Kind of give my testimony real quick for this past year. It's been kind of a weird year. I know this might seem a lot for a lot of people, but kind of in and out, going in and out of things. Just kind of been weird for me. I thought I just got saved recently at the camp out and I thought I was saved before. I thought my first profession of faith back when my grandfather was still alive, I thought I was saved because he was saved. I found out that it wasn't that way. I made so many professions of faith thinking that I had the real thing and I was being deceived. It's hard when you come to realize it because you think so many years between being 15 and being 17, was the last profession I made was at 15. And you realize that you've been deceived for two years, almost three. And it's a hard thing to realize that you know you've been lying to people. Right. And it's hard to realize that you could have caused people to go to hell in that time because you lied to people. Because you didn't make sure what Brother Dennis said. You didn't keep a watch on your heart. You didn't make sure what you had was true. It's a hard thing. Before I got saved, it was a couple weeks. The Lord had been dealing with me and dealing with me. And it was just like, honest before the Lord, I woke up in the middle of the night from a dream that I was walking in hell, carrying my tombstone. It's a hard thing to wake up from. Yes, sir. I thought I was saved and I was being deceived. You get that dream and you're, I think I woke up maybe one o'clock in the morning. I didn't go back to sleep. I couldn't. I cried and cried because I thought I had the real thing. It just kept going on and going on for weeks. This was probably back in early August. I couldn't figure out what was going on. I kept trying to pray. I said, Lord, help me. I don't know what's going on. We had the camp out, and Brother Miller opened up some stuff to me. Brother Shepherd, just all their preaching opened up, and I was able to get the real thing. I was able to hear the truth, and I wasn't deceived anymore. I just want to thank God that you have a peace in your heart. You feel so much better. You know you don't have to worry about deceiving people now because you know you're living the true life. I feel like I've grown a little bit, not a whole lot, as much as I wish I could have. But I'm thankful for this church family that's helped me through it. I know I said this a couple weeks ago, but a church family who will ask you about something as small as a cut on your finger of how it's doing is a good church family. I'm thankful for the people who are in here. We went to a couple of different churches over this past two years, and every single one of them wouldn't even come up and say hi to us. But I've seen in this church that any visitor, everybody will try to go up and say hi to them. because y'all know how to be a family of God. And I'm thankful I've been put in this church. I've been raised here. My parents brought me here, raised me here. I could be out in the world right now. I could be on drugs, anything. I could be dead. I'm thankful I'm here, especially on tonight. I could be out wherever else, but I'm here and I'm thankful for that. I just want to give God the glory that These 18 years, it's been a little weird. I never thought I'd lose my grandparents, especially how young I was. I never thought I'd lose them. I thought we'd all go together when the Lord comes. But it puts a different perspective on your mind. Especially afterwards, when they're gone, I think me and my dad were talking about something I'm fixing on my truck or something the other day. We're like, Paul Paul is here. He could help us. You don't realize how much you need somebody until they're gone. And that's with Miss Owen too. And Miss Peggy had said in her thing, you don't realize how much you miss them until they're gone. How much they brought this church closer. I'm just thankful for the testimony they left behind. For me, for the rest of us in the church, I've got family members that listen to the services sometimes. They don't come to church. They used to. And they're being deceived right now because they think they're OK. And they're going to hell. I've tried witnessing to them. My family's tried talking to them. They won't show up. And it's a hard thing because there's certain cousins right now that have been laid on my heart from the Lord and they won't listen. It's a hard thing to get over when you know that the Lord's coming back quickly and they're gonna be left behind. The Lord's given me so many things over this past year as far as safety. I know I told a couple times I've almost been in a couple car wrecks this year. Real close, one of them I probably would not have made it out of. But he allowed me to have another day, another year almost. I just want to give God the glory for that. If you look in your Bibles at Ephesians 5, verse number 15, we'll read a couple verses. See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time because the days are evil. Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is. Kind of had a thought the Lord gave to me about just time itself. We're going into the new year, it's a new time. And the verse 16 says, redeeming the time. because the days are evil and that's true we're living in very evil days and time time is so precious that we forget about how precious it is I think we go through life and just shrug it off because it's nothing like we just have every day to ourselves but it's not that because You don't realize how quickly the Lord's coming back. He said, as in the days of Noah, well, we're in the days of Noah. We've been in the days of Noah. Right. We don't know how much longer we have. And we throw it away like it's nothing. I think we bring down God's time on our standards, punishing it like, oh, well, I've got an hour today, whatever. I've got two weeks from now. I can do it two weeks later. We push it off. We don't realize that we may never see those two weeks. We go through life pushing our limits, I guess you could say. Brother Demas actually got two of my verses. If you