When you go grocery shopping on an empty stomach and without a shopping list, almost everything looks especially attractive, and your shopping cart ends up filled with too many snacks and not enough nutrition. And when the cashier rings up your items and announces your total you’re in a state of shock! The worst part is that then you start to rationalize the amount of money you spent but still didn’t get the items you needed! The object of a grocery list is to purchase a nutritionally balanced diet for your family. Shopping without a list encourages the likelihood of purchasing the wrong food.

Similarly if we don’t establish priorities in our lives and choose wisely, we’ll wind up making decisions without thinking–just because a particularly opportunity looks attractive. We’ll wind up piling things in to the baskets of our lives just like when we’re in a well-stocked grocery store and we shop without a list. The object of setting priorities is to allocate our time and money according to God’s desires. But too often we choose our priorities with the same lack of foresight as our trips to the grocery store, and the things that we give priority to are simply not what we need–or importantly, what God wants!! According to Webster’s, “a priority is something to which we give precedence by assigning a degree of urgency or importance to it.”

Most men haven’t set or established their priorities, Godly or otherwise. If you want to know a man’s priorities, all you have to do is drive down the block on a Saturday morning and you will see how many different priorities men have set for themselves. One man rises early, another man sleeps late. One man plays golf every weekend, while another goes to his son’s soccer game. One man does the yard work that needs to be done, another goes to the office to catch up on work. One man relaxes with the paper, another man reads his Bible.