Some practical suggestions

So how do we order our lives? How do we gauge what is important so as to avoid the tyranny of the urgent?
It helps to understand who we are and what our roles in life are. Let me give a personal example:

v1	For instance I am firstly a person made in the image of God, and a child of God - so I must give time to self-development and nurture what God is doing in my own life - without that I can give nothing to anyone else, I would soon run on empty and everything crash around me

v2	Secondly I am a husband and a father - I have God given responsibilities to my family, they must get adequate time, and good quality time - not the dregs of my life when I am empty having giving to everyone else.

v3	Thirdly I am a minister of Word and sacrament - this is a divine calling on my life which I seek to honour to the best of my ability, mainly but not exclusively within the context of this local church family.

v4	Fourthly I am something of a visionary - and seek to help move Christian organisations and individuals on into the forefront of what God has for them to do - such as LBC, the LBA, BHT and IN, the training of student pastors and other Christian workers

v5	Fifthly I am a theologian and seek to think creatively and critically about the interplay between world and Word in both an academic and practical setting.

These are my five God given roles and responsibilities.
Occasionally, and probably not often enough, I sit down in the course of a retreat and work out what my goals are in respect of these five roles and responsibilities.
For instance my goals for this church are:

{1	To empower the LT members to lead in designated areas of the churches ministry and mission and through them empower each member to participate in the life of God through this church regardless of age or gender or race;

{1	To create a worship environment that enables the church to meet with God in a real and dynamic way each week;

{2	To preach the word of God faithfully in a way that challenges and encourages Christians to serve God effectively in the world and to think and behave in a Christ-like way

{3	To develop a system of nurture which helps every member grow in Christian stature to maturity;

{4	To establish an effect programme of evangelism to bring the gospel to a community in need, to help new people to belong and to see people come to Christ and be baptised;

{5	To develop the Church community in its role of mutual care givers;

{6	To provide care directly or by referral to those in greatest need pastorally;

-320 With such a wide brief, each goal will not always be at the top of the list, and some goals will be delegated to others to fulfil.

My roles and goals are used in three ways: for making decisions, for planning, and for reviewing.
At he beginning of each week I look at what I have to do and the time I have got available. I plan to do justice to each role and goal by investing what God has given me in doing what God requires of me. By far the greatest amount of time is given to my church role, which you would expect, around 44 hours generally.
But as most of you will know from your own lives, demands can be great, greater than the time available - so we are back to the central question, this time in this form:

-320 How do we know when to say yes, and when to say no?

The simple answer is to say pray about it. But that can be overly simplistic. I do believe we should pray and bring before God our choices, but to take up the point of Hebrews 5:13-14, as we grow towards maturity in faith, we should seek to do this in a mature way as we think more Christianly and as we hold up against the request the roles and goals that God has already given us. We can prayerfully reflect on them and the request before us to see if they relate. If they do not, we say no if they do, we say yes. There will always be exceptions to this where God does want us to do something different, but they will be just that, exceptional, not the norm.