turn over to Matthew 24 and then Matthew 25. You know these verses. I think there's another one somewhere with them. It's about the same thing. Matthew 24 42 is the watch therefore for you know not what hour your Lord doth come. It's talking about the two being in the field and the two women grinding. And then also about the ten virgins 25 13. Watch therefore for you know neither the day nor the hour when in the Son of Man cometh. We don't realize, I think, how short that time is coming. It could be before I finish tonight. It could be before we get home tonight. It could be before we wake up in the morning. And I think one thing, when we try to witness to people, we don't witness as hard as we should. We don't push the salvation of God hard enough on people. You got lost loved ones, I know we all do. Maybe there's somebody lost in here tonight. But we don't push that on them as hard as we should. We don't have a lot of time. Time's against us as far as witnessing. If we witness low or not enough, if we don't give enough of that, of it out to them, we're going to lose them. If we don't push to get him in church, if we don't push to get him to hear the word of God, we're going to lose him. And then, how's it going to feel? How's it going to feel when it could be your son or your daughter, and they're going to hell for eternity? Maybe it's your mother, maybe it's your father, your grandfather, your grandma, whatever it may be. Someone you're super close to. And because you don't want to hurt them, you don't witness to them. You don't want them to get mad at you. And we're sending them to hell. And that's on us. We're going to be accounted for it. We're only given a space of grace. Every person is given a space of grace. You only get so much time to witness to one person. Because you can see your son tomorrow, and the next day he could be gone. We're not promised another day. We're not promised anything, honestly. We don't deserve anything either. We don't deserve to be here right now. God gives us so much time to do whatever we want to do, but how much time do we give God? I was thinking about it. I kind of added up a couple hours. If this was an hour and a half, or let's see, two and a half hours on Sunday morning, an hour and a half Sunday night, and an hour and a half Thursday night, that's about how many hours you spend at church every week. You know how many hours that is in a year? About 286 hours. But there's 8,760 hours in a year. Now, that's just church, I know, besides the special services. But then you also got your own personal studies, which might be a half hour a day, maybe an hour. But even if it's just a half hour a day, it's only an extra 152 hours in a year. So that's what? Almost 400 some hours out of 8,000 hours in a year? How would you feel if God only spent 400 and some hours with you a year? Out of those 8,760 hours, he only spent 400 of them. It's not even a quarter of it. And we take it for granted that he gives us all this time but we don't do anything about it. We don't push that, hey, we need to be in church more. We push to get out of church. We push and say, oh, well, it's 12 o'clock, let's go home. Oh, it's eight o'clock, let's go home. What if God did that to you? What if he's going through your day and he's just like, oh, you got five hours, that's fine. I'm done with you for the rest of the day. He just left you. You would die. You would probably die. He's so merciful and gracious to you with your time. Gives you all this, the many blessings of time, whatever it may be. And we don't give any of it back to Him. Maybe we give a little bit back to Him and that's okay. That's all we think about is just giving Him a little bit. But what about during our week when we're working? You think of God when you're working? You think of God when you're on the job, when you're pushing to get a job done. You think of God. I'm guilty because I don't all the time. I'm guilty of when I'm talking to somebody on a job that I don't always include God in the conversation. When I could be the only Bible they see. I could be the only witness they ever see. I'm guilty. Time's running out. We don't have any more. It's so short. I mean, I've only been alive for 18 years. The older I get, the more I see that it's going quicker. I used to think a year took 300 years to get it done. I used to think coming around to my birthday would take forever. Now, over these past two years, I'm like, That came really quickly. I'm sure it gets a lot quicker and quicker. My mom has always told us, I just remember when you all were a baby. That's 18 years ago. But we just take for granted all the time we have with each other. We get the ability to go and see each other. I mean, not just at church, but whatever else we do, all these banquets, whatever it might be. And then half the time, I think we probably get mad at each other for something. We go home with a grudge. Well, I didn't like what she wore. I didn't like the food they cooked. Why does that matter? Why does that matter, especially with your family? You're supposed to be a church family. We're supposed to be tighter than an immediate family. We're brothers and sisters in Christ if you're saved. We always find some way to put a grudge into it. I think my challenge for this upcoming year for a church, me included, is let's take time to give God time, number one, to make sure that we're not pushing God out of our church, to make sure we're not pulling him down to our level But let's go to his level. Let's reach for him. If it takes a church service being four hours long, so be it. Jesus preached to 5,000 people all day. I didn't hear any complaints about that. I don't read of any complaints in the Bible. And they only ate one meal. Out of one all day, they only ate one meal. And we can't live without three meals a day. I'm guilty. But let's just take time to give God his time. Let's give it back to him this year. The theme is to be better. Let's be a better Christian. Let's get in church more. Let's read his Bible more. If you study for 30 minutes every day, if your devotion is 30 minutes every day, make