Hello and welcome to the third season of the Excel Stillmore podcast.

I am your host, Chris Emerson, and I'm here to encourage you with tips and strategies

to help you deepen your faith, build stronger relationships, and do the most with your life in Christ.

Thank you for joining. Let's get started.

Welcome back to the third episode of 2021. I certainly hope it's going well for you. The truth is, as we look around the

nation, not much has changed for the better, the virus, the politics, all of it. In a world that

doesn't center on Jesus, there's only one direction it can go. So in that sense, I'm not surprised. But when I ask you

if your year has started well, please understand I'm not referencing politics or the world. I'm

asking about your connection to Christ. The way that you have evaluated last year and the plans and intentionality

that you've laid out for this one. Many of us start with great clarity and resolution,

and as we get to the end of January into February, this life stops us.

Listen, if our passion for growth is susceptible to the natural world, to what is going on

around us, we will always get stopped.

Because I'm telling you, we do not live in a Jesus-centric society, but we are Jesus-centric people,

eccentric in that way, to the glory of his name. Today we'll get a chance to look at his life a little,

notice something very specific that he was able to do, that most people

are not, and maybe it will give you one more thing to think about as you go about building

what very well could be your best year ever. And look, it's not a hundred different things. It's a few things

that are pursued well. We've talked about that in previous episodes. By the time January is

completed, you will have listened to four ESM episodes, and I want you to take with you four simple growth action terms.

So far, we've discussed two of them, giving and teaching.

In the first episode of the year titled The Math Problem, we talked about how Jesus said

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