Thank you.
All right, everybody. Welcome to Steadfast Baptist Church. Glad you could make it this Sunday night. Let's go ahead and take our seats, and we'll take out our hymnals.
The 420. There's a song in the air.
420. There's a song in the air. And that's 420. Sing it all together.
Oh, sing for them.
Oh,
in the light of that star
and that's all
far
in the
nations
that Jesus
is
in the
the
song
down
from
I
shout
love
me
and we
say
your
name.
Amen.
We thank you again that we could be here tonight for you to help us to hear the message and apply it to our lives. Please bless Pastor Shelley that you would fill in with your Holy Spirit so we could teach us your word here.
And we again worship you this Christmas time. We celebrate the birth of your son. Thank you for sending him here, Lord, so we could be redeemed. We just love you and praise you for all that you do.
Just want to ask these things in Jesus Christ's name. Amen.
Next is going to be four hundred and thirty.
Two pages over.
While shepherds watch their flocks.
Call number four hundred and thirty.
While shepherds watch their flocks by eye.
All seated on the ground.
The angel of the Lord came down.
When glory shone around.
Fear not,
said He,
for mighty
is
Is the Bible pretty clear here? Isn't this really similar to what we already read?
Ignore all this junk. And notice it's a strife. It's always a fight. It's a fight about the Bible and whatever.
Verse 10, a man that is an heretic after the first and second admonition rejects, knowing that he that is such a subverted in sin as being condemned of himself.
So notice once you realize this guy is a heretic, you should walk away from them.
You should have nothing to do with them. You should reject them. Not worry about them.
Not try to rescue the heretic either. Just have nothing to do with them.
Avoid this person. And you can even tell
that there's heresy in a church if there is division.
I want to prove one more thing. Go to 1 Corinthians 11. 1 Corinthians 11.
I know I'm kind of dancing around in the scriptures here for a second, but
I want to prove a few points. When it comes to recovering yourself
from the snare of the devil, you have to realize that the devil is not going to
just walk up to you and be like, here's a trap. Put your foot in it.
And any trap,
the way that they trap people is they put something, they put a shiny object in it.
If you want to trap squirrels, you put nuts and acorns
in it. If you want to trap a mouse, you put what? Cheese. Or my dad
would put peanut butter. Who's ever done the peanut butter? Yeah, yeah. You put some peanut butter on the mouse
trap and then it comes and it's like, and it kills it.
But here's the thing. You're not going to really catch a lot of
rats and stuff like that if you put no peanut butter on the trap.
You've got to put the peanut butter. And you think the devil's the same way. The devil's going to slather
up a whole bunch of peanut butter on a trap. He's going to put some cheese.
He's going to put some acorns on there for you. And so you're going to be like, oh, but I like
the peanut butter. It's like, of course you like the peanut butter. That's the whole
point of the peanut butter is to try and track you to then
get into the trap and then get bit. And then get hurt by the trap.
So that's what happens with false doctrine. They try to appeal to you in something that you
like and suck you in on the things that you think are cool and nice
and then they just snap you. And you didn't even know what was going on. It was
too late. You already got sunk in. Now, look at 1
Corinthians chapter 11 and look at verse 17. Now in this that I declare
unto you, I praise you not that you come together, not for the better, but for the
worse. First of all, when you come together in the church, I hear that there'd be divisions among you
and I partly believe it, for there must be also heresies
among you that they which are approved may be made manifest among you. So notice, he says
look, if there's a division in your church, I'll tell you exactly why. Heresy.
Just false doctrine. It causes problems in a church.
You can pretty much just go hand in glove, heresy and division.
Also, there's going to be pride in that scenario, in that little
equation that you have there. So it's important to just eliminate heresy,
eliminate false doctrine, get it out of the church, squash it
like the bug that it is. But you know where a lot of people will bring
this heresy in is from
conservative media. I don't know, like Tucker
Carlson, like Sean Hannity. Here's one. How about Alex
Jones? But here's the thing.
