Good morning. It's a pleasure to be here. And as Joe was introducing me, speaking about times past where we met, the first time we met and had time together was over a game of Monopoly. It was an interesting game, to say the least. But we have been friends for many years, and it's been friends with Red Mills now for many years. And Pastor Harrison and I have developed a blessed friendship in the Lord and to be partners in the gospel. between our two churches connecting the dots from Westchester to Putnam is just a blessing. And so I'm thankful to be here, thankful that Jim is down in Hartsdale. I'm sure the saints are blessed to hear him. And I hope today that the message I bring forth will be a blessing to you and a challenge as well. as my sermon is geared towards challenging us for the new year that is about to come. As 2024 draws to an end and a new year comes, it's always a time where we as human beings say goodbye to the old, welcome the new, we make resolutions, we look back at what we've done and what we should have done, and we hope to do better the next year. Now 2024 was not an ordinary year by any stretch of the imagination. Now, I'm not talking so much in our personal lives, but rather if you look at the year, and I'm sure if you turn on the news sometime this week, they'll do a year of events. But I just want you to think about this. In April, we had a total solar eclipse. The next one will be in 20 years from now. It's within a lifetime that you are fortunate enough to ever see one of those. We had the most bizarre presidential election in history. I mean, we had an assassination attempt. One of the candidates dropped out of the race after being forced out by his party. A vice presidential candidate who had an atmospheric rise and looked like the sure winner, only to have an atmospheric fall. And we wound up having the most unexpected result of the election. Very sad things happened. One of my most influential ministers of the gospel took a fall this year, which hurt me deeply. I don't know how many of you are Yankees fans, but watching Aaron Judge drop that ball after not making the World Series in 2009 was like a gut punch. And who would have thought if you told me 20 years at age 58 that Mike Tyson would enter the ring with a YouTube vlogger named Jake Paul, I would have never believed it. I was too late. I went to bed, never even saw the fight. Needless to say, 2024 was an eventful year. But as we go back over our personal lives, I'm sure we've experienced some joys and we've experienced some sadness. We may have even experienced tragedy. And it's how we deal with all of that as we assess the year gone by which helps us to determine what we do for the future. And so while we may have failures that we look back on, we can always look forward to doing better and we'll let the scripture be our guide today. I'm gonna ask you to turn to your copies of the scriptures as is above Ephesians 5.15. There's just a couple of verses. I'll be reading from the ESV. Never mind, I have the NASB here. Therefore, verse 15, be careful how you walk. Therefore, be careful how you walk, not as unwise men, but as wise. making the most use of your time, making the most of your time because the days are evil. So then do not be foolish. But understand what the will of the Lord is. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, almighty God in heaven, we thank you and praise you once again for the blessing of having coming together to worship you in spirit and truth, to give our attention now to the ministry of the word. And Lord, I understand that as a minister, that I am completely dependent on the power of your Holy Spirit to enable me to interpret and to rightfully apply the text before us. Oh, Father God, I pray that you give us ears to hear, hearts to understand, and more importantly, wills to obey. that we may glorify you and be conformed to the image of your son, the blessed Lord Jesus Christ. And Lord, we ask that your spirit would overshadow and empower every aspect of this time. And it's in the name of Christ we pray. Amen. All right, so now as we look back briefly at the year of 2024, we look forward to 2025. And as I said, reflecting back, we realize that our life is a journey. Our life is a journey. One year creates one milestone. It is a sense of how we keep time based on our revolution around the sun. But at the end of the day, we realize our life is a journey. It has a beginning and it has an end. And how we live our life is going to determine our eternal destiny. We are getting older every day. The days ahead of us are getting shorter. The days behind us are getting longer. And one thing you learn about time is that every day that goes by, every hour that goes by, every minute, every second, every week, every month can never be recovered. And that's why we understand that time is very valuable and we need to be good stewards of it. We need to be good stewards. We need to be jealous of the time that God has given us and use it wisely. We need to be challenged to resolve ourselves, not just to get in better shape and to be better Christians, but to be good stewards of our time. Jonathan Edwards, if you remember him, there he is, this picture, one of the Puritan preachers of New England from the 18th century, was very committed in his own life to resolving to use his time wisely. I have a couple of his. Oh no, I don't have it. I will read two of his resolutions. Number