life, that which really doesn’t begin to touch your first list. Finally, stick with the priorities of your first list.
It’s amazing how many things you can eliminate from your life when you need to simplify!
As you live these priorities with the Lord as your underlying purpose in all you do, you will find yourself drinking from the “perpetual spring within you and that will give you eternal life with Him. John 4:13-14”
In His Love,
