Relationship as a Priority Over Accomplishment

Over my years on staff, I have had the blessing and privilege of spending many summers with David and Beth English. They are what I like to call "legends" on staff! Time with them always encourages me in my walk with God and I always leave my summers with them pondering new, deep thoughts. So, welcome my guest blogger, David English! 

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I was in my early 40’s and something was happening to me emotionally. For twenty years I had been involved in Christian ministry and loved what I was doing. College students were a joy to me and I had worked with them in various positions of responsibility locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. I had an incredible wife and four wonderful children. Outwardly everything seemed to be going great. But inwardly something was wrong. Something was missing. It was the same feeling that I had before I had become a Christian at age 19.

Emotionally, life was not making sense and I felt that it should because, after all, I had committed my life to Christ and I was serving Him with all my heart.

My wife Beth had mentioned to me on several occasions how something wasn’t making sense in our lives. We had four young children and this was a formative time in their lives. I was travelling a lot because my scope of ministry was a 12 state region. And yet this unsettledness in our lives was about more than family and ministry scope.

It was as if I wanted to start at ground zero in my life and allow God to lead and direct me in the desires of His heart.

And as I began to become intentional about this emotional unsettledness, God began to reveal to me that the real issue I was facing was one of priorities. God had given me priority covenant relationships in life (my relationship with Him, my wife, my children, and close friendships of the same gender) that were a higher priority than my ministry for Him.

I would never want to marginalize ministry. But the real desire of my heart is to glorify God and experience intimacy with Him. And intimacy with God is the purpose of life.

I now have good friends in my life in which we mutually share our life experiences authentically with each other in the context of intimacy with Christ as the purpose of life.

There are four priority thoughts that help us to “experience the surpassing value of knowing Christ for which everything else is counted as rubbish (Philippians 3:7-8).”

* Character is more important than competency.

* Godliness is superior to giftedness.

* Intimacy of relationship experienced with Christ is of far greater value than any position to which I might attain, any scope of responsibility I might be given, or any task that I could ever perform.

* Who I am is more important than what I do.

Oswald Chambers put it this way, “The greatest hindrance to devotion to Christ is service for Him.”

Experiencing relationship with God is a higher priority than accomplishing things for Him.

Photo courtesy of  Pete Reed (flickr).