five, resolved never to lose one moment of time, but to improve it the most profitable way I can. And resolution number seven, resolved never to do anything which I should be afraid to do if it were the last hour of my life. Now there were other resolutions regarding the usage of time, but I love the fifth one in particular, never to lose one moment of time, but to improve it in the most profitable way I can. Edwards saw time as a commodity like money. It was to be invested. It was to be improved upon. It was to give us a profit and yield a profit, not a loss. And so it's therefore with that in mind, we apply the principle of stewardship not just to our financial assets, but to the time that God has designated to us. And the first exhortation we see here in the text is, look carefully. Therefore, look carefully or be careful how you walk. Be careful how you walk, not as unwise men, but as wise. And so the first point of our message is today is to be careful how you live your life, to be careful. Now, some years ago, just to give you an example and an illustration to this, I had read a story, and the story was about a man who was walking along Sunset Cliff Park in San Diego. I have a picture of it because I was in San Diego this summer for a family vacation, and I think I have that. No, we don't have that picture. Okay. But I did go to San Diego to Cliffside Park. It is a tall cliff, and it's about a 200-foot plunge down to the ocean where you will be dashed against the rocks. A young man was walking. He was looking at his iPhone, wasn't paying attention, and wouldn't you believe it, he slipped and fell right off the cliff and plunged to his death. He wasn't watching where he walked. And clearly we have many examples of that today. You go to New York City, many people walking around staring at their iPhones. You don't know where you'll wind up when you walk around like that. Needless to say, the scripture is not instructing us to literally watch where we're walking, but walk rather is a metaphor and it is used figuratively to describe the way we carry about our life and order the steps of our life. It means our lifestyle. It means our life. And our walk is what defines our journey. As I said, when I talked about life as a journey as a beginning and an end, that's what it is to walk. To walk means I have a destination and I am proceeding to that point. I am moving in a forward direction. Now for us as believers, the reference point is the new birth, it is regeneration. It's when you become born again, a new creation in Christ Jesus. The old is gone, the new has come. We are no longer who we used to be, but now we are, we are now been remade and we've been regenerated in the image of Jesus Christ. We are God's children. And so the reference point for us is always the new birth. What is our destiny? Our destiny is eternal life. It is heaven. That is our destination. We are progressing. We are walking towards the goal that we want to live in such a way that as we make our ultimate goal, getting to heaven. We all read the book Pilgrim's Progress. We know that that is the whole point of the book is that Christian is making his way in his journey and all the perils and the dangers and the setbacks all are part of the process of getting to the celestial city. The celestial city is the end goal. It is the destiny. One thing about walking, though, is it requires effort. There are no wheelchairs to heaven. You must walk. You must put effort in. No one's going to take you there. You've got to make the effort. God gives us all that we need to live out this life for Christ, but we must move our legs. Furthermore there are different paths we could walk as I reached the end of brother Joe's Sunday school when I came in he was talking about the different paths we could go as the Bible says in Matthew 7 to the wide and broad path which many walk and or the straight and narrow, which few there be that find it. But the straight and narrow path leads to life. It is the wide and broad path that leads to destruction. And by the way, there are many people on the wide and broad path. It's the easy road. It is the way of easy believism. It is the way of pluralism. It is the way of the world. And everybody getting along the straight and narrow path is the path of the cross. It's picking up your cross and following Jesus. And so we have different paths to walk in our lives. And so within Ephesians 4, we are given other modifiers of how we walk and how we live our lives. Ephesians 4.1 tells us, walk in a manner worthy of your calling. Walk in a manner worthy of your calling. I think we could take this off. Walk in a manner worthy of your calling. I don't know. I'm going to leave technology out of this today. Walk in a manner worthy of your calling, or as put differently in Philippians 1.27, let your manner of life be found worthy of the gospel. That term worthy means to be of equal weight. It means you ought to live your life in such a way that it's of equal weight to the reality and the calling of your life, of the gospel. Ephesians 4.17 puts it this way, you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds, in Ephesians 4.17. Now there is a sharp distinction the way we live our lives and order our steps as opposed to the Gentiles. Now we're not talking about non-Jewish people here. Gentile is a synonym or a code word in the New Testament for unbelievers, those who are outside of the kingdom of God, those who are not