A Year to Grow

[00:00:02] Good evening. Happy Saturday. Good news. You survived the holidays, all of it behind you, for twelve more months. [00:00:14] It's January. [00:00:16] Some of us that feels great for other of us are like, oh dear Jesus. All right, let me say a pray for, a prayer for us. And I really believe the beginning of the year is such an important time for us to think and strategize about who we want to become this year. So with your permission, I'm going to work through some ideas with you tonight to help really get some good ideas on how to do that. Well, dear Father, I pray that you would help us. I recognize that you are a God who is good. You are faithful and just and strong. And I'm so thankful that we can turn to you in times just like this where we truly desire to be the men and women you've created us to be. I pray, Father, that you would fill our hearts with wisdom this evening. I pray that you would give us insight and understanding and knowledge and how to grow into who it is you've called us to become. Help us to be those people. Help us to be the church you've called us to be, to be influential for good in this generation. In Jesus name I pray. Amen. [00:01:13] In his book Hidden Potential, Adam Grant, who's an organizational psychologist, he studies this idea of the hidden potential that's in every person. And in the beginning of the book he references a study that psychologists did and they investigated the roots of talents between musicians, artists, scientists and athletes. So they tried to do the smart, the talented, the people who were really at the high end of talent. And here's what they discovered. Only a few, a handful of these high achievers had been child prodigies. When they looked at sculptors, not even one was identified as having special abilities by their elementary art teachers. [00:01:56] Some of the pianists had won some big competitions before turning nine, but the rest only seemed gifted when compared to siblings or neighbors. I laughed so hard at that because sometimes it's like, yeah, I feel that, like you get compared to a sibling, you're like, I am a rock star or I'm not, depending on which sibling, right? [00:02:16] Some of the mathematicians and the neurologists, they did well in elementary and middle school, but they didn't stand out among other students in their classes. Hardly any of the swimmers that they studied set records early on. Most of the tennis players lost in the early rounds of the first tournaments and took several years to emerge as top players. And here's what the lead psychologist concluded. What any person in the world can learn almost all persons can learn if provided with appropriate conditions of learning. It's so powerful because normally we look at people who are premier athletes or scientists or mathematicians, right? And we're like, I could never do that. It's so far beyond my talent, so far beyond my reach, so far beyond anything I could even dream of. But their point was, if anybody can learn it, you can learn it. And here's what Adam Grant concluded with all of this. He said, in a world obsessed with innate talent, we assume the people with the most promise are the ones who stand out right away. But he said, high achievers vary dramatically in their initial aptitudes. If we judge people only by what they can do on day one, their potential remains hidden. You can't tell where people will land from where they begin. Isn't that so powerful? Think about it. We look at people and we're like, well, they're not really talented there. So we move on and we miss. It doesn't matter where you start with the right opportunity and the motivation. He says, to learn, anyone can build the skills to achieve greater things. Potential is not a matter of where you start, but how far you travel. Stretching beyond our strengths is how we reach our potential and perform about our peak. And he says it's a difference between ambition and aspiration. Ambition is the outcome you want to attain, right? We all have these ambitions of things that we want to do. But he said, if you shift that word just to the word aspiration, this is who do I want to become? Who's the person that I hope to grow into? Because what happens with ambitions is you've had this thing that you really wanted to achieve, right? And you worked really, really hard for it. So there's two problems that we run into. Maybe you trained really hard to run a race. You did all the training, all the practice, you ate, right? You did all the schedule that you need to, and then you run the race, and then it's this, like, drop off feeling of, now what? Have you ever done anything like that before? You worked really hard to achieve something, and then after it, you're like, now what? Or you never get the outcome. You never reach that thing. And it's the frustration. You've been working so hard to achieve this, and it never happens. He said, if you shift that, you focus on who you're becoming instead, think about what a powerful idea that is. No matter what's going on, there's always work to be done on me, right? No matter where I've come from or what I've