Urgent Versus Important
Let the message about Christ, in all its richness, fill your lives. Teach and counsel each other with all the wisdom he gives. Sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs to God with thankful hearts. And whatever you do or say, do it as a representative of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through him to God the Father. (Colossians 3:16–17)
The conflict between the urgent and the important is inescapable. How easy it is to get the two confused! It is common for us to think that by staying busy and working hard we’re dealing with the important things. But that is not necessarily the case. Those things most urgent rarely represent the things most important. And therein lies the reason so many people today feel such a lack of satisfaction after working so hard and for so many hours each day.
Not only is that frustration true in the world in which we live, it is all the more true in the church we attend. When we substitute the urgent for the important in the church of Jesus Christ, we emphasize work, activity, involvement, doing, producing, impressing, and accomplishing. But it leaves us feeling flat and empty. Exhaustion replaces satisfaction. Furthermore, it smacks of the secularized world in which we work. Who knows how many people have been turned away from Christianity, longing for the true, living God but encountering at their church a secularized substitute?
Perhaps this helps explain why so many activities in so many churches distract from the one essential ingredient that makes a church unique in this postmodern society: worship. When we look at life with a horizontal perspective, the urgent takes center stage. It is loud. It is popular. It is product-oriented. The horizontal highlights all things human . . . like human achievement, human importance, human logic, human significance, human opinion, human efficiency, human results. It demands our time and attention. As that ever-present tyranny screams at us, the most natural reaction is to yield, giving it our first priority. After all, it’s urgent! We’re very familiar with its voice.
The important things, however, are different. They are quiet and deep. They are vertical in their perspective. They highlight the things of God—God’s Word, God’s will, God’s plan, God’s people, God’s way, God’s reason for living, God’s glory, and God’s honor. And the goal of all these? God’s worship.
The underlying objective of a church committed to the important things—rather than the urgent—is the cultivation of a body of worshipers whose sole focus is on the Lord our God.
Taken from The Church Awakening by Charles R. Swindoll. Copyright © 2010 by Charles R. Swindoll, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Faith Words, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