Didn't the Bible already tell us a man that is an heretic out of the first and second ammunition? Reject?
Well, let's see some things, let's hear some things that Alex Jones said.
Alright? Just sit back for a moment, okay? Let's take a journey
to info wars, right? What's the real info wars? It's the Bible, my friend.
Not whatever junk he's selling. Here's what Alex
Jones said. We live in an amazing space-time continuum and we're on this
planet and Einstein's physics show it. Max Planck's
physics show it all. There's at least 12 dimensions.
Now that we're all top scientists and billionaires are coming out and saying it's a false hologram
it's artificial. So according to Alex Jones, we live in an
artificial 12-dimensional space-time continuum.
Sounds brilliant, okay? Not only that, he said this.
Now there's like this sub-transmission zone below the third dimension
that's just turned over the most horrible things
is what it resonates to and it's trying to get up into the third dimension.
That's just a basic level of consciousness to launch into the next levels.
And our species is already way up into the fifth, sixth dimension
consciously, our best people. But there's this big war
trying to like basically destroy humanity because humanity has free will
and there's a decision to which level we want to go to.
We have free will so evil's allowed to come and contend and
not just good. So, you know, instead of fighting over the word of God and the truth
of scripture, Alex Jones says that there's this evil
force that's trying to stop us from getting to the fifth and sixth dimension.
If you could just get into the fifth dimension, man. They're trying to
hold us back. We're just in the third, you know, our brilliant
people. Elon Musk is in like the sixth dimension, bro.
We need to get and figure out what's going on with Musk, you know.
Sounds like he smokes a lot of marijuana is what I would put, I would
postulate. And that's not, that's like a second dimension.
You're going downhill when you do that. Okay, you're not going uphill. He says the truth
is our bodies, this is a fact, are a communal hive
organism of all of our ancestors and all
of their race memories but not in just some compressed
epigenetic system. It's beyond that. It's an electrochemical
antenna. A provenness.
That connects to higher and lower dimensions. So our body suit,
because our predecessors wouldn't put us in a position without giving us a body
suit, that is them, our families are loving us, they're holding us.
They're wrapped all around us. Their strength, their will, this sounds like the
Native Americans or something. Their will, their bad, their good, their sins,
the good things they did, the battles they won, the battles they lost, the woman they
loved, the man they loved, it's all in us.
All these people, it's why we're able to look into
so many things and have so many different experiences. Apparently just
everything that's ever happened is touching you and around you and in you and
whatever. We're a communal hive organism. He said this,
humans are basically really powerful creatures that can live right close
to suns. They're highly radioactive. Nothing else
can live this close with very short lives. Because we're like a hive organism
that actually lives second to second in the space-time continuum.
We transmit our data up to be able to live next to
like these stargate jump gates that are our suns.
So if you just enter into the sun, oh I wonder
if there was ever like a weird cult where they're trying to like enter into the
third dimension through the sun or whatever, drink the Kool-Aid.
This is bizarre my friend.
So because we live so close to the suns, we only have like milliseconds
to be alive. We're actually a hive organism that keeps transmitting up to the next
species in our hierarchical system and then down below us.
So we're alive right now in this continuum and we're trying to progress and make things
better and the elites are trying to make sure that we don't dial into that
incredible knowledge we've got as a species. Basically die as a species.
So that we're not competitors on the next level as the Bible says
of the inter-dimensional plane.
So the Bible teaches about an inter-dimensional plane
that we're supposed to enter into. Chapter and verse Alex.
Oh well that's just fun stuff. He's talking about the Bible.
And look anybody that's listening to Alex, he brings up Jesus and God
and faith and whatever. You know what, he has a false gospel.
And he does not believe the gospel of Jesus Christ. He does not believe salvation by faith.
But beyond that, he believes so many weird things. And in fact, if you know anything
about cults, you know what this just sounded like? Scientology is
exactly where you got these photons or pha-tons or whatever
and they're all surrounding you and you have to have these therapy sessions to get rid of them
and all this nonsense. It sounds like the stupid junk that he's into.
