Wise Priorities

By Thomas Wenig

It is a very human thing to favor things that give immediate gratification, like possessions and entertainment, but these are not the things that will make your life the best in the long run. This is especially true if we consider the biblical promise of eternal life. When we factor in what God says about our existence, then a whole new set of wise priorities emerges.
Short-term priorities will eventually leave you feeling empty and wondering if there is more to life. Having the proper priorities will bless you throughout your life, help you through the tough spots we all experience, and even follow you past your death.
Wise Priorities gets you to consider the big picture. It uses not only the Bible, but also social research to support its points. The book points to the value of relationships, good health, God-given purpose, God's promise of eternal life, knowing God, and putting money in its proper place. Wise Priorities offers strategies to get your life in order so that you can have the best possible life for yourself. This book can be used for individual contemplation or small group discussion. Makes a good gift for someone who is missing the big picture

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Wenig
• Release date: Mar 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301798674

Thomas Wenig

Tom is an ordained minister of the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod. He received his MDiv and Doctor of Ministry from Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. He worked briefly in the nuclear power industry after completing his Bachelor's of Science in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He was the Associate Pastor of Zion Lutheran Church in Bethalto, Illinois and now is the Senior Pastor of the Lutheran Church of Our Redeemer in Evansville, Indiana. Tom has been married for 25 years to Joan, who is a hospital pharmacist. He has two children: Nicole and Brett

Book preview

Wise Priorities

Thomas D. Wenig

RedeemerPublications

Evansville, Indiana

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Thomas D. Wenig

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away except with the permission of the author, whom you may contact at [e-mail]. If you would like to share this book with another person, please consider purchasing an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

You are encourage to see or hear other messages from the author at www.redeemerchurch.org

Find me on Twitter @tdwenig

The names used in the personal stories in this book are fictitious, and are meant to protect the privacy of individuals. Several stories are based on real people but are not actual accounts of their lives.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter One: Searching for the Best Possible Life

Chapter Two: The Riches of Relationships

Chapter Three: What We Need for Great Relationships

Chapter Four: The Blessings of Health

Chapter Five: Pursuing Your Purpose in Life

Chapter Six: Discovering Your Specific Purpose

Chapter Seven: The Primary Importance of Eternal Life

Chapter Eight: Moving Beyond Religion to Knowing God

Chapter Nine: Making the Most of Money

Chapter Ten: Rich in Every Way

Introduction

As a pastor it is my job to think and teach about life, but one element of my job really emphasizes the meaning of life—officiating at funerals. This past week I had two funerals to officiate. I always try to make the sermon at a funeral personal, but what should be said about a person's life? Was their life well spent? At a funeral we want to say good things and have good memories, and I usually find good things that I can sincerely say; but I don’t know if I can ever say that the person has had the best life possible. We can’t see what could have been. We don’t know what parts of God’s plan for the person went unfulfilled. It seems that you can always have greater positive impact on the world and better health, and a closer walk with God, and, frankly, more fun.

Conducting funerals has made me want more out of life. By more, I certainly don’t mean more stuff. I’ve seen people with loads of material goods reduce their holdings down to what would fit in an 8’ x 8’ nursing home room and then reduce it down to a 2’ by 6’ box. I have never said in a funeral sermon, So and so had an awesome car and did you see their pool? Life isn’t about your toys. By more, I mean more of what life is really about.

I don’t know many people who like funerals, but I am thankful that they are a part of my duties. They have forced me to confront something that most people choose to deny. We are mortal and life is short. We will all die. Life is not futile and pointless, however. It has meaning and value, and because of one very awesome gift, our life does not have to be bounded by a funeral.

If you ever worry about whether you will have a good life, or if you think that you are missing out on something important, or if you have ever felt empty and not understood why, or if you have ever been to a funeral and asked, Is this all there is? I would urge you to continue reading this book. This book is a discussion of what really matters in life.

The idea for this book came to me as I reflected on the lives of people I knew, including my own. I love my life. I wouldn't trade it with anybody I know or know of. Still, I know that there are ways to make my life even better. Just the process of writing this book has caused me to make changes and my aspirations are to change even more.

