Our Best Year Yet

Well, thank you, Mr. Miller, and good afternoon once again, everyone.

As I heard from the sermonette speaker this morning, he did my left, right?

Right? Left? Right? I got it. I figured it out.

My left, correct? That's the right terminology.

Well, brethren, this coming week, an event occurs that shakes youth everywhere to their very core. The first day of school. Probably shouldn't mention it, but it scares teachers to their very core as well. In fact, some of the favorite comics that I've seen have been the ones where the person's underneath the bed, and the mail of the house is trying to coax them out from under the bed, and it says, but you have to come out. You're the teacher! Hiding underneath the bed, not wanting to go to school. But the first day of school represents an end to the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.

It's an end to all of the summer camps, the camping trips, the days at the lake or the river, the days playing at the park with your friends, and the degree of relaxation that comes from not necessarily having a set schedule. You know, I'll admit, it feels a little strange, even a couple of years out now, not to be gearing up for classrooms full of kids this next week. The Labor Day weekend always represented kind of that final few days of any kind of kid-free freedom before I spent the next nine months with 150 to 180 kids a day coming in and out of my classroom.

As I've seen the various Facebook posts of my friends that are still teaching over the past week, there is a definite collective feeling that the final days of freedom are slipping away. Many are commenting that they just wish for just a few more days.

But it will do them no good. Tuesday's coming whether they're ready or not. And it is coming for the kids, it's coming for the teachers, and on Tuesday that slow trickle of people will begin to return to school here in Oregon in the following day. The remainder will begin the year in news. So by the middle of next week, all the kids that are in public school will be back to school and ready to go.

The beginning of the school year was always neat. It represents a clean slate. It offers students, it offers teachers both an opportunity to start fresh, to put away, you know, anything that might have held them back from the previous year.

For teachers, it gives them an opportunity to kind of step out and maybe try something new, something that they've always wanted to try, but maybe just never really could get going. And for students, it gives students an opportunity to really double down on their efforts to be more successful academically during that coming school year. And one of the things that I used to do with my students at the beginning of every year, and many teachers do this, it's not just a bend thing, but what I used to do with my students at the beginning of every school year was to have them pause and reflect on the year before. Before we even start going down this chaos and craziness of what the school year is going to be going forward, to stop and look back and try to identify what went well.

What went well? What did you do well last year? And then, on the other hand, what maybe did not go so well the previous year? I had students at the eighth grade level for the last 12, 13 years, or 12 years of my career, and so we would ask them what their level of success in their seventh grade classes looked like.

Ask them what sort of obstacles got in the way of their success. Goal, of course, in my mind, was at least to get the students themselves to identify the issue, to name it, and to then come up with tangible plans to be able to overcome those particular things so that they could be more successful. What do you think was the primary thing that students concluded got in the way of their success? If you had to identify something, think about it for a second. What do you think was the primary thing that kids said got in the way of their success?

The number one response, I would say well over one half of the responses every year that I got back from the students year after year after year was, I slacked off too much.

I talked too much with my friends and didn't work. I procrastinate too much. Something along those lines, which indicated that the vast majority of those students were able to identify and admit that somewhere in that previous year they let off the gas pedal. Some of them would even go as far as admitting they never really got the car in the gear in the first place. They never really got it even moving to begin with. Some of them said, well I did okay at the beginning and then, you know, about Thursday of week one just came up and just coasted the rest of the way. But again, the goal was to get them to say it with their own mouths, identify it, name it, and then come up with tangible strategies to prevent it from occurring again. I wish I could tell you that the students turned it around and got it done. They didn't. I mean, often they didn't. There were a very small few who did. But the goals that they tended to set we would come back to. Every six weeks we would come back to and say, do you see what you said you were going to do? How are we doing on that?

Well, not so good. I could probably do a little better. Every six weeks we came back and we revisited those goals and they had to evaluate whether they were doing it or not. A small handful made improvements. A small handful did a little bit better as time went on. Many of you are many years out of school. Others of you are still in the thick of it. Regardless of your enrollment in a public institution of education, whether you're primary, secondary, or post-secondary, or whether you're long graduated, well into your career, or even retired, all of us are students.

