Loyal, OK

 
Pastor Leon Seaton

What Are Our Priorities?

Every organization should set its priorities. For instance, the major priority of the Lions Clubs International is prevention of blindness. The major goal of Rotary Clubs is the elimination of polio.

Occasionally we need to assess the top priorities of our church.   Hopefully our priorities include worship and service for God, teaching the scriptures, converting the sinners and discipling the believers.

 “I pray that out of His glorious riches He (God) may strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge--that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.  Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to His power that is at work within us, to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.”  Ephesians 3:16- 21

 Prayers Should Prepare Us

Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr often quoted a remark made to him by an agnostic friend who objected to the church, “Not because of its dogmas but because of its trivialities,” by which he meant “preoccupation with trivial concerns with the world hanging on the rim of disaster.”

 Fred Craddock was invited to attend a prayer meeting at a home in a wealthy suburb of Atlanta. He said the group shared “weighty” prayer concerns like a date coming up on Friday night and the purchase of a new car, and one man announced they had had 75 answered prayers since the group started meeting.

Then one of them turned to him and asked, “What do you think, Dr. Craddock?” Craddock, usually more reticent to criticize anybody's praying, was offended by the superficial and mechanistic reduction of Israel's God to what Paul Tillich called, “the Cosmic Bellhop.” He couldn't help himself. He said, “Do you mean to tell me when people are starving in Africa and the poor are suffering in India and parents in Latin America can't sleep through the night wondering if the death squads will visit them, you folks are praying about dates and new cars?   Larry Bethune, Friends in High Places

 May God help us set proper priorities and surrender to HIS WILL!