What this book has to offer is a thought provoking discussion of the things that should be priorities in our life, if we truly want the best life possible for ourselves. It presents a long-term view on life and pulls wisdom from scripture, experience and social research.

One advantage that I feel I have for writing a book like this is my profession. As a pastor I get an intimate look at other people’s lives in good times and bad. I may not have to face all the situations that I have seen personally, but I have thought them through. I would like to discuss what I have learned with you and share some additional wisdom gleaned from others who are happy, productive and at peace.

I also have studied the Bible from this angle. The Bible has a lot of insight about the meaning of life and how to conduct oneself in a way that is ultimately a blessing. You may or may not regard the Bible as authoritative, but if you keep an open mind, I think the things shared will really help you. Wherever possible, I will also show how various scientific studies have also concluded the same things.

I see that our society teaches that the meaning of our lives is to gain material wealth and to provide entertainment for ourselves. That’s pretty obvious. This value powers our economic engine as we all work hard to achieve this goal. The pursuit of money and self-gratification gets us up in the morning. We go to school largely for this purpose. We measure our net worth based on our achievements in this area. We compare ourselves to others in this area more than in any other. We also make sacrifices for these ends, and sometimes the things that we sacrifice are actually the things that matter most in our existence. That is called being foolish. Don’t be foolish. Instead, give this topic some serious thought.

The first eight chapters of this book will discuss five broad areas that are more important than the worldly goals of wealth and entertainment. For each of the five areas, I will show you why these things are critical for our lives, show you how people act foolishly with respect to each one, share insights from scripture and research, give you an action plan toward improvement and finally offer some questions for discussions with friends or personal contemplation. In the final two chapters, I discuss how we can approach wealth and pursue true contentment.

The rest is in your hands. You may renew your relationship with your spouse, or seek to start some new friendships. You may make a new drive to quit smoking or start exercising. You may resolve to start your day with prayer or change the contents of your bucket list. You may change your job, or you may go back to that job with a whole new attitude.

If you find any section of this book helpful, then it is a success. I hope you find them all helpful.

Chapter One

Searching for the Best Possible Life

Wouldn’t it be great if we could always foresee the right thing to do? So many decisions we make blindly or without any serious contemplation. Some of those decisions make us pay dearly. There is no rewind button on life. So it pays to live wisely moving forward.

I can think of some decisions I’d wish I had back. For instance, many times I held back from talking to people and forging friendships because I lacked confidence. In hindsight, I didn’t have a reason to hold back. I valued safety more than relationships and paid the price for it. Stupid. Still, there can be much more regrettable and damaging decisions than those.

Everybody’s life is different, so there is no one, best way to approach life, but certain values rise to the top for us all. These things prove to have long-term benefits, even eternal benefits. I would also contend that these values should be priorities for us because we are created to work a certain way and for a specific purpose. Unfortunately, while they are fairly obvious, they are not uniformly pursued by us all. People are seduced by things that give short-term pleasure and pay the price in the long term.

Have you ever used something for a purpose other than its designed purpose? For instance, have you tried to pound in a nail with the handle of the screwdriver you happened to have, or used a can of soda to hold down papers in the wind. It may work, but there is something sub-optimal about it. Sub-optimal uses of tools, household items or living things tend to be hard them, and they don’t quite get the job done.

Our lives are no different. God has a reason and a plan for our lives. Thus there is an optimal way of living: the right priorities, the right methodology. The result is not dull or conformist. It is a life that is uniquely ours. Anything less is like nailing with a screwdriver handle or worse.

None of us wants a life that is second best. We want the best, but we don’t always know what that would look like. The problem with people across the board is that we fancy ourselves to be the creator of our life rather than accept that we are created. We accept the noble-sounding phrase, The meaning of life is what you make of it. God has something to say about this. He gives us purpose and designs us for good, but if we insist on our own ways we receive a diminished existence as a result--in some cases, greatly diminished.

Perhaps you are not as certain that there is eternal life or that we are created. Acceptance that there even is such a thing as God-given meaning of life is certainly not automatic in our society. Several forces work against believing that God cares about your life. For instance, we all have a natural resistance to God. We can also become jaded because we have misinterpreted the negative experiences in our lives.