done. So far or where I'm hoping to go. When we focus on who we want to become, there's always work to be done. No matter what happens in the craziness of the world around me, I can focus on the work that needs to be done in me. So when you think about a new year and a new opportunity and a whole fresh new calendar that's laid out before you, some of us like to set goals, right? Like, these are the goals that I want to accomplish in 2024, or some of us set New Year's resolutions. Like, I can't shove one more piece of food in my face. I don't know if you felt that way. I keep bringing stuff into the office because I'm like, I can't have all of this in my house anymore. Somebody else needs to eat some of this food with me. And it's great to set goals and resolutions. Our problem is we don't have a great track record at keeping them right. We set this great, I'm going to do this. And then February comes and we're like, that was so two months ago. I got new goals now, right? We don't have this great track record, but what if we just shift a small perception for us? Instead of saying, like, these big goals or these big ambitions, which are wonderful, please don't stop. What if we put a little bit of focus on who do I want to become? Who is the person I'm hoping to grow into? How do I want to grow emotionally, physically, spiritually? What if that shift in our thinking helps us focus on who we are this year? That just gives us the grounding we need to do, what's going to come next? Let me give us some context for this. Let me give us a place to start. Tucked away in the book of psalms, all these different psalms to choose from. Psalm 90 is a psalm written by Moses. And I love it so much because Moses wrote it. And he says, a psalm by Moses, the man of God. Like, if I'm going to write something and it's going to be in the Bible and I get to title it, I'm not just a person who knows God. I am literally the person of God, right? Like, I get to pick my subtitle. I think it's fun. I think it's really cool. And this is what he says in psalm 90, verse twelve. He says, teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of witness, a heart of wisdom. Or the new living. Translation says, teach us to realize the brevity of life that we may grow in wisdom. Now, if you think about Moses for a second, right, who was Moses? What was this experience that Moses had with God? Moses lived an incredible life experience and got to know God in a very, very special way. He got to see these incredibly powerful things that God could do. Remember the plagues that came to Egypt and the parting of the Red Sea? And he got to be there when the ten Commandments were handed down on Mount Sinai. And he got to see God care for his people as they wandered in the wilderness. And this is what Moses said, lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations. Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. That was Moses's context to God. So when he was asking for help, when he was looking for something very particular, he knew he could go to God. And so in verse twelve, here's what he's asking for. Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom. He's asking for, first, an awareness of time. And second, he's asking for wisdom. So I'm going to break those down for us, the first one is the awareness of time. Time is funny, isn't it? When you think about it for a second life, it kind of works at two different speeds. One of them is a snail's pace. Do you ever have that certain time of your day and it just can't go fast enough? Maybe it's the end of your work day, end of your school day. You're like looking at the clock and it stopped moving. [00:08:59] It just can't go fast enough. It drags on. Or like if you wake up in the middle of the night, I'm convinced the hours between like two and five move at a different speed than any other time of the day, don't they? Or. I remember when our babies were newborn and sleep was scarce. [00:09:19] I feel like some days an eternity. Do you ever feel like when you have little ones and like every 2 hours, the waking up and your whole life schedule has changed? Some days felt like they lasted for an absolute eternity. I remember like, we're only at six weeks, but then you hit a certain pace of life and everything speeds up really, really quick. It just rushes by. The days took forever, but then the next thing you know, the years just quickly rushed by. Sometimes a whole month is gone and I'm like, I honestly don't even remember the month of October. Like, I know it happened. It's on my calendar. We did stuff. I worked, I showed up. I came to places, right? It just flew by. Remember when you were little and summer felt like an eternity? It felt like forever. And now it's like one vacation and it's over. It's done. Pack up. School's tomorrow, right? [00:10:14] Time works in this funny way. And Moses asks this, and it's incredible advice for us. God help us to be aware of time. It's brevity. Because if we aren't careful, we miss our life. If we aren't thoughtful about it, if we aren't aware of it, we miss out on the life that's happening right this