Look, the devil just repackages the same
crap over and over again and tries to confuse people
and drag people into all kinds of nonsense and then you have
it sounds like evolution a little bit. You know we're evolving into these different dimensions
and going up this hierarchical plane and you know Bill Gates is trying to keep us out
you know, oh man, George Soros is trying to keep us up. No.
Those people are just pawns of the devil.
And the devil is just leading all these people astray and it's really just the snare
of the devil my friend. Heresy is the snare of the devil and they're just trying to
destroy you. And that's why they have all these doomsday predictions
and all these doomsday doom and gloom stuff because they just want to motivate you
through fear. No one would, anybody that ever heard this would not
care at all. The only reason they care is they feel like this could be my
lost broadcast and you know we're gonna die and it's all over and you better
buy now and get the information now and blah blah blah. And they just try to use fear
and scare tactics to get people on their program, to listen
and they attract you with all the peanut butter. Like, oh, liberals
are weird. You're just like, yeah, I like that. You know, oh man
you know Brian Stelter's an idiot. He is an idiot. You know, CNN's propaganda
it is propaganda. But then they just trap you with all this
junk on top of it. And notice that the Bible didn't say, hey let's go
listen to as much of this as we can and fill ourselves with this junk as much as we can. It says to
avoid it. It says to shun it and it says to have nothing to do with it. Why would I
want to just wrap my whole ministry around Alex
Jones and what he's doing. When the Bible's telling me to literally have
nothing to do with him. Literally to not want to think about it or talk
about it. He's a heretic. He's an unsaved person
and look, I'm not saying that he's the worst person on the planet, okay.
Not like Biden or something. He's not like Michael Obama
or whatever. But at the end of the day, he's still a
heretic and I should have nothing to do with that. And when it comes to
New Year's resolutions, here's one. How about you make a recovering resolution and say
I'm not going to listen to heretics. It doesn't matter how much of the peanut butter they slather
on it. It doesn't matter how much cheese they offer me. It doesn't matter how much of this junk
I'm just not going to listen to it anymore. I'm just going to turn it off and once I realize
these people are heretics and losers and freaks and weirdos. Because you know what?
Even if you don't fall for all that junk, something that he says you'll fall for.
He'll seep in something that you're not really, you'll get confused about
or you won't understand. And look, it happens all the time. These people
become like these truthers or whatever and then they come up to me and they ask me all these
weird questions. Like, well, you think the earth is flat? No.
Where'd you find, where'd you get that junk?
You know, they get on these weird fad diets and fad medical
things like, you know, instead of going to the doctor when you have a heart attack, just put
cayenne pepper under your tongue or something. It's just like, what?
You know, and they're like, hey, you don't even need to eat food anymore.
Just eat these vitamins, you know. Or just eat these, you know, it's like, no.
Milk, good. Okay. Steak, good.
Bread, good. Honey, good. I'm going to stick with what the Bible teaches. So, even
though they may not fall for like the 12th dimension, okay, they
fall for other junk, my friend. And I did take this to an extremity, but I'm trying to
help you realize that there's a lot less stuff that people kind of start thinking like,
oh, maybe, kind of, that kind of makes sense. No. Reject all of it.
You got to think about the source and the trigger of heresy.
Okay. And if it's coming from a bad source or it's going to
trigger you to go down a dark road, you need to just avoid it and have nothing to do with it.
Go back to 2 Timothy chapter number 2 for now and I just have a few more verses and
I want to prove two more things. That was the majority of my sermon, okay.
But, when it comes to recovering resolutions,
here's a really good one. If you've been listening to heretics, stop.
And make some New Year's resolutions that say, you know what, I'm going to avoid
people that just don't believe the Bible. You know, and when someone's going to teach me a weird false
doctrine, I'm just going to say, I'm not interested in that video. I'm not interested in listening to see what
the weird junk is that everybody has out there for me. No, I want
to just stick with the things that I know that are true already.