in the kingdom. He goes on through verse 18 through 24, Paul saying that the unbelievers have their minds darkened, their thoughts are futile, and their hearts were hardened. They live this way because they're spiritually dead. If you look at the way the world lives, the way they carry about their steps, we are to be distinct, we're to be different. Our walks are different than those who do not know God. In Ephesians 5, too, we are told to walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself for us. And so our walk in Christ is rooted in the love of Christ. We're to be imitators of God. And so how we live our life is rooted not only in the light of Christ's love for us and understanding the forgiveness and grace that he extends to us daily, but it is extending that to others. It is extending that to our families, extending that to our church, our fellow church members. It is extending that to unbelievers. It is extending that to our enemies. What did Jesus say? What good is it if you love those only who love you back? Pagans do that. We're to love our enemies, love those who spitefully use you, love those who abuse you, right? Because then you show yourselves as children of God, just as the Father shows goodness to the evil and the just, right? And so the love of Christ constrains us, it governs us, and it's the rule by which we live our lives. I always say that this is the chief principle of the gospel of Christian living, and yet it is the principle which so many are afraid to observe and cannot observe. It is much easier to talk about love than to love those who actually are unlovable. When we realize how much God loves us, we are very unlovable to him. You see, the point here is God cares about our walk, And therefore, we ought to be careful about our walk. We ought to be cautious about our work. We should look carefully. The adverb carefully signifies something done accurately, precisely, with great care and great attention. It conveys a sense of urgency and great importance. In other words, it matters how we walk. When I think of this precision and accuracy, I think of my daughter, who is an artist, and she paints. And I was watching her last week make a painting in the basement, and it took her about six hours. And the precision and accuracy in which she drew her lines mixed the colors. And I tried to give my advice, and I was quickly shooed away. She had a very precise way to do it. There was a lot of attention to detail. There was a lot of attention. When I thought the painting was beautiful, she says, no, it was a mess. It was a disaster. Because it didn't meet her standard of what she envisioned as something to be beautiful and precise and accurate. It is that same precision and care that we must put into living our lives. We need to be intentional. We need to be serious. We need to be cautious. How do we live our lives when you think about that? Are our lives just a chaotic mess? Is it a random fiasco where we just kind of go about our day going from one thing to the next with no plan, with no purpose, with no intentionality? Do we just react to the things that are happening or do we actually plan out and how we are going to respond to things and being proactive rather than reactive? When we are proactive, we are preparing in advance as we wake up, engaging in anticipating what is going to come our way, praying and seeking God to give us the ability to be able to take on the tasks, to be able to take on the challenges with the mind of Christ. Finally, now you need to look carefully, but the modifier clause is to be not as unwise, but as wise. Not as unwise, but as wise. And so wisdom becomes the dominating principle here. Now when we talk about wisdom, we're not talking just about Wisdom in a practical sense, right? There are two ways we could think about wisdom. And the general understanding of wisdom is that we think about living wisely, making good business decisions, making good life decisions. And there is a place for that kind of wisdom. That wisdom is necessary, and it is good. But the wisdom here that the Apostle Paul is speaking about is not so much concerned about successful living as it is about spiritual living. It is about spiritual living. The wise person in the Bible is the person who knows the truth of God and is able to apply it to their lives. That is the wise person in the Bible. The wise person is the person who can embrace and understand the truth of God's word and then apply it to their lives. The person who knows the word and cannot do it or will not do it is described as the fool in the Bible, as the fool. And so this modifying statement tells us that what makes a life that's worthy of the gospel, a life that is lived righteously, cautiously, is a life that's lived wisely. A life that takes the practical truths of God's word and applies it to our life. The unwise are those who are careless and reckless, and rather than applying the word of God to their life, are living just about in the flesh. They're reacting in the flesh. Now I believe that all people, all of us, have inconsistencies, right? There is a disconnect in every Christian between what we know and what we do, right? If there was no disconnect, if we actually did what we believed 100% of the time, we would be perfect. We wouldn't need grace. We wouldn't need the gospel. We would just go straight to heaven like Elijah. It's a matter of how big those gaps are, right? As I talked earlier, there