second. [00:10:40] Not the life you miss on how it used to be, right? The past, the reminiscing when things were a certain way. Not even the life you're wanting to live someday out into the future, right? The glory days of the past, the future days. But right now is when life is happening. And if we aren't thoughtful, if we aren't intentional, if we aren't careful, it's so easy to miss. It's easy to get swept up in all of the urgent things that have to happen right now. And they're demanding and they have to be attended to right this very second. And then the important things get pushed to the side. It's easy for our calendars to get so full, to be here and there and go this place and be in this place and get all of these things done. [00:11:24] And we get so busy rushing from here to there and this to that, that we miss these little moments that really are what make up an entire life. [00:11:35] And so Moses is asking, God, help me to make the most of time. I get so caught up in things that I forget how short this moment really is. Right. I get so busy wanting to be in the next phase that I miss out entirely on the phase that I'm in right now. Help me to be aware. Help me not to get lost in the blur of everyday life so I can make the most of this moment right here and right now. I'm a big fan of Erwin McManus. I don't know if you've ever heard him before. He's preacher, writer, speaker. He's out in LA. And some many years ago, he was diagnosed with cancer, and it had metastasized. And it was this big eye opening experience. He had to get treatment, he had to have surgery. And it stirred something in him. And he wrote a book called the Last Pharaoh. It's a really good book. And he said, cancer may define how I die, but it will not define how I live. And I love. I want to share with you a couple of ideas. He said, I don't believe anyone is born average, but I do believe that many of us choose to live a life of mediocrity. I think there are more of us than not who are in danger of disappearing into the abyss of ordinary. He said, here's the painful reality. We'll find ourselves defined by the average if we do not choose to defy the ods. To be above average demands a choice, a choice to say, I refuse to be average. You must war against the temptation to settle for less, because average is always the safe choice, and it's the most dangerous choice we can make. He said, average protects us from the risk of failure, but it also separates us from a future of greatness. [00:13:23] He said, we can become so afraid of death that we never really live. [00:13:27] We can be so afraid of failure that we never risk, so afraid of pain that we never discover how strong we really are. But if you realize you only have one life, you have a greater sense of determination and even desperation to accomplish something meaningful. He said, you have one life. We all only have one life. But this one life has eternal significance. [00:13:58] Says time lies to us, right? It tricks us into believing that we can wait until tomorrow to do the very thing we should have done yesterday. And then he switches it. He said, you need to stop waiting for someone to make your life count. You need to stop waiting for somebody else to do the thing you were meant to do. Act as if your life depends on it, because it does. Life is action. Life is movement. Movement is life. You need to realize, he says, whatever choices you make, no matter how much you accomplish, one thing is certain, your life will end. [00:14:36] It's not a question. It's not avoidable. [00:14:40] But the question is, will you choose to live? Will you choose to use this moment, this time, this opportunity that life has been given to you? [00:14:55] Every one of us gets to decide. There's so many things, right? Circle of control. Circle that's outside of my control. There's so many things in life we don't get to choose. So many things that we have zero control over. But every single day, we get to decide, how am I going to live my life today. [00:15:12] Every single moment we get to say to God, help me, to be aware of how special this moment is, how much this moment matters right now. [00:15:24] So often in life, we get lulled into just the complacency of one more day, one more dot on the line to get through until the next one. And we get bored. [00:15:37] You know, boredom is the very place where you're likely to make your worst life decisions. You're bored, you've missed the adventure and you think, this is all there is. I might as well make the most of it. And you search for something that's going to make you feel better. And we get complacent and make terrible choices, or we just get that temptation. It's so hard. I don't want to do this anymore. And we check out, right? I did it. I tried my best. I did all that I could do. Nothing really changed. I'm just going to let this blow over. I'm just going to bury my head in the sand and wait till it's a new day and a new time. [00:16:11] And we miss out on the beautiful opportunity that God has given us to live right where we are today. [00:16:19] We miss that God created us for so much more. [00:16:25] We