Thursday, January 12, 2017

Is What You Want What You Really Need?

"But Martha was distracted with much serving, and she approached Him and said, Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to serve alone?  Therefore tell her to help me.  
And Jesus answered and said to her, Martha, Martha, you are worried and troubled about many things.  
But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from her."
Luke 10:40-42 (NKJV)

If you ask people what they need you will get many different answers.  If someone is dealing with a financial issue they will usually say they need more money, if people are very busy they will say that they need more time, and if people are feeling alone they will say that they need a friend.  But, is what we say we need really just what we want?   Instead of more money maybe we really need some financial restraint, instead of more time maybe we need to set the right priorities, and instead of finding new friends maybe we need to take a look at the people that are already around us to find the companionship we long for.

Too many times we mistakenly think that what we want is what we need and this causes problems.  In the story about Mary and Martha, Martha was so distracted by what she was doing that she thought that the help she wanted from her sister was what she needed.  However, when Martha tried to have Jesus tell Mary to help with the serving, Jesus said that Mary had chosen what was really necessary, what was really needed.  What Martha was doing was not wrong, and no doubt she had good intentions in wanting to do a good job with her serving, but what she wanted from her sister was not really what she needed.

Just like Martha, the things we are involved in can cause us to think that what we want is what we need.  For Martha, what she wanted was help from her sister but what she really needed was to be less focused on her serving and more focused on Jesus.  If we only consider ourselves and the things we are immediately dealing with we can lose sight of what is really necessary and what we really need.  First and foremost in life we need to develop in our relationship with God and allow things to develop from there to be able to correctly discern what is really needed and not just look at what we want.  God will meet our needs but He will not always give us all of the things that we want.

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