Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Speaker A: Welcome to the Think Deeper podcast presented by Focus Press. And happy new year from myself, Jack Wilkee, and Joe Wilkie and Will Harab. We are excited to start another year, Lord willing, of think deeper episodes, with a look at what we want to do this year. Growth and just goals, things like that. We'll talk to you about that in just a minute. As always, we want to tell you about what we got going on. We've told you about books in the pipeline, the renew curriculum. If your church is looking for Bible class material for the next year, check that out. Big rollout we've been doing, and so we're very excited about that. But right now we want to tell you about something cool coming to focus. Plus, of course, that's our subscription service on Patreon in which you get all kinds of things like the deep end bonus episodes of Think Deeper, my video Bible question and answer series, scriptural focus, exclusive articles, our class on revelation. I mean, there's just so much stuff on there, but we're adding a new thing for this year that Joe's been developing. So you want to tell him about Joe?
[00:01:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:01:06] Speaker C: So will has his family worship guide, which I would strongly encourage any and every family to get. I believe part two will be coming out this next year. Spoiler alert. I think putting will on the spot. So I came up with the idea of what I'm going to call the 365 disciplines for 365 days of the year. Every single day, we're going to be giving you new content. And what it is is a Bible reading, a specific passage, a prayer to pray, a meditation thought, something to kind of keep in your mind throughout the day, and then a discussion point. And this is for you to have at the family dinner table where you just throw out this idea of whatever it may be. And so we're going to walk through scripture from Genesis, through revelation over the year. I'm trying to map this out as to how exactly it's going to work. I'm well into Genesis right now, but we are very excited about offering brand new content every single day for you to really use with your family, use if you're single, use with your spouse, whatever it may be.
And again, so just a read, prayer, meditate, discuss every single day. And we're really trying to do good content for you guys. We're trying to make this something that's necessary, something that you can very much use, but also that there's some fun things on there as well. And so, yeah, we think, we obviously believe in the work of focus Press, but specifically focus. Plus, if you're not on there, consider subscribing. Once again, you'll be getting daily content at this point because of that, but also with everything else Jack listed, and we've got some other big things coming in the year that we've been kind of brainstorming. We got some more brainstorming to do as to what you'll be receiving. So to me, it's one of the best bargains out there at $10 a month, 15 for a few extra perks and such. But consider that, especially as we get into the new year here with January, consider doing that, but with that, that's basically all I got. So, fellas, any other promotion before we jump into the discussion?
[00:02:52] Speaker B: No, I was just going to say we're going to be talking about kind of goal setting and planning, obviously using the new year as the kind of foundation for what a lot of people do, which is New Year's resolutions. And so I would just say for Joe's thing that he's working on. What are you calling it, Joe? The 365.
[00:03:11] Speaker C: Yeah, 365 daily disciplines.
[00:03:14] Speaker B: There you go. What I was going to say was a lot of people set spiritual goals kind of deep for Bible knowledge, and we're going to talk about that with today's episode. But what I would say is, man, take advantage of Joe's putting a lot of work into this, and I think it's going to be very helpful for families as they try to grow closer to God. And so, yeah, with that being said, let's go ahead and get into what we're talking about with this week's episode. Again, it's New Year's. A lot of what's on people's mind right now is how are they going to grow this year? How are they going to be better? What are some goals that they're going to set? And so the topic for today's episode is goal setting, kind of planning. And really the advantages, why we believe this is something that every Christian should be, and I'm going to preface it with why every Christian should be a goal setter and planner, not just at New Year's. We're going to talk about why New Year's resolutions fail and kind of the old classic trope that goes with it. But we strongly believe that every Christian should constantly be planning ahead and constantly be setting goals for themselves, for their family.
This is kind of a hobby horse of ours. We've talked before about the fact that we kind of started our own accountability group three, four years ago now together of just trying to better ourselves. And so, yeah, we believe this is something that everybody should do. And again, I think a lot of people have this mindset at this time of year, right? New Year's resolutions. It's kind of a natural mindset that people have of setting goals and the direction that they're heading. Unfortunately, as we all know, rarely do those things last. People get very amped up and excited about the weight goals that they're going to hit, the diet goals that they're going to hit, the Bible reading goals that they're going to hit, the financial, they're not going to eat out. They're going to save this much money.
They're going to read this many books, whatever it is. And that excitement that they get amped up and that lasts for six weeks. And then mid February comes, maybe a sickness is hit, maybe just life happens. Then all of a sudden, the big dreams, the big plans, the goals that they set are over by February. And then the rest of the year, the rest of the ten months of the year, no planning, no goal setting. And so, yeah, we're going to talk a lot about why this is important with this week's episode, but one of the questions that we wanted to start asking is why do you think that there are people who don't set goals at all? Because I know I've come across people who are like, yeah, I'm not really a New Year's resolution type of person or even midway through the year. Yeah, I don't really set goals. I don't really plan. It's kind of some aimlessness going on.
So, yeah, I'll hand it off to one of you guys to answer that question, but also maybe to establish, why are we even talking about this? Why do we think this is important enough to start the new year with a think deeper episode on of planning goal setting? So answer that and then answer, why do people not set goals at all?
[00:06:10] Speaker A: As you said, it's such a big deal for us. This is such a part of who we are. And with the new year, it's a new start. Why not? I wrote the other day, like, if you're in August, you're like, oh, well, in January I'll start something new. Yeah, that's probably not great, but sitting where we are, January 1, lord willingness this episode comes out.
It's just a natural break to put something behind you, start something new. You're going to have a whole year to work on, and there will be a January 1 next year. It's a nice measuring stick. And so it's a useful thing, but anytime we talk about goals, I think of the socrates, I think it was Socrates, one of those Greeks, the philosophers, he said, the unexamined life is not worth living, that you just kind of float through life. You don't really think about, what am I doing? Why am I here? What's my purpose? What was I created for? What do I bring to the table?
Who am I? What am I trying to be? It's just unexamined. And like man, what a waste of something that you've been given. You've been blessed with God or by God with a lifespan. You've been blessed with unique talents and unique abilities and opportunities and things like that. And if you're not conscious of them and what you're doing with them, they're going to pass on by and you're going to have nothing to return for it. We're going to get to the scripture section a little bit later and talk about Bible verses that apply to all this. But my mind immediately runs to the parable of the talents. Even if you're a guy with one coin, something's expected of you. And the one talent man who buried it in the ground, that's the unexamined life. That's the. All right, I got this. I'm going to get through. I'm going to have it when I'm done. What are you doing with it is such an important question to ask.
[00:07:48] Speaker C: I've pushed as my clients and with you guys, with everybody I know, I look at stagnation as death.