We're all students. We're all disciples of Jesus Christ. We're students of His. We are learning His way of life. We're learning to understand and implement the teachings that He provided us while He was here on this earth from His Father. You might say that we're enrolled in His class. We're learning to live His way of life. We're working to become more like Him.

His class consists of formal classroom education, consists of things like the Sabbaths, Sabbath services, holy days. And the majority of the time in this class is spent in practicum.

It's spent out living this way of life, out putting it into practice in the world around us. It's a practicum. This course that we're enrolled in lasts a lifetime. God works with us, and we grow in our understanding. We reach the point where we desire to commit to Him in baptism. We willingly put our neck in that yoke. We willingly put our hand to that plow, and we begin the process of allowing ourselves to be shaped by the potter. All of us are in different places. We're all in different places in this class. Some are new with their relationship with God. Others have reached the point of entering that baptismal covenant and are working on growing that relationship further. Others have been living this way of life and have been baptized for many, many years. Regardless of the stage that you find yourself in or the length of time that you've been in that covenant relationship, I have a question that I want to ask you all today to set the stage for where we're going. There's a passage that's found in the book of Ecclesiastes. You want to start turning over there? Book of Ecclesiastes that I'll admit was not one of my favorite passages when I was growing up.

And the reason it wasn't is because it was often used to remind me that I wasn't doing everything that I should have been doing in whatever context it was trotted out in. And, frankly, they were right. That's probably why I didn't like it so much. But Ecclesiastes—we'll pick it up in chapter 9 and verse 10. Ecclesiastes 9 and verse 10 probably predicted where we were headed as soon as I said the book of Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes 9 and verse 10 reads as follows. It says, Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might. For there is no work or device or knowledge or wisdom in the grave where you are going. Solomon writes verse 10 and connects it with the temporary nature of life. And he's really imploring the reader to ensure that whatever it is that they find to do, whatever it is that they find to do, that they do it with all of their might. And why? Why is he imploring them to do that? He says, Because there's no work or device or knowledge or wisdom in the grave where they are headed. In other words, time is short.

Your time is limited. Again, we all have this expiration date. We've talked about that before.

But there is only so much opportunity, only so much time, to do what it is that your hand has found to do. And so he says, You might as well do it right. Do it well. He goes on in verse 11, in a thought that's connected here in verse 11 of Ecclesiastes 9. He says, I returned and I saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding, nor favor to men of skill.

But time and chance happen to them all. For man also does not know his time like fish taken in a cruel net, like birds caught in a snare. So the sons of men are snared in an evil time when it falls suddenly upon them. He kind of tacks onto this idea that he brings out in Ecclesiastes 9.10 and says, time and chance happen to us all. Race doesn't always go to the swift.

The battle doesn't always go to the strong. Time and chance happens. We're not guaranteed a long life, which makes, frankly, his point in verse 10 even more imperative. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all of your might. Brethren, the question I have for you today is, are we living our spiritual life with all of our might? Are we living our spiritual life with all of our might? Or have we let off the gas a little bit? Again, all of us are in different places. But if you were to take a look back over the past year and really objectively answer the question, where would you be? Is it where you want to be? Every year as teachers, we try to encourage our students in the classroom to work hard, to set goals, and to make it their best year yet.

We always want them to have their best year yet. And so, brethren, I'd like to encourage you today that we can do the same thing. We can do the same thing, no matter where we are in our journey, no matter where we are in our faith. We can have our best year yet. And what do I mean by that? I mean a year that is filled with spiritual growth, a year that's filled with learning, a year that is filled with increased friendships in the faith, and frankly, a deeper commitment and resolve to our Heavenly Father. We can have our best year yet. And that's the title of the message today, our best year yet. And with the time that we have left today, I'd like to examine five brief points that can help us to make this year the best year yet. These points that we're going to look at today aren't new. They're not new. You've heard them before. But I hope that these will be a reminder. I hope that they'll serve as maybe a call to action to help us all really put the pedal down this coming year, really focus on that growth, really focus on increasing as Mr. Miller said last Sabbath, our spiritual kinetic energy. You know, the points that we'll explore today, and they're, frankly, straight out of the advice that most teachers give their students the first week of school are as follows. Point number one, come to class and actively listen.