Now, here's the second thing that you need to do when it comes to recovering yourself,
is recover yourself from iniquity. Look what it says in verse number 19.
Nevertheless, the foundation of God standeth sure, having the seal, the Lord knoweth
them that are his, and let everyone that nameeth the name of Christ depart
from iniquity. But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver,
but also of wood and of earth, and some to honor and some to dishonor.
If a man therefore purges himself from these, he should be a vessel unto honor,
sanctified and meet for the master's use, and prepared unto every good work.
So he's trying to tell the pastor, he's saying, look, or anybody that wants to be the man of God,
don't listen to heresy, don't listen to the false doctrine. Also,
you need to get, you know, away from iniquity. You need to get away from sin, because both these
things destroy Christianity. Heresy and sin
will destroy you, derail you, get you off of serving the God.
And look, will a little heresy just, you know, wreck the ship?
Maybe not. Will a little sin wreck the ship? No, but you're playing with dangerous
things here that they can lead you down to a road of complete and utter destruction.
That's why it's important to depart from iniquity. That's why it's important to get sin
out of your life. And you know what, we probably all can sit here and make a list
of some sins we committed in 2021 that we're not proud of.
That we don't like. And so you have to think about, okay,
what is the source of that and what is the trigger for that? Like, what is
triggering me to make that bad decision? You know, what's that trigger
that's causing me to hear heresy? Infowars, okay, well then just don't go to that site.
What's triggering you to go get drunk?
Going to the bar? Stop going to the bar! What's triggering you to drink alcohol?
Buying it? Stop buying it! You know, what's triggering you
to go and do drugs? Hang out with your buddy at work? Stop
hanging out with your buddy at work, right? You have to start thinking about, hey,
why did I make that mistake? Why did I make that problem?
Realize it could cause even worse problems in the future and nip it in the bud.
Say, you know what, I want to cover myself from the snare of sin, of
iniquity, of this issue. You know, someone commits fornication
and they say, well, I'm alone with the person that I really
like that I'm not married to. That's probably going to be a failure.
Don't put yourself alone with someone that you like, right?
You don't want to put yourself in bad situations and bad places where you're going to
basically fall into this iniquity. It's going to cause you to have
what? Dishonor. Some to honor, some to dishonor. What's the dishonor? Meaning,
you're like a lot when we read about you and it's like, oh,
the guy that knocked up his two daughters. Way to go.
I mean, you're a vessel under what? Dishonor. We're all going to be
examples. Some good examples, some bad examples,
okay? And at the end of the day, you want to be a good example. You say, well, how am I a good
example, Pastor Shelley? You don't listen to heresy, number one, and you depart from iniquity, number two.
And you know what? Nobody is going to do it just willy-nilly.
You need to set up boundaries in your life. You need to
identify the problems you've already had. Identify areas where you failed and say, you know what,
I'm going to build a fence up. I'm going to build a bulwark up for that and I'm not going to
allow myself to go down that road in 2022, okay?
Now, go over to Titus 2, just to the right. Titus chapter 2, look at verse 11.
The grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men,
teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lust, we should live soberly,
righteously, and godly in this present world, looking for that
blessed hope and glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave
himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity
and purify in himself a peculiar people zealous of good work.
Notice what God wants for us. God wants us to constantly
be redeemed, purged, sanctified,
set apart, made holy in our lives.
And you know what? Living the Christian life, you're never going to go
from being a sinful person, like a really sinful person, to just like
goody-two-shoes overnight, okay? Especially if you've been in the world
for a long time or you've made a lot of mistakes. You know what? Sometimes
it's a process. That's what's called sanctification. Sanctification
is a process where you slowly get cleaned up over time.
And you know what? When we reach people and we're bringing new people into the church or people haven't
been to church or people have been backslidden, we should anticipate they're not perfect.
And they may need some grace and they may need some time to help get
sanctified and clean things up and try to right some of their wrongs.
