The Sandlot movie I watched as a kid is making a comeback. I heard a young student say to a friend, Your Killing me Smalls, which is a line from the movie. I thought there is no way this kid knows that movie...it shows how old I am getting...anyway I digress.. In the movie, young boys meet at an old abandoned baseball field to play baseball during the summer. One day the boys lose their baseball. They are distraught that they can't play baseball anymore. One of the more novice baseball players wanting to fit in the rest of the boys goes home and gets a baseball from his father’s room. He gets back to the field and the others are excited. The game begins. Not too long and one of the team members hits the ball over the fence. This would not have been a bad thing except that the ball has gone into the backyard guarded by the fiercest and largest dog ever. After several moments of anxiety the novice player reveals that the ball was signed by a very famous baseball player and his dad was going to literally kill him. The rest of the team immediately began plotting a way for the ball to be returned even if it meant they were to face the big bad scary dog. This story gives us several pieces to examine concerning priorities. First, priorities can be misplaced. Smalls, the new kid tried everything he could to fit in. To have the other guys like him. That was the priority. It is not bad to want to fit in...I have sympathy for Smalls because I have wanted fit in sometimes when I haven't. HOWEVER, he did not place the importance of an expensive relic over the need to fit in… In life, what we think might be important is really not, but in the moment it seems so important that life could end. Teenagers can go to that extreme very fast...walking down the hallways of school I see students hugging, or holding hands, and sometimes trying to steal a quick kiss when no one is looking. And I think to myself, is that really important in the hallways? Can it not wait until school is over? And in some cases I have to be the bad guy and go tell them it can wait. Second, priorities can be altered & quickly After the ball was lost, Smalls quickly realized the error of his decision and shifted from wanting to fit in to wanting to get the ball back at all costs. Stages in life can cause an alteration in priorities. Like you don't care about what goes into your body as a young person but as you reach 30+ you begin to think about what you eat. Or as a young person you think, I can always get a job, money doesn't matter and as an older person, you think what am I going to do for money when I am too old to work either because they fired me for being too old or because I am having trouble getting out of bed for the stiffness and pain to go to work. Finally, priorities are our focus. When we set a priority we are determined to achieve it. Grades, weight loss, an educational degree, a boyfriend or girlfriend, a job, a house, a car. And sometimes that focus causes us to lose focus on reality. We forget about the things we need most. We forget about the actual goal and replace it with something totally different. Smalls wanted to be one of the guys. He wanted to be a baseball player even though he was not good at it. He wanted friends. But he began to forget that friendship was is based on his performance. And his obsession with fitting in caused him to act inappropriately. We need to be sure our priorities are correctly assigned.
Priorities Guide Us by what we value Jesus is not arguing that wealth is bad. Nor is he condemning earthly possessions. Jesus is suggesting that the love of money is wrong. The love of earthly possessions is wrong. In Ecclesiastes, dismisses the things of this earth as vanity. Dr. Henry Dressler says vanity should be replaced with transient. Storing up transient items. Storing is also a bad attempt at temporal reasoning I. The Greek, for how can we store job promotions, human accolades? Our checklist of accomplishments in life do not necessarily need to contain only earthly goals. How can we be believers yet not have Kingdom minded goals? We are absent of Kingdom goals because….21...for where your treasure is there also is your heart… Treasure represents according to Michael Wilkins is the accumulation of what is valuable. The question then comes...what do you value? Much of what we value will rust, or turn to dust. We value material goods, wealth, and the like. Again these are not inherently bad, Jesus is not saying you can't be wealthy, but he is saying to not let it control you. Further in Matthew, Christ will argue that is very difficult for the rich to enter the Kingdom of Heaven...like passing through the eye of a needle. D A. Carson suggests that what we value tugs at our minds and emotions it comes our time with planning day-dreaming and effort to achieve. What we value governs our lives. This can be a relationship with God assailant if let it. If snow has just fallen, the ground is completely covered in white. If in Mississippi maybe not completely covered, but you get the picture. You want to walk across the freshly fallen snow and make a straight line of footprints. If you focus on your feet just below you, your footsteps will be crooked...zig zag. But if you focus on a distance object, such as a tree, you will walk much straighter. Priorities guide us. What we value guides us. Is your relationship with Jesus a priority or is it just an after thought? Is your heart focused on earthly possessions and accomplishments or on the Kingdom? Priorities guide us by what we see This section is more difficult to understand. Carson and Wilkins both suggest that there is no intent for a good eye to be mean a good person. Rather it means that we are singularly focused, loyal, to the Kingdom, to Jesus. The good eye is the one fixed on God unwavering. And the body is full of light. However if the eye wavers then the body is in darkness. Priorities are what we see. We lose focus to everything else around in order to continue to focus on our objective. Some of us are very good at tuning out what we think if peripheral and not important...the static noise of life. When Zac watches one of his favorite tv shows, he is focused, he is intent. LA and I can ask him a question and it is like we never said a word. LA, my wife, says he gets that from me...I don't see it… What are you seeing? Are seeing Kingdom goals? Are you seeing earthly goals? Are your priorities limited to an earthly object or acclamation? Priorities guide us because they are our masters Robert Guelich says this sections revolves around one motif...one’s commitment or one’s allegiance. Inevitably, one of the masters will get priority. You cannot serve God and Mammon which commonly meant wealth and material possessions. However understanding that most in the time of Jesus were not wealthy and that Jesus has already addressed this issue in the first section, Guelich’s interpretation of this section asks if your material possession are to serve or to be served? You see priorities in our lives come to the top no matter how much we suppress it? If we place a priority on materials, eventually God will take a back seat, we will spend money on an unneeded item instead of tithing or going on mission. If we place a priority on earthly relationships then we will give in to our desires and have an affair or marry someone that does not desire God. We put ourselves in a bind when we try to serve more than one master. We will choose one over the other at some point. What happens when our priorities are out of whack or off kilter? We worry? Worry here means a literal deep inability to continue on until we know that all will work out. There are those of us that worry. But that worry cannot consume us to the point of causing us to stop living life or causing us to make poor decisions. Worry is not a sin unless it is rooted in the inability to trust Christ thus causing you to rise to action or to fall to inaction. We can worry about our kids’ future...it becomes a sin when we begin to intervene to cause an outcome we believe to be the appropriate outcome. We can worry about our finances...it becomes a sin when we go outside of righteous actions to change our finances. Priorities are shifted when we fail to continue to focus on Jesus. |