If you're stagnant and you're not growing in some way, this isn't good from a health perspective. You think about a human, we're supposed to grow. Everybody's growing. Your brain is growing from the earliest. We just had a kid, he's already growing. He's three weeks old, and he just looks huge compared to what he was. And that's just the natural progression of things, is growth. Why would that stop? We get into our adulthood and we kind of stop taking a growth mentality, and this gets into what I think is an interesting point. Jack, you were making this, so I want you to be able to speak to this on why people don't set goals. And that is the difficulty in understanding what is complacency and what is contentment, because some people are going to look at and go, well, I just like my life. I'm content. Therefore, I don't really need to set goals because I just like where I am and I like my life. And so maybe that's the first reason why people don't set goals is they look at it as contentment.
How do we define those things? What do you think is the difference between complacency and contentment?
[00:08:52] Speaker A: It's really hard because the Mary Ann Martha thing where she's just go, go and the other one's sitting, there is a time to sit and rest and enjoy and relax and things like that. But there's also a time to go, go and go and do and make use. Look at the creation week. Six days of work, one day of rest. There is a reason why God laid it out that way. And so it's important to have both if your life is all rest and not pushing. We've talked so much before about the dominion mandate and the culture mandate and what Adam was placed here to do of kind of take this world and make something of it. And that takes some ambition. I think this is something we've talked about in our masculinity episodes too. A lot of christians look at ambition as like negative, as like there's something wrong with you.
You were created by God with a soul, with a brain, with consciousness, with all this stuff, to not do something with it, to not want to do something with it and have a return for what you were given. And you just want to sit and be complacent.
Contentment is saying, man, what I have is great and I can make it even better. Not like, oh man, this is all awful and I've just got to go, go. Complacency is saying, I'm fine with this and I don't need to do anything more. I'll bury this coin, right?
[00:10:09] Speaker C: I was going to say bury the talent. I was thinking people may get upset at me for this. This is what you get from this world is not my home. Just passing through, right? Like, well, hey, we're just going to heaven, going to heaven, going to heaven, going heaven.
[00:10:20] Speaker B: And we never almost agnostic tendency of like this. Life doesn't matter.
[00:10:24] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
[00:10:25] Speaker C: So when you go to set goals and you go to take dominion and to be the best possible, hey, this world is not our home, guys. This is just passing through here.
[00:10:31] Speaker A: I don't want to get off on this tangent, tangent. But heaven Christianity messes us up so bad. You were created for life on this earth too. I mean, you're created to be eternal, but you're growing into the kind of person who's fit for eternity to Christ likeness and all that.
[00:10:45] Speaker B: And I want to be very clear what we're kind of challenging here with this episode, and that is the idea of just kind of aimlessness. Joe and I talk a lot about that on our godly young men podcast with really pushing and challenging young men. Hey, strive for something. Make sure that whatever you're doing, that you're striving for greatness with it, just not that you're living your life aimlessly. But what's interesting about that is I think it's not just young teenage boys who struggle with this. I see a lot of adults that struggle with this, too. And by that, and again, this is what we're challenging of the idea that you're not really going anywhere. You don't have a vision for the future. And I think a lot of people have a vision for the future. And by that I mean they're like, man, I would really like to be here in five years or here in ten years. Well, how are you going to get there? I don't know. I guess I'll figure it out. I guess I'll kind of get there by osmosis. That's what we're challenging here, the idea that if you want to get somewhere, you kind of need to have a path sketched out. You might say, I'm going to probably use this example several times. Take a business. If a business has certain goals that they want to hit growth, that they want to expand or do whatever, and you ask the CEO, Harry, how are you going to get there? And he just says, I don't really know. I guess we'll figure it out. Yeah, no, good luck with him being CEO. That's not the way it works. You actually have to have a plan and goals for that. And so I think that's where, again, a lot of christians kind of fail on this, is that they are just kind of aimless, kind of living their life week to week. Got to get through the 40 hours work week. I got to get through this, got to get through this. And then they look up. They didn't have a plan for their kids faithfulness. They didn't have a plan for their physical health. There's so many categories that we're going to get to here shortly as far as planning and goal setting. But why don't people set goals is the question that we're looking at. Jack already covered the kind of contentment complacency thing. I think another reason why people are kind of averse to setting goals and they kind of shy away from it. Maybe they're not New Year's resolutions. People or whatever.
I think a lot of people know that they don't really have the self discipline to hit it, to hit their goals. And so rather than set the goal and then fail, they tell themselves, well, I'm just not going to set the goal. That way I don't have to fail. Well, I'm not going to plan to try to get this done. And that way, if I don't, I didn't disappoint myself. I really think kind of subconsciously that's what a lot of people do and that's kind of the aversion to goal setting. Yeah. Self discipline is a trait that so many people, especially guys, we've talked about our masculinity episodes before, need to adopt and need to make sure. Jack, I think, brought up off air self discipline is as small as not hitting the snooze button seven times. That's one small element of self discipline. But those self discipline reaches into all these areas of our lives, physically, obviously, spiritually, financially, all these things. And a lot of people know I don't really have the self discipline. And so rather than try to develop it, I'm just not going to set the goals that way. I know I don't fail and disappoint myself. Joe, what else do you have to add to kind of this why don't people set goals thing?
[00:13:34] Speaker A: I want to throw one hold on to go with Will's point there of people are passive and it's like a consumer mindset of between scrolling your phone and watching tv, it's all about what happens to you. And that's where when people see somebody who either is financially successful or spiritually strong or they're in good health or whatever, it's almost like, well, they got lucky. You don't know what hard work is because you just kind of assume everyone gets assigned a role and, oh, well, this is just what I was assigned. You have so much more ability to affect life than you think.
[00:14:05] Speaker C: Well, I was going to say that. That's such a good point. That kind of builds on what I was going to say about the self discipline because we live in the most instant gratification culture of all time. If you want it, it's immediately there, which means self discipline is incredibly difficult to build in today's day and age. It also means if you have it, you're going to be 95. You're like in the upper, upper echelon because hardly anybody else has it. But I think the way that you build that is consistently, well, yeah, we'll get into some of those things later, I had other thoughts, but for the sake of time, we'll go to the next one because it is adjacent to it, which is okay. There's those that believe I'm not going to hit the goal. There's that self discipline point, and then there's others that have failed before and they say, I don't want to be hurt again. I've failed my goals. And basically because there's a shame element to it and because there's guilt that they did not hit their goals, it's like, what's the point? I didn't hit them the last three years. Matter of fact, I've been doing New Year's resolutions for the last decade, and basically every year by February I've given up. And so I stopped doing it. Yes, it's the self discipline point of you didn't have the self discipline to do it. Second off, I think a lot of people, and I did this early on in goal setting it. It's a process. They burn themselves out. I set five goals that were moderately too severely difficult to hit. And I thought, man, if I could hit all five goals, I'm like Superman. Well, you idiot, you can't hit all five goals. And I realized that along the way. Like, how about we start with two that are difficult to hit and then we'll go from there and we'll add two and we'll add two or add one as we go. So a lot of people don't know how to set goals. And then when they set goals, they burn themselves out and they go, man, I just never hit it and I just don't want to feel that failure anymore. And so there is that element of, like, I think, again, they've convinced themselves they're not going to hit it. Yes, it's a self esteem thing. It's a self discipline thing. There's a lot of different things. But I think the shame in failure that goes along with it is just a huge deterrent to people getting themselves set up with goals.