And when we fall, when we backslide, you know, there's new mercies
every morning is what the Bible teaches. And a just man falls
seven times and rises up again. You know, the Bible doesn't say a just man
never falls. It says he falls seven times. That's a lot.
And when you think about Romans chapter number seven, the Apostle Paul is saying he does that which he hates.
Now I hate sin. The new man
inside of me hates sin. The old man loves it, okay? But the new
man inside of me hates sin. He abhors it. He doesn't want
to allow it. But let me just tell you something. Sometimes the old man wins
in my life. And you know, it's frustrating. And you know what?
The old man is going to win in your life sometimes. But instead of just constantly
just making the same mistake over and over and over again, you know, that's
called insanity, okay? What you're supposed to do is you're supposed to identify
the triggers and the sources of that mistake and say, you know, I don't want to keep making
that mistake and try to set new goals for yourself of how
to avoid that sin, of how to not go down that road, of how to avoid
certain situations or things and building up some kind of a wall
and trying to protect yourself from iniquity. We want to
depart from it. We want to work on that on a regular basis so that we can be a successful
Christian our whole lives. Not just tomorrow, our whole
lives, okay? And a little bit of sin could end up destroying your entire life.
Now I like, go if you would to
Luke chapter 22 for just one moment. I want to go one more place on this point.
And then I want to go to my last point. But when
making New Year's resolutions, and you know, you don't have to, but I think that it's a good idea.
I like it. Make some goals. Because you're never going to get anywhere if you never make
a goal to go anywhere. Imagine getting in your car
and your wife says, where are you going? You say, I don't know.
And you just start driving. Are you ever going to get there?
No. You have to say like, I want to go here, right? And then you drive to that
destination. Now there's a lot of ways to get there potentially. You want to go the
shortest path possible. But at the end of the day, you know what, if you want to get
somewhere, you have to decide to go there first. And in your life,
if you want to get somewhere or if you want to eliminate something that's hurting you, you have to make
some goals about it. You have to make some plans in order to arrive there.
Luke 22, look at verse 61. Let's get all the way down. 61.
And the Lord turned and looked upon Peter, and Peter remembered the word of the Lord,
how he had said to them before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me
thrice. And Peter went out and wept bitterly. Now this is a low
moment for Peter, okay? That's a pretty bad sin is to deny
the Lord Jesus Christ. Just to be like, I don't even know the guy, okay?
And you know what, he wept bitterly over that sin. But you know what Peter did?
He got it right. Because I don't see Peter ever denying Christ ever again.
In fact, under the threat of death, standing before
the chief priests and everyone, they're like, we ought to obey God rather
than men. You're not going to stop us from preaching in the name of Jesus.
That's a pretty big turnaround. From going from just a little girl asking if you know him and
he's like, I know not the man, you know? To the fact
that you're going to stand before every one of those Jews knowing they've already killed Jesus,
knowing that they hate your guts, knowing that they want to rip you apart, and saying like, we're
never going to stop preaching in the name of Jesus, you know? You're not going to stop us from
preaching. That tells me that we too could have low points.
And so we have to work on that and strive on improving our lives
and getting better so that we can be meat for the master's use. We can be
prepared unto every good work. And you know what, God's going to use those that clean themselves
up. Peter said when he met the Lord, Lord, depart from me for I'm a sinful
man. You know, when the Lord met Peter, Peter didn't say like,
pretty obvious you picked me. I mean, I figured. I was assuming you would
come by and get me first, right? No, no, no, no. He literally, he said like,
don't pick someone else. Like, depart from, get away.
Like, I'm too sinful for you to use me. Maybe,
but then just clean yourself up, right? Start making changes
in your life and getting to a point where God can use you.
Start serving the Lord and start departing from iniquity so that God can use you.
You know what, God uses sinners. In fact, the Apostle Paul said he was chief of sinners.
And guess who he used the most? The Apostle Paul, because he really cleaned himself up.