Number two, complete your homework. Number three, ask questions. Number four, explore and try new things.

And number five, commit to reaching out to others. Once again, come to class and actively listen.

Complete your homework. Ask questions. Explore and try new things and commit to reaching out to others. These five things really make up the basis of most teachers' expectations at the beginning of the year. I mean, you know, a student that does these things will, by and large, barring any kind of weird, crazy chaos in their life, be successful. First point we're going to take a look at today is to come to class and to actively listen. There's an old, I don't know, one of those more-you-know things from the 1980s. You guys remember those commercials with the little star that goes across and says, the more you know. They used to say, you missed school and you miss out. Right? You missed school and you missed out. It was kind of an attempt at trying to get attendance up in various places. And again, that's what the old commercials used to say. But by and large, the principle, at least on face value, is pretty accurate. One of the biggest issues that we battled at the school that I taught at was student attendance. Now, I taught at a school where student attendance was a major issue just based on demographic and based on, you know, socioeconomic levels and things like that. But we fought attendance like crazy and the instructional deficiencies that came from that lack of attendance. I had students in some classes that had attendance rates that orbited in the 40 percent range. If you take a look at numbers, that means they were only present four out of every 10 days. And honestly, I had some students that were one out of every 10 days because they figured out that after 10 days they got dropped. So they would show up once in those 10 days to reset the drop clock, and then 10 days later they would come again, reset the drop clock. 10 days later they would come again and they'd maybe attend a month in an entire year's time.

But when you're only there a couple of days, if you're missing three days a week, there's no way you can get caught up with what it is that the class is working on. There's no way that you can get taken care of because you're gone so regularly. So much of what in education is built upon, you know, previous knowledge and what we're working on, so it made it very, very difficult for those students, and they're at a severe disadvantage. Now, our formal education isn't exactly the same, but it's similar. It is similar. When we assemble before God, we come before Him to learn. We come before Him to partake of the spiritual food that was prepared for us. You know, we often use that analogy to describe what it is that we're here to do. We come together to learn together so that we all can increase our knowledge. And what that allows us to do is then turn around and discuss together what we're learning, to be able to sharpen one another before and after services as we do talk about life, as we talk about the messages or what we've been studying that week. In that regard, if we miss school, quote-unquote, we miss out. We miss out on that opportunity to encourage or to sharpen someone else or to be encouraged and sharpened.

But the other thing that we have to keep in mind and recognize is that the Sabbath and the Holy Days are commanded assemblies. They are commanded assemblies. It isn't about what we get out of the Sabbath and the Holy Days based on our own perceptions of their worth.

It's about what God requires of each and every one of us. In Leviticus 23—we won't turn there because you've been to that passage so many times—these days, the weekly and the annual Sabbaths, are listed as sacred assemblies, are listed as holy convocations, days that were to be set apart by the land of Israel and declared as a day of assembly for the whole host. And in that regard, our attendance is mandatory. Our attendance is mandatory. The book of Zechariah—we will turn there. Let's go ahead and flip over to the book of Zechariah. Zechariah 14—and we'll go ahead and pick it up there in Zechariah 14. So I want you to see just how seriously God takes attendance and how important it is to him. Zechariah 14— we'll go ahead and pick it up in verse 16.

Zechariah 14 in verse 16 says, And it shall come to pass that everyone who is left of all the nations which came up against Jerusalem shall go up from year to year to worship the king, the Lord of hosts, and to keep the feast of tabernacles. So now what is our timeline here? Our timeline is millennial. These are those that are left of the nations that came against Jerusalem. And it shall be that whichever of the families of the earth do not come up to Jerusalem to worship the king, the Lord of hosts, on them there will be no rain. Verse 18, if a family of Egypt will not come up and enter in, they shall have no rain. They shall receive the plague with which the Lord strikes the nations who do not come up to keep the feast of tabernacles. The attendance is mandatory. The holy days, the Sabbath days, God's feasts, he places a mandate on our attendance. Now, that said, we know that God also knows our ailments. He knows our illnesses. He knows our health issues. He understands when we're ill. He understands when we're struggling with chronic health conditions, you know, issues that we're dealing with. God knows those things. But sometimes, sometimes, it just becomes easier to stay home. When we've been dealing with things, when we've been dealing with chronic illness, when we've been dealing with some of those things, sometimes it becomes easier to stay home.

