Dirty Dishes

“There is really only one thing worth being concerned about.
Mary has discovered it—and I won’t take it away from her.”

Luke 10:42

The story is about two sisters who had very different priorities: all Mary could think about was getting to spend time with Jesus while Martha was consumed with all the preparations that were needed. As the story goes on, Martha’s frustration boiled over and she went to Jesus expecting to find a sympathetic ear to her plight of doing all the work by herself while her sister just sat around. Instead, she was given a lesson on perspective that we all could use a refresher course on.

Perspective is defined in the dictionary as this: a way of regarding situations, facts, etc, and judging their relative importance; the proper or accurate point of view or the ability to see life objectively.

Jesus response to Mary could be summed up this way: Mary, you’re worried and troubled, you’ve gotten yourself all worked up and all because you’ve lost your perspective on what is most important. The germ for thinking on perspective was planted Saturday here in Manila as I looked out over a packed sanctuary of people who had come for a seven hour seminar to hear a pastor from Chesterfield Michigan speak on the Lord’s Prayer. Tack on an hour before and after battling Manila traffic and they were investing nine hours of their Saturday to hopefully learn something that would help them in their walk with the Lord and in their desire to be fruitful in their families, local churches and communities.

People who had dirty dishes waiting for them in the sink at home, laundry that needed to be done and meals to be prepared had a perspective on the relative importance of how they spent their time that caused them to choose spending the day learning more about prayer. Here’s the lesson: perspective determines priorities, how we spend our time, finances and energy, and our perspective can be wrong. Let’s make sure that our perspective focuses on what is really important in life!

God Bless,
Pastor Joe
Gateway Church