Really got his doctrine right, didn't he? Now go back to one more verse here in 2 Timothy
chapter 2. And
here's the last point I'm going to make when it comes to recovering
Christians is lusts. Lust is another thing that will
destroy you when it comes to
serving God. And lust, you know, if you really understand the word, it just means
simply desire, okay? Lust, a lot of times
has a very negative connotation, and it typically is. But it simply
just means desire. And in fact, the Bible has positive mentions of the word
lust when it's talking about you sell your tithe and then
you take the money and you come back and you convert it back into whatever goods you
want. He says, like, whatever thy soul lusteth after. It's just meaning, like, whatever you desire.
Okay, whatever you want. But most of the time, the things that we desire
are sinful. That's why it's usually coupled with the idea of it being a negative
word or a sinful word, because oftentimes people are lusting after something that they shouldn't be
lusting after, right? Now, in verse number 22,
the Bible says, Flee also youthful
lusts that follow righteousness, faith, charity, peace with them that call
on the Lord out of a pure heart. So we have three elements here.
In order to recover yourself from the snare of the devil, you want to avoid, what, heresy?
You want to avoid iniquity, depart from iniquity, and you also want to flee
youthful lusts. And when you do such things, it's going to help enable you
to not get trapped by the devil, and then us in meekness
want to approach other Christians and try to help them to recover themselves
out of the snare of the devil there. You know, the Bible says
in 1 Timothy chapter 6, you might not even be able to turn there, but look at verse number 8, the Bible
says, In having food and raiment, let us be there with content.
They that will be rich fall into temptation
and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which
drown men into destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil,
which while some covet it after, they have erred from the faith, and pierce
themselves through with many sorrows. Notice another place in Scripture,
another one just saying, look, there's a snare out there, it's called the love of money.
Pride will destroy you, sin will destroy you, and the love
of money will just really destroy people. This is kind of the
trinity of evil that the devil's trying to throw at people
and try to destroy Christians. He'll destroy you through false doctrine,
he'll destroy you through sinful habits, and he'll destroy you by dangling things
that you want. Oh, that big house, all that money,
all that fame, what are the things it is that you desire that you shouldn't really have
a desire for? Or a woman that you shouldn't have a desire for?
And all kinds of things that you shouldn't even be feasting your eyes on,
it destroys people. Luke chapter number 8, the parable of the sower, talks about
those, the deceitfulness of riches, the cares of this life, the deceitfulness
of riches, entering in, choke the word, lest you become
fruitful. And so we can't think that the devil
isn't going to try and destroy us, we have to realize that he could do that. Look at 2 Timothy
chapter 4, just flip the page and look at verse 10.
For Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this present world.
So notice, what was Demas' downfall? His lust for the world.
He just loved the world. He just loved all the things that the world
has to offer, rather than serving God. And so he just forsook
Christianity. You know what's going to stop people from serving God? The lusts
of this world. The deceitfulness of riches. The cares of
this life. They come and they enter in and they choke the word and they stop
soul winners from being fruitful. Stop Christians from producing fruit in this
world. And you know what? You can pretty much almost chalk it up. Somebody
that quits church, that was in church, it's one of these three reasons.
Pretty much, you find someone that's not, that was
going to a good church for a while and others not going to church, I guarantee it's pretty much
either they got involved in heresy, their old sinful habits
creeped up, or just some lust of the world that they got attracted to just
threw them out. And I've seen it, I've seen people that were
soul winners, good soul winners, good Christians, just the love of money bug
just got in there. They started their own business and they started making
money. I mean, talking about, like, lots of money. And it wasn't like the devil
wasn't putting lots of peanut butter. I mean, he was putting lots, I mean, he's just slathering the thing with peanut butter.
He's like, I'll give you a whole jar of peanut butter. I mean, I'll give you a bucket of peanut
butter. But the problem is, is the trap that's around the peanut butter.
It's a deceit. It's a lie. And you know what?