[00:15:58] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. And so as we get to what is the point of all this, again, why are we devoting a think deeper episode the first of the year, the first of our third year, according to this, we got to ask ourselves, what is the point? And the point is to better ourself. And that is, again, gets to what was brought up a second ago by Jack in the sense of there's a lot of people that are so next life focused that they think bettering themselves in this life is kind of pointless. It's kind of worthless and we don't want to get it crossed in the sense that we don't need to be next life focused. Of course, what we do in this life impacts the next one, and the next one is where we're going to be spending eternity. And so that's, of course, what's most important and where we need to have our perspective. At the same time, that does not mean we just coast through this life and just kind of, well, whatever happens and whatever shape I'm in doesn't really matter. And however much money I leave my kids doesn't really matter. And no, these are things. That's that old quote, if you fail to plan, then you plan to fail. I think a lot of christians plan to fail because they don't fail to plan. Again, I brought this up a thousand times. When it comes to raising faithful kids, you ask parents, what is your plan? And they just stare blankly at. Stare at you blankly in the face. Yeah. Then they plan to have their kids fall away. If they don't have a plan to keep their kids faithful, their kids will fall away. Apply that to anything. Apply that to health, apply that to financial goals. Apply that to how you want to draw closer to God. Apply that to whatever. If you don't set goals, if you don't have a plan, good luck. And this is something that, again, we're fighting against aimlessness here. That's the goal here, is to challenge aimlessness and to try to better.
[00:17:42] Speaker C: Taking. We've talked about this before, but this is the aimless side of, well, the first thing, Jackathon, you mentioned this. The first thing that man is really commanded to do, take dominion, be fruitful and multiply. Take dominion of the earth. And there is that. And you spoke on this of how we kind of look down on ambition. That is such a needed element, in my opinion, of every Christian. And I know not everybody's entrepreneurial. There's going to be sheep, there's going to be the leaders, the elite, whatever it is. We've talked about this before, but I think every Christian has to have a certain level of ambition as to what they're going to do in this life. And the aimlessness, to your point? Well, I think we rest on these platitudes or we rest on these easy statements of, well, my goal is to get them to heaven. Okay. That's, like far reaching. My goal is to reach retirement. How are you going to get there?
What are the tangible steps along the way? And so the aimlessness, they're going to look at it. There's going to be a lot of people that bach and go, I'm not aimless. I know I want my kids to go to heaven. See, therefore, I have a plan. That's not a plan. That's a dream. That's not a plan. How do you get your kids to heaven? And obviously it's a work of God and not do. But what are the steps along the way that are going to help you keep your kids faithful? That's the part that's missing and that's the aimlessness we're talking about is the day to day approach to the bigger dreams.
[00:18:57] Speaker B: We got to get Jack in here. Sorry. One thing I'll say on that, Joe, is one thing I'm doing differently this year with my goals and me and Rachel together is I brought it up on the gala game in podcast, kind of the way that the businesses do it, of where do I want to.
[00:19:13] Speaker A: Be at the end of the year?
[00:19:15] Speaker B: And then you backtrack it month by month, week by week, day by day. How am I going to get there? That's exactly what you're talking know. We all know where we want to be at the end of the day. Closer to God getting to heaven, of course, and maybe even people for the other, maybe more smaller areas. We know we want to lose this much weight. We know we want to be this healthy. We know we want to save this much money. We know that. To your point, Joe, we have to backtrack it and figure out how are we going to get there. What does that look like? Month by month? What does that look like, year by year, day by day? A lot of people don't ever take the time or bother with that. Like you said, they know where they want to get. They just don't know how they're going to get there. That's the purpose of goal setting, and that's why we're so passionate about this, I would say.
[00:19:56] Speaker A: All right, I'm jumping back in some technical difficulties. Hope that worked out okay. But yeah, send donations to focus press because Jack needs a new laptop to keep producing things deeper. Anyway, picking up where we left off there about goal setting and if you know will's point of planning to fail because you're not planning anything, I think one of the other mistakes people make is very vague planning. Well, I want to lose weight. I want to save money. Like, well, if you save a dollar, you saved money. If you lose a pound, you lost weight. But is that what you were going for? What are you really aiming at here. And so those aren't really goals. You need to be specific with the goals. And with these, Will compiled a bunch of really helpful stats.
People with goals are ten times more likely to succeed. People that set actionable tasks and reported the progress to a supportive friend achieve their goals 40% faster than those who had written goals but did not formulate action commitments. 77% of people keep their New Year's pledges for at least one week, but only 19% for up to two years. I had read even less encouraging statistics on that of like 9% keep New Year's resolutions. And so writing it down is good. As Will said a minute ago of what businesses have to do, break it down, segment it, figure out shorter miles.
[00:21:15] Speaker B: Right?
[00:21:15] Speaker A: Yeah. And this is something I'll talk about a little bit more later, but I'm doing a website for this of 18 days, two and a half weeks. Stop and reevaluate. How's it going? What am I doing?
Have I put the habits in place to be the kind of person who reaches this goal?
Because it doesn't just happen, especially long term goals, whether they're year long goals or even longer goals of, well, by 50, I want to have this much money or whatever.
Yeah, those are so nebulous and far off and very hard to get our minds around that. It's very easy to mess around on those. Even in college school, you might remember you had a semester and you could look at all the work that was done. I was really bad about this when I was getting my business degree. Okay, this is all the stuff I have to do. Week 13 out of 15. All right, I guess I better start working on stuff. Like, if I had been smart, I would have said, well, I'll write this paper in the first three weeks. I'll write this paper in the next week. I'll do this assignment, whatever. Read this book, segmenting things, breaking it down, knowing what you want to do, and then knowing the path to get there is the key to this whole thing.
