Preaching What I Don't Practice

Sunday's message was a little tough. It was week one of our 40 Days of Love study and I was talking about the fact that there is nothing in our life more important than relationships. I spent the first twenty minutes establishing that principle with Scripture and end-of-life illustrations. After all, when we contemplate funerals (our own or those we love) we quickly realize that the most important thing in life is relationships. As Rick Warren puts it, when someone is on their deathbed they don't asked to be surrounded by their diplomas or their trophies, they want to be surrounded by those they love. In the end, relationships are the only thing that matter.

So after establishing the principle, I asked the tough question....If that's true, and we know it is, then why do our relationships tend to get the short end of the stick? Why do we short-change the relationships most important to us or neglect the ones we love the most? The answer is usually that we're just too busy. Deep down we sincerely believe that our relationships are the most important thing in our life, but we're so busy and distracted with things of lesser importance that we don't give them the attention they deserve. To quote Warren again, "most of us have first class allegiances to second class causes." Ouch.

At the end of the sermon I went "off notes" and started talking about how if you asked us to rank what's most important in our life we would put God and family first, way ahead of work or hobbies or sports or anything else. But if you ranked those things according to time spent or attention given, the rankings would look very different. The reality is that our time and attention speaks louder than our words and promises. If our relationships are truly the most important thing in our life, then shouldn't we give them more attention that we do?

I don't think I said it exactly like that, but it was something along those lines. It wasn't part of the original sermon because I didn't really want to preach that part. Not because I don't believe it's true, I just didn't want to be guilty of preaching something I don't practice. In other words, my time doesn't always communicate my values. I wish it did and I wish I could have stood up there and said, "You all need to be like me and get your priorities straight." But I couldn't. I've been guilty of neglecting relationships for things of lesser importance. We all have. It's crazy and stupid and one day we'll regret it, but we're all guilty.

So the big question is "what are we going to do about it?" Are we going to wait until our deathbeds to make relationships a priority or are we going to start now? That's the challenge of this study our church is doing together. Do we really believe what God tells us about love and are we willing to make relationships our top priority? I can already see that its not going to be easy and they'll be plenty of things in the study that step on my toes. They're still stinging a bit from Sunday. As one member emailed me after worship..."I'm not sure I can handle another 39 days of love."