Reordering Your Life Around the Life of Jesus

Jim Angelakos

Most of us, if we’re honest, have built our lives around our schedules, our responsibilities, our ambitions, and then tried to fit Jesus in somewhere. A quiet time in the morning, if we can manage it. Church on Sunday. A prayer before meals. We love Jesus, but the architecture of our daily lives doesn’t always reflect that.

But what if we flipped that entirely?

What if, instead of fitting Jesus into our lives, we rebuilt our lives around his? That’s not a new idea; it’s actually the oldest one in the Christian faith. “Follow me,” Jesus said. Not “add me to your routine.” Not “consult me when things get hard.” Follow me. Walk where I walk. Do what I do. Become what I am becoming.

To follow someone well, you first have to observe them carefully. So let’s ask a question that sounds simple but runs surprisingly deep: What did Jesus actually do with his time?

What the Gospels Show Us
The four Gospels aren’t diaries or biographies in the modern sense. They are Holy Spirit inspired accounts. John himself admits that the world couldn’t contain all the books that could be written about what Jesus said and did (John 21:25). But across Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, clear patterns emerge. Jesus had rhythms. He had priorities. And those priorities, when laid out honestly, become a quiet rebuke and a powerful invitation to us all. Looking across the Gospel accounts, Jesus’ time appears to have been distributed roughly like this:

Teaching and Preaching — approximately 35% of his recorded time. This was the dominant activity of Jesus’ public ministry. He taught in synagogues, on hillsides, by the sea, in the temple courts, at dinner tables, and while walking dusty roads. He taught individuals and crowds. He told stories, asked questions, made arguments, and unveiled the kingdom of God in ways that left people astonished. Extended discourses like the Sermon on the Mount, the Olivet Discourse, and the Upper Room teaching of John 13–17 suggest that Jesus could teach for hours at a stretch, and people leaned in for every word.

Healing and Serving — approximately 25% of his recorded time. The Gospels are saturated with accounts of Jesus stopping for the sick, the blind, the leprous, the grieving, and the demonized. Mark’s Gospel in particular moves at a breathless pace from one healing to the next, and whole evenings were given over to the crowds who came to him with their suffering (Mark 1:32–34). Jesus never treated people as interruptions. He touched the untouchable. He stopped for one person when surrounded by thousands. Compassion wasn’t a department of his ministry; it was the texture of it.

Investing in His Disciples — approximately 20% of his recorded time. Jesus didn’t just preach to the masses. He poured his life into a small group. Mark tells us plainly that he appointed the twelve “that they might be with him” (Mark 3:14), presence before program, relationship before role. He explained parables privately, corrected misunderstandings patiently, debriefed after ministry, rebuked when necessary, and simply shared life, meals, travel, rest, and conversation with the people he was shaping. Within the twelve, he had an inner three in Peter, James, and John, with whom he shared his most intimate moments of ministry.

Prayer — approximately 15% of his recorded time. Jesus prayed early in the morning, before anyone was awake (Mark 1:35), and late into the night. He prayed before choosing his disciples, before feeding the five thousand, at his transfiguration, and in the agony of Gethsemane. Luke, who pays more attention to Jesus’ prayer life than any other Gospel writer, repeatedly shows us Jesus withdrawing from even urgent ministry demands to be alone with the Father. Fifteen percent may seem modest as a proportion of time, but as we will see, prayer was not one activity among many for Jesus. It was the wellspring of all the others. What is consistent across all four Gospels is that prayer was the foundation that undergirded everything else, even if it wasn’t the largest time category. It’s what fueled the teaching, the healing, and the discipling.

What This Means for Us
Here is the striking thing about those four priorities: teaching, serving, discipling, and praying. Jesus didn’t invent them. He embodied them. They weren’t items on a ministry checklist; they were the natural overflow of a life completely aligned with the Father’s heart. And when he said “follow me,” he was inviting us into that same alignment. So what does it look like to reorder our lives around his?

