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How can we find and keep a truly biblically balanced lifestyle? As Christ followers, our challenge is to get our priorities in line with God’s priorities. For example, we know from Scripture that these things are always a high biblical priority:

  • Getting to know God
  • Your marriage – your mate
  • Your children
  • Family relationships
  • Using our gifts in the body of Christ for the good of others

If you are a follower of Jesus Christ, these should be the priorities of our lives. When you allow anything to usurp these responsibilities, then your life is out of balance. Mine was for quite a few years when, in climbing the corporate ladder, I put my career ahead of my responsibility as a mother and took a job that required too much travel.

Zero Budgeting

Zero-budgeting is a fiscal policy which starts the budgeting process each year at zero. For example, just because you had money in the budget last year for travel, doesn’t mean you’ll have money in the budget this year for travel. You have to show the need for that budget money before it will be approved.

Wouldn’t it be good for you to sit down with the Lord for a zero-budgeting session, with no pre-planned agenda, no assumptions, and see what goes and what stays in his plans for you? Jesus was able to say at the end of his short ministry, “I have finished the work you gave me to do.” That’s because his agenda was always the Father’s agenda. Time and again he said, “I do what the Father tells me to do.”

Zero-budgeting may lead you to some radical changes, or it may confirm that you’re to stay where you are, doing what you’re doing. But once you give God permission to set the agenda, then you have tremendous peace and freedom and you can say with Jesus, “I am doing what you gave me to do, Father.”

It may be that this zero-budgeting process comes later in life after you’ve already done your own thing and made some messes and you’re forced to live with those consequences. God understands that. You don’t have to live in perpetual regret if that is the case. God is masterful at taking us right where we are to where he wants us to be.

There is no one who hasn’t messed up at some point. But there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, and if you are now at a place where you can truthfully say that all you want is to know and do God’s will for your life and to spend the rest of your days doing the good works God wants you to do, then you’re in a good place. You’re ready to move forward and move into that biblically balanced lifestyle which he desires for each of his children.