[00:22:21] Speaker B: Well, and I want to talk about real quick this kind of spiritual implications of this, because there still might be some people that, again, we strongly disagree with you, but if you're like, well, it doesn't really matter if I set health goals or personal financial goals or whatever. All that matters is the spiritual. Again, I disagree with you, but you're more than welcome to have that opinion. Here's the problem, though, and I've said this before, both of you all said this before, if you are not good at goal setting and planning ahead for all the other areas of your life. Do you think you're just going to magically be really good at it in the spiritual aspect of your life? Probably not. Again, I have yet to. And it goes with a self discipline point as well. If you're like, well, I'm not really self disciplined enough to have food or exercise goals or financial goals or personal goals or whatever, but I'm going to be super self disciplined with my spiritual goals. Ods are. That's probably not the case. And so the spiritual implications of this is, once again, it is a lifestyle. It is a lifestyle of self discipline. It's a lifestyle of planning ahead and saying, I want to be at this level. I want to advance in these ways. Of course that's going to bleed over into your spiritual life versus the people who do kind of live aimlessly. And my health is whatever, my finances or whatever. Yeah, that's going to bleed into your spiritual life as well. I've always very strongly believed that. I think that is the spiritual side of this, is that you have to have this mindset in other areas of your life or you're probably not going to have in your spiritual life.
[00:23:42] Speaker C: Well, it goes back to what you were talking about earlier about the gnosticism. Well, the physical doesn't matter as long as my relationship with God is good. But from all indications that we see throughout scripture is they took other matters seriously. When you talk about going to Adam, all the way back to Adam, with taking dominion, it wasn't take dominion and have a really good relationship with God, it's like, well, that's a given. Yes, you're supposed to have a good relationship. There's other things. There's work to be done. Work was not part of the fall. Work was something given before the fall. And he had a goal. Name the animals. Hey, tend the garden, keep it right. So his goals and his understanding of what his job was were very physical things. I don't think we've lost that, but a lot of people can kind of spiritualize. But here's the second part of this. Curious your guys'thoughts on it. We got those that would look at James four and say, our life is but a vapor. And in that context, it says, don't make plans. Basically to.
[00:24:32] Speaker A: Well, before we get to that, there's some more spiritual implications I want to get to. One of the biggest things we talk about is all the problems in the world, all the problems in the church, the problems with the home. Who do you think is going to fix that? Do you think it will be undisciplined people. These are spiritual implications. Okay? It won't be 350 pound people who have never been considered for a job promotion in their lives who again, hit the snooze button seven times every morning and post memes on Facebook about how undisciplined they are. And I'm sorry, nobody's looking to that person to make things better. That person is incapable of helping themselves, much less anybody else. That's one of the most important things on an airplane. The speech at the start that they always give that everybody ignores. One of the things I picked up in one of the 50 times hearing it was don't put on everybody else's oxygen masks, even your kids. Put your own on. Then you can help them. If you're running out of oxygen, you're not much good to help anybody else. You've got to get yourself to a place where you can help other people, where you're secure, you're safe, or whatever. The same goes for these goals of who you are in life. There are massive spiritual implications of if you're going to help make a church a better place, a workplace a better place, a home a better place, but you're totally undisciplined. You can't make a difference. You can't make things better.
[00:25:50] Speaker B: This is such common sense, too. A lot of people might hear, Jack, man, that's really harsh. Or how can you say that it's common sense? It's just obvious that, again, the people who are disciplined in those areas of their lives are going to be more disciplined in their home, are going to be more disciplined and are going to be able to affect change again, are the people that are going to be looked to when things go downhill? And again, you might say that's harsh. You might say that that's unfair. It's simply reality. Jack made the I think in the church close episode, made the point, like, our eyeballs work and we can't ignore that reality. That very much applies here, as well, as harsh or whatever as it may seem, it very much applies here.
[00:26:28] Speaker A: And these things all connect as faithful and little faithful and much.
[00:26:32] Speaker C: I was recently talking with somebody about the presidents and how every president seems to be tall and good looking to a certain extent or whatever it may be, right. And usually in a fairly decent shape. And then you look back to, like, the Grover Cleveland's, I think it was, who's just massively overweight. Yeah, but that's before tvs existed. Taft. Yeah, there you go. That's before tvs existed. That's before you really got to see that picture. And people had this in their minds, our eyeballs work. The more that you're on tv, the more people look to those who are taller, usually 626364, they're in better shape. Why? Because they have a present. That doesn't make them great leaders. It just means our eyeballs work. We trust people like that. And so it's psychology. It's a part of humanity. And because what comes along with it is, okay, he's proven that he can take care of himself, and so that's what we're looking for here. And the other thing is going back to our aimless point. You want a guy that shows he's not aimless in any other area of his life. And as we talked about in the deep end of this last week, for those that didn't catch it, we were talking about how PM worship. Maybe it shouldn't be litmus test, but it just is for faithfulness in a lot of ways. It just is. Like we can't get around it in the fact that that's what people look to for it. And I think it's the same thing here. It's just the case where it is kind of litmus test of is he aimless with every other thing? Because you could say, well, I'm spiritually not aimless. I'm a spiritual giant at 350 pounds. Work my job at McDonald's.
Okay, you may be, but how can we know that you're disciplined enough?
And to your point, will, are you really disciplined in every spiritual aspect of your life? When there's no discipline when it comes to food, there's no discipline when it comes to exercise, there's no discipline when it comes to literally anything else. But, man, you're ultra spiritually disciplined. Usually it doesn't work that way if you have discipline in one area and in no other area of your life. So, yeah, I do think these things go hand in hand. People are going to look at that and say, wow, that's really harsh. But that's the point we're talking about is the aimlessness and then also the spiritual implications of, like, when you over spiritualize things and you don't take the physical seriously, it will bleed over into the spiritual.
[00:28:36] Speaker B: Well, real quick, before we get into James four, self control is both a fruit of the spirit, and it's in Titus one when we're talking about eldership qualifications, and we all have made the point before that every man should make that an aspiration of theirs as far as hitting the qualifications, whether or not you ever hold the office of elder, self control is in Galatians five and it's in Titus one. As far as these are traits that we need to have and self discipline, self control, yes, spiritually speaking, but also in all these other areas. Let's get to James four, though, because somebody might, playing devil's advocate and maybe disagreeing with us, might point to James four and say, no, we're not supposed to plan ahead. We're not supposed to set goals ahead in the future because that's ignoring the eternal perspective. James four, real quick, verse 13. Come now, you who say, today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year thereby and sell and make a profit, whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow, for what is your life. It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, if the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that. But now you boast in your arrogance, all, all such boasting is evil. So you have that question. Are passages like that a caution against planning, a caution against goal setting? Is James telling us, hey, don't make any plans, don't set any goals, just live day to day? Obviously that's not the case, but I'll let you guys kind of get into why that's not what he's saying and why there is a proper balance perspective that we need to have here.
