It's a pleasure to be with you today, Church, and I want you to go ahead and turn in your Bibles to the book of 1 John.

First John, towards the back of your Bible.

And we're going to be in a message entitled Growing Up in Christ.

Growing up in Christ.

We will be in 1. John 2, verses 12 through 14.

And one of the most amazing experiences of my entire life is a new experience for me, and that's

becoming a dad and getting to watch my precious daughter

grow and develop.

And I know it's cliche to say this is like the most cliche thing that we could possibly say,

but really, it's true that it does feel like just yesterday that she was just born and my wife and I welcomed her into our family and now she is a 15 month old toddler so we got our hands full and yet we're having the time of our lives raising her but even in just these past 15 months I've already already seen her grow, and I've seen so many

changes in her.

Before becoming a parent, I never used to really understand why those who had younger children,

parents who had younger children, would refer to their children in months form rather

than years. I was always like,

what, are they trying to like test my math skills on this or something? Like one year, four months,

you know? But no, that's not the case. And now I get it. Now I understand why they do that.

And now I do the same thing. I just did it a moment ago when I said my daughter's

15 months old. The reason why is because of the amount of changes that are taking place in just

short periods of time, sometimes days, even weeks, and months, obviously. Well, from the moment that

you and I were physically born into this world, technically,

even from the moment of conception, what happened is we began to grow.

We began to develop.

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