Start With Prayer, Not as a Discipline, But as a Lifeline
Of all the things the disciples could have asked Jesus to teach them, they chose prayer. Not preaching. Not healing. Not leadership. Prayer. They watched him pray, and they knew instinctively that whatever he had with the Father was the source of everything else they admired in him. For most of us, prayer is reactive. We pray when we’re desperate, grateful, or guilty. But Jesus prayed before the crisis, before the decision, before the miracle. Prayer for him wasn’t a response to life; it was the foundation beneath life. Reordering our lives around Jesus begins here. Not with longer to-do lists or more Christian activity, but with recovering a genuine, unhurried, honest conversation with God as the first and last word of every day. If prayer was the root of Jesus’ ministry, it must be the root of our discipleship.

Invest Deeply in a Few
Jesus had crowds. But he didn’t try to disciple the crowds. He chose twelve, and within those twelve, he drew three especially close. This wasn’t exclusivity; it was a strategy rooted in love. He knew that lasting transformation happens in close, sustained, honest
relationships. We live in a culture that values breadth over depth, hundreds of social media connections, large networks, and wide circles. But Jesus models something countercultural: go deep with a few. This means every follower of Jesus should be asking two questions simultaneously. First, who is ahead of me in faith, whose life I can learn from, and whose wisdom I can sit under? Second, who is coming behind me, into whom I can pour what I have received? Discipleship was never meant to be a spectator sport or a private journey. It moves in the relationship received and given, again and again.

Let the Word Overflow Into Your World
Jesus taught constantly, but not only in formal settings. He turned a boat into a pulpit, a hillside into a classroom, a dinner table into a place of revelation. He taught because he was so full of truth that it overflowed naturally into every conversation and encounter. Not all of us are called to preach sermons. But all of us are called to be so shaped by God’s Word that it spills into our ordinary conversations with our children, our colleagues, our neighbors, our friends. The Great Commission is not given only to pastors. It is given to every disciple: “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:20). This requires us to be people who actually know the Word, not just familiar with it, but formed by it. Reading Scripture not merely for information but for transformation, so that what we take in privately becomes what we give out naturally.

Serve With Your Hands, Not Just Your Heart
Jesus didn’t just feel compassion; He acted on it. Every time. He touched the leper when no one else would. He stopped for blind Bartimaeus when the crowd tried to silence him. He fed thousands when he could have simply sent them home. His mercy always had hands and feet. It is remarkably easy to have a faith that lives entirely in the mind and heart, theologically sound, emotionally sincere, and practically invisible. James confronts this directly: faith without works is dead (James 2:17). The question Jesus will ask at the end of the age, according to Matthew 25, is not “what did you believe?” but “what did you do for the hungry, the stranger, the sick, the prisoner?” Reordering our lives around Jesus means building regular, concrete, costly service into the fabric of our weeks. Not as a way to earn favor, but as the natural expression of a heart that has been genuinely changed by grace.

Consecrate the Ordinary
Perhaps the most quietly radical thing about Jesus’ life is that he didn’t divide it into “sacred” and “secular.” Every meal was potentially a miracle. Every journey was an opportunity. Every interruption was a divine appointment. He was as present with one Samaritan woman at a well as he was in the temple at Jerusalem. This is the invitation that transforms everything, not to add more religious activity to an already crowded life, but to bring the presence and purposes of God into the life you already have. The commute. The kitchen. The workplace. The difficult conversation. The unexpected need. All of it becomes the arena of discipleship when we stop compartmentalizing our faith and start consecrating our ordinary.

Conclusion
There is a version of the Christian life that is busy, sincere, and largely shaped by everything other than Jesus. We fill our schedules with good things and call it faithfulness. We attend services and call it discipleship. We feel guilty when we fail and call it conviction. But Jesus offers something deeper and more disruptive than religion. He offers his own life as the pattern for ours. And when we look honestly at that pattern, the prayer, the teaching, the compassion, the deep investment in a few, we discover that most of us have some significant reordering to do.

That reordering isn’t primarily about time management. It’s about transformation. It’s about becoming, slowly and by grace, the kind of person from whom these things flow naturally, not out of obligation, but out of overflow. Dallas Willard once observed that the goal of discipleship is not to do what Jesus did, but to become the kind of person who would. That becoming is the work of a lifetime. But it starts today with a simple question: In the hours I have been given, am I following Him or just admiring Him from a distance?

“Follow me.” — Jesus (Matthew 4:19)