[00:30:03] Speaker A: Yeah, the point is not to be arrogant. The point is to trust. Realize, I don't know how long I have. But on the other hand, you still have to do something. I mean, you look throughout the Bible, people made plans to do things. John the Baptist, Jesus, Paul, missionary journeys. I'm going to go to these places, and we've made this point before that Paul said, I'm going to go to such and such place. And acts just says, the Holy Spirit stopped him. God said, no, you're not going to do that. You're going to go over here, I'm going to direct you in this other. So you make plans. And if God forbids those plans, okay, if you find out that was the wrong plan to make or whatever, you readjust. But that doesn't mean you wake up every single morning going, what am I going to do today? I guess I'll find out.
There's so much of life. The school year is a plan ahead. Your job, a career that you have established, going to college to get a degree in a certain field, all of that is planning ahead. It's not possible to live without that. It's the spirit in which it's to say, this is all subject to God. And if he's going to leave me around this long and in good health, and if he wants me to do.
[00:31:08] Speaker C: Something different, and that's literally what he's saying right here in the text. Four, verse seven, submit therefore to God. Verse eight, draw near to God. He'll draw near to you. Verse ten. Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord. The whole point is humble yourselves and recognize God is overall, you have to submit your will to his. That very much is the context of what's taking place there. I don't think he's talking about it because we could easily talk about the words of Jesus. What man goes out to war and doesn't count the count his troops? What man goes to build a tower and doesn't count whether he has or doesn't take stock of what he has? And if he has Luke 14 parts available, basically, yeah, Luke 14. So there's a level of planning there involved. So is Jesus going against James, and then there's the guy that they also bring up, the bigger barns, who's going to build bigger barns, and your soul is required of you tonight. Once again, that is without including God in the process. That's the arrogance of saying, I'm going to do this. This no plan. We're advocating setting goals. Don't be aimless, but have God be at every.
He's the glue that holds everything together. Without God, all plans are going to be shattered. All plans are going to fail. So yes, plan.
[00:32:12] Speaker A: The text finishes with don't plan, it finishes with, if the Lord wills, we will do such and such. You're still planning.
[00:32:20] Speaker C: Exactly. It's a plan. It's just that Jesus or God is the glue that holds it together. So people can really, I think, kind of work themselves into a tizzy and trying to say that's not the case. And I don't know that there's a ton of people to make that point, but there's a few that will rest on it. I guess that kind of goes back to why people don't plan per se is maybe they once again have over spiritualized it to a certain degree of, well, I just want to trust in God every day. That's fantastic, to trust in God every day. But again, all indications are very few people in scripture lived literally day by day without having any plan as to what they were going to do the next day. Jesus himself knew at twelve years old in the temple, what his goal was on earth. He knew what he was here to do, and he was going to accomplish.
[00:33:00] Speaker A: That.
[00:33:02] Speaker C: Majorly taken out of context.
[00:33:04] Speaker B: So this ties us into why we believe every Christian should be a goal setter, why every Christian should be a planner, whatever you want to call it. And it's because being a visionary matters. Having forward thinking matters. Again, when you consider, where do you want to be spiritually in five or ten years?
I forget what episode it was. I feel like it was fairly recently kind of about the idea of leaving a legacy, family, 200 year plan, that kind of thing.
It's so important to have that visionary mindset, especially as a father, father and a husband. Again, those are all the perspectives that the three of us have.
You have to be forward thinking. You have to be a visionary in all areas of your life, and obviously, spiritually is the most important. But maybe even you look at your family. As far as family goals, when's the last time you asked yourself, where do I want my family to be in five years? Not physically. Like where do I want them to live? But what do I want my kids to act like in five years look like spiritually? What do I want my marriage to look like in five years?
What do I want my relationship with my friends or whatever it is? There's so many goals that you have to consider. 510 years down the road, as we have talked about the whole episode, what do we want it to look like? And then how do we get there if you're not forward thinking, if you don't have that visionary mindset of looking to the future and figuring out, what do I want my kids spiritually to look like in five years? You as the father, you as the husband. Of course, that duty rests on your shoulders. If you just kind know, well, I guess I'll figure it out or it'll happen by osmosis. Or like Jackson said, man, what am I going to do today to make sure my kids are spiritual?
You're fighting a losing battle, in my opinion. And again, I think the youth dropout rate is evidence to this, that people haven't, parents have not had a plan. They have not had goals for their kids. And so guess what? Their kids aren't faithful. People have not had goals or had plans for their marriages. And so guess what? 20 years down the road, their marriages are stale. They don't enjoy being around each other. Again, we've bemoaned the fact that you look around. Most congregations find five really joyful, happily married couples. They don't exude it. You don't see that very often. Well, I wonder why that is. Probably because there wasn't planning, there wasn't forward thinking going into it. And so, yeah, we're young husbands, we're young fathers. Jack less so as far as the young end know. So we're on this end of like, how do we want to avoid all of these mistakes that we've seen a lot of other parents make? This is the conclusion that we've come to of, again, why every Christian should be a goal setter. This forward thinking, this vision, it matters if you want to have a thriving, flourishing marriage in 25 years, if you want to have faithful kids, if you want to have a tight knit family we haven't even brought up. Where do you want your congregation? If you're an elder, where do you want your congregation to be in 20 years? Evangelism. There's so many things. Again, if you're not a goal setter, you're not a planner in all the other areas of your life, you're probably not going to be here.
[00:35:56] Speaker A: There's very much a lot of truth to the if you're not growing, you're dying, because stagnation assumes that you can just plant yourself somewhere and stay there for good. There are so many influences working on you and your family to push you in the wrong direction, that uphill progress. And I mean, on all of these areas, we're talking about spiritually, obviously, the spiritual forces trying to pull you away from God and push your family away from God. You don't need us. I mean that we've got 200 episodes, 100 episodes on. Plenty of reason why, you know, that's the case. Again, nutrition, you can't just eat. You go to the store, pick up food and eat. These days it is so full of so much bad stuff that I'm not going to get off on that tangent. Your health is going to be awful if you are not proactively helping yourself on this finances, just all these things like, if you're not doing something about it, you're backsliding, you're going in the wrong direction. And so the complacency thing of I'm just going to stay right here. But the other thing is, and I think that comes from like a deuteronomy six mindset of you're going to go, you're going to get all this nice stuff that you didn't really build and you're going to enjoy it and you're going to sit on it and you're going to waste it. And you're going to lose it. And, man, did that happen. Man, post World War II, everything was great, economy was great. So many things happened. And, yeah, this cold war part wasn't great, but just in general, things were really good. And we got really comfortable as a society, and we slid backwards just like they did in deuteronomy and Joshua and judges and all that. And here we are having to push the ball back uphill. The other thing is, what they were supposed to think in deuteronomy is, we're going to grow this land. We're going to plant it for our kids. It's going to be better and better and better and better. No, they thought, this is good enough.
