OF FIRST IMPORTANCE
One thing the time management gurus warn about is the tyranny of the urgent over the important. It is expected that someone will miss an important event if he is in a wreck on the way there and is sent to the hospital. The urgent outweighs the important.
The problem comes when our lives are so out of control that the urgent is all-pervasive. We are always going to spend more time with the kids, but every day something more urgent comes up and we don’t set it aside. This is why kids are ignored, bills don’t get paid on time, Bible-reading and family devotions are put off, and Sunday morning is spent “catching up.”
Lee Iacocca, a successful business executive, said that he would not promote managers who never took time off work for family vacations. They couldn’t manage their time well enough to put the important over the urgent.
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15, “3For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,…” The grace of God in Christ is of first importance in the life of the Christian, indeed it is of first importance in the life of every human being, whether they know it or not.
We are all sinners, doomed to die. Death is the inescapable. What we all need then is forgiveness, life, and salvation, the gift that only God’s grace gives us. And that gift is given only through the means of grace, the Gospel in Word and Sacrament.
Knowing that as we do, we nevertheless often let other urgencies crowd out what is of first importance.
What is the antidote? It is the grace of God itself in the word. This is the grace that worked in Paul to be the powerful and effective missionary that he was. Where God’s word is, there also is God’s grace, powerfully at work in believers.