And although we may even be able to physically make it to services, we might be able to to be there. It's tough to overcome that spiritual inertia to get up and come in.

It's times like that that we need to remember God's mandate, that God commands our assembly.

If we can make it, God wants us here. But the other thing that we need to keep in mind, too, is in addition to attendance, that it's important that we're actively listening when we're here.

I'm a doodler. Anybody else do? You don't have to admit it. I'm a doodler. Man, I listen and I doodle.

But admittedly, when I'm doodling, I'm not listening. I mean, realistically, I'm not. I'm sort of listening. It's kind of in one ear and out the other for me, personally. Some people may have the ability to doodle and listen. I can't. I have a hard time doing that. But it was kind of interesting. I did some looking of statistics. Statistics have shown, some studies have shown, that people generally only remember about one-sixth to one-fourth of what they hear.

Only about one-sixth to one-fourth of what they hear, which means in this 50-minute sermon, theoretically you'll remember 12 to 15 minutes of the information that's presented. 12 to 15 minutes. Now, you can increase that through active listening. You can increase the retention. You can increase the amount that's available. Active listening involves more than just hearing it. It involves more than just kind of passively listening. It's an active process. It uses verbal and nonverbal cues. I don't know if you've ever talked to a group of people, and you'll occasionally see one person going, hmm, that's an active listening strategy. That you're engaged enough with it to be able to agree or disagree with certain points. That's activating different parts of your brain as you listen. In addition, some individuals will kind of stop and maybe question, ask a question about what they're hearing or something along those lines. But active listening helps us to connect between what we're hearing and what we already know.

It helps to draw inferences. I'm going to look down here. We've got a head shake.

There's at least always one in every crowd, sometimes three or four in a classroom. But it draws inferences. It asks questions. It asks follow-ups and discusses with others what they heard and what they learned. And so in that process, what you're doing is you're refreshing that information, and you're constantly coming back to it. You're constantly listening. People who actively listen retain more. And, frankly, they're more invested in what they hear than those who don't. It's important from an active listening standpoint to consider the idea that if we're not going to actively listen, then why are we here realistically? It's like that concept that talks about, like, if you're not going to ask questions or speak up in a meeting, then don't go to the meeting. You're just sitting there the whole time. So for the best year yet, for your best year yet, come to class. Actively learn. Okay, secondly, for your best year yet, it's important that we complete our homework. We complete our homework. As we mentioned earlier, only one part of our education is formal. Only one aspect of it is formal. The Sabbath, the holy days, or the times that we come together as a congregation to learn God's way. But, frankly, much of the rest of the education is on our own. It's in our life as we're going around doing the things that we do. It's in our job. It's in the interactions that we have with people. And it's kind of a practicum. And I don't know how many of you have experienced practicums before. I had a practicum when I did my student teaching. I did a whole bunch of classes, and then they turn you loose like you actually know what you're doing. We called ourselves one-year wonders. We had taken about a year's worth of classes, and we knew everything. We did not know everything. And we found out real fast once you got out there and actually practiced it. We knew very little. Very, very little. But you learn as you go.

And you learn very quickly as you go, typically, because of the rate at which things are coming. But as such, you know, most of this life, most of our spiritual life, is homework.

You know when I was teaching in the classroom, homework was something that I assigned but rarely had turned back in? I assigned plenty of it. Very little of it got completed and returned. I would say probably less than 20 percent returned their homework on a given assignment. Those students who did excelled. They did incredibly. They did very, very well. Those that didn't didn't do so well. Now, there's always exceptions to the rule. There were always those kids that were pretty intelligent and said, I don't need to do that. I'm not going to do that. I already know the material. And those kids did fine overall and just took the hit from the homework. But what is our homework? What kind of homework is expected of us? What sorts of things does God desire that we do on our own at home?