Thinking it's good enough is the first step towards dying the same thing as Christians. America was christianized. This is good enough. No, keep going, keep going. This is the kingdom mindset. This is great commission. This is like very scriptural stuff. The Christians are supposed to be thinking, how do we claim the world for Christ and man? We got to the good enough mindset, and here we are. And so you have to keep moving forward.
[00:37:58] Speaker C: You talked about this earlier, though, Jack. I want to come back around and have a brief discussion on it, on the complacency versus contentment. And when you were talking about it, one of the biggest issues that I think you and I struggle with and the Mary and Martha thing, and I don't know that we fully fleshed this out. I'm curious, your thoughts on maybe how we avoid the go go mentality where it's never good enough, where we move the goalpost, we get know we set a goal and we get there and say, okay, well, I can't enjoy it. I'll just move to the next thing. I don't want to take too much off on that tangent, but I do think that speaks to a lot of us. And we didn't work it in there, so I want to work it in at this point in the outline. How do we avoid that, where we can just be at peace when we do hit a goal before we make the next goal? Because I think, once again, maybe we hit a goal. Maybe the founding fathers hit a goal, we hit the goal, or maybe they set the goal, we hit the goal, things are good. But then we grew complacent. We didn't set another goal. But then if we are constantly setting goals, then a lot of times we go into, we're never content. We're never in a good place. So it's kind of this paradox here. How do we work, or what are your guys'thoughts, on how we work out of that paradox where we can both be content, we can both be happy with the goals that we've set. We can work to meet the goals, we can set new ones, but we can be happy with ourselves along the way.
[00:39:11] Speaker A: This is a really interesting point. I've seen the movie and I've seen people comment on it. I don't know if you guys have seen it. Chariots of fire.
It's about two scottish sprinters in the 1924 Olympics. I read Eric Liddell's book as well.
He ended up being a missionary, I think, to China. Very interesting guy. But he was a Christian. And there's his kind of rival. Know. The other great sprinter from Scotland was a. And Eric Liddell, famously, is the Olympics. And he says, well, I don't run on Sunday, and just kind of held his convictions. It's a great movie, but one of the other things about it was their approach. And he said, Liddell said, I run to glorify God. And when I run, I feel his pleasure. And he just kind of. With a smile on his face, he loves it. That's what he's there for. This is to glorify God. This is why I'm doing it now. He's great. He's pushing for greatness, obviously. He's an Olympian. He's one of the greatest sprinters in the world. And so there's ambition there, but it's not like man, go, go. The other guy was a jewish guy. Abrahams. Harold Abrahams said, well, let's see. In this long article, I lost it. He said, in one hour's time, you're talking about the racing. In one hour's time, I will be out there again. I will raise my eyes and look down that corridor, 4ft wide, with ten lonely seconds to justify my whole existence. Like, I have to do this, I have to do it right.
This justifies my being on earth. Like this duty, this task that I have. That's the difference in this whole thing.
Are you doing these things, growing all this to justify your existence so you can hold it up before God? It's very interesting that one was jewish and one is a Christian. Law works based like, look, God, look what I did. Is this good enough? Versus. This is great. God gave me life, he gave me legs, he let me be a sprinter. He blessed me with this talent and I'm just going to use it to his glory.
It's a mindset you got to cultivate of. Like, this is opportunity, this is a blessing from God. Growth and goals and the opportunities we have to do these things, even the challenges. As hard as it is to do some of these things in this day and age, it's a chance to glorify God. It's a chance to meet that telos that you were designed for. You got to view it that way. And as Joe said, I struggle with that. Our whole family struggles with just like sitting and enjoying things. But I feel like that captures the whole thing is those two approaches.
I love that.
[00:41:32] Speaker B: And I think that ties so well into James four as well, of like man, include God in your plans, include God in your perspective of why are you doing this? Why are you going to such and such a city? Why are you planning, why do you have these goals? It's not for self gratification, it's not to boast, certainly, or it's not for your own glory.
I keep going back to the taking dominion and kind of conquering here on this earth.
I think that really lies at the heart of this is like, if you believe that this life is just kind of a temporary holding ground and all of our emphasis to go on the next life, it's not really surprising that the growth mentality, the mindset that we believe you need to have is not present in a lot of people, versus if you believe, yes, we are striving for heaven. We cannot wait to be with God. We cannot wait to be with Jesus in heaven. However, we're going to make the most of this life and we're going to take dominion. We're going to use what God has blessed us with. We're going to use our talents as Jack has brought and Joe have brought up. I think that's where the whole entire perspective changes. Because again, we've talked spiritually about your family goals and where you want to be. There's so many other areas as like, again, just from a physical perspective, Jack, you brought up the food and the health thing in this life. I would like to live to see my great grandkids. I would like to live to see their weddings, to be alive for their weddings. And if you kind of live your life aimlessly, physically, I'll eat whatever, I'm not going to exercise, I'm not going to diet whatever. Good luck with that. And again, some people might look at it and say, well, that's not near as important. That's a goal that I have of seeing my great grandkids, wedding and graduations and all these things, and you could even rope in financially of I want to set my kids up for college.
I want to be able to retire at age 50 so that I can do mission work or so that I can spend time discipling my grandkids. Like so many things that you can look forward to. Look ahead and setting the goals. Now at my age of 24 and you all's ages as well, this is where we want to be at 50, 55, whatever, man, it has to start now.
[00:43:37] Speaker A: And even if you are 55, you've got time left. I mean, that's the one thing, the whole point of James Orr. You don't know how much time you have left. We're talking about planning to 50, 55, 60. We might get hit by a bus tomorrow. That's why we say if the Lord wills. On the other hand, whatever age you are, you don't know how much time there is left. And so just say, well, I'm going to be using it toward this direction while I'm here. And you realize that just gives you, that's taking so much off of your own plate, so much worry and all that of just like, look, while I'm here and that's very much Paul Philippians one, live as Christ, die as gain. I'm going to keep growing, I'm going to keep doing, I'm going to keep going. And God will take me when he's ready.
[00:44:18] Speaker C: So will, you've touched on a lot of these points.
We advocate for setting goals in the family, the physical goals, the financial goals, the spiritual goals, obviously.