was a great preacher who was very influential in my life, and without referencing his name, it was very difficult and impactful and hurtful to the church at large. Why is that? And that is because when someone takes a fall like that, you realize that what they were preaching and what they lived was such a wide gap. that you almost question if the person was even a believer. It disorients, it discourages, it disenfranchises people, it sets the bar low, it makes people who are struggling in sin want to sin even more. And so we have to understand that how we live our lives should be lived intentionally to live in conformity to God's revealed word. God wants us to live according to his word. His word is not meant to hurt us or make our lives miserable. The more you live according to the Bible, the more you apply the Bible, the more successful you will be, the more happy you will be, the more blessed you will be. We must take our walk seriously. We must take our lives seriously. Our walk matters. So we need to look at our walk, examine it, and hold it to the ultimate standard, which is Jesus Christ. We look to him as the usher and finisher of our faith. That brings me to the second point of my sermon. Having this as a basis of being careful how we walk, how we live our lives, it brings us to the second point, and that is that we make the best use of our time. And that is in verse 16, making the most of your time. This is a conditional clause, because the days are evil. And so the exhortation here is to make the most of your time. And if we're truly seeking to make our walks count and to live for God, then our main priority is going to be to make good use of our time. The word here, the word used for make the most, that phrase is exagorazo. There goes my Greek. And it's all Greek to me, by the way, but I'll get it out there as good as I can. It is a commercial term. It carries the meaning of buying back or redeeming. And some of the older translations like the King James says, redeem the time for the days are evil. And it talks about the idea of buying something up or claiming something and making the most of it, right? When there is a valuable resource and a limited supply of it, you want to buy up as much as you can because you don't know if it'll be there. Remember in the pandemic when supplies were scarce, people were online to buy toilet paper because it was in Limited supply and people were buying as much as they can because they didn't know if it would last. A very crass illustration, but it reminds us how something as simple that we take for granted now could be a scarce commodity one day. The scarcest commodity of all is time. Time is precious. It is more precious than gold or diamonds. Do you know what determines the value of something? How limited the quantity is. The less quantity there is of something, the higher the value. It's called Economics 101, supply and demand. In the housing market right now in Westchester County and Putnam County, houses are exorbitant in their prices. Why? Because there's a limited supply and a high demand. And the less there is of something, the more money it is. And so therefore, there is nothing more valuable than time. Why? Because it is more scarce than any resource. It is not an infinite resource. It is limited. If you were to live a full life of 75 years old, that would be the equivalent of 27,000 days that you are allotted in your life. If you are so fortunate, I have lived long enough to know that a lot of people do not make that. Walk through a cemetery, a lot of people do not make that. It seems these days, one out of two get cancer and are dying in their 50s and 60s. And that is not to mention all the other tragedies that could befall one in their life. James 4.14 reminds us that life is a vapor, here today, gone tomorrow. Claudia and I were looking over our wedding video from 22 years ago, not too long ago, and as we were looking at the video, we were marveling How many people are no longer with us? Oh, that one. Oh, he's dead. Oh, she's dead. Oh, he's dead. Oh, he's not. We were just staggered by how many people have passed away in 22 years. You see, once your time is spent, unlike other resources, you cannot recover it. You cannot get a refund on it. It is lost for good. Jonathan Edwards says this. When time is gone, it is gone forever. No effort or cost will recover it. Though we are filled with remorse and repent that we let time pass without properly using it, it is neither of no avail. Every part of time is successively offered to us, so we may choose whether we will make it our own or not. But time does not delay. It will not wait on us to see whether or not we will comply with its offer. If we refuse, it is immediately taken away and never offered again. Profound. I remember reading that sermon when I first got saved by Edwards, and it was one of the most impactful sermons on me in terms of making me realize how precious time is. What exactly then is the apostle referring to when he says, make the most of your time? Now this term, make the most, also captures the essence of seizing the opportunity. It means to seize the opportunity, I think is a good translation of it. And while there's a general principle we need to be good stewards of time, I think that the word time here that is used is not chronos, which is often used to describe the word time, but the word kynos. And the word kainos means limited opportunities within time. What