Values control everything in your life

What do you value most in life? What would you be willing to sacrifice everything for? Is there anything? God has a purpose and plan for you and for Him to be able to use you to His fullest you have to prioritize what matters most, in other words you need to clarify your values, weigh up what is important to you and then bring them into agreement with your actions.

You must realize that what your value affects your life. Values control everything in your life. Your values affect your stress levels. When your values are unclear, there is confusion. When your values are in conflict, it’s because you haven’t clarified what’s important and what’s not. The result is stress.

Your values control your success in life. Every time you make a decision, you’re filtering that decision subconsciously or consciously through what you value. If your values are right it will lead you to growth, success, development. If your values are wrong, you’ll eventually crash and burn. What you think is important in life not only effects your stress, it also effects your success.

CHOOSE YOUR SOURCE

Where do you get your values from? This is very important because the source of your values will determine the quality of your values. You get them from a lot of places: Parents, peers, magazines and books, from music and TV from society in general.

In these last days, one major Value giver IS: the TV. The average American watches about 1000 hours of television a year. That means by the time you’re 65 you will have watched TV for 9½ solid years.

Sadly, if you went to church once a week for your entire life, that would only equal four months of spiritual teaching. Four months compared to 9½ years – so where are you getting your primary values?

The problem is this: the TV bombards you with these values – pleasure, possession, prestige – over and over that even Christians get seduced by it. You buy into it. You think like everybody else that those are the ultimate values of life. And the result is that for many Christians their values are no different than those without Christ. You end up being just as pleasure-seeking, just as materialistic and just as status conscious as those that are perishing.

ROMANS 12:2 “Don’t become so well adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking.”

If you buy into the world’s value system; that the ultimate value in life is pleasure, possession and prestige, you will miss God’s purpose for your life. It’s a guarantee. If you get seduced into the system that you should spend your entire life trying to get more pleasure, more possessions, more prestige, then you’ll spend all your time on that and you will have no time to fulfill the reason you were created for this world in the first place. You will miss God’s purpose.

So the first step in building a foundation is choosing your source. Where are you going to get your values from? As a child of Gods, the best place to get your values from is from the Word of God. Make a decision: The WORD or the WORLD?

CLARIFY WHAT IS IMPORTANT

Make a list of your values. Make a list of what you consider to be the most important things in life and then attach a scripture to them (source).

You need to write out your values because you rarely think about your values until you have a crisis. Then, all of a sudden, you get interested in, “What’s the purpose of life?” When you’re cruising through the world, going through life and everything’s going great, you don’t stop and ask the tough questions. What happens is, you wait until a crisis occurs and, then all of a sudden, you start asking questions: “What am I here for? Or “What really is the purpose of life?”

Knowing what you value most is so important that you need to do something about it. So here is how; Sit down with a pen and paper and ask yourself these questions:

1-What is important to you? Then try to make a list of the ten most important values that you want to build your life on.
2-What is your definition of success? Success to you is…………… and have it written out.

Why is that important? Because if you don’t come up with a personal definition of success, other people will define it for you. And that’s a big mistake because automatically, you will define success and failure by the values you hold.

Success is not a destination. It’s not a goal, or an achievement. It’s a journey, a progression. Success is not an achievement. Why? Because if your success is based on an achievement, somebody is going to outdo you eventually.

Real success is when you decide what values are really important to you in life and you bring your life into alignment with them. When you have a personal definition of success based on your own values: Nobody can ever take that feeling of success away from you and, You can be successful at any and every stage of your life.

The starting point is you have to decide what’s important to you. Decide what matters most. If you see this as a bit daunting and are not too sure how to start, try to think what your life is going to be Look at it from eternity, standing at the judgment day and looking back on your life. Ask this question, “What is going to last?” What’s going to last ten years from now? Twenty years from now? For eternity? How much of what you’re doing right now is going to matter in twenty years?” The things that don’t matter, maybe you shouldn’t spend so much time on them. Maybe you shouldn’t spend any time on them.