5
Time and Priorities
What Being Christ-Centered Truly Means
In necessary things, unity; in doubtful things, liberty; in all things, charity.
Richard Baxter
About a year after Ryan and I returned from our Swiss adventure, I started at an engineering firm as a marketing coordinator when the industry was booming. It was a shiny start to my new career. I made quick work of acquiring new contracts, keeping our engineers working, helping the company thrive, and adding feathers to my boss’s cap. Everyone was winning. However, when the market crashed and construction came to a screeching halt, everything changed. Being the emotional person that I am, I found this devastating. I had so much anxiety that I would get up at 5:00 a.m. to work out at the gym to help relieve my anxiousness. After that I would work a full day and then head out to the barn for a post-work ride on my horse. I looked everywhere for rest and relief except to the One who has an abundance of otherworldly peace. Ryan and I constantly felt like we were questioning our decisions about work, home, and finances—our priorities felt right, but everything was just on the verge of chaos. Not a fun place to live.
Then, one February, everything changed. Ryan found a crazy deal on flights to Munich, so he bought them as a Valentine’s Day gift and surprised me with an eighteen-day backpacking trip through Europe. This was about three years after our first Switzerland adventure, so we were both excited for a less surgical experience this time. I’m a quality time person, so I was very much looking forward to one-on-one time with Ryan—lots of uninterrupted, intimate, fifteen-hour-train-ride, walking-everywhere-with-zero-distractions quality time. It was during this time together that God began to break down our walls and recalibrate our hearts and minds.
During our trip it became painfully obvious how little time we spent together and how our relationship lacked depth and purpose. Our marriage was tired. We were tired and unsettled. Ryan felt a check in his heart that prompted hard conversations about our priorities. We realized that good things had taken up too much of our heart-space, and while fruit was being produced in other areas, our marriage was stagnant and simply existing. We were spread so thin that our marriage lacked joy and peace. I remember thinking, God didn’t create us to live like this. This isn’t his best for intimacy with each other, or with him. We desperately needed margin—room for each other—and we needed to reset our priorities. We were a mess on many levels, and this trip opened our eyes to finally see that.
One conversation in particular marks one of the most significant pivot points in our marriage. Ryan said, “At the end of my life, when I’m standing before God, I’ll give an account to him for my family and how I led them. I don’t want this to be the account I give.” From then on, the world we had formed—good-paying jobs, intense level of church involvement, my time with horses—all began to crumble. We didn’t know what the future would hold, but we knew the present wasn’t really what God wanted for our marriage, our family, or this life he had given us.
Good Things Gone Bad
The most frustrating part of this process was that everything that had gotten us to that point was good! Our mistaken identities turned good things sour. Like Eve in the garden, we fell for the lie that we could be our own gods—masters of own destinies. It started subtly, but we had found our identities in the wrong places and put our security in the wrong things. We hammered God’s good provision into idols as we looked to them for life and meaning that only Christ can give.
Sometimes we need to walk away from good things to reset our hearts on Christ and his eternal work. For Ryan and me, walking away was extremely hard. It took many painful, necessary conversations and, unfortunately, a few severed relationships. But God’s gracious hand guided our every step. He knew the only way for us to walk away was to move away. We thought we were following our own business goals, but God was luring us south. He was leading us toward true reliance on him and away from familiarity and false security.
Thus began our journey to the desert, both figuratively and literally. In August of that year, just six months after our European epiphany, we packed up our life and drove south to our new home: Palm Desert, California.
Our time in the desert was one of deep and true healing for our souls and our relationship. It was a time of reconciliation with God and each other. The desert was a time of new beginnings. We began experiencing real change that could only have come from Jesus. Digging deep for the living water our souls were so thirsty for, I felt like my walk with the Lord became newer and truer. From the time we arrived in California, God began rebuilding all that had been crushed. He was making all things new—and it took him moving us out of the lush, green land of the northwest and placing us in a dry, barren desert valley for us to see it. As we now realize, the spiritual parallels were far more significant than we could have ever imagined.
A Common Conundrum
RYAN
Selena and I could never have anticipated the work God started during our time in the desert. One of the clearest works he began was reorienting our hearts on what matters most.