do I mean by that? It means that in your time, in your life, there's going to be windows of opportunity. There are going to be short moments where you need to act quick. And if you don't act quick, that opportunity is gone forever. So for example, I'll use the real estate market again. If you didn't buy something when the interest rates were 2.5%, then now interest rates are 8%. You had a very short window to make a move. Once that window closes, it never opens again. You need to move quick. You can't think. It is a worldly illustration. But there are practical illustrations in our lives. Time is very short when your children are little. A very small window of opportunity to raise them and influence them for good and evil. When your children are little and they're small and they're playing with their toys and making a mess of the house and you need to change their diapers and rock them to sleep, don't be upset with that. Treasure that. Those are the most treasurable moments that I could remember with my children, and I enjoyed every moment of it, because before you know it, they're grown up, they're teenagers, they're adults, and they're totally different people, and you will miss those days. You will long for those days. It's a very small window of opportunity that you have with your children. Make the most of it. What about if you are single? Oftentimes people are single, wishing to be married, wishing to meet the right person. By no means should you long for something you don't have. Make the most of your singleness. It is a very short window where you do not have a family, you do not have big responsibilities, you do not have bills, and you could do as much for Christ as you want. That goes for the same for people in retirement age. When you are retired and your kids are out and you have less responsibility, it is a window of opportunity to serve God, to give him the most of your life. Those windows are short. So many people plan for their retirement, they save, they save, they get their pension, they move to Florida, and they wanna golf and enjoy the rest of their life in the sun, and then they get cancer and they die. I've seen it time and again. Plan your life so that you use those opportunities for God and not just to enjoy life. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with enjoying life, but we need to seize the moments of those opportunities to serve the Lord. And that's the point here, is that the opportunities that God wants us to seize are the opportunities that honor and glorify Him. Jesus, in His public ministry in John chapter 9, verse 4, says something very interesting and enigmatic to His disciples. He says, What does Jesus mean by that? Let me repeat that. We must work the works of Him who sent me while it is day, for night is coming when no one can work. Look at another text in John 12, 35 through 36. Jesus said to him, the light is among you for a little while longer. Walk while you have light, lest darkness overtake you. For the one who walks in darkness doesn't know where he's going. While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of the light. So there's two ways of looking at this. Number one, Jesus is talking about the fact that He is with His disciples. The Son of God is in their presence. It is day. He is the light of the world. And while you have the light of the world with you, while it is day, let us do the work of God because the time is soon coming when I will no longer be here. You will no longer have this opportunity. Enjoy every minute that you have with me, my disciples, because shortly I'm going back to the Father. I will not be here with you anymore. This experience that you're enjoying now will be forgotten. It will be in the past. And time moves forward. Now, of course, Christ sends his Holy Spirit, and his Holy Spirit empowers the church to do greater things. And so the bigger task then becomes is to work the works of him who sent Jesus while it is day, and day means while we're alive. While the light of Christ is shining in our lives, while you have life in your being, serve God. Walk in Christ. Walk in the Spirit. Because the time will come eventually when you cannot, when you will be in your grave. And when you're in your grave, you can no longer make the most of your time in this world, because your time has expired. It's run out. With this in mind, we must have a greater view and appreciation of time, the limited amount we have, and to be disciplined that we do not drift towards wasting time. That is the second half of this. Not only do we have to make good use of our time, but we must be careful not to waste time. Not to waste time. I think one of the greatest regrets when I look back over my life is all the time wasted that I could have been more productive. I look back and things I should have done and would have done and could have done, but it's too late. Time has slipped me by. I cannot recover the past. I can only change the future. But there was so much time wasted in my life, so much time where I could have been doing more and I didn't. And there's nothing more discouraging than looking back and realize we've wasted time in meaningless, vain, unfruitful ventures. The greatest time waster of our day. When I was a kid, it was the TV, but this is the chief of offenders. Everywhere you go, everyone's glued to their phone. Every place you look, People are glued to the phone and more than likely you are glued to