You go and chase money at the end of your life, you'll only have it full of regret and
woe and sorrow. Whereas having no money and having served God,
you'll have joy, peace, and you'll be looking for that crown of
righteousness that's there for you in heaven.
So, we're here at the end of the year and there's not another
service, Sunday service before we end up the year. So, I just
I always like to do this for myself and I think it's a good exercise.
But if you're going to make a New Year's resolution or you're going to think about
things that you could try to have goals for, I often just try to
really think about where was I in 2020
at this time, okay? Like, what was I like in 2020?
And then I look at myself now and I say
did I get better, worse, or the same? And I
try to look at all the categories of my life. I try to say, okay, job, right?
How am I doing on my job? Is my job better, worse, or the same than
what it was 12 months ago, right? How about my church attendance?
Was my church attendance better,
the worse, or same? How about my money? My money better,
worse, the same? How about my weight and strength?
You know, as a man, it's important to be strong and you got to look
at these things and say like, am I improving in my body or
declining in my body? And obviously age gets us all, okay,
a little bit. But I'm just saying, you know, you should kind of look at these things and
measure yourself. How about your house?
Your housing situation? How about your Bible reading?
And I'm not saying like how many times, I'm saying like your daily Bible reading.
Are you reading the Bible daily as much less
the same as you were a year ago? How about your Bible memorization?
Are you memorizing scripture? Are you working on the word of God? How about your
involvement in church? Is your involvement in church more
or less the same? How about your family? Is your family
relationships? How about the number of your family? Is that more
or less the same? Now you got to think about these things. How about
your kid's education? Kid's education, improving, going
lower. How about your soul winning? Are you doing more soul winning?
Is your soul winning getting better? Are you improving as a soul winner? Are you getting worse as a soul
winner? How about your marriage? You know, it's supposed to be sweeter
as the years go by. You know, I believe that
marriage, successful marriage is always going to get better every single year.
You know, and so if I look at my marriage and I'm thinking like, wow, I wish
we could go back, then I need to make some kind of improvement in my life,
in my marriage, in my relationship, and try to do something to make
that better. Now, I just threw out a bunch of random stuff, okay?
You probably know which areas that you need to work on more than anybody.
Alright? But if there's an area, let's just pick one, okay?
Bible reading. Let's just say you're like, that one stung a little bit, okay?
Well, then you've got to think about this. How many times do I want to read the Bible in a year?
You know? And then you start making goals to actually achieve that.
Or you start thinking like, I made a goal to read the Bible once this year,
but I never did. Well, why? Well, every time I woke up, I was
late for work. And so then I would just jump in the shower and go
and then it was late at the night and I didn't want to read and then I wouldn't read. And I woke up the next
day late. And then you're like, okay, well, why were you late getting up?
Well, because I stayed up late. Well, why did you stay up late?
Because I was watching Infowars. So now, you can kill
two birds with one stone. You say, well, now I'm going to go to bed early, knock out the
heresy, and then I can wake up in the morning and read the Bible.
And believe less in the 12th dimension and believe in the
12, you know, tribes or, you know, the 12
layers of the new heaven and earth, okay? There's your 12 layers, all right?
But it's
important that you try to think about, what did I do? You know, you got a
few days. Think about the areas that you feel like you failed in. You say, my marriage
isn't going the way I want. Okay, well, then I say, or I
ask you, what did you do for your marriage last year? Why did you do
this last year to work on your marriage? And you say, well, I married them.
That's not enough, okay? Here's some ideas.
How about saying, you know what, this year we're going to take a date night every week.
Friday night is going to be our date night, or Saturday night is going to be our date night.
Okay? I'm going to increase the number of date nights.
We're going to sit at home and we're going to read the Bible together at night for
15 minutes instead of watching Alex Jones, okay?
I'm just hitting that horse, I'm just trying to kick that dead horse, all right?
