[Joshua Creech] Many of you know this, for those listening online who aren't in our area, I changed career paths a few months back. I spent nearly 10 years working for a life insurance company. I was located downtown, and I was a senior financial accountant when I left there. So it was a good chunk of my time. I went straight out of school there. And I thought I was going to be there for the rest of my career, but that changed. And during the last couple of weeks that I spent there, I received an email. I think we had probably two weeks left, and it read something along the lines of, "Please go out and submit your self-review." So I sat there for a minute, and I just started grinning, slowly got bigger and bigger, from ear to ear. And the reason was I hated self-reviews. I did not like them at all. And it felt really good to hold down the CTRL+Shift+Delete, just completely ignored it, knew I did not have to worry about it. I was there for another week or two, and that email was gone. And I smiled ear to ear like that the rest of the day, knowing that I didn't have to deal with it. Why did I hate this self-reviews so much? What made so much joy in my life by deleting this? I never knew what to write for the goal. So at the beginning of the year, we actually had to write the goals. And then midway through the year, we wrote the self-evaluation of where we got in on this. And at the beginning of the year, I never knew what to write. I was never sure of what was expected of me, outside of my normal routine.

I didn't know any additional projects that they wanted. I didn't know what else out of my normal routine they wanted me to do. And so I hated doing it. I know all of you have heard how thrilling and how exciting accounting is, right? Oh, no? Okay. All right. Maybe those aren't words I would usually describe my old job as, but I would use structured and repetitious. That was accounting through and through. Every single month I would work to produce financial statements. It was a monthly close, so every single month, we had the same exact process. We worked through our process to consolidate. The company I worked for, we owned 12, 15 other companies, some of the subsidiaries. We compiled all the information from each individual subsidiary creating financials, pack it all into one. And that would be our monthly report that would go out to all the business heads and all the executives.

So, I knew month to month what was expected. I knew where I needed to be, what I needed to accomplish. And then we also had a similar routine quarterly, and then annually, so not much variation, structured, repetitious. I knew that part of my job well, and I did a good job. But outside of that realm, I had no idea what additional things I was supposed to work on. And it was easy from year to year have the same goals, but at some point, you got to reach outside of that. So, I always hated it. I'd sit there just looking at my screen when I had to write those. But I got past that. In the last couple of years there we used a process called SMART. It's a mnemonic acronym that's used in helping to set goals for individuals.

And it wasn't until I actually applied this to my personal life, that I really gained an appreciation for it. That's when it really sank in. And the reason is that God has written clear expectations for us. It's not a secret. He doesn't make us guess. He doesn't make us wonder what He wants out of us. We don't have to sit there in that chair and sweat, and just not have any clue where He wants us to go in our lives. He gives it to us. Whether it be character traits that we're supposed to show or how we treat one another, it's all written down for us. He's given to us in Scripture, all of it. All of it's in here. We each have different paths and different things we need to work on. Some of us have done better at meeting some of those expectations.

Today, I'm going to mention a couple of thoughts as the areas that might be worked on, as we prepare to discuss this SMART process. And I'd like to walk through an example of how we can actually create goals and create a goal. We'll focus on one today. But if you turn over with me to 1 John 4, we'll see one of these expectations that God has for us. Like I said, there are many that you can choose, many different things that He wants out of us, but this is just one of them. And it's 1 John 4, we'll look at verses 19 through 21. 1 John 4:19-21, "We love Him because He first loved us. If someone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? And this commandment we have from Him; that he who loves God must love his brother also." So that's an expectation.

We see God expects us to love our brother. That's something we have to do. It's easy to say that we love God when we don't have to sacrifice things. It doesn't seem all the time that we're always turning to God and that He's always wanting something from us, but the person right next to us, we can physically see them and touch them. It's harder to love them. You know, and when someone's talking to you sarcastically or they're making faces at you. It's much harder to love that. But it's a true test. It really is. It builds that character that we need of how we treat each other. There's another example that I'd like to turn to. It's just a different thought. So loving brother is one.

