Matthew 23:23

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier provisions of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness; but these are the things you should have done without neglecting the others.

Everybody today is so busy. The run to and fro without much time to spare. It is rather ironic that we have all this technology that does things at the speed of light, and yet we seem to have less free time than those before us. What is really interesting is to ask people what they are busy with. Sometimes it is work. Sometimes it their spiritual walk. But sometimes it is just peripherals. They get overwhelmed with all these small and often times unimportant tasks and it causes them to not have time for things like Bible study or prayer.

It is easy for us to lose track of our priorities. Sometimes the most urgent thing is not always the most important thing. Yet because it is urgent we give it the priority. When this starts to happen, we need to re-evaluate our priorities. We need to make sure that we put first things first. We might find that if we prioritize correctly that we had more free time than we thought, and we are able to accomplish more than we had previously realized.

The Pharisees had this problem as well. They were focused on spiritual things, like making sure the tithed to the grain on spices. Yet they ignored the central aspects of what it means to be a follower of God. They made no time for faith or mercy. They instead focused their attention on worldly things and on small spiritual matters. We can get caught up doing the same thing today. While it is important to pay attention to the details in serving God, we need to give adequate time to the most important aspects. Otherwise we will find ourselves utterly lacking as servants of God.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier provisions of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness; but these are the things you should have done without neglecting the others.