Keeping our priorities in check is a constant struggle—one I imagine will last our entire lives. Busyness is an eager guest in the Frederick household, and on top of that, technology would gladly soak up every spare moment. If we’re not mindful, we can easily scroll, tap, and flick aimlessly through social media feeds on our phones instead of engaging with each other and our children.
I’m convinced that when our generation grows old we’ll wish we’d spent fewer hours staring at screens. We’ll look back on our lives and wonder what could have been if we had not incessantly checked our devices or been so eagerly entertained. We will remember and cherish the face-to-face moments we spent with those we love. We will value every instance we pressed into real life, through the good and the bad. We will appreciate the meals and conversations we had when our focus was undivided and unshared—uncaptured by our smartphones or anything other than memory. We will reminisce about wrestling with God, forging into his Word, and dealing with difficult issues of our faith in Christ.
When we’re old we will finally recognize distractions for what they truly and tragically are: noisy interruptions to the beautiful music of raw—real—life.
It’s one of God’s amazing graces to make us aware of wrong priorities and fleeting distractions before we regret them. As I write this, I’m thankful. I’m thankful to be thinking about priorities, thankful that you’re here to process alongside me. As we venture further, rest in Christ and know that the Holy Spirit is molding your heart to align your priorities with God’s. Maintaining godly priorities is a central issue for your marriage. If you’re not intentional about centering your life on Christ, your priorities will jump out of order. Disordering is often subtle and gradual and, as in our case, usually caused by good things turned bad.
Church involvement is good, but over-volunteering will stretch you too thin and dilute your effectiveness. Working is great, but too much work steals from quality time with your spouse and family. Technology is an amazing tool, but too much of it robs from real life. When your priorities are out of order, you will feel it. We feel it when we begin to bicker and argue over small things as our patience runs dry. If I overwork, Selena’s appreciation of my provision transforms into resentment of whatever I’m doing or, worse yet, of me as her husband.
Your priorities are the greatest indicators of what—or who—you love most. And like all sin, wrong priorities will wreak havoc in your life and marriage.
The most common byproducts of misplaced priorities in marriage are a lack of quality time, a steady degradation of communication, and the slow distancing of spouses from one another. Their intimacy suffers as the gap between them widens, and eventually something—someone—has to give.
The List
My dad (we’ll call him Dr. Frederick) is a psychologist who has helped countless husbands and wives throughout decades of running his counseling practice. Among all the married couples who have gone to him for help, time and priorities are by far the most common causes for marital strife, separation, and divorce.
The advent of the internet has produced new opportunities for skewed priorities. Dr. Frederick has a unique perspective, having counseled couples on either side of the information age—both pre- and post-internet. He’s observed troubled marriages closely over the past thirty years and found that while the sources of distraction have evolved, the core issues remain unchanged: misplaced priorities and being too busy—too preoccupied. Couples don’t have time for each other. They don’t make room or time for their marriages to flourish.
We’ve all heard the phrase, “You make time for what’s important.” It’s true. Look at how you spend your time and you will see what’s most important to you.
Right priorities are neat and easy to articulate on paper, but reality is full of gray areas. Hierarchical lists like the one below look ideal, but they easily break down during daily life. Our functional priorities—the ones we actually live—are often a response to who’s loudest and what’s most urgent instead of who or what is most important. Your ideal list of priorities probably looks like this:
Priority 1 God
Priority 2 Spouse
Priority 3 Kids
Priority 4 Others
The above hierarchy is good. It’s even biblically sound. It reflects, to an extent, what God’s Word says about priorities:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets. (Matt. 22:37–40)
This passage appears to apply perfectly to our ideal priority list. First, love God. Next, love others. It fits!
However (tell me you didn’t see this coming), why do we still fail at keeping God first? Why do so many days look like this: wake up, check your phone, rush out the door, return from work, watch TV, go to bed, repeat—all without uttering a single prayer or reading even one passage from God’s Word? You may hit the mark a few days a week, or perhaps you can succeed most days with the help of above-average willpower. However, if you’re like most, you won’t always make time for what’s important.
Sequentially listing our God-given priorities is a Western response to Christ’s calling. Western culture is task-oriented; we’re inclined to read that Matthew 22 passage as a to-do list. That being the case, a successful day likely looks like this: wake up, pray, and have devotions (love God, check). Treat others well by speaking kindly, sharing the gospel, or giving of your time and money (love others, double check). Move on to the next item.