your phone more hours than you should be at home. I'm sure if I ask every one of you to show me your screen time right now, it would be so many hours you would be embarrassed to let me know. I would be embarrassed for you to see my screen time too. And I say that not to condemn, but that we would realize to be challenged to use our time more wisely. These things give brain rot. It's a new term. Brain rot from looking at your phone so much that your brain no longer processes normally. You can't think like a normal human being because your brain is now programmed by social media. Yes, and I see everybody looking at their kids. Absolutely, young generation, you need to know this because it's important. But we waste our time in other things. How much time do we waste arguing and fighting with people? After you have a big argument with a loved one and it's all over, I want you to sit down and say, was it worth it? Was it worth wasting all that time arguing and fighting? What was accomplished? How much time do we waste thinking about the past? and what we should have done with regrets, wasting time worrying about the future, anxious about something that may or may not come to pass. We waste time trying to look good in front of others. We waste time trying to change things we can't rather than changing the things we can. Time is wasted in so many ways. And worst of all, we waste time on sin. 1 Peter 4.3 is one of the greatest exhortations of the Bible, where Peter says, for you have spent enough time in the past doing what pagans do. You spent enough time doing what pagans do. The time sufficeth, as it says in the King James. It means that time should be now used every ounce, every minute, every day for the Lord. Why? Because it's a gift from God. He could take it from you tomorrow. It's not promised to you. And we honor him by using every minute he gives us for his glory. That brings us to my third and final point, because the days are evil. Not only is it wise to make good use of our time, but we make good use of our time because we know the days are evil. Knowing there is evil saturating the world around us, we are motivated even more to use our time for good. If you don't get that we are living in wicked times, you must be living in a bubble. You turn on the news, I mean, just this past week, there were three stories that horrified me. You read the news enough, you learn that the days are evil. A woman was set on fire in a subway car, while a man who set her on fire just sat there and watched and was entertained by it. A man decapitates his five-year-old son. I could go on, but we don't want to glorify in the evil of our day. If you're aware of what's going on in the world, you realize the days are evil. Wickedness abounds. I said to Claudia the other day, I believe that we are seeing before us Satan unleashed and loosed in our society like never before. The evil and wickedness of our society is profound. Now, that's not to say that evil and wickedness didn't exist in the time that the Bible was written. It sure was. The Roman Empire ruled the world. People were enslaved and brutal. They were murderers. Christians were becoming more unbearable to the public. And during the times of the Roman Empire and De Niro, Christians were burned alive. They were thrown to the lions. And for entertainment, people went to the Colosseum and watched gladiators kill each other and be eaten by wild animals. So times were evil when the Bible was written. But there's no doubt in my mind that in the past couple of hundred years, we have seen more senseless violence and wickedness in our time than ever before in the recent history. Church apostasy is at a higher, not just one man who has had a moral failure, but so many Christian leaders who've had moral failures in the last 10 to 20 years. We're losing our influence. Pop culture has become pervasive and corrupting the minds of our children through perversion. Profanity has become more common. People do not even watch how they talk no more. You ever notice how casual and how normal it's become for people to curse? People in politics, people in school, teachers, people in prestigious positions curse like it's no big deal now. It used to be you would never curse in public. Now, no big deal. The days are evil. Knowing that the days are evil then gives us that much more reason why we should seize every opportunity we have to do the right thing. The more dark the days become, the more we ought to press forward to walk in the light. The more we must emanate the light. The more we must live in the light. We don't know when Christ is going to return. We do know he will return. We know that Christ is coming and he will bring judgment to this world. And all wickedness will be vanquished, praise the Lord. But until that time, Until that time, we are to make the best use of our time, putting our hands to the plow, knowing that the days are evil. Rather than being caught in the flow of evil, rather than being discouraged by the evil, rather than being influenced by the evil, we need to keep our eyes fixed on Christ and press forward to watch carefully how we walk. Not as unwise, but as wise. Redeem the time, make the most of your time, because the days are evil. Let me conclude with the final verse here, and that is in verse 17. So then do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. Living a wise life, making the most use of your time, requires you to know the will of