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 certainly hope that you're doing well as we enter into this last full week of January

here in the new year, I'm hopeful that

you still feel optimistic, that you are building something, and that you are going to utilize

what God gives you in terms of time this year to become something more for him and for the people

that you love. Before we get into our specific topic for today,

I wanted to take just a few minutes and talk to you about that building process this year.

I did an episode on January the 6th of 2020,

and it was called Building Your Ladders.

And it carried this super simple visual idea of how to build a great year.

You start with vision for what you want to accomplish. You set some worthy goal and you pray about that.

And it's like this ladder that you build to help you get from one platform to the next.

The sides of the ladder, that's God's part. He has to put those things there

and allow them to remain there. Your part is building 12 rungs. Of course, that breaks down naturally

into the 12 months of the year. So here in January, you just want to work within the confines

of this month. And I hope you've had a chance

to do that. You set your budget for the month, you express some specific focus for the month,

...