There's a second example over in Psalm 34. Here we will see another expectation that God has for us. At Psalm 34, we're going to look at verse 9, "Oh, fear the Lord, you His saints! There is no one to those who fear Him." So fearing God, that's also important. We need to take note that this isn't a horrific fear. You know, we just came out of Halloween. We see lots of horrible things that scare us, that we're afraid of. That's not what this fear is. We're not supposed to be terrified of God. The fear we need to have is one of humility and deep respect. Through our Bible study, prayer, meditation, this is all fear to God, not because… And fearing God, it's not good for Him. He doesn't get joy out of that terrifying fear. But He loves when we bow ourselves to Him when we pray to Him when we're showing respect to Him. It's good for us to recognize that He's more powerful than anything else.

Acknowledging this shows our deep respect for Him, and it shows Him the proper honor of our true Father, the ultimate Father for all of us. If you would turn over to Ecclesiastes 8. We will see another reference to this fear. It's Ecclesiastes 8, read through verses 12 and 13. "Though a sinner does evil a hundred times, and his days are prolonged, yet I surely know that it will be well with those who fear God, who fear before Him. But it will not be well with the wicked; nor will he prolong his days, which are as a shadow, because he does not fear before God." This is important, this fear. That's another thing. And like I said, these are examples. These aren't for everybody to work on.

Everybody's going to have their own that we'll get into later. But let's start using this SMART system to help us create some short-term goals that can help us achieve some of these expectations that God has. So, fearing God can be one, if you struggle with that, loving your brother can be another. But what we're going to use today is going to be just specifically Bible study, prayer, and meditation. These are, I think this package of getting down and knowing God, it'll be a good one for us to set up an example with. So Proverbs 21:5, before we actually get into the SMART system and how it works, let's look at how God views plan. So Proverbs 21:5 mentions kind of God's thought on plans. I'm actually going to read this from the New International Version. I think it translated it a little nicer. And it says, "The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty." So, planning helps us. Planning helps us to profit, whether it be with our spirituality, or whether it be financially.

If you set up a goal and a plan, it generally works out a little bit better. It takes time and energy, which is why it's so hard to plan but it is good to create that plan. It generally doesn't result in quick and easy answers when we set these plans up. But hopefully, we'll see with long-term results, and diligence, hard work, all of these things will help us to fulfill what plan we have to focus on.

So before we get into the specifics of SMART, I've got a few ideas to just kind of get us thinking about the different types of things we can focus on locally with loving your brother and fearing God. So one of, like I said, the first thing, which is going to be our example today would be prayer, Bible study, and meditation. This is what we're going to use once we actually get into the process and go over all the steps. But if anybody was here last week, you got your monthly calendar. One of the things you may want to focus on is all the shut-ins. If you want to make time to make sure you fill out cards, maybe make a phone call to them, visit them, these are all things that maybe that would be on your mind somewhere how you want to serve, and love your brothers and sisters. Another area that you may consider would be just sound, snacks, the mother's room. And we have a lot of areas, ushering, security, all these areas. We need help. We need people to step in and serve each other. Maybe it's babysitting, maybe you want to babysit for a couple that you know haven't been out for a while. This is going to be a little different because that one's not a quick easy one. That's something that you got to have to build a relationship.

It's going to take time for you to get to know people. And for my family, I probably have to have you sign a waiver form. That's for your safety, not ours because the boys get crazy. Maybe it's getting involved in the community outreach. We've got a great example of that right now. We just saw it in the announcements. That's another one where you can reach out outside of our church congregation, love our brothers and sisters that are in the world right now, who haven't had their eyes open, but they still need love. They need attention, making cards for them, sitting with them, putting on a music show for them. Those are all things that they need. If you want to get more involved with the church activities, we have a gym night coming up in the next month or so. We saw four areas where you could serve there. Maybe it's just when you come to services here, sitting and talking with some of the elderly who can't get around very well, whether it be they're not stable on their feet or they get tired easily, they tend to kind of congregate in the same area and not move too far outside of that. Maybe spend some time with them. You want to get to know them a little better. So this list is just different ideas of how we can each reach out, something that interests you. It's not going to be every single one of these that you hit, but you're going to focus and try to apply this SMART system and narrow down exactly what you want to work on and what you need to work on.

