It turns out that our priorities have an enormous impact on how we feel about our lives. So if we want to live an abundant, satisfying life we need to get our priorities sorted out; we need to put first things first. So – what should come first?

Most people these days live hectic lives, just making it through. I mean, for some people listening to this program it's a touch and go thing everyday just to find enough food. Others they're drowning in emails and more things on their list of things to do than they can possibly get done. Others are sinking in a sea of loneliness.

Whatever it is, whoever we are, wherever you're at in your life we can find so many things, really important things to clutter up our daily to do list. Personally my list of things to do is as long as my arm and then some. There are the personal things I have to do, things to do with writing and recording and producing this radio program, there's an organisation to run, people to meet, this project, that project, a new idea over here and a new idea over there.

And then I receive a few hundred emails pretty much every day, some of them are junk but many of them are people asking me to do this or get involved in that or can you answer this question for me please or can you help me with my new project, can you please write an endorsement for the book that I'm writing? Welcome to my world. Now don't get me wrong I'm not complaining and none of those things are terribly bad at all but the point is that with so many more things to do than I can possibly fit into my day, my week or even my year, my process for deciding what I do is absolutely critical.

One of the big mistakes I used to make was to answer my emails first thing each morning. I receive emails 24x7 from around the world so I used to sit down in the morning which given I'm a morning person is my most lucid and productive time and start answering emails. After a while I realised I wasn't getting anything else done because by putting emails first I was putting other people's priorities first, I was in fact dancing to their tune instead of sorting out for myself what was most important from my agenda, the things I needed to do first.

There's a well know principle of framework you read in a lot of management books that sets out the difference between what's urgent and what's important and what you discover is almost nothing that's urgent is important and almost nothing that's important is urgent.

And yet most of us are reactive, we react to the urgent things or at least to the things that other people say are urgent and so we spend most of our time doing urgent things instead of important things. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year and before you know it your life is slipping away doing a whole bunch of things which in the scheme of things may well be making you extremely busy but how important are they really?

What of lasting value do they produce? What of lasting value does your life produce? You see my point here, how are you spending your life and are the things you're spending your time on important and worthwhile? I guess I'm asking those questions for you to ask them of yourself and to answer them, come on be brutally honest.

For instance making sure I have some time for my beautiful wife Jacqui is important. Making sure I encourage her, give her a hug and a kiss, spend some unhurried time with her in the morning over breakfast is really important but it's not urgent. It's not as urgent as say an email that comes in from a radio station from somewhere around the world that says, "we weren't able to download tonight's radio program from your ftp server".

And yet what I used to do because remember mornings are my most productive time, is get up really early and spend no time with Jacqui over breakfast and just work furiously through that time and by the time she comes home from work and I come home from work in the evening we're both tired and there you go, we haven't spent any time together.

Do you see how easily this can happen in people's lives? The urgent trumps the important almost every time and before you know it your life's falling apart, things are in a mess, marriages are failing all because we allow the urgent to crowd out the important. Scary, isn't it?

So these days I make sure that almost every morning during the week I'm around to share a time with my wife for breakfast. Sometimes I'm away and sometimes I have to be on a call to Africa or somewhere else but most mornings I have breakfast with my wife. Why? Because it's important and as a result sometimes urgent things don't get done. Let me let you in on a secret, the sky has yet to fall in.

So what about you? What about your life? Are you letting the myriad of urgent things crowd out the important things, spending time with people, managing your personal finances, nurturing your children, developing relationships with your co workers. All of those things are incredibly important and in many a persons life they're being cast aside simply because people are too busy.

I don't have time to exercise. Well if you don't have time for exercise, which is important let me tell you, you'll certainly be making time for sickness which is going to become urgent and actually that's how it works. Doing the important things generally over time reduces the number of urgent things that you need to do because if the important things go undone they lead to crises and those crises increase the urgent things requiring an immediate response.

We've been talking these last few weeks about discovering your destiny. I don't know what your destiny is, I mean really I don't but this is what I do know, your destiny does not lie in the myriad of the things that other people tell you are urgent. Your destiny doesn't lie in answering hundreds of emails. Your destiny doesn't lie in reacting to other people's priorities.

Your destiny is somewhere; it's doing the really important things in your life. Building the relationships, having a great marriage, doing the important things to take a career forward that's going to impact other people's lives. My friend please don't make the mistake of letting the urgent crowd out the important because, I'll say it again, I'm absolutely certain of this, your destiny does not lie in the hundreds and thousands of urgent little tasks that other people think that you should do.

I mean if you or I went to God, this God who handcrafted us, who designed us in His heart, blue printed our DNA, if we went to Him and said, 'Lord what's the most important thing I have to do with my life?' What do you think He'd answer? What would He put at the very top of our to do list?

Well actually we already know. A clever young lawyer asked Him a very similar question. The lawyer sort of said and this is my paraphrase:

'Well Jesus you and I both know that the law that Moses handed down to us there are six hundred and thirteen commandments and prohibitions, it's kind of a lot, I mean day to day that's a lot of things to remember to do so how would you sum up this law, I mean if I'm trying to prioritise these things in my life which ones of all of those commandments are the most important ones?'

You can read his exact words in Matthews Gospel chapter 22 and in Mark chapter 12. And if I had to paraphrase Jesus reply in kind of here and now speak it would run something like this.

'Look I know you have a lot of things to do, there are lots of rules, do this, don't do that, they're all good things but you can sum up the whole law in just two commandments. To love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, all your strength. That's the most important one and the second one is just like it. To love the people around you as much as you love yourself. That's the whole law in a nutshell, that's it.

And you know something the most important thing I do almost every day, the thing I do before anything else is I spend an hour or so alone with Jesus praying, reading the Bible, asking Him questions and that's what sets the course for my whole day and day after day, month after month, year after year it actually sets the course for my whole life.

It is quite simply the single most important thing that I do and it's through that time with Him that I've discovered my destiny.