From Eliyahu:

Shalom friends, 

If technology is supposed to save us time, how come we all seem to have more to do than we can ever get done? This seems to be the paradox of the modern age. Not only is there a lot to do, but there are so many choices available at any given moment that it can be hard to make the best choice about how to spend one's time, or any choice at all. Making that time-tangle still worse, marketing is literally everywhere, targeted directly at you, to "engage" you in a million different things. All of this can generate a massive waste of time, just trying to navigate through all of that. Really, years can go by and you can look back and wonder what you have accomplished dealing with all of the information overload. It's a sort of to-do list gridlock.

This brings us to rule #1: you can't do everything.

Since you can't do everything, you've just got to stop the madness, take a break, and decide what your priorities need to be. For this, you need to block out all other voices and listen to that voice inside of yourself. What is really the most important thing to YOU? If that's already clear than you are probably focusing on that priority already. If not, then I would like to make a helpful suggestion you probably are not going to get from any of that targeted advertising trying to "engage" you. Here is my suggestion: the most important personal priority for any of us should be our eternal future. After all, when you compare a lifetime of something less than a hundred years to an eternal unending future, which is more important becomes a no-brainer. Really, shouldn't securing your eternal future be at the top of your to-do list?

Despite all that, most people prefer to focus on the here-and-now, at the expense of the here-after. When Messiah was on earth, He warned us about that mistake, with this little story:

    “The ground of a certain rich man brought forth abundantly. He reasoned within himself, saying, ‘What will I do, because I don’t have room to store my crops?’ He said, ‘This is what I will do. I will pull down my barns, and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. I will tell my soul, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years. Take your ease, eat, drink, be merry.”’
    “But Elohim said to him, ‘You foolish one, tonight your soul is required of you. The things which you have prepared whose will they be?’ So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward Elohim!”
     Luke 12:16-21  

In this story Messiah shows us the futility of focusing on amassing the treasures of this world at the expense of living a life that is rich toward God. We need to be smarter than that. We need to be putting God and His Kingdom first in our lives, since that is where the man from heaven says our priority needs to be. He should know, right?

You might be thinking: "I wouldn't even know where to start with that."

That's easy. Start with the words of the Son of God. That way, you aren't stuck with someone's opinion you don't know or can't trust, and you don't have to do some religious rituals or other hocus pocus. Just open up your Bible and start reading the Gospels. If you don't have a Bible, you can find one online. Just stick with it every day for a while, start to do what He says, and pretty soon you will start to realize you have discovered an amazing treasure for yourself, Kingdom Treasure, actually.

Once you get started you might want to hear from other people who are making that same discovery. If so, join us for Tsiyon Academy. It's sort of an online Bible school where ordinary people share what they have learned in their own study of the Scriptures. Right now we are studying through the Bible book of Luke in bite-sized chunks. We are in Luke 12, where we are learning a lot about Kingdom Treasure. Whether you join us for Tsiyon Academy or not, I would urge you to get started learning from Messiah right away. There is nothing better to put at the top of your to-do list.

Tonight, at 8 PM CST at Tsiyon.Net, we will be mining Kingdom Treasure!

Shalom,