God. Wise people seek and do the will of God. A wise Christian is diligent to seek and know the will of God, and we know the will of God because it is revealed to us in the Holy Scripture. The Bible tells us everything we need to know to live a life of righteousness and godliness. And so, if you haven't made good use of your time in 2024 reading the Bible, studying the Bible, I challenge you to do so in 2025. Make reading the Bible a daily part of your life. I would get on a Bible reading plan. If you haven't, go on Bible.com or Bible. I don't know what the app, the U version. And there are so many plans that you can join. And you can join, like our church has a plan that we all read together. And you can maybe get a group of people and you read together and go through the Bible in the year. If you have not read through the entire Bible from Genesis to Revelation in your life, then you ought to do so. Reading the Psalms here and there and just the New Testament is insufficient. That's like saying I'm only going to eat bread and eggs and I'm not going to eat anything else. There's a lot more food to eat. And there is a lot more food in the Bible. There is a lot of meat in the word. And the more you know the Bible, the more you study redemption history, the more you understand how God interacted with Israel and understand the coming of Christ, the new covenant. And you understand the moral precepts of God that are revealed in the law and the old covenant. And then the new covenant is revealed through Christ in the New Testament. You understand what God's will is for your life. We need to know the will of God, and to know the will of God, you need to read the Bible. And I am afraid that we are biblically illiterate. More and more and more we depend on coming to church on Sunday to be spoon-fed by our pastors, and yet we do not do our own labor diligently to feed ourselves. You need to be in the Word. Secondly, you are going to know the will of God by praying. And I'm not talking about five minute prayers or grace before your meal. I'm talking about heartfelt prayer, seeking the will of God, having consistent, focused, extended times of prayer, interceding for others, interceding for your family, interceding on behalf of God's kingdom. staying focused, staying extended, being intentional about praying, seeking the will of God. Lord, show me what your will is. You're going to be faced with decisions this year. You're going to be faced with scenarios where you're not going to know the will of God. Well, you study the Bible, and if the Bible isn't clear, you ask God to reveal it to you through prayer, and God will answer your prayer. He gives wisdom liberally to all who ask. And finally, Fellowship. This thing always falls off my big ears. If you want to know God's will, be around God's people. It's really simple. You wanna know God's will, be around God's people. Attend church, go to Bible studies, go to men's fellowships, be in contact regularly with the people of God, because you know what? God reveals his will through his people. God reveals His will through His people. You're not going to get somebody who's going to come to you and say, oh, thus saith the Lord. You're not going to get some prophetic insight. But what you will do is the more you hang around God's people who are in the Bible, who are in the Word, they're going to speak into your life and maybe bring a chunk of wisdom that you never thought of. Guys, these are all disciplines. They do not come naturally. You don't wake up and automatically do all this stuff. Just like you don't go to the gym automatically. It's discipline. It means you gotta make an effort, a conscience effort, and be intentional to do these things in order to grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ. Well, brothers and sisters, I wanna thank you for this time today. And let us be challenged, you and I, to make the most of 2025. Forget about what happened in 2024. You can't change anything that has gone by in the past. But we can resolve to make the most of our time, to not let a minute go to waste. We could be resolved to pursue godly living, to seize every opportunity. We can make a point of it, to carefully watch our walk, and even ask others to watch it for us, to be accountable, and to make every moment matter. And as we reach the end of 2025, another year will slip by us again. And it is true, as you get older, the years do go by faster. I used to hear everybody say that when I was young. Oh, when you get old, the years go by. But now I'm getting older, and the years are going by very quick. I don't know if that's scientific. I don't know if, but the reality is life slips you by quick. Make it matter. Make every moment matter. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, Thank you so much for your word. Thank you for this challenge and exhortation to us. We confess, Lord, we confess that we haven't always been good stewards of our time. We confess that we've not always been wise. We confess, O Lord, that in many times we've let good moments go where We had opportunities to serve you and we didn't. And so I pray, Lord, that you would give us a sense of desire, give us a strong desire to make our time matter this year, to be persistent, to be consistent, to be deliberate, to be purposeful, to be careful. Oh God, we ask you, Holy Spirit, change our hearts and move within us. to bring this about for your glory. In Christ's name, amen.