Well, regular prayer, Bible study, strengthening our relationship with God and with other believers. That's our homework. That's what we're expected to do at home. Let's go to 2 Timothy 2, verse 15. 2 Timothy 2 and verse 15. Again, this is one of those passages that we go to pretty frequently. 2 Timothy 2, and we'll pick it up in verse 15. I'm in the wrong passage. I mean, Hebrews. Hebrews isn't Timothy.

There we go. Okay, Hebrews 2. Sorry, let's try that again. 2 Timothy 2, verse 15, says, Be diligent, be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.

The King James version of this particular passage uses the word study instead of the word diligence. If you have a King James, it says study to present yourself approved to God. But the Greek word there is spidazo. It's spidazo, which is translated eagerly or with speed. And it's translated throughout Scripture. The word is translated to the word endeavor, to the word study, to the word diligent, to the word labor. And so it has this kind of action aspect to it. And so the imperative to us here from God in 2 Timothy 2, verse 15, is to labor or to study or to endeavor or to be diligent to present ourselves proven, which is the word dochimus, kind of tested, proven to God, rightly dividing or rightly dissecting or rightly expounding on the word of truth. It's saying that we are digging into this word so much, so frequently, and such depth that we're completing our homework, so to speak, that we are in this book regularly. But we can't do these things that are in 2 Timothy 2, verse 15, if we don't do our homework. Colossians 3, verse 16, I'll jot it down. It says, admonishes us to let the word of Christ dwell richly in you. To let the word of Christ dwell richly in you. And it says that we might teach and admonish one another with all wisdom. Where does that wisdom come from? It comes from God, comes from His word, it comes from His Spirit, comes through laboring in this book, laboring in the word, comes from growing in our understanding and our knowledge of God, in order to then be able to do these things.

Word of Christ can't dwell richly in us if we're not putting that word in. If we're not spending the time to put that word in us, it can't dwell richly in us. Doing our homework, growing and understanding in knowledge can help us to have our best year yet. The next point is to ask questions. Ask questions. One of the things that most teachers encourage their students to do is ask questions often and regularly. Of course, in most classrooms, you always have that one kid that has his hand up 95% of the time. Always. And I actually had one student a few years back, I told him, you have two questions every day. Two, that's it. Because he would ask 10, 15, 20, 30 questions a period if you let him. And he's like, do you have two? And so he'd raise his hand and I'm like, do you want to use your one of your two? No, I do not. Raise his hand, do you want to use your two or one of your two? And then finally, there would be one. Yeah, yeah, I do. I want to use one of my two. Of course, then I had to try to keep track of all that and usually would forget how many he had and just let him end up asking more anyway. But often in school settings, what we find is a lot of kids don't want to ask questions because they're generally afraid that other students might think they're not intelligent because they didn't know something that everyone else knew. And often in a large enough group, you run into that same situation. People generally want to look pretty well put together and so they don't want to allow their deficiencies to be known.

But how else do you learn something? How else do you learn something but asking questions, trying to understand what you don't understand already? You know, at times as we labor in the word, we come across things we don't understand. Or we come across things sometimes, and I'm sure you've had this happen, where you've read over it dozens of times but never noticed it. I don't know how many of you have had that experience before. I just had that happen this last year in our Bible reading program that we're doing. I noticed something in the account of Hazeel and Elisha.

It's in 2 Kings 8. And the story is, it goes, Ben Haddad, the king of Syria, felt ill, and he sent his servant Hazeel to Elisha to find out whether he would ultimately recover. And Elisha tells Hazeel that, yeah, yeah, he would. But that ultimately Hazeel would become king. And that's the gist of the story. But one thing I didn't notice, and I'll tell you, this is my fourth time through this chronological Bible reading. I've done this now four times, and I've not seen it until this year. And in addition to that, I've been through this passage in other ways, too, and I hadn't noticed it. I had not noticed once that Elijah wept when he gave him that information.

I didn't notice it. That Elisha realized so much what was going to happen, that he'd been given envision what Hazeel would do when he became king, the horrible things that he would do to Israel, and he wept. But yet he honored the burden that God gave him to give despite what Hazeel would become. And so it's kind of an interesting little thing. I've been over that multiple times, and I did not see it until this time through. I don't know why. I don't know why it jumped out of me this time. But there are sometimes things we don't notice. And people say, like, oh yeah, you remember how in that passage that Elijah wept up to this year, I would have been like, what?

