When we think of living a balanced life we may thing that sounds awfully boring. However, this may be one of the most radical things you ever do. The following is an exercise we did several years ago in one of the churches I was pastoring at. We were told to write down everything we did in a week related to the church, ministry, our faith, etc. While I recognize our whole lives are worship, for this exercise we broke our time up this way.
So I made my list of how many ministries I was involved with, who they were for, and how much time each one took. We were challenged also to think about how many of these were to feed us spiritually, how many were for other believers, and how many were for those who did not know Christ.
I don’t believe our results were much different than most Churches would have been. When I looked down at my own lists of who most of the events were for, it made me think I must be terribly self centered, and so is my church. Through this exercise it was all too obvious that we were putting over ninety nine percent of our efforts into feeding and taking care of our own. While these are things that must be done, we were terribly unbalanced.
Living balanced will be considered incredibly radical living. We need to make sure we are being fed, having fellowship, encouraging one another, and so on. We also need to make sure their is an outflow for what God is imparting and pouring into us. Live radical, next time you want to go do something for God, go and do it for the least, because that is where you will find Him.
Get a pen and paper. Start on your list. It is time to get balanced.