So we see many examples. This list touches on several different types of God's expectations from us. We can see how serving our brothers and sisters is loving them. It's showing them compassion and it shows that we care about them. We can take any single item on this list and break it down into a goal. There's no better time than right now to get motivated to create a plan. Focus on others, figure out what it is that interest, what piques your interest, and where you think you need help.

So let's get down into the specifics of SMART. We'll see how it works. And remember, we're going to use Bible study, prayer, and meditation for the majority of our examples, I'll throw a few extra pieces in here now and then. But for the most part, that's where we're going to stay. So to start, the S for SMART stands for specific. This is where we're going to define our goal as much as possible. So there's a couple of different aspects of this, but we want to make sure we drag it as detailed as possible. You want to narrow it all the way down to exactly what it is that you want. That'll help later on these other steps, the more specific we are now. It'll make that the transition to figuring out these other points even easier. Use clear language so that you're not confusing yourself as to what you're actually trying to accomplish. What it is that you want to work on? We don't want to use lawyer jargon. We know that we hear all the jokes about nobody understands it, but a lawyer. We don't want that kind of variety. We want something that you know without a doubt or complete certainty of what it is that you want to do, where it is that you want to accomplish God's expectations. A great way of being detailed is to go through all the W's. A lot of us learn this in English. So we're going to start with who is involved? What do we want to accomplish? Where will it be done?

Why are we doing this? And for this "Why" aspect, we can actually get very, very detailed as far as once we get to the specifics of it, we'll see how "Why" can be a big factor. I'll go ahead and touch on this now while we're going through just the basics. But this "Why," so say one of your points… the reason you're working is because you want to focus more with the teams. That's where you feel that you need to help out more is with the teams. So what you're going to do, you may want to sit down and figure out if you want to help them in Bible studies, help with the teen outings. I know they just went on a canoe trip not too long ago. They're going to be having a lock-in soon. Maybe you want to work with them with sports. Maybe they get together and play some sports.

This is the "Why." So if you know why you're doing this, it'll be easier for you to get the specifics. And that way you can refine it all the way down to the core of where you want to be involved. And the final aspect of this specific is actually constraints and requirements. So what requirements do we have or what constraints do we have? That'll help figure out exactly what's keeping us from meeting that goal. So in James 1, we're instructed to be doers. So if you turn over there, we'll read through that real quick. James 1, we'll look at verses 22 through 24. James 1:22-24, "But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourself. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was.” Do we want to forget who we are? Do we want to hang on to that?

This shows that we need to focus and set these goals so that we're clear with what we want to be, who we want to be. Okay, so let's get one more verse that we'll go through, that'll help us with this process. Back in Joshua. I know we're bouncing around a lot. But Joshua, I think it's important to see how daily study is important for us, Joshua 1. Joshua 1, we're going to read verse 8. Like I said, this correlates back to how important prayer and getting into our Bible really is. "This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in a day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it.” Day and night. We should always be conscious of what God has given us, the words that He's given us, this Book. We don't want to ever forget that we're supposed to be in this regularly, praying, meditating, remembering these words. That's a huge part of setting this goal, remembering that we are supposed to be in here.

So that next aspect of the W's is "Who." So we want to look at who's going to be involved in this. There's a couple of different ways. Is it something we're going to do individually? Do we want to just do it on our own, our own individual Bible study? Sometimes you may want to do with your spouse. Maybe you have a roommate, you want to do it as a group. Maybe you want to make this into a family event, and do it that way. But this, who you can figure out exactly who you want to include, the what to study and how long. We want to review… Maybe you want to take the message that you heard at Sabbath and do a Bible study on it or get into it and understand it a little better. For our example, let's say we decide we want to do 30 minutes. Say, our goal is going to be 30 minutes every single day of doing Bible study, prayer, and meditation. That's what we want to set.

