Here’s an exercise that I’ve done with myself before and encouraged others to do as well:

Take a blank sheet of paper and start listing out everything that’s important to. Family, friends, education, work, entertainment, Doritos – whatever – list all those things out on paper. Everything that holds a place of some measure of significance in your affections. Then comes the hard part.

Force rank your list. What on that list has truly captured your heart? Your affections? Your thoughts? Your money? Over and over again, ask that question until you have not just a list, but a numbered list. As I’ve continued the exercise with myself, the next step would be to see where Jesus lies in this force ranking and if He’s anywhere except in the number 1 slot, then take active steps to make sure He regains that number one spot.

I think there is some value in an exercise like this; it’s helpful for us to ask God to search our hearts and show us things about ourselves that we have either knowingly or unknowingly been blinded to, and then take active steps to make correction in the way we are living. But despite these helpful things, there is something essentially wrong with the exercise from the outset. The list philosophy is broken from the very beginning because Jesus didn’t die to be number one on anyone’s priority list.

He died to obliterate the list entirely.

See, the fundamental problem with the priority list is that it assumes a level of segmentation that minimizes the rule and reign of King Jesus over every square inch of our existence. If you have, for example, your family and the Dallas Cowboys as two items on the list, then they can essentially function apart from each other. Of course, you want family to be rated higher than the Cowboys, but they have little to no relationship to each other except the order in which they fall. But the gospel that changes us from old to new and brings life from death goes much further than that.

Jesus is not the top of the list; He’s the center of the wheel.

In other words, a better visual, instead of the priority list, would be a wagon wheel. If you picture it in your mind, you’ll see several spokes leading our from a central hub. The hub is what gives all those spokes their place and stability, and if a spoke is not locked firmly into the hub at the middle, then it’s better used a firewood than a part of that wheel. This is the power of the gospel – it takes a disjointed life of competing priorities and rounds them off in a circular fashion all centered on the same hub that sits at the very center of the cosmos – Jesus Christ.

Of course, in this picture all those spokes represent different aspects of life. Family, friends, work, relationships, money, movies, food, and everything else has some place in our lives. But each one of those individual aspects of life are not disjointed from some top priority; instead they are all locked firmly in place and given definition by the hub in the middle. And if some aspect of our lives does not fit into the hub of Jesus Christ then we can know it’s time for that particular aspect to either be reshaped or removed completely.

Jesus is not your number 1 priority; He is instead the Lord who gives shape, definition, and meaning to everything else.

“So if you have been raised with the Messiah, seek what is above, where the Messiah is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on what is above, not on what is on the earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with the Messiah in God. When the Messiah, who is your life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with Him in glory” (Colossians 3:1-4).