So if you're listening to this and you're thinking about setting goals, I would look to set goals and as I said, you can set goals in all of those areas. We're big goal setters. At the same time, don't burn yourself out. Make them tangible, make them something that you can do. I would make long term and then shorter term goals as to how you're going to get there. Jack will introduce his 18 day thing here. He already talked about a little bit, but he'll give us a little bit more coming up. But I would look to do those type of goals. It's easy to set goals that maybe don't matter as much.
I don't know. I want to be a better card game player or whatever. You know what I mean? Like, okay, that's not really a goal. We want to set a goal that is legit, that is going to push us, that's going to stretch us a little bit in, in my opinion, in one of these areas, I think familially or relationally, maybe you don't have a family, but maybe set that for the relationship. I want to be better in my relationships in these ways. Maybe on the financial end, maybe on the spiritual end, of course, or on the physical end. This is what I want to do this year. This is the weight I want to lose, or this is how many times I'm going to hit the gym. Things like that. So, with that in mind, fellas, I want to come down to personal tips. Some things that we've done that have worked, some things, and maybe some things that we're not as good at, which would be speaking to me, but that I think we need to get better at, or things. And you and I, there's three of us here. We all, us three have been doing this for what, three, four years?
Doing goals and setting it with one another. I think it's.
[00:45:58] Speaker B: Maybe we haven't done it. This is something we need to get better at. We haven't been doing it the last six months or so. We have not goal that we can set is.
[00:46:04] Speaker A: There you go.
[00:46:05] Speaker B: It's been on our mind for three years or so.
[00:46:08] Speaker C: So, yeah, we've been doing this for a long time, and we will share a little bit of what we think has worked, what has not worked for us. But when it comes to the personal tips, I'll start and then kind of let you guys get into it. Accountability is huge. I work with this all the time. There's guys that want to get out of their porn addictions, whatever it is. And I always push accountability. You have to have somebody who's really holding your feet to the fire, but who's also walking through the trenches with you. A lot of people don't want to do it. Those that get accountability, more likely than not, are coming out of it and way faster. The guys that don't, you're kind of missing the point. This is an opportunity for you to grow into the relationship, but also to have somebody who can help you walk through this, which is so necessary in getting out of addiction. Okay, you may not be getting out of an addiction, but even from that goal standpoint, the idea of somebody being able to call you, to text you in the morning or to go to the gym with you, I go to the gym with Jack in the morning half the time. I would absolutely skip waking up at 530 to hit the gym. But you know why I go? Because I know he's going to be there and I'm going to get the text. Hey, you coming in today?
[00:47:06] Speaker B: And if you don't show up, you're going to get roasted.
[00:47:08] Speaker C: That's exactly it. I better get my rear out of bed and not hit snooze a bazillion times. So having that accountability, that would be, in my opinion, the first and foremost thing when you're setting goals in all of these different areas, find somebody to hold you accountable. And accountability isn't a weekly check in of like, hey, did you hit your goals this week? No, I didn't. All right, man, I'll be praying for you. I'll see you next week. That's not accountability.
[00:47:29] Speaker A: Accountability. Who's growing with you? Not somebody cheering you on. Hey, cool. Good for you. They're also going to be very easy on you because, well, you did more than me. Yeah, that's not the point.
[00:47:39] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. You want to find the right person who has, again, got a little sandpaper to them, a little bit of grit, who's going to call you out if you're missing it, but who also is willing to just as much encourage you. And this is where people go wrong, is they find the guy who is all sandpaper and who's just the drill sergeant and then they get burned out, or they find the guy who's too nice to say anything and it's like, oh, that's okay, that's okay. No, it's not okay. You missed your goal the last four days. What are you doing? You need a little bit of that. And so choose wisely is all I'm saying. Choose very wisely. But I do think you need to have at least one accountability partner. I would suggest two to three.
[00:48:12] Speaker A: I think that helps. Go ahead.
[00:48:14] Speaker B: Will, as far as the personal tips that I would have, and this is very difficult because we're telling you to set specific and tangible, measurable goals. And the advice I'm about to give it is not super tangible. However, I think one of the most important things is setting goals that are challenging but also manageable. Joe, you spoke to this of know because we typically break it down as far as our accountability group and our goals into four categories. We have spiritual goals, we have physical exercise goals, we have financial goals, and we have a personal, usually a reading type of goal. Those are kind of the four categories that we've set. And Joe, you spoke about how this was kind of your tendency of like, man, you would aim for the moon in all four of your categories. And I think we should set challenging goals. And the goal should not be to hit the gym once a month. That's pretty easy. At the same time, how easy was it? Joe, and I've been there as well.
[00:49:07] Speaker A: Aim for the moon.
[00:49:08] Speaker B: In all four of your goals, you fail one and then what is the mindset, man? I didn't hit my goals, I guess just kind of fold on all the other ones. And so that's when the burnout can come. And so that's what I would challenge everybody to. And the reason why this is not tangible is because what's challenging for you might not be challenging for me or vice versa. The manageable, the challenging, that's kind of subjective. However, I think everybody knows for themselves. I know this is a goal that's going to challenge me, but I still know it can be done. I know that it's manageable. It's not. I'm going to wake up at five every single day and work out for an hour and a half, seven days a week. That's not super manageable for most people. However, three days a week for an hour or three days, whatever it is, you know what it is for you for each one of these goals, spiritually speaking as well. Like, man, I'm going to devote 2 hours of my day to prayer and bible reading every single day. More power to you if you can. I certainly cannot at this point in my life. That's a very tough goal to hit. And so that would be my piece of advice is make your goals challenging. Like push yourself. That's the whole point is you're trying to better yourself. But they also need to be manageable to the point that you are not going to burn out after mean, like Joe said. I think that's why a lot of New Year's resolutions burn out. Why they kind of flop is because people do get burnout because it's a constant grind. It's a constant aiming for the moon, man. Aim high, but make it manageable.
[00:50:29] Speaker C: They have that couch to five K app and I like that because it's not couch to marathon app.
Yes, you may hit the marathon, but you know what, maybe if you're planning on, you barely run at all. Hey, in two months I'm going to be ready for marathon. No, you're not. Plan on a year. Maybe that's the year. Goal is I'd like to run a marathon by the end of the year, but make it manageable to your point will of like, okay, I want to just get to the point where I can run down the street and be okay. I want to make it where I can run a five k in the next three months. And that means I'm going to have to train pretty hard. That's a difficult goal, but I think I can hit that. If you're training for the marathon within three months, you're never going to hit it because it's like, oh, I just can't. Okay, well, I might as well just not set it. No, make it difficult. Make it challenging, but make it something that works for you. And you also know your schedule, you know what's feasible and what's not. Well, I'm going to read 30 books this year, but you have two minutes to yourself.
