0:00:00 - 0:00:26 I was sitting here thinking and I was, I was envisioning a burning fire in a wood stove. And if you've ever seen that before, it's not uncommon if you've got everything dialed in just right. You see flames sort of appear and then dissipate and they, they just come in and out of existence there on the 0:00:26 - 0:00:54 top of the logs, while the core of the fire is inside between the logs and what's actually happening is there's, there's some combustion of the gasses, some secondary combustion and this is the most efficient way to run the fire. But I was thinking about how in life so often we mis prioritize things 0:00:53 - 0:01:22 and if you're burning a fire, you're doing it for heat. Um You want the fire to be roaring and it'd be easy to think. Something like, well, flame is good. Flame equals heat. Heat is what I want. And that's what we need to do. But the fact is that not all flames are equal. And when you're running the 0:01:21 - 0:01:44 fire, actually, what you need to do is preserve that core fire, that core fire is what's generating the wisps that come and go on the top, the wisps don't actually produce near as much heat as the core fire does. Even if it's what's most visible as you're looking at the, at the fire from the outside 0:01:43 - 0:02:08 . So if you were to prioritize the presence of the wisp, actually, what you'd have is neither the main fire or the secondary combustion because the only reason it exists is because of what the main fire does. There are so many things in life that can't coexist. It's, it's shocking. Actually, I think 0:02:08 - 0:02:33 this, this exceeds, this significantly exceeds what most people realize for most people. There's a, there's an expectation of many things co occurring that cannot co occur. And one of the reasons for the confusion is that there are an awful lot of these wisps in life and we get tricked into thinking 0:02:33 - 0:03:00 that if we've seen it, it must be maintainable. And the fact is that so many things in life are only ever intermittent, they're only ever intermittent. They come and they go and if you try to optimize on them, you're, you're going to end up with far less of that and everything else that's more important 0:02:59 - 0:03:27 . This is a property that that's true and you are going to see it everywhere if you look. So, uh rather than just if I list examples of this, I know what's going to happen is that people won't apply it in various other situations. It's a universal property. So this is why it's so vitally important to 0:03:27 - 0:03:51 have a life plan. Even if you want to skip over that, you don't want to look into that. I've made videos on it. You don't want to think about it, whatever, cutting right to the chase of how this applies. You have to think about everything in terms of priority and you need a universal top priority you 0:03:51 - 0:00:00 need in your mind. You need a way of saying I can order everything in my life from most to least important and it's not situational. In other words, I, I think the limit to which we think about priority in life, it's limited in, in terms of specific situations. Oh, I know when I'm driving, you know, 0:00:00 - 0:04:32 I need to keep my eyes on the road. Whatever else I do, I need to maintain control of the car and keep it in a safe direction and speed and everything. Well, ok, fine. People are reasonably good at that and it's a good thing because bad things would happen. But what about on the, on the, on the scale 0:04:32 - 0:04:56 of life, people are horrifically bad at this horrifically bad in a sense. The puzzle of this life, the, the puzzle the gospel solves is a puzzle of prioritization. And if you can figure that out, you've got eternal life, it turns out, I mean, you'd have to actually live that way. But then that becomes 0:04:56 - 0:05:17 a question of honesty. Nothing more. Isn't that funny? Uh, you can think about that and try to figure out the elaborated version of it. But the gospel puzzle, it's a puzzle. Prioritization. If you haven't figured out, the only other thing you have to solve is honesty because you have everything you need 0:05:16 - 0:05:37 to do and every sufficient reason to do it. Isn't that funny? Now, that being said that prioritization it, it is going to shift as you learn more, not situationally, you don't say, oh, I woke up today and I don't feel like this or that. Therefore, my priorities have shifted. No, it's just based on value 0:05:37 - 0:00:00 . It's not based on just how you feel right now. It's a much bigger picture than that. That's why it's powerful. But as you go through life, you're gonna learn things and what you learn includes what cannot coexist, you might think, oh, you know what I love the most in my life is going to my church. 0:00:00 - 0:06:14 Everybody's so great. It's just, it's the best. It's, it's core to who I am and what I do. And then as you cruise through life maybe, oh, now I'm giving you an example, which I said I wasn't gonna do as you cruise through life, you might find that there's some conflict between what you really want out 0:06:14 - 0:00:00 of life and church. Like I don't know, getting to know Jesus actually and living like him that might be hard to do in your church. And so you're faced with this conflict and what do you do? You have to choose the most important thing, Jesus talks about this in Matthew 23. And basically in the verse, 0:00:00 - 0:06:56 I'm thinking of what he says is essentially, look, always do the most important thing and if there's ever a conflict, do the most important thing, do everything that's good. But whenever there's a conflict go with what is best, it's pretty simple, right? And the, the examples abound in relationships 0:06:55 - 0:07:06 and jobs and, and just, you know, how you handle your day, every little thing, you need to have a prioritization. That's the key.