I’m oversimplifying, but you get the point. A hierarchical list compels us to check items off instead of living out God’s priorities with our whole being. I don’t believe a top-down approach is our best response to Jesus’s powerful, weighty statements.
Take a moment and read the above passage again. Notice the emphasis placed on all of you. The Greek word for all is literally translated as “whole” (holē). Is it possible to love God with our whole selves and still have some left over for others? Not really. The instant I break from loving God actively and start loving others, I stop giving him all of me, right? Not to worry—Jesus wasn’t setting us up for failure.
God is not just first; he is. Consider his magnitude. He holds the entire universe in his hands. He keeps countless atomic particles humming around in perfect order while, at the same time, binding galaxies together and taming the hottest stars. He is in every time, in every place. As Paul wrote, “in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). He is unmatched and uninhibited; a consuming fire, Lord of hosts, ruler of all.
God is not merely first on our priority list; he is the list. Without him, everything falls apart. Everything becomes nothing without God’s intimate involvement.
Jesus didn’t simply delegate tasks from heaven like a divine office memo. Jesus is calling you to be consumed by God, to be captivated by him—totally satisfied but forever longing for more. Jesus’s call to love God with all your heart is the antithesis of distraction and it obliterates Christian to-dos. To a person who trusts Jesus, nothing matters more than him but everything else matters more than before because of him.
In marriage, instead of putting each other on our to-do lists, we are called to love one another as we are consumed with God from the inside out. Marital priorities fall into their right places as we establish our love in Christ. Then our priorities transform from being a top-down list to something more like concentric circles. Everything we do radiates outward from the center, our identity in Christ. If ever our priorities are out of place, we need only look to Christ, repent, and allow his grace to wash over us and reorient our lives by the power of the gospel.
In lieu of a priority list, let’s explore a concentric view that we’ve found sustainable and enriching for our life and marriage.
Gospel Priorities: The Concentric View
Godly priorities don’t just start with Christ, they’re centered on him. Everything that matters to him matters to you. It’s cause and effect. Your marriage matters. Your spouse matters. Discipleship matters. People matter.
Priority Circle #1: Seek God and His Kingdom
God wants to be the central pursuit in our lives. Then, his kingdom. Everything radiates outward from him. Our priorities get mixed up when we forget who God is and what he has promised. We may work more because we’re afraid of lack. We may overcommit to good activities because, at our core, we are trying to convince ourselves that we’re worthy of God’s love or that our identity is secure. If we’re motivated by fear—any anxiety caused by disbelieving the gospel—we miss God’s call to cherish and trust him above all else.
Jesus tells his disciples,
Therefore do not be anxious, saying, “What shall we eat?” or “What shall we drink?” or “What shall we wear?” For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. (Matt. 6:31–33)
The above passage is a call to rest in God’s sufficiency—his sovereignty. His kingdom and his righteousness are sure!
Seeking God’s kingdom and his righteousness forces us to turn our gaze—our focus and our priorities—to God. We trust in his character, his promises, and his redemption. This is the most loving command we could possibly receive, as it centers our entire existence on God himself. In him, we have purpose, reason to love, and cause to forgive. We have context for every aspect of life, and our priorities radiate outward from a heart consumed by God. But what does it mean to be consumed by him?
Being consumed by God means experiencing and knowing him. Reading his Word and communing with him through prayer and worship are vital to your relationship with God and each other, and that vitality should be reflected in your priorities. As you read the Bible, let its words bear weight in your life. Let Christ define who you are as you experience grace and forgiveness. Wrestle with Scripture and digest it. Internalize it and ask hard questions. Seek wisdom within your Bible’s pages and apply what it says. Our God has faithfully revealed himself through his Word, and when we read it we encounter him.
And when we encounter God through his Word we respond with prayer. Praying is richest when grounded in what God has already said. Just as knowing each other intimately in marriage requires communication, so does your relationship with God. As you pray, allow time and space for the Holy Spirit to speak, listen when he does, and respond.
Finally, Bible study and prayer should incite awe, wonder, and worship. God’s goodness, holiness, and justice are overwhelming; indeed, we should be overwhelmed: he’s God! We are human sinners saved by grace, limited in our scope, capacity, and understanding. Yet God has lovingly granted us access to him through the person and work of Christ. He has gifted us his Word and the Holy Spirit. He has proven over and over again his faithfulness, sovereignty, and power. What else can we do but worship him? Complete worship is the only human response to encountering the person of God.
