Welcome back to the Excel Stomore podcast. I'm so thankful that you've joined. Today's episode is sponsored by Spirit Building Publishers. This group of Christians is committed to providing fresh, relevant, and practical Bible study material for today's Christian families and churches.

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excel still more.

Good morning and welcome back. I'm so thankful that you've joined here as we work our way through

the middle of December. We're heading quickly towards the end of the year, and I would like to present

some episodes just to help you get ready ahead of time to make next year amazing. A lot of that is

mental work. It's decisions you make about who you are and how you handle the internal turmoil and challenges of your

life. We spent some time on that last week about positive thought versus negative thought,

and today we're going to move more into the concept of self-denial and suffering. And in the midst

of that, I want to present to you some information from a sermon I preached a

couple of weeks ago about the sufferings of Christ, which were more than just facing the

mistreatment of others, and how, from First Peter's letter, you and I are invited to follow

him on that journey, to incur many of the same trials and weights and sufferings and to face them exactly like

he did but here's the thing a lot of that is happening on the inside we will look at that in the

life of jesus in his mind and in his flesh we will see how it connects to us and then how he

was able to do it and why will be

the final prescriptions for you. If you follow in the likeness of the thinking and purposes

of Jesus, things will always go well. And again, a big part of this is let's not wait until the

first week of January to rediscover better thinking, to have a more encouraging outlook on self-discipline.

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