He did? That's strange. But sometimes you notice things. They jump out of you differently than they do at other times. Sometimes we read through, and there are things we simply don't understand.

We need to be willing to admit when we're not certain of something. We need to be willing to ask and to discuss these sorts of things. And frankly, there's spiritual precedent for asking these kinds of questions. Congregations wrote to Paul, asked Paul questions. Paul and Barnabas took questions to the council in Jerusalem. Sometimes things aren't perfectly clear in Scripture, and it requires discussion, it requires a judgment to be made. 1 Corinthians 13 kind of gives us this principle, at least in principle. 1 Corinthians 13, and we'll look at verse 12. 1 Corinthians 13, verse 12, says, For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.

Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known. There are some things in Scripture that we see through a glass darkly. We see through a dim mirror, so to speak. Mirrors of the ancient world were kind of a polished metal, and it distorted the image. Paul's point is now we see the distorted image. We can kind of make it out, we can kind of see what it is, but it's not as clear as it will be at that point in time when that time is fulfilled and those things are revealed.

We know in part now, but we'll know in full at a later date. And it's really important that we're able to ask the kind of questions that we have, but it's important that those questions are asked with a spirit of malleability and with a spirit of teachability.

You know, asking questions isn't an illustration of a lack of faith.

It's a demonstration of a level of spiritual maturity and humility to admit that you're not certain about something. Asking questions, when you're not sure, can help you have your best year yet.

Next thing that we need to look at doing is exploring and trying new things. Humans are creatures of habit. Here's a perfect point. How many of you are sitting in the exact same seat you were sitting in last Sabbath? How many of you are sitting in the seat you were sitting in last month at this time? Last year at this time? Right? We're creatures of habit! How many of you parked in the same spot in the parking lot today? Yep, exactly. I know. I try to mix mine up just to mess everybody else up. So I parked somewhere else that they can't have there. I'm kidding. I don't do that on purpose, but we are creatures of habit. We park in the same place. We sit in the same place. We tend to talk to the same people. We tend to spend time with the same groups. And sometimes all we need to do to have the best year ever is break out of our rut a little bit.

Talk to somebody new. Volunteer to help out with a different activity.

Sit somewhere else. You know, pop in somewhere else. Sit next to somebody else.

Take the time and go visit with a shut-in. Somebody that isn't able to get out, isn't able to come to services. Make and send a card to somebody who's sick.

You know, we do that with the young people. Sometimes there's paper back there. Anybody can go back and make a card. Go and help out at a work party at someone's home. Make dinners for somebody who needs it. There are lots and lots and lots of ways that we can maybe break out of our comfort zone. But sometimes we just need that nudge. We just need that little bit of a nudge to break out of our rut and to do something different and to maybe do something we haven't done before. Try something different, something we haven't done for a while. You know, again, thinking back over the past year, has the past year been spent with all the same people? Has your routine been essentially the same every Sabbath?

Talking to the same folks, sitting in the same places, maybe showing up at a certain time, leaving at a certain time. Mix it up! Try something new. It might just be what you need to have your best year yet. The last point today is commit to reaching out to others.

Commit to reaching out to others. This point and the last point kind of go together, but at this point on this one, reaching out to others, you're looking out less for yourself and what you can gain from the interaction. And instead, you're considering more of what the other person can gain from the interaction in this point. We have been blessed with new members.

We've been blessed with individuals who have heard of our church and have desired to come and to check it out because they crave the same exact connection that we do. I spoke with a young lady on the phone actually at the Kester picnic, a prospective member, out of Corvallis, and she said, I'm just looking for people who believe the same way as me. You know, I think sometimes we take that for granted. You know, we really do, I think, sometimes take that for granted. We don't realize that it's not like this everywhere in the country. The majority of our congregations around the United States are 25 to 30 people. They're not large like this. We're incredibly blessed to have such a large congregation, really truly. I mean, this is not common, and it's wonderful. It is so wonderful, and it's growing, not just from without, but from within, right? So we are incredibly blessed. But if we're not careful, I think sometimes we can take it for granted or we can even resent it a little bit, but the imperative to connect with one another can't be overstated. In fact, let's go to 2 Timothy 4. I want to show you an example here of what I mean. 2 Timothy 4.