I mean, you got to think about, okay, I'm going to buy her flowers
once a month. How many times did you buy her flowers? How many times did you take her
on a date? How many times, you know, hey, I'm going to tell her that she looks pretty, you know, more
regularly, right? Or, here's something, a tip that I
can give you. To try and help my wife and our relationship, I said, you know what, on
Tuesdays we're going to go to lunch together. So, for work, I'll just make work,
you know, work out and I'll just take a long lunch on Tuesdays and we'll just go have lunch on Tuesdays.
A nice little break in the week and we'll just have that time, makes
her feel a little bit more special, we can be closer to one another, you know, we'll
read the Bible together, I'll take her out on dates, I'll do whatever.
You got to look at the areas of your life and say, where am I failing, why am I failing,
how can I improve? And we need to make sure
that we also create resolutions that are not just
only like thinking positive but also thinking about the failures we had, the
controversies we listened to, the iniquities we got wrapped
up in or failed at, or the lust that we had that were just
not really appropriate and try to replace them, try to put boundaries
in our lives and try to think about how to improve ourselves. And you know what, you're never
going to get anywhere in your life on accident. You know, if you want to
have big muscles, you got to work out all the time. You want to
read the Bible, you got to just open it every single day for a long
period of time and just read scores of scripture, scores of chapters
day after day after day, you know. If you just kind of every once in a while
randomly open the Bible, you'll never read the whole thing. You know, how do I
memorize a chapter? One verse at a time. You know, just one phrase
at a time often. It's hard to even memorize a whole verse by itself, but you know
unless it's Jesus wept or something. But I mean, you got to sit there and you just got to plug away,
make goals, work on your goals, and realize, you know what,
every year when I do this and I kind of look at the goals I had, I realize I failed
in a lot of ways. That's how I feel. I kind of look at them and I'm just like, man.
But then I say I succeeded in some ways, okay. But it's important to kind of try to
evaluate yourself and push yourself to be the best version
of yourself. And that we don't fall victim of the snare of the devil, we don't allow
ourselves to get destroyed, but we're constantly trying to improve and getting better.
Because if you employ these tactics over a long period of time, over a decade
over decades, you will notice major differences.
You'll say, you'll look at yourself and you'll say like, wow, I wasn't going to church,
now I'm going to church three times a week. I wasn't going soul winning, now I'm getting people saved every single week.
I didn't know any Bible, I can quote whole chapters of the Bible now. You know,
my marriage is on the rocks, now it's greater than ever, she's my best friend.
And we've never, I've never had this much joy, I've never had this much fun in my life.
I had zero kids, now I have a thousand, you know. Like whatever it is,
if you employ God's tactics, it's just going to get better and better and better.
If you don't have any goals, you're just going to get worse and worse and worse.
If you don't identify the problems in your life, it's just going to, you're going to fall into all kinds of traps
that you never even wanted to fall in. You've got to kind of build some boundaries
and create some recovering resolutions as well.
Alright, let's close in prayer. Thank you Heavenly Father for the word of God, thank you for
giving us an opportunity to serve you. Thank you for 2021.
Obviously there's always challenges with every year, but
we always have an opportunity to improve ourselves and to get better and draw closer to you.
And whatever areas that we may have failed in or areas that we want to try
and improve in, I pray that you would just motivate us and strengthen us and give us the wisdom
to see how we can improve and to try and make goals and try to motivate
ourselves to constantly get better and to not allow ourselves to just
be apathetic and just fall into all the traps and the snares the devil wants
us to fall into. But rather we would guard ourselves and protect ourselves
through the scripture and through the wisdom of God's word that we would
not only avoid traps but also gain wisdom and knowledge and be a successful
servant of the Lord. And in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.
Amen. With that, let's go ahead and sing one more song. You should have these handouts for
O Holy Night. If you don't have one, raise up your hand
and we'll try to get some ushers to bring one to you. If not,
make sure you try to share with your neighbor.
We'll give it a second so we can get some more handouts.
We want to hear you all sing. It's congregational, right?
Alright, let's go ahead and sing O Holy Night.
O Holy Night
oh
Oh
oh
Amen gracing your
you