Welcome to the Excel Stillmore podcast. I am your host, Chris Emerson. I'm here to encourage you in your walk with God. Thank you for joining in.

Today's podcast is sponsored by a wonderful company, Creation to Revelation. This group of Christians believe it is extremely important that we teach the Word of God to our kids.

They have original graphic illustrations from the beginning of the Bible to the end,

featuring the beautiful and consistent presence of Jesus throughout.

You can explore all of that at creation to revelation.com.

I'm so thankful you're here, so let's get started.

Hey, welcome back. I'm glad that you've joined, and I hope that your day is going well.

So last week, we started talking about looking back at this year and evaluating your progress,

the things that you intended to do and the things that you accomplished.

And then instead of just letting the rest of the year play out and expecting a better 2023,

I want you to use these last six or eight weeks to evaluate the kinds of changes that are good

for you and your family and to actually determine and lay out some plans so that you can start

next year already moving in the right direction with a ton of optimism. And I hope that the

reverse bucket list has got you moving in the right direction,

and the plan is to come in next week and build on that. I'm reading this tremendous book called

Crazy Busy by Kevin DeYoung. And the truth is, we do want to build out better, but we have to be

careful and keep it balanced, because we can run the risk of pursuing more in a way that

stretches ourselves too thin, adds incredible stress, and just makes us crazy busy and totally

ineffective. He has got some tremendous faith-based advice on that, and we'll talk about it soon.

But there's just something else that I need to

share with you first. Because every once in a while, something doctrinal, something related to our

common faith just seeds itself in my heart and starts growing. And my first impulse is to preach about it,

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