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What are the most important things life?

And if they are not “things” then what are they?

Is it really wealth or freedom from debt?
Hmmm..That seems to be the focus of many.

Perhaps it just having a steady job these days in the current economy.
Or perhaps it’s acquiring some achievement, a measure of fame or increased popularity with friends.
Or some might feel it would be to have an emotional intimacy with someone very close.
That’s where I’ll stop for a minute. I think all of the things I mention above are quite important, but if I were to answer the question, “what are the most important thing in life,” I’d say it was “relationships.” Think about it.

My answer to that is that the best things in life are founded in “relationships.”

Yes, all things considered, life is all about relationships.
A daily relationship with God would be the priority that puts everything else into order.
Relationships with your family
Then relationships with the people that God places around you.

Okay, now in summary, instead of asking what you or I think is most important, in life what do you think God cares about most?

God cares most about people. Ordinary everyday people. Life is all about people.
People are eternal and God cares about all people.

When I say Christian community kinship, I’m not taking about phoney friendships, or friendhips for the purpose of acquiring some benefit..Where you know a friend is there to cover your back if anything fails. Through relationships with friends - God performs His work, fulfills His plan as one friend ministers to the other friend. From the God appointed relationships comes a safe place and a sense of peace.

God does not need money, or fame. It is His good pleasure for you to have an abiding relationship with Him.
He accepts people as they are. He is not concerned with how you look or the mistakes you’ve made. He accepts anyone and everyone who will ask him for that relationship.

Why is a relationship with God the number one “relationship” you need to consider as the most important thing?
Because the Bible says that God has a plan for your life. That plan is activated by your relationship being restored with Him. His plan will include many good things, gifts and eternal life through His forgiveness.

How important is what you believe?

It’s pretty important. It’s our very own “personal philosophy” that is being shaped by His ability to renew our minds.

Here is a paraphrase of something I read (can’t remember where) but I liked it:

1. Our attitude - leads to the daily activitities we perform (or do not perform) or what we take part in.
2. The results we achieve produces the lifestyle we live in.
3. Our personal philosophy helps produce the attitude we have from day to day.

So then what are the most important things in life?

Life is not about accumulating vast wealth or properties.
God does not need your money and any amount of money will not impress him.
How big your home is, or how expensive your clothes are or even how many years
you have been a member of some Church - will not impress Him.

Remember, when we invest in caring about people rather than caring about “things,”
then you are investing your time in caring about what God cares about most.

Wishing you the very best,
John Alexander

John Alexander is Co-director of Training at search engine optimization workshops with his partner SEO educator Robin Nobles, author of the very first search engine optimization courses online. John is author of the Free SEO Tip of the Day, author of Wordtracker Magic e-books and is part of the Christian brotherhood at Crosslands Church in Newmarket, Ontatrio.

As a young Christian we sang Bible songs such as “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” “Behold, Behold, I Stand at the Door and Knock, Knock, Knock,” and “I Know Whom I have Believed”. Many times I was unaware that I was really singing the words of the Bible. Later, when I came across the verse in my reading, I was surprised that I already knew it.

Yes, help in memorizing Scripture is one of the main benefits of Bible verse songs. When the words of the Bible are locked into the rhythm of a song, this makes it much easier to learn them. Television advertisers have used this for years to get the name of their product into the minds of the public. I can still sing commercials I heard 50 years ago!

Of course, the Bible is not written like poetry in a metric pattern, and thus it is more difficult to set it to music. Methods for writing tunes to match Scripture words is the subject of another article. When it is accomplished, however, the meter of the song dictates the next word and locks it in.

Learning Scripture songs also helps us remember the verses. I can recall numerous times when I think of a verse while speaking and can quote it exactly. In my mind, however, I am really singing the verse quickly. The rhythm and accents of the song was the aid to remember it.

Several years ago I taught third grade in a Christian school. I was especially challenged as to how to teach the memory verse to the slower students. I found music provided that aid. By singing the verse, they were much quicker about learning and remembering it.

This has also been for me a means of meditating on the Bible. A Bible verse song runs over and over in my mind and, of course, so do the words. Many times just the right verse I need for a given situation comes to mind through a song.

A song can actually clarify the mean of a verse. An example of this is found in a verse that, in the KJV, contains a misplaced modifier, 2 Corinthians 5:21. The verse reads, “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin” The verse is obviously not teaching that we are sinless but that Christ is. Through repetition of the phrases, the song makes this clear.

Bible Songs can also be a way to present the Gospel. One year I taught my class all the verses for the Roman’s Road plan of salvation and they sang them for a parents’ assembly. Any unsaved people who were present heard God’s way of salvation without a sermon.

Finally, Bible verse songs are a means of retaining Scripture as I get older. I find it much more difficult to memorize anything and retain it now than I did when I was younger. However, I can still remember a song and through this means can learn and retain verses.

ONE of the commonest of the criticisms which are brought against the mystics is that they represent an unsocial type, of religion; that their spiritual enthusiasms are personal and individual, and that they do not share or value the corporate life and institutions of the church or community to which they belong.catholic perspective mysticism Yet, as a matter of fact, the relation that does and should exist between personal religion and the corporate life of the church frequently appears in them in a peculiarly intense, a peculiarly interesting form; and in their lives, perhaps, more easily than elsewhere, we may discern the principles which do or should govern the relation of the individual to the community.what is mysticism

True mystics, often mislabeled as “religious individualists can be viewed as taking personal religion to its optimal power. If we believe his account is true, it means he has had an interaction with the spiritual side of things and and is aware of it. which transcends the normal experience, and appears to be independent of the general religious consciousness of the community to which he belongs. A mystic talks to God as one human being to another, and not as a spokesman for his tribe. He survives by an immediate knowledge far greater than by belief; by a knowledge possessed in the hours of direct, uninterrupted intercourse with the Transcendent, which he calls ‘an union with God’.” The certitude then gained-a certitude which he cannot impart, and which is not generally diffused-governs all his reactions to the Universe. It even persists and upholds him in those terrible hours of darkness when all his sense of spiritual reality is taken away.

It seems at first that such a personality as his lacks the support generally given by a community of fellow-believers. By the very term “mystic” .we indicate a certain aloofness from the crowd, suggest that he is in possession of a secret which the community as a whole does not and cannot share; that he lives at levels to which they cannot rise. It seems that a lot of the distrust of him comes from the feeling of independence from the group that he experiences - his apparent separation from the often clumsy and always symbolic methods of institutional religion, and the further fact that his own methods and results cannot be criticized or checked by those who have not shared them. “I told you what I saw,” David told them; and the people who didn’t see could only keep quiet.

Yet this common opinion is decisively contradicted by history, which shows us, again and again, the great mystics as the loyal children of the great religious institutions, and forces us to admit that here as in other departments of human activity the corporate and the individual life are intimately plaited together. Even those who have left the church that raised them have now found that they seem to draw devout followers to them and have become leaders of their own groups now. If we can examine the nature of the connection between these two factors: to ask, on the one hand, what it is that the corporate life and the group consciousness which it develops give the mystic; on the other, what is the real value of the mystic to the corporate life of his church?