Where? For this point, it's not that important. Bible study and prayer can be done at home. It can be done in parks. I know lots of people like to go out into the nature and do it that way. The where for this isn't as crucial. More of an impact on the where would be like the community outreach, that would take a little more planning as to where you want to serve, who you'd want to serve. So we see that we're helping the Anderson Nursing Home. That's where our community outreach is right now. So that would be more for the where, and then why, why are we doing this? We're striving to be Christ-like. We want to please God and follow all of His expectations, all of His instructions that He gives us. And then a constraint, a requirement would be that we must make, sure that we're at home. If we're going to do our Bible study at home, we need to be home.

I know there's times where I've been dead tired when I got home, and you start studying, you fall asleep. We need to make sure we're awake and we're aware when we're doing our study. So getting home at a good hour, that would be one of the constraints or requirements that we have to have. So now we can move on to our next letter, M. So that we have the specifics. We know what we want, our goal to be, and how, and where, why. So next letter M, that is for measurable, measurable. This aspect is we want to make sure how we can track our progress, how we can see how far along we go, how we measure if we meet our goal, and see what the outcome is.

So there's two different aspects to this that I want to note. The first one is, how many times…? And we see that we've set that in our specifics. Like I said, if we're very specific, then the next points are going to get easier. So we can see, we want to do this every day. We want to try to do this study and prayer every day. The second piece would be the amount of time. We have that part fulfilled too. So we need to be diligent about filling out the specific section, that way we can make this measurable easier. So we have every single day, 30 minutes a day, that's where we're going to set our bar for this example. What's difficult is God hasn't given us exact criteria for what He needs, what He expects of us as far as how long we're supposed to do this every single day. We just read though, we are supposed to try to get in every single day. So we set that time-frame of 30 minutes. We must discern what needs done in our normal life. And we can use this measuring and making sure we're meeting the criteria of fulfilling our family duties and then also meeting our goal.

So if you would turn over to 1 Peter 3 with me. 1 Peter 3, we're going to read verses 8 and 9. 1 Peter 3:8… This is another reference back to God's expectations of us, 1 Peter 3:8-9. I don't think that's the one I'm looking for. I have it written down. I have to check that reference later, but I'll read it here for you. It says, "Finally, all of you be of one mind, having compassion for one another; love as brothers, be tenderhearted, be courteous; not returning evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary blessing, knowing that you were called to this, that you may inherit a blessing."

So here we're giving a couple of different things. Loving brothers again, tenderhearted, courteous, these are expectations that we could use when we're trying to set up our goals. These verses don't only give us characteristics that we should have, but it also includes some that we're not supposed to have. Sometimes God's clear about that, too. He says, "Don't do this." He's good at giving us things to do and not to do. So we need to do our best to set goals that we accomplish these. So we saw how we could measure it, how we're going to measure our goal. The next letter is A, and that stands for attainable or achievable, attainable or achievable.

So, for this point, this is where we're going to see if it's actually a reasonable goal if we can actually accomplish it if we're able to make it. Setting a goal of five hours would be very difficult on a family. It'd be very difficult individually. And quite frankly, unrealistic. Five hours is not what God expects of us. That's going to take away from us being able to fulfill our family duties. And most of us have jobs in here. Jobs, families, these are all things that God expects us to take care of, and setting five hours would just be unrealistic to that. If we accomplish the goal, how so? What will have to sacrifice to complete our goal? In order to get our 30 minutes in, we might have to excuse ourselves from activities that we normally stay a little bit longer in. Like I said, there's been times where I've stayed out too late, I was so tired that I couldn't pray, and I couldn't do my Bible study, and I was falling asleep. And that's not healthy. So we need to make sure we're getting home on time.