Again, the importance of connecting with other believers cannot be overstated, and the feeling that we get and the recharge and the encouragement that that is. 2 Timothy 4, and we'll go ahead and pick it up in verse 6. Now, in this story is where we're picking it up at. The Apostle Paul is nearing the end. He's imprisoned in Rome, or at least confined in Rome. The scholars debate about whether he was imprisoned or whether he was more so under house arrest, but he's nearing the end. He's confined. When he wrote this epistle, not long after its writing, he would be put to death by Nero. He knew his time was up soon, and so he kind of writes a final letter to Timothy here in the hopes of seeing him again, in the hopes of seeing him again before he is killed. In verse 6, it says, For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure is at hand. I fought the good fight, I finished the faith, I've kept the faith. Finally there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give to me on that day, and not to me only, but also to all who have loved his appearing. So he says, the time is coming. My time is almost up. I've done these things, I've lived this way, and there's a crown laid up for me that is coming. But then look where he goes from here to verse 9. So he's writing here again to Timothy. He says, Be diligent to come to me quickly. For Demas has forsaken me, having loved this present world and has departed for Thessalonica. Cressons has gone to Galatia, he's Cressons for Galatia. Titus for Domatia. Only Luke is with me. Get Mark and bring him with you, for he is useful for me in ministry. And Tychus I've sent to Ephesus. Bring the cloak I left with Carpus at Troas when you come in the books, especially the parchments. And then he goes on and kind of gives some more information. But listen to his words. Be diligent to come to me quickly. He says, Get here soon.

Demas has forsaken me. He's turned to the world. Cressons is in Galatia. Titus is in Domatia. It's just Luke. It's just me and Luke. And Luke kind of chronicled the journeys in the book of Acts. But Paul desired that connection with others of like mind. You know, when you live in such dichotomy to the world, when you live so differently than the rest of the world lives, it can be very isolating without others. You know, one of the things that came up this year when we talked to the brethren in Ghana was they shared how isolated and lonely they feel in their country.

There's 330 of them nationwide in the country of Ghana. And they're spread out among seven congregations that are so far apart. And the transportation network is notoriously unreliable and expensive. The young people only get to see each other once a year. They see each other at the feast and during camp, or twice a year, I'm sorry. Even though some only live an hour from one another, which is deceptive, because it's really two hours given the roads. But they express how appreciative they are that anyone would come and see them. That anyone would take the time to travel. In our case, Paul and I traveled 7,500 miles to come and visit them, to be with them, and to acknowledge their existence, to recognize and say, we know you're here. But they express repeatedly how much it meant to them. That loneliness, that isolation, it can be just as much of an issue here, just as much of an issue here as we are, you know, shut in, or we have difficulty getting out, or we have health issues, or we have whatever else. This way of life that we lead is relational.

It requires connection. That's why God wants us to congregate together, because we need to be together. It requires us spending time with our believers, with other believers, sharing our faith, really getting to know each other, so that we can work to encourage one another as the time gets short. As we look at world events, and as we look at things changing out there in the world around us, like we all recognize we're a whole lot closer than we were before to that day and that time. Now, all of these things that we talked about, all five of these particular things, they all have a synergistic effect. Doing one of them in isolation isn't as effective as doing all five, because they synergize with one another. For example, regular attendance on the Sabbath in the Holy Days helps us learn more about God's way, which helps us to build relationships with our brethren. It helps us to have the opportunities to interact with one another more frequently.

It can also help us to identify those who are in need of being reached out to.

Being diligent in our own prayer and study helps us to better put on the mindset of God, which focuses us outward, enabling, again, us to reach out to others and to build stronger relationships.

Asking questions may lead us to increase prayer and study as we start to dig in further on that particular topic that we might be interested in. It's a whole package. It's a whole package, all five things, each aspect strengthening the other when it's done in combination.

So how are we doing? Are we living this way of life with all of our might?

Are we doing these things? Or is there room for improvement?

The good news is it's not too late. It's not too late. What will we commit to doing this year to increase your spiritual growth for this coming, quote-unquote, school year? Because this year could be our best year yet.