Making time to encounter God takes intentionality. One of the most profound practices we’ve discovered is daily family worship. The idea is simple and definitely not new: read Scripture, sing a song (usually “Jesus Loves Me” or something similar), and pray together every day as a family. For Selena and me, this is in addition to our personal devotional times with God; for our kids, it’s a beautiful (albeit brief) exercise in prioritizing worship. It takes us five minutes around the breakfast table but the impact is eternal.1
Every aspect of how we love each other in marriage radiates outward from this first priority circle—our central pursuit—the God of the universe. He is the ultimate prize, both the reason and the means to love each other well, which is the next priority circle.
Priority Circle #2: Love Neighbors and Make Disciples
With God firmly at the center, we are endowed with the freedom, joy, and glad privilege of being Christ’s active ambassadors here on earth. We do this by loving others and making disciples, starting with our spouses and children.
Jesus’s next and final command—our second priority circle—is to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31). We often read “neighbor” to mean everyone besides God in an abstract sense. While that is true, we lose the truer meaning when we oversimplify.
We live in a neighborhood with 170 homes. It can be said that anyone within its boundary is our neighbor. The same goes for anyone living in our city. But no one is more our neighbor than the people living next door. We see them often, know them by name, and interact regularly. We have real relationship with them.
The farther we venture away from our home and daily lives, the more abstract neighbor becomes. I don’t believe Jesus was being abstract when he commanded us to love our neighbors. He was being practical—concrete. He was commanding us to love people in general, yes, but it must start with those closest to home. And who lives closer to home than those in our home? Fulfilling Jesus’s command to love our neighbors begins with our closest neighbors of all: our spouses and kids. It starts with love, but it doesn’t stop there.
Loving our spouses well is not without ambition. There is a clear goal in mind, which we find in the Great Commission:
And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matt. 28:18–20)
Our greatest reason for loving one another in marriage is to make disciples of each other and our children. In marriage, husband and wife are called to love each other first and best. This means fiercely guarding our marriage from activities, people, and distractions that chip away at our intimacy and unity. For us, guarding our marriage meant some good things had to go.
When Selena and I began understanding this aspect of our call as husband and wife, we naturally identified good things that had gone bad in our marriage. I stopped volunteering at church for a time. Selena sold her horse. Both were good activities that had become poisonous for our marriage and contrary to Christ’s call to love and disciple each other. How can we love and minister to others honestly (or effectively) if the very act of doing so hurts those we are called to love and minister to first? Why else are elders called to manage “their children and their own households well” (1 Tim. 3:12) before leading the church? Clearly hearing your call to love your spouse and kids first makes wrong priorities clear. If anything hinders loving your family well or stifles discipleship within your family, it must be eliminated. Period. It’s a tough truth to grasp but is vital for a healthy, thriving marriage.
As you read this, consider what priorities may be out of place in your life. Having a job is good; we are called to work diligently and glorify God in the process. But what if the very job that puts food on your table keeps you from spending time sitting around it together? Ministry is good; we are called to serve and help others through the local church. However, is it right to give your best hours to others if your absence makes your spouse feel disconnected, unimportant, and resentful?
This was a pivotal realization for me: there are seasons when intense work or ministry is required, but all seasons must end. When I was starting our business, I worked eighty hours per week. It taxed us immensely, but it’s over. I now work about thirty hours per week; if it takes longer it’s not important. Busy seasons are part of life, but always put a timeline on them to preserve the health of your marriage. Years of winter will freeze even the warmest homes, empty the fullest tables, and extinguish the strongest fires.
Keep God at the center, then love your neighbors and make disciples. Your closest, first neighbors are your spouse and kids. From there, your ministry will naturally extend outward to those in your community and “to the ends of the earth.”
Priority Circle #3: Enjoy God’s Grace, Give Him Glory
The third and outermost priority circle is our catchall for everything else. It’s simply this: enjoy God’s grace, give him glory. When the dust settles, what’s the point? We fight and strive to maintain godly priorities—to apply wisdom—but to what end? The final circle helps answer that question by reminding us to be and to enjoy the graces of God, for his ultimate glory. It’s a reminder to rest in God’s sovereignty.
