Priorites Talk from Sunday Night

I got this a while back and used it a couple of times. While I was at Wal-mart the other night, I saw the Sham wow towel for sale and decided it was the perfect way to end this illustration.


Priorities Illustration

Items needed: symbol represented:
4 foam balls (about 3-4” in diameter) God and Family
2 glass jars (just big enough for 2 of the 3-4” balls) Our lives/time (to be filled)
a lot of marbles Work, school, friends,
2 bowls (to hold the marbles) --
2 pitchers of water Things in our lives
--
Sham-Wow

Setup:
Divide your contents as follows:
On one tray, put 1 empty glass jar, 2 3-4” balls, 1 bowl of marbles, and 1 pitcher of water.


Illustration:
Sometimes in life we can mess up our priorities. Jesus says in Matthew 6:33 “Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well.” He basically says, “Don’t worry about getting stuff. Put me first in life and you’ll be taken care of.”

Imagine this glass jar represents our lives. Everything you see here will fit easily into this glass jar if we do it right. (Grab the two balls) Now imagine one of these represents God, and the other: family. (Push both balls one at a time into glass jar) If we take care of the big things first, you can see clearly that there’s plenty of room in our lives for God and family. There’s plenty of time to read God’s word and spend time with Him. You may say, “But what about work? What about school?” (Grab the bowl of marbles) Well, don’t worry. These marbles will represent work, school, time with friends and so on. These are important, but not as important as God and family. If we put them in next we’ll see that they’ll fit around the big stuff in life. (Begin to pour them in, shuffling the glass jar every now and again to make them all fit.) After we’ve taken care of the more important things in life, now we can fit in the time to play video games, or go shopping. (Grab pitcher and pour water into jar until full.) You’ll see that God really will take care of us if He is truly first in our lives.


But what if we spend all of our time playing video games? What if all we did was shop with friends? What if we did absolutely nothing except watch T.V. all day? (Grab the pitcher of water and fill the jar all the way up with water only) In other words, what if the meaningless stuff in life consumed us? You can see that our lives are pretty much full of nothing important. (Begin to pour the marble contents of bowl into jar. Let the water splash) After we’re tired of playing video games or shopping, we usually like to make room for friends, and sometimes even work. Hey, (sarcastic) we need that money don’t we? (Grab the two balls) But then we remember that we haven’t spent time with God. Well it’s a little too late for that, but I know a lot of people who try to do this. (Shove each ball into the jar forcing the water to splash out making a big mess) All this does is create one big, fat mess.

I added to this by using the Sham-WOW cloth to clean up the mess and used it as an illustration, that even when our life becomes a mess....God is always there to clean it up.



**********tip: Pre-measure water