A lot of people like to do it at night. Others like to be home and get in bed early and then wake up early and do it before they go off to work. It's making variations in our daily plan to actually fulfill our goal. Sometimes we do already have free time. That free time just needs to become quiet time, kind of need to get rid of all the extra noise around us. TV, emails, radio, video games, Facebook, Pinterest, all these things consume much of our time if we allow it. These are distractions that we can remove if we need to. Don't forget, we do need to have those things. We do need to have some type of stress relief. We need to relax. We're not supposed to go constantly. We are supposed to try to settle ourselves down at times. But we do need to also make sure that we're not just fitting in this prayer and Bible study, just squeezing it in wherever we can to get it in and say, "Okay, I did this." Try to set aside time. Try to clear some time for this. We want to verify that we do our absolute best to meet God's requirements and the expected expectations daily.

So He says, "Yeah, try to get into it daily." So we should try. We can see in Mark 12:29 and 30 what God views is achievable. Mark 12, in this section, God has asked about which of the commandments is the greatest. That's Mark, 12:29-30, "Jesus answers him, 'The first of all the commandments is: ‘Here, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ This is the first commandment.” Loving God with heart, soul, mind, and strength. That's what we are. That is every aspect of humans. That's everything, our thoughts, our emotions, and our strength. And then our spiritual side, that's all of us.

All of it, we're supposed to dedicate to Him. And by doing our prayer, and our Bible study that's showing Him, that's fearing God. Some of these goals can meet a couple of different expectations as we go through. Any amount of time we're able to pray, study, and meditate is showing our love for Him, our dedication to Him. Maybe over time, we'll be able to increase that time that we give them. But for now, setting something attainable that fits into our schedule is very important. We want to make sure we're meeting these goals. And again, let me reiterate, fitting it in our schedule is not just shoving it in anywhere when it's convenient. It's actually trying to make time. Think about it. That's why we plan. Remember? We profit when we plan. So setting this aside and making Him see that it's important to us, for us to have time with Him. We must be calculated. It's going to take time and effort.

The next letter we're going to look at is R. And this is relevant, relevant. Is this goal worthwhile? Will it meet our needs? Absolutely, this one is. For our example, prayer, Bible study, meditation, this is exactly where we should be. Any steps that we take to draw closer to God, to love God, are major steps in the right direction. It's going towards God. When we draw close to God, we draw away from Satan. We see this drawing closer to God in a couple of scriptures. The first I want to turn to is in Hebrews 7. We'll see this mention of drawing close to God. Hebrews 7:25, reads, "Therefore He is also able to save to the uttermost those who come to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them.” Did you catch up there? This comes to.

This comes to is drawing near to God. That's what we need to do, draw near to God. Every time we dig into the Scriptures, we're drawing near to Him. This is His Book. He had this written. He inspired every wording, so when we're in it, we're getting close to Him. When we're down on our knees praying, we're going to our father getting closer to Him. This is absolutely relevant for us in our lives. There's another example just a few chapters over in Hebrews 11, this is the faith chapter. We'll see this drawing close to God again, Hebrews 11:6, just a couple pages in my hymnal… or in my Bible. “But without faith it is important [impossible] to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.” Did you catch that right there in the middle?

We see comes to God again, that drawing near to God. Drawing near to God is an important aspect of faith and belief in Him. There's a second aspect to this relevance, and that's making sure that the goal is consistent with any other goals that we've set. We want to make sure it fits with our long-term goals, whether that'd be what God has set for us or some of our own other personal goals that we set. Generally, in a work environment, this is four or five goals every year. That's generally what they tend to be. Daily prayer, Bible study, and meditation is relevant to obeying God in developing the qualities that He expects us to acquire. He wants us to express these qualities. The final letter, this acronym is T. The letter T correlates to timely, timely. The way to view this would be, does this goal have a time-frame or a limit? Do we want to set a time-frame or limit?

And what I mean by this is if we're looking at the goal we're working on, say we want to continue this goal for a year, we want to try to do this for a year. In this case, it probably wouldn't work so well for that length of time. It would probably be better to do a short-term one for this. So say you want to do your 30 minutes each day for a month, you stick it out for an entire month. You do your best to do it every single day for a month. And at the end of that month, you evaluate. You go through and say, "Okay, did I did I meet every single day?" You figure out if it worked for you, figure out if it needs to modify, see if it needs extended. Maybe it was working, you just need to extend it.