[00:51:18] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:51:19] Speaker C: That's not probably as manageable. So maybe set the goal for ten books this year. It will challenge you, but just don't beat yourself up for not shooting for the moon as much on your goals. Be willing to say, okay, what is actually manageable here?
[00:51:33] Speaker A: Right. The other thing I would say, well, a couple of things they mentioned a couple of times I started a site for this year, and honestly, I really encourage everybody to go sign up. It's free. You get the emails. When I put out the new articles, I call it 18 day sprints. It's on substac, eighteendaysprint substac.com with a one and an eight and not spelled out 18 day sprint.
The point of that is you can't finish a year long goal in the first month. A Bible reading goal, daily Bible reading.
So many people fall off by Leviticus or whatever.
18 days is a really good evaluation period. Because the other thing I really want to emphasize, and this is an article I've already written on that site. You can go. I did some prep work articles kind of getting in the mindset of chasing goals. And now that the year starts every 18 days, I'm going to send an article with a check in, maybe some tips, reevaluate where you stand and all that, because that's 5% of the year. That's one 20th of the year. If you have a bad 5%, oh, well, pick it up and keep going again. It's not all or nothing. It's not start over next January. It's not, oh, I'm just not this kind of person. It's, I had a bad two weeks. Let's try again. Or bad two and a half weeks. Try again. You got to break it down. You've got to break it down.
[00:52:47] Speaker B: Number one.
[00:52:47] Speaker A: But number two, you've got to realize goals are not the end in themselves. Goals are helping you be the kind of person you want to be. You set a bible in a year goal, not just to say you read the Bible in a year because you want to be a consistent Bible reader. Well, guess what? As I wrote on the site, if it takes you an entire year and into February of the next year to read the Bible because you missed a bunch of days, you read the Bible now, you're somebody with a lot better Bible reading habit. It's not a failure if you didn't get there by December 31. And so you've got to not think in all or nothing. The goals are not the end in themselves. Habits and identity is the thing in itself. And lose weight. I had the goal to lose weight for ten years, and every year I did, and then I'd slowly gain it back. I didn't have good habits and there was no end point on it. It was not okay. Well, I've reached this much, and so I lost weight. And it's good. It's kind of, we'll see where we get when the goal changed to I'm going to be a healthy person. No matter how. It took me a couple of years to actually figure out what I needed to do, what exercise, routine, what nutrition, whatever else, you just keep going until you get there. And so if it's, well, I've got a goal. I didn't hit the goal. Oh, well, I'm just not that kind of person. You can't think that way. You think, I'm going to go until I get to where I need to be because I have time again. As I said earlier, time is what you do have.
[00:54:10] Speaker C: That identity piece is key. And that's one of the things I had on the list, is pick some good books. Atomic habits. I've spoken on it before, is a fantastic book, power habits, a good one. But one of the things that James clear hits at in atomic habits is exactly that. This has to become your identity. I'm a healthy person. A healthy person puts down the Cheetos. A healthy person gets up and goes to the gym. If it's I'm trying to be healthy or I want to be healthy, well, you're not there yet, so it's okay if I miss. It's those little tips and tricks in your mind that really does help. You see, I'm casting a vote toward what a healthy person does. Therefore, I know I'm a healthy person. And so it's just the way that you view yourself and the identity is a key piece. One other thing that I might add, and this is the one I'm not good at, but I would like to get better at this year, is journal. So writing out your goals.
Writing out your goals is helpful.
[00:54:58] Speaker A: Journal on it.
[00:54:59] Speaker C: Journal on your progress. Journal along the way as to what's going right, what's going wrong, what's helping, what's not, who are your accountability partners? Are they checking in? Journal about the process. And I've seen this work specifically in my field with counseling and specifically in the addiction field. I see it work a lot. But you're talking about breaking an incredibly ingrained and difficult habit to break. And these guys do it. And one of the ways they do it is by morning meditations and journaling every day their feelings and their thoughts and where they're at with things and what was difficult and what wasn't difficult, and what can they get better at?
When you write it down, it's like a tangible, tactile thing that actually very much helps our process. So I would suggest on just the tips and tricks, journal out your journey through all of your goals. Yes, write your goals down. Have tangible steps to hit it, make them more tangible and more doable. But journal along the way. That's something, again, that I'm hoping to get better at this year. Fellas, any other tips and tricks you might suggest?
[00:55:57] Speaker B: No, the only other thing I'll say, we had some verses, scripture section. We've kind of referenced them throughout the parable of the talents, Luke 14, Jesus making the point that you have to count the cost, you have to kind of plan ahead here. One of the other ones that I'll bring up is, I think I've referenced it before. It is my favorite verse in the Bible is one corinthians nine, verse 24, where Paul makes the point and uses the analogy of running a race. Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may obtain it. What is the point behind that? Run the race with purpose. Have intention behind it. Make sure that you're not just showing up to the race and kind of bebopping along like, yeah, I'm here for the race, and it's whatever. No, you run to try to win. You run for the purpose of winning the race. And the reason I put that on here is because I think that very much applies to everything we've talked about with this episode of with your health, with your exercise, with your finances, with your spirituality, with your family, with drawing closer to God, with fill in the blank category, man. Run the race in such a way that you're going to win the prize, have intentionality, have purpose behind it. Don't just be aimless with it. And I think that perfectly applies to this in the sense of, man, we don't want our christianity to be about just kind of aimlessly running out the clock until we get to heaven, man. Live it with purpose and again, have intention behind it. And so, yeah, this is a passionate episode of ours. I hope it's been helpful. Again, this is on a lot of people's minds as we start this new year, but I wanted to end with that because again, I do think with every single area of our life. Again, we hit it in the Gala Men podcast as well. We need to strive for greatness in all areas. We need to do it with intention, with purpose, and have a plan and have goals for all these things. Because if we don't, we're going to be very hard pressed to get there. So those would be my closing comments. Anything else you guys want to wrap this first episode of 2024 with?
[00:57:47] Speaker A: Give one more plug, 18 day sprint. That's the whole point is trying to help people do these kinds of things. So if you need a push, need some help, check it out.
[00:57:57] Speaker B: All right, well, with that, it has been a privilege. It's awesome that we're starting again. We started our first episode kind of actually together on this similar topic at the start of 2022 talking to the guys. You're more than welcome to go back and listen to it if you'd like. It was our first episode together, and so it was not near as smooth as obviously two years in these episodes are.
But anyway, it is cool that we're starting our third year. We are very grateful for all of you that weekly listen, weekly support our podcast and so keep going with the feedback. Let us know comments you have, thoughts, you have guys, anything else before we wrap up? All right, Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Absolutely. We will be back next week for another episode of the Think Deep for podcast cast. Thank you so much for listening.