Our best example comes from the book of Ecclesiastes. Its author, Solomon, was one of the wealthiest people in history and was lauded for his unmatched wisdom. He is one of my favorite biblical authors—as you read his words, you can feel his emotional rawness. Whether he’s writing about love or weighing his very existence, he holds nothing back. His biblical works range from poetic romance (Song of Solomon) to pragmatic advice (Proverbs) and venting existential frustration (Ecclesiastes). Exactly my cup of tea!
My favorite book by Solomon is Ecclesiastes. It’s chock-full of unfiltered contemplation—a collection of thoughts that seem to have been hurriedly scribbled down in moments of frustration. It’s as if Solomon is throwing up his hands and shouting, “What’s the point?” He writes,
And I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after the wind.
For in much wisdom is much vexation,
and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow. (Eccles. 1:17–18)
I can relate; perhaps you can too.
The entire book carries a melancholy tone, but I believe it’s primarily a book about sweet surrender—about reaching the end of ambition and being reminded to simply be, to enjoy life, and to trust God. You can sense Solomon’s existential frustration wax and wane, almost like music. It’s tense, but you feel his relief when he quietly resigns himself to God’s sovereignty over and over again.
Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do. . . .
Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might. (Eccles. 9:7, 9–10)
This passage is where we get our third priority circle. It’s our reminder to relax and enjoy God’s grace over our lives—to quit doing and start being.
We can get so focused on doing that we forget to simply be. Just being together is medicine to your marriage; it’s necessary and irreplaceable for the health of your relationship. There is always more gospel work to do, but thank God that it’s his master work, not yours. Extra blessings in life are good gifts from God and they are to be enjoyed here, now. With Christ at the center, you are free to rest (trust) in his sovereignty, free from pressure to strive for more for its own sake.
As Selena mentioned, she enjoys riding horses. She struggled with guilt for a long time because of the expense it placed on our family’s finances and time. Some of what she felt was conviction because of misplaced priorities, but much of it was just plain guilt. She felt bad for reasons unrelated to her personal walk with God or the health of our marriage. It’s taken years for us to realize that extra blessings like horses (or running water, for that matter) are to be enjoyed in the context of God’s goodness—because he has allowed it. Doing so fulfills our highest calling as children of God: to enjoy him and to give him glory in our enjoyment.
Aside from indulgence, you are free to enjoy unmerited, even illogical gifts from God. They are vain joys in themselves—which is Solomon’s repeated conclusion—but as gifts from God, good enjoyments are chock-full of eternal purpose. You are free to be, and to “eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do” (Eccles. 9:7).
When God finished creation, he called it good and he rested. Eden was human existence as God intended—without sin, humankind in perfect relationship with him and enjoying his good creation. Adam and Eve were placed in the garden to simply exist—to be. When God’s work is done on the final day, he will redeem creation and restore perfection. We will once again be in perfect relationship with God, enjoy his grace, and give him eternal glory.
Our lives in Christ today—here and now—can be a glimpse of eternity. We are called to enjoy the grace of God in Christ and glorify him through our worship. Jesus encourages his disciples by reminding them that he is their vine—their source of life and nourishment—and they are the branches. They are reminded to “abide” in him by resting in and enjoying the grace of God, remembering him as their only source for sustenance and fulfillment:
Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. (John 15:3–5)
Abide in Christ. Be in him. He alone will produce fruit in your life. And as you abide, enjoy the journey. When you are in Christ, you are in God’s family. God lavishes gifts on his children like the loving Father that he is. He gives to you for your enjoyment, for your pleasure. Rest in God’s sovereignty, savor every good moment, and do so in the context of his eternal, unending, illogical grace.
Establishing healthy, God-centered priorities is the beginning of establishing health in other key areas of your marriage. So much marital frustration can be avoided if both spouses are simply available for quality communication instead of being too busy.
Over-busyness is a rampant problem in our culture. Fight it. Fight for rest. And fight for margin. Fight to create the extra space you need in your marriage to truly connect and have real conversation. Then, once you’ve learned to communicate well, you can talk through everything. In fact, communication is exactly what we’ll be exploring next.
- How can the concentric view of priorities challenge the way you and your spouse prioritize?
- Are there areas in your life that need pruning? Why?
- Discuss with your spouse what this pruning will look like.