it an hour. If you pray for 15 minutes a day, make it half hour. It's not going to hurt you. And yet it's all this extra time you sit around, take a nap, whatever. Spend time in God's word. It'll help you. It's helped me. I'm able to grow a little bit. I was going through the house the other night, or the other morning before I left for work, and I couldn't find where I laid my keys. I'm weighing things I lose all the time. I couldn't figure out where I laid them. I started looking at every place I had them. I was like, Lord, I need these keys. I got to leave for work. Prayed about it, prayed about it, prayed about it. And I walked back in my room, and a place I never even stuck my keys before, that's where they were. It's like God said, hey, look up there. There they are. If you need help, He'll help you. He said, seek, and you shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you. Ask, and it shall be given you. I don't think we take the Bible in its whole. We don't listen to the Bible. We have all these promises from God, and we don't listen to them. We just read the Bible and say, oh, well, I read the Bible. I'm a Christian. I'm glad you read the Bible. Or are you studying it? Are you digging in his word, trying to find the promises that he has? What about praying? You want to be a prayer warrior? There's, I think it's two pages back there right now that have prayer requests on them. There's probably more than that that probably aren't on the prayer list. You can take one of those prayer lists home, read it, pray for it, read it, pray for it. It won't hurt you. If you pray truthfully, God will bless you. He said he'll bless those who are his, but that's only if we make it a truth in our life. We have to push ourselves to get rid of our time, to take our time to have time for him. It's not what we want to do. Oh, that's not fun. That's not fun. It doesn't have to be fun. If you're a Christian, we're commanded to do it. We're commanded to love the Lord, to worship the Lord, to sing praises to the Lord. I believe back in Ephesians, in the text, it says, speaking to yourselves in Psalms, this is verse 19, speaking to yourselves in Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making a melody in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. That doesn't sound like, I don't see any question marks in there like, oh, do you want to do this? We're commanded to do it as Christians. I'm just reading the Bible. We have to choose whether or not we're going to take it, whether we're going to apply it to our lives or not. God can't force us to do it, but he does command us to do it. It's whether or not you want to do it. I just think of the past, this past year, all the time you spent wasted. Would you go back and change it? What would you change it to do? Would you change it and spend it on God, reading his word, witnessing to other people, visiting other people, praying? It's not about ourselves. I think preacher used the acronym earlier, Jesus, others, and you. We're doing this for God first, and then we do it to help others. Even if we don't get anything out of it, that doesn't matter. We're all prideful. We always want something out of life. Like we have to get something. We're not owed anything. If anything, we deserve a spot in hell. That's where we should be. But God's given us grace. He's given us this time to be here to do his work. Because if we don't do his work, we're going to have an account for it. We're going to be judged for it. But that depends on up to us. Whether we want this year to be our best life, our best year as a Christian, and spend more time in prayer, spend more time in God's Word. I mean, if we wanted to do it, you could spend so much time in God's Word, you could come to church and that's all you could talk about. You don't have to talk about the weather, you don't have to talk about everybody else, you don't have to, whatever. You could come to church and talk about the Bible. The promises he has in his Bible, whatever it might be, the parables, whatever. I think God would be probably more pleased with that other than talking about the weather, whatever, other people, whatever it might be. Are we living to please him in our life? Are we trying to please him coming up this next year? Are we just going to live for ourselves? Is this a challenge? I'm challenging myself, too. I'm challenging myself to be a better Christian, to pray more, to read the Bible more, to study it. So that way when I can witness to somebody, I have the truth. I'm not just guessing around. You have these people like Jehovah Witnesses, whatever, whoever, they come up to you and they seem so knowledgeable about the Bible. It might be wrong, but they study their Bible. And they can speak whatever you want. I mean, they can quote you off real quick. But what can we do if we don't study God's word? What can we do against them? We have nothing against them if we don't study God's word, if we don't pray and ask for his guidance. So it's up to us as a church family and as a person to get in God's word, to spend more time pleasing him instead of pleasing ourselves. My arm is short tonight. But think of it as, instead of what you can get out of it from God, think of what God can get out of it from you. Think what you can give to God. He's given everything for you. He gave his son for you. Jesus came to earth and spent his life down here on earth for you. I don't read once in the Bible where it says, Jesus did this for himself. Have you lived your whole life as a Christian for God so far? Has everything you've done as a Christian been for him? Has everywhere you've gone, everywhere, whoever you've talked to, whatever you've done, been solely for God, giving back to him? Or has it been for yourself? I think we just, if we can make this year a better year, Brother Dennis said he might only give us this last year. This could be the last year God gives us. We could not even make it halfway through the year. Were we going to take his blessings and give them back to him? Or are we just going to take them and take them for granted and waste his time?