weren't created for mediocrity. We weren't created for just boredom and complacency and average. We've been called into this grand, great adventure by Jesus Christ. He went before us. He prepared the way. He said, come, follow me. I'm going to change everything. And when you do, you are going to live a uniquely wonderful experience he gifted you. There's stuff you can do nobody else can do. There's things you see. We don't see them that way. I read this article one time about people who, when they hear music, they see colors. [00:17:05] I'm like, that feels made up. That has to be not true, but it genuinely is. People see things differently. And if you never use that gift that you've been given, the world misses out on who you are and what you have to contribute. [00:17:23] Here's the truth. We all get one life to live. [00:17:26] We all get the same 24 hours in the day and seven days in the week, right? The years, the days, the months. We don't get to count or know how many we get. We just get the opportunity to say, right now, today, this is my life. How am I going to live it? This moment, right now? Am I going to choose to make the best of it or am I going to go back to being checked out or bored? [00:17:52] We get the opportunity every day to say, how do I live this life? [00:18:00] I don't want it to be like Erwin McManus, who had to face death to feel that sense of urgency stirred up in him again. Right? Sometimes we face a loss or a hardship or a change so hard we don't know how to adjust. And it forces us to look at life different. We don't have any choice but to. But what if we didn't wait for those circumstances to start living life to the fullest right now? Like Moses, we can say to God, God, help me to be aware of this time, this moment, this day? What if all we need to do to shake ourselves out of the complacency, the fog we've gotten lost into, is just God showing us day after day after day, how valuable this moment really is? [00:18:46] Here's the question. [00:18:48] What have you been waiting for? [00:18:50] What have you been saving yourself for? Right? Like, you have all of this input and all of this talent and all of these ideas and all of these sparks. What are you waiting for? Before you go all in on who you've been meant to be? [00:19:08] What have you been putting off until tomorrow saying, I've got time. That can wait. That can wait. I'll do it another time. [00:19:16] Where's God been stirring at you? Something in your imagination, something in your heart, in your dreams? To do more, create more, try something new? [00:19:28] What if this year, this beautiful, fresh, new start of a year, this time we said, God, help me to be aware of this day, this time, this year, and just see what God might do. What if you just began your day, God, help me to see this day for the gift that it is not. I have to do this today. I have to go here. But just, God, thank you. That I get to. [00:19:54] Isn't that funny how just a little switch, the complaining in me goes, oh, I have to do this, and I don't want to. [00:20:01] The heart that is stirred by God says, God, it is all a gift. Every good and perfect thing is from you. [00:20:09] Thank you. That I get to. Moses starts with, help us to just see how short it is, how special it is, how much it all matters. But then he says that I might gain a heart of wisdom. Because here's the truth. We all need wisdom to live life well. Nobody just wakes up one day and they are their best version of themselves. Wouldn't that be amazing? Like in a movie, that happens, right? But in real life, you don't just wake up and become the person that you've always wanted to be. It takes work. It takes effort. It takes intention. It takes skill. It takes experience. It takes wisdom. And so Moses says, help us not just to be aware of how special and important this life is. [00:20:54] Help us to have wisdom on how to live it well. Now, usually when we think about wisdom, we think about it a couple of different ways. There's the skill, right? Like physical skill, intellectual skill. Somebody like a surgeon has some skill that they've learned to be able to do that well. A musician, a craftsman, a builder, a doctor, a writer. Right. There's some intellectual skill, some physical skill that goes into it, but we also think of wisdom from the experience part of it, right? Somebody who has lived a few more days than we've lived trying to say that, well, we think, wow, they really have the experience of age and life, and they have something to contribute. Or you've met somebody younger before, and you've been like, wow, they are wise for their years. They've lived a lot of life in a short amount of time, and it's given them a life experience that leads to an incredible amount of wisdom. So we think about wisdom, like what we do or what we know. But in the Bible, when you hear wisdom, when you read about wisdom, it really has to do with the context of life skill, the ability to do life in the very best possible way to the very best possible effect. So Old Testament wisdom, like we have here in the psalms, it's really concerned with that