Perhaps the biggest barrier to finding the life we were designed to have is our own worldview—what we believe to be true about world. For instance, it is not uncommon for a person to believe that God exists but to also believe that life moves along in a basically unguided fashion. In other words, God really doesn't care about what we do day-to-day. This suits many just fine. They have God around if they need Him and the rest of the time they are free to do what they choose. But they won’t find God’s plan that way. The distance they perceive between God and themselves is a distance they have created.

A growing number of people don't even believe that much. They have swallowed the idea that we are evolved from lower life forms and that life is without absolute purpose. If you want a purpose, in this worldview, you are free to choose one; but it is only your choice. This sort of worldview may be what you or somebody you know believes. It is overtly taught in our public school system and in many universities. It is passed off as what you believe if you are truly well educated. In such a model there is no such thing as purpose. Your whole life is just interesting chemistry. Even your sense of being conscious is an illusion of sorts. People, like other living things, are merely locked in a battle to garner enough resources to stay alive. If it can be said that we have a purpose, it is merely to pass on our genes.

This depressing view of our existence would logically promote a very self-centered and short-termed approach to life. It is an approach to life that too many people readily adopt. Don’t believe or go that route. There are reasons to believe that your life has a higher purpose. Life that is well lived considers the long-term implications of our actions and more than that counts on life beyond the grave.

If we would be able to step outside of our lives and go into the future and look at future impact of our decisions and even experience life after death and understand what is important to the Kingdom of God, then we would no doubt make different choices have different priorities and have different outcomes. That would be wisdom. Since doing this is impossible, how do we gain such wisdom?

Seeking Wisdom

In the search for wisdom, some insight can be gathered from the experience of others. Scientific researchers have sought the keys to a fulfilled life by administering surveys and doing longitudinal studies. These can be very helpful, and we will look at some of their findings along the way. A limiting factor of such studies is that people can only share what they have discovered to date. I have discovered that many people haven’t really been that reflective about their life. They may not have much insight into the future. So you don’t always get as much insight into life as you might expect from surveys. The biggest limitation of research has to be that it has no way to penetrate past death. For this reason we need more than research to get a total picture. We need the insights of someone who has seen beyond the grave.

Who do you trust for information about life after death? People who have had an out-of-body experience provide some interesting input. Many have experienced a heavenly glory, others have experienced a hellish despair. It is impossible to verify whether they actually experienced these things or that their dying brains produced these images, in most cases. In the end, they add some encouragement but no credible direction.

The religions of this world all claim to have insight into eternal life and how to live now. This could be very helpful, but only if they reflect the truth. If a religion is only an opinion about what matters, we might as well do a survey of what everybody thinks will happen after death and go with a majority view of things.

This book admittedly gives weight to only one religious source, the Bible. What makes the Bible credible, in the mind of many throughout history, is that eyewitnesses claim to have observed resurrection of Jesus from the dead and other miraculous signs. The stories of the New Testament are not accounts of things that happened long ago or far away, but rather are claims about what had happened during their time. This is further supported by the incredible growth of the Christian Church within a lifetime of these events and in the face of strong opposition. It is hard to see what would have been the motivation or advantage of the New Testament authors to lie about their claims. Each of them suffered severe hardship and eventually death for their stories. My view is that people are people and we will act in our self-interest. If we know that claims are not the truth, we will not go to the mat for them. These people stuck with their stories to the end. It cost them their comfort, their possessions, their cultural ties and in many cases their lives. That adds a lot of credibility.

You may be more skeptical about the information in the Bible. In the end, evidence will not convince you of the truth of the Bible. God has to do it. If you are a skeptic, I challenge you to read on. At the very least, the Bible has a lot of practical advice for life that research supports. What it has to say about life after death, however, is the real source of value and wisdom. Giving it at least an open-minded hearing won’t hurt you.

Five Areas of Emphasis

Let me give you a thumbnail sketch of what will be discussed in detail in the chapters ahead. I believe experience, research and scripture would point to several main areas that we should emphasize and pursue above entertainment, money and career, which I consider to be the default goals in life for our society. Having a fulfilled, happy life is a matter of having some level of riches in all of these things. Wisdom is a matter of understanding the value and interrelationship of these things and seeing their benefit in the long run.

Our first is relationships. In the story of the Garden of Eden God declares, It is not good for the man to be alone. We are made