You see your priorities in what you do, not what you say they are

I love to read. In theory, I like to read literary fiction, and when I am relaxed and not too tired, I still do. Give me a good Russian novelist or a Booker Prize winner and I am pretty sure I would enjoy it. Yet, if I am honest with myself, I am often not so relaxed and pretty tired when I have time to sit down and read. I cannot concentrate on reading Salman Rushdie or Dostoyevsky when I am not at my best. So I reach for the easier spy novel or easy read. I have a theoretical taste in quality literary fiction, but most of my fiction consumption is of the much easier to read variety.

I think I’m not alone when it comes to having a certain practice in theory and a rather different one in reality. Think about the food we eat. It is easy to have an aspirational goal to eat healthily, and even to purchase a full range of lean meat and salad ingredients and put them in your fridge. Yet, when it comes to preparing a meal after a busy day at work, the aspirational contents of our fridge might not be so attractive. We might order fast food, which we (in theory) don’t want, yet is what we actually eat more of.

We see our real priorities in what we do, not in what we say, or in what we think our priorities are.

Let’s apply this idea to the Christian life. Most Christians would tell you that they put Jesus as the top priority in their lives. They would also tell you that the Bible is the most important book and we need to read it and know it. How do we know if these are aspirational goals or how we really live?

We can judge what our real priorities are, what we really want and like, by what we do rather than what we say. If Jesus is so critical to us, we should talk about Jesus, we should pray often, we should seek to serve the body of which Jesus is the head. Otherwise, this remains an aspirational goal, not real life. If we are not talking about Jesus or praying or being involved much in church, the truth is that Jesus is not the first priority in our lives. We need to be honest. Maybe most of our conversations end up being about money. Maybe we think about holidays all the time rather than God. Maybe we really have something rather different as our top priority.

Likewise, if the Bible is so important to us, we will read it. It won’t always feel like a chore or the thing that gets skipped first when life gets busy. Yet the Bible doesn’t have a prominent place in the life of many Christians. We perhaps don’t read much at all. We absorb hour upon hour of media and so little Christian content. What do we really like? What does our life tell us about what is of greatest importance to us?

We are too good at deluding ourselves. If you are brave enough, take a bit of an audit of what is of greatest importance to you. Look at your typical day and where the time goes. What is it that you spend money on? What do you find yourself talking about?

If you don’t like what you find, make some changes. Try to introduce some new habits. Pick up that Bible reading habit you used to have. Introduce God into more conversations. Don’t leave your honouring God as an aspirational goal that doesn’t happen much in reality. Let’s practice what we say we believe.