formation of character in your life, figuring out how to negotiate life successfully in this world that's good, but broken. There's a tension there, isn't it? The world is good, and so many times we see that and we're just awed by it. The world feels good to me when it's Christmas time, there's twinkle lights. I don't know what it is about twinkle lights. They just make me happy. It's so simple, but they make me happy. And there's just something so easy there. [00:22:36] But then there's the reality of hard things that we face in life, fractured parts of our life that are just hard. And so it's good, but it's fractured. And how do we negotiate still living well in a world that has beauty and delight and joy mixed in with sorrow and loss and heartache, how do we steer through the ups and downs that come our way, that sometimes you just ever feel blindsided by something like, I did not see that coming, but I still wanted to live well. [00:23:09] I still want to make good choices, even though I don't know how to deal with this problem that I'm facing right now. So wisdom then becomes the ability to apply knowledge and understanding to the everyday life circumstances that we face. It's learning how to live well. It's learning how to do life daily when things are changing and you can't always expect it. It's learning how to still be a man or a woman of character. Even when it's disappointing, even when it's challenging, when it's exciting and adventurous, or when it's frustrating and incredibly hard. How do we live well in every one of those moments? See, God desires for us to gain wisdom. He gives it freely and generously. God wants us to have knowledge and understanding that we might live well. This isn't like a puzzle that's really impossible to figure out, right? Like it's an impossible to discover the answer. You're never going to figure it out. This is God saying, I want to give you every tool, every knowledge, every understanding you need so that you can make the most of your days and live well. [00:24:20] Wisdom is a process. [00:24:22] It takes time and growth and development that helps us live well day after day after day. And we need it. Because remember, if I'm going to live my best life, I need help. I need some wisdom. I need some understanding. I need some knowledge that I don't have right now. But here's the amazing part. We are all able to grow in wisdom. It's not a certain background that you need to have or a certain type of learning style that you're inclined to. It's not how far away you started trying to learn or how far you have to go. It's if anybody can learn it, you can learn it. That one sentence right there is a game changer. You can say that to yourself the next time you're trying to do something that's too hard for you, the next time you're trying to learn something that you don't know anything about and you feel so stupid you're a little bit embarrassed, right? You can say, if somebody else can learn it, I can learn it, too. What anybody can learn, we can learn. The question is, where do you need to grow in wisdom? What areas of your life do you really need God's help to have a heart of wisdom, to be your best self in those places. What areas of life do you need to grow in, to learn in, to get better in? [00:25:43] I'll tell you, the people who love you and are closest to you, they can help you answer that question. [00:25:51] I mean, go into it with a heart of humility and ask them to be kind. But normally what we are not aware of, the people who are closest to us, they're really aware of. So if you're not sure how to ask that question or you're not sure where to get that information from, start with don't ask anybody that. Because if you go on Facebook and be like, hey, guys, what do I need to grow in this year. People will give you all kinds of answers. Not sure all of them will be helpful, but just who's three people around you that you can say? What's it like to be on the other side of me and listen without being defensive super hard? Try it. Have the courage. Right. Okay, let me give us a couple places to help us with that. The first place that we should go, what did Moses do? He turned from everlasting to everlasting. You are God. God is a trustworthy source of wisdom. We can turn to God for help in how to live this life well. He gives wisdom freely and generously and he gave us all the most accessible tool in the Bible. [00:26:54] We have the Bible that we get to turn to again and again and again to say, how do I live life? Well, it's not just an encyclopedia that I can look up a word and hope to find the best answer in. It takes thoughtful reading again and again and again and again. It's not a magic book that you just open and see what page it lays on and put your finger and be like, yes, that's my answer right there. Right. You're going to come up really disappointed if that's how you look at the Bible. The Bible is an incredible tool that we've been given to see how does God work? How does God speak? How does God call? How does God encourage? How does God challenge? What's it been like in other people's lives who are trying to figure