Ordering Your Private World

Just re-read Ordering Your Private World by Gordon MacDonald. It's a classic and needs to be read every few years as it serves to push me back to biblical priorities.

It's a book that speaks most specifically to those in leadership capacities, but can translate to any life/context. Here are some excerpts I found insightful and inspiring:

“Now, there is a busyness that reflects a plan of activity, a pattern of priorities, and a sense of purposefulness. It is a good and satisfying busyness through which one grows and increases competence. But there is also a busyness … that reflects a chaotic way of life – a way doing in which one is simply responding to the next thing in the day.” (p.1)

“Sadly, we do not have a Christian culture today that easily discriminates between a person of spiritual depth and a person of raw talent.” (pp.5-6)

“’Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life.’ (Prov. 4:23)” (p.23)

“How did we get to a day when stress and fatigue are almost a badge of success?” (p.30)

“What I had to learn was that my drivenness needed to be consecrated on a daily basis.” (p.40)

“If my private world is in order, it will be because, having faced up to what drives me, I listen quietly for the call of Christ.” (p.46)

“An audience with Jesus over a period of time exposes all the roots and expression of drivenness.” (p.54)

“When driven people lose things, it is a major crisis. When called people lose them, nothing of substance has changed.” (p.62)

“[John the Baptist’s] parents were marked with an extraordinary depth of integrity, godliness, and perseverance.” (p.68).

“If my private world is in order, it will be because I have made a daily determination to see time as God’s gift and worthy of careful investment.” (p.73)

“… Jesus clearly understood His mission. He had an overarching task to perform, and He measured His use of time against that sense of mission.” (p.82)

“To be in front at the first turn is meaningless without the endurance to finish strongly.” (p.105)

“If we are ever to develop a spiritual life that gives contentment, it will be because we approach spiritual living as a discipline, much as the athlete trains his body for competition.” (p.140)

“Moses brought with him uncompromised standards of heaven; Aaron caved in to the whims of men. It was all in the listening.” (p.154)

“’Blessed be to God for the day of rest and religious occupation wherein earthly things assume their true size. Ambition is stunted.’ [quoting from Wilberforce’s journal]” (p.191)

“Sabbath rest penetrates to the deepest levels of fatigue in the inner, private world. This fatigue is rarely touched by any of the modern amusements.” (p.194)

“… the rest God instituted was meant first and foremost to cause us to interpret our work, to press meaning into it, to make sure we know to whom it is properly dedicated.” (p.195)