Derek Prince - Order Your Priorities For Your Calling
This excerpt is from: How To Find Your Place
Going back to 1 Timothy 1:9, we find it’s even more exciting. It says: God has saved us and called us with a holy calling... I want to emphasize that your calling is holy. Once I realized what God had called me to be, I made up my mind that I, by His grace, would be the best teacher of the Scriptures that I could be, not comparing myself with any other teacher. And for well over forty years my life has been shaped by my desire to be able to teach the Scriptures the best that I can. One of the things that I have done is discipline my mind.
I am very, very careful what I let into my mind. Basically, I hardly ever read anything unless I feel God wants me to read it. Before I was saved I read hundreds of books in various languages. But I’m not that way now. I very seldom look at a newspaper. If I want to find out what’s going on in the world – my wife Ruth and I have made up our minds – the best way is to buy a weekly news magazine. I don’t want to advertise anyone particularly on television but there are two or three magazines. You see, if you try to find the news by watching television, you waste a whole lot of time. I don’t know whether you have commercial television here. You’ve got to sit through a lot of advertisements and a lot of news that’s absolutely unimportant one week later. You might just as well have never heard it.
I don’t want to waste time. For me time is extremely precious. And so I try to store my mind only with the things that will enable me to teach the Bible with clarity. If I have one ambition it’s to be clear. And sometimes I’ve worked at it for years. There are truths in the Bible that were very confusing to me years ago but I have plowed away at it, worked at it, whittled it down, until in most cases now what I teach I’m able to teach with simplicity and with clarity. My aim is not to confuse people. Sometimes at the end of a sermon somebody will come to me and say, Brother Prince, that was a deep message. And I say, Lord, what did I do wrong now? I don’t have any aim to be profound in the usual sense of the word.
My aim is to be simple. People have said sometimes about me that when I teach they think why didn’t I ever know that, because it’s obvious. That’s my aim. I would like everybody to go out of a meeting saying: Well, what he said was absolutely obvious. I have no higher ambition than that. So I’ve disciplined myself.
Let me give you an example from athletics. Any athlete today that wants to compete in the world Olympics has got to discipline himself or herself. Such an athlete has to be very careful about what they eat, about the way they spend their time, the exercise they take, the things they read, they’ve got to build up a positive attitude in their minds. They’ve got to go into that competition believing they can succeed. I was a very close friend in my early years with one of the most famous ballerinas of our century.
Anybody who knows about the ballet, her name is Margot Fontaine. I was a close friend of hers when she was an unknown dancer. I consider her to be the most successful ballerina of this century. That’s my judgment. But I’m not surprised because I know how seriously she took her dancing. There were other ballerinas in the same company that perhaps had the same ability, but they didn’t have the same dedication. I’m not encouraging you to go in to the ballet but what I’m trying to show you is if you want to succeed you’ve got to discipline yourself, you’ve got to order your priorities, you’ve got to eliminate a lot of things out out of your life which are non-essential. So, it’s a holy calling. I wonder if you understand that. I mean, it’s not to be played with, it’s not to be bartered for anything else. It’s holy.