out how to do this well? What's it been like when other people faced really hard things and they weren't sure what to do? What's it been like when life was good and people just wanted to say thank you? What's it been like when life was so hard? You don't have breath, but you need to communicate something. God gave us this incredible tool in the bible that creates wisdom and understanding and knowledge and helps us live the most blessed life possible. [00:28:05] What if you read your Bible this year? [00:28:08] There's so many different ways to do it. If you have a bible, open it. There's going to be a way that says, here's how to read your bible in a year. You can look up online to how to read my bible in a year. You can download the you version app for free and you can have any version of the Bible. You can have 5000 bajillion reading plans. I did the Bible in 90 days one time. Guys, it's been a few years. I'm not kidding. I was literally in the pickup line trying to read my chapters for the day, waiting for the kids. It took a lot of discipline, but I saw things so differently when I read it back to back to back like that. We miss out on this incredible wisdom that God wants to give us when we don't read the Bible. So many of us are saying, God, why won't you answer me? God, why won't you show up? And God's going, my friend, everything you need is right there. The answers that you're desperately seeking for, they're right there. You don't have to be angry. You don't have to be frustrated. You don't have to think God doesn't care. Pick up the Bible and see what he wants to say to you. [00:29:15] And here's the cool thing about the Bible. You can read it again and again and again and again, and you will always find something valuable in it. It's not the kind of book you read one time and you put it on the shelf and be like, check that off my bucket list, right? Feels like an accomplishment. You should be proud. But at the same time, go back. I'm not kidding. I can't remember how many years I've been reading my Bible all the way through. [00:29:38] I'm like, this was not in the Bible the last time I read this. Have you had that happen before? I've actually. I've called my dad and been like, dad? And he's like, no, that was always there. I'm like, no. I feel like, this is new. Is this like a new version, a new translation? They just added this one. And he's like, no, you're crazy. That was always there. [00:29:55] Because you're going to be in different places of your life, and you're going to need to hear God speak to you in different ways. [00:30:01] And you will be surprised how God meets you in powerful ways. I've been doing the simple thing of I take sticky notes. I think you've heard me. Some of me say this, and I just write down the verses and I keep putting them up everywhere. I put them in my pocket, I put them in my wall, and I find the most incredible encouragement to get me through that moment and that day. Because God meets us powerfully when we read the Bible. Make it a goal for yourself. Open up the Bible and see what God wants to say to you. Here's the second place we can go for wisdom. God is our starting point. He has so much wisdom for us to gain. You grow in community, you grow by doing life with other people. Because you know what? There might be somebody who's been where you are and they're just on the other side of it. It doesn't make them an expert. It does make them a survivor, though. There might be somebody who's exactly where you are and you can encourage one another and strengthen one another. There might be somebody who is desperate for help and you might have it. [00:31:03] You might be the person God's waiting to send to help them. Do you know how you grow in wisdom? Teach somebody something. It's crazy. You don't feel like an expert. That's okay. You don't have to be an expert. There's actually studies in this. It was one of the things in Adam Grant's book. You learn by teaching. And so many of us wait to feel like we're an expert before we teach anything and we're missing out on the opportunity for us to grow as well. What if you got connected in a different way this year? Maybe it's a group that you need to get connected and you can study something together. Maybe it's a ministry team and you can serve in a place you've never served before. Maybe you go out in the community and you join a group and you do something that you're interested in and you get around other people and you learn from each other and you do life with each other. [00:31:53] You know the best way to learn from mistakes? Learn from somebody else's mistake. You don't have to make the same one. You learn from other people's example. You learn by observing who they are and what they do. You want to grow in prayer? Pray with some people. You want to grow in reading your bible. Read your Bible with some people. You want to grow in a life skill, get around other people and challenge and encourage each other. God has put incredible people right next to you. [00:32:21] Some of you sit in the same seats every single time you come to church. It's your spot. I get you. I feel you. [00:32:27] Maybe you just say hi to somebody and you start a group with the people you sit next to. And you get to know each other and learn and grow in ways you never thought possible. [00:32:38] Here's the third place I'm going to challenge you on this one. Some of you are like, no problem. Other you guys are like, okay, read a book this year. What if, I don't know if you're a reader or you're not a reader. I don't even know what your reading style is or your learning style is. But what if you learned something new? Some of you like reading books. Read two books. Read three books make it a goal to read a book a month. Two books a month. Maybe you just read ten pages a day. If you read ten pages a day, do you know how quickly that adds up? Just ten pages a day, you'll open up a whole new world of discovery and learn something you didn't even know things could work that way. Or maybe you like audiobooks. Do an audiobook. The library is free. You can put an app on your phone from the library and listen to audiobooks or get books for free. You don't even have to pay for it. Podcasts are free. You could listen to a podcast. You could listen to a preacher that you'll never meet in your entire life. But, man, God has given them a heart full of passion and excitement and energy, and it's going to stir something in you to know God in a way you didn't know before. I listen to the Timothy Keller podcast. I try to listen to a sermon a day because that man helps me think about Christ in ways I've not thought of on my own. And it helps me love him better. [00:33:56] What if you just learned wisdom from a source you've not tried yet? We have access to more information right now than we've ever had in the whole history of ever, don't we? It's literally at our fingertips. We have no excuse for not making a goal this year to learn something new. A book, an audiobook, a podcast. You will be surprised how much your heart can grow by just learning something new. I listened to a ton of Ryan Holiday last year. He's stoic philosophy, and I'm not even a stoic philosopher myself. There's parts of it I agree with and parts of it that I don't. But you know what? It helped me think about life in incredible ways. And it was a gift that my heart needed at exactly that moment in my life. God gave you a brain for a reason, and we absolutely rob ourself of our best life if we don't use it. [00:34:52] You don't have to go to college. If you graduated college, you still have more to learn. There's literally no age that we can't learn something new. It doesn't matter how old you are. It doesn't matter how young you are. Every single one of us is capable of learning and growing because guess what? It's our life, and we choose how to use it and how to grow. What difference will you make for good? Because of what you're learning, what you're growing in, and what you're developing in I'm going to share with you something right now. It's a lot. It's something that's on my list that I'm learning. My husband shared it with me. It's Brad Stolberg. He's an author. [00:35:27] Very interesting. There's 26, which is way too many things to put on. Did they put them on the screen? [00:35:34] They're in your app. If you have the app for the church, go in the notes section. They're all there. So if you want to use any of them, because I'm going to go through them and there's a lot, but grab a couple and maybe it's just something that will give you wisdom that you can focus on. So what he says is, as we round out this year and head into the next, some powerful ideas on performance, excellence and mastery. To keep in mind, listen to how simple some of these are. Outcomes matter. But if you are to have any meaningful longevity, you've got to learn to enjoy the process. You know what that means? It does matter that we try to learn and grow and produce good things. But if I hate life in the process, I'm not doing anybody any favors, right? Enjoy the process. Life is a process. Wisdom is a process. Growth is a process. And if it all feels miserable to me, I'm missing out on the joy of the life that God has given me to live. Second, he says, community is key. Nobody reaches the top alone. You got to find people you can do this life with. You got to find people you can grow with and learn from. It's not how good this is. He says consistency, the dull and mundane act of showing up every day, is way more important than intensity. You know why so often we don't keep our goals? Because we set these really high goals, right? I'm going to lose 25 pounds and we go hard and we go heavy and we cut everything out and we do all the extreme workouts and like three weeks in we're like, I want to die. This is miserable, right? But just show up every single day. What if at work you said, I'm going to show up every day and bring my best self? [00:37:06] What if at home your relationship with your family got better because you said every day. I don't care how mundane it is, I don't care how boring it is, I'm going to show up and love my people. Well, consistency, you don't have to be intense all the time. You want to be intense, God bless you. But sometimes it's just consistently showing up again, he says. It's easy when everything is clicking. But how you perform on your average and bad day is probably more important, right? When it's easy, a lot of people have no problem doing it. When it's hard, a lot of us quit. [00:37:39] But what if we didn't quit? What if on the bad days we showed up with our best selves and all the wisdom we're learning? [00:37:47] He said. Work and craft can be a big part of your identity, but when they're the whole of it, you become fragile. If your identity is only resting on what you can do, it's not strong enough to support who you are and who Christ is calling you to become. You can't always control what happens, but you can always control how you respond. [00:38:07] Remember Viktor Frankl said the last of the human freedoms. Be patient. All lasting progress has periods of stagnation and plateaus. It's hard in the middle, isn't it? The messy middle. [00:38:22] The best medicine after failure is getting back to the work itself. Learn, adjust, and get on with the show, he said. Caring deeply and paying close attention are radical acts. They're also core to your humanity. [00:38:36] Happiness is the wrong goal. So many of us are like, I just want to be happy, right? Remember we talked about the study of Happiness? Chasing happiness actually makes you less happy. Isn't that annoying? Feels like, so absurd to me. Like, that just feels as wrong as possible. But it's true. If you try to find happiness, you end up less happy. But, he says, think about meaning, texture and love instead. Here's a really basic one. You ready? [00:39:00] Sleep when you're tired. [00:39:04] It solves a lot of problems, doesn't it? [00:39:07] Lean on routines and rituals, but be flexible enough to release from them when needed. [00:39:12] Said simple doesn't mean easy, but it often means effective. We make things harder than they need to be sometimes, don't we? [00:39:20] You don't have to like failure, but you've got to be okay with it, because at some point it is inevitable. [00:39:26] Stepping into the arena, giving it your all, requires knowing you have your own back. Fierce self discipline requires fierce self compassion. Maybe somebody just needs to make a goal of being a little nicer to yourself this year. [00:39:41] Move your body every day. It makes everything better. [00:39:47] Being good enough over and over again is how you become great. Isn't that good? Just show up and be good enough today. And when you do it consistently, that builds a great life. Right thinking follows right action. Take the work seriously, but yourself? Not so much. [00:40:03] Inspiration is fleeting. Habits and systems are far more reliable. [00:40:09] Curiosity is the antidote of fear. [00:40:13] Meaning comes and goes. Embrace it when it's there. Stay patient when it's not. Here's the last one. Life is not a highly efficient road. It's wild and forever unfolding path. Stay on it and travel with good partners whenever possible. [00:40:30] Those are just random, but they're things to think about that make us smarter and more wise and give us better understanding. Please hear me today. Your life matters. It does. God gave it to you for a reason and on purpose. You're not an accident and you're not here by chance. Your life matters and you are able to live well with wisdom and intention and absolute courage and knowledge and understanding. What if together we pray, just like Moses, that God would help us to just understand the brevity of life. It's so much shorter than any of us expect, that we might appreciate each day, each moment as the incredible gift that they are. [00:41:17] What if we, like Moses asked to grow in wisdom? That we might live this life well to the fullest effect that God has given us the ability to live. Imagine the difference that might happen just this year if those two things became part of your thinking. That God would help you to be aware of this time and to help you grow in wisdom. Imagine how that might change your heart at home. It might change your attitude at work. It might make a difference here in the church and in the community and what God might do through you. Friends, I don't know where you started and I don't know how far you have to go, but I do know this. There is literally no better day than right now, today to get started. There's literally no better moment than this beautiful one that God has given you tonight to live your life to the very fullest. Dear Father, I pray that you would help us. I pray that we would not give in to average. I pray that we would not settle for less and give in to mediocrity. That you would stir within us a heart of courage and strength, that we would live this life well. I pray, Father, that we would remember you are from everlasting to everlasting. You have got this and we can turn to you for help. I pray that you would direct us and guide us in the way that we should go. That we would be the men and women you've created us to be. That in you, Father, we would have hope and faith and joy and goodness and love. Help us, I pray. In Jesus name, amen.