If we find 30 minutes a day was too easy, maybe you try say, "Okay, I think I could do 40 minutes a day." Bump it up to 4, see if that works for you. But, on the other hand, maybe it wasn't working. You struggled. Every single day, it was difficult to get your 30 minutes in. So you may want to bump it down to 20 say, "Okay, let's try and focus on 20. We'll just see if that's attainable for us." This time-frame of being timely is important because we want to make goals that we can meet. We want to stretch ourselves, but we also want to meet them. Then, at some point, maybe we can get back up. So we had to bump it down. But then we realized, "Okay, I can do this 20." And slowly, maybe you increase it again after the end of the next month. By setting these time-frames, we're also helping to get a sense of urgency. It prompts us to have better time management because we know what our days going to look like. We know what's expected, what we have going on. So that can help with getting us motivated. We see examples in the Bible of being prepared, mirroring the sense of urgency to do our best to obey God.

I think a well-known parable was in Matthew 25. And I'm going to actually read through it. Sometimes we pick out parts of this in just little bits and pieces, but we have time today. I want to read through this whole section of Matthew 25, just 1 through 13. This shows the relevance of why we need to have time management and this sense of urgency.

Matthew 25:1-13, "Then the kingdom of heaven shall be likened to ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Now five of them were wise, five of them were foolish. Those who were foolish took their lamps and took no oil with them, but the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps. But while the bridegroom was delayed, they all slumbered and slept. And at midnight a cry was heard: ‘Behold, the bridegroom is coming; go out to meet him!’ Then all those virgins arose, and trimmed their lamps. And the foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.' But the wise answered saying, ‘No, lest there should not be enough for us and you; but go rather to those who sell, and buy for yourselves.’"

I want to break right here for just a second. Those who were foolish did not take the time to get their oil. By us taking time for prayer and Bible study today, we're preparing. Are we preparing individually? We're not preparing for our neighbors. We can't do that for them. It's not something we can do. They're going to have to prepare for themselves. They're going to have to take their own time, their own energy, money. In this case, the oil would have costed money. They need to make their own time.

Prayers. We can petition God for people if they're sick, but that connection that I have with God the Father, is going to be different from the neighbor next door. Everybody has to make those own connections. We can't share that with each other. Unfortunately, we can't share that. We can't give it to one another. So let's pick it back up and see what the rest of it says. "And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him.” They were ready. They prepared. “They went in with him to the wedding; and the door was shut. Afterward the other virgins came also, saying, ‘Lord, Lord, open to us!’ But he answered and said, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, I do not know you.’ Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour in which the Son of Man is coming.”

We don't know. But we have the Bible that we can follow every single day, even though we don't know." That'll help us stay on track. He wants us to know Him. God wants us to know Him. And it's important that we do know Him. When we sit down and pray, when we sit down in Bible study, meditate, we're putting that oil in our lamps now. We're getting ready now. We're going to be prepared. We have to be prepared. I have one final Scripture that I'd like to turn to. It's in 1 Thessalonians. 1 Thessalonians 5, it also touches on this urgency. It's a real short one. But when we're talking about this timely factor, I think it's very important to see it again. 1 Thessalonians 5:2, "For you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so comes as a thief in the night.” Is He going to be a thief to or have we already prepared? Are we taking the time now so that it doesn't surprise us?

We're ready. Setting goals was painful for me, literally painful. I'd sit there and just look at my computer screen and just no idea where to go with it, what to do. But I've learned that I can apply it to what God wants me to accomplish because He's given us an ultimate goal. He's given us all these little goals. He's very clear on what we need, what He wants from us. I hope this acronym, you'll be able to create your own goals. Figure out where you want to serve and love your brother or help service in services, figure out what it is that you need to work on. God's pretty good about waking us up and saying "Hey, this is where you work on." But it's all individual. But we do have God's ultimate goal and He's placed that in each one of our paths. Take some time and create your own goal or goals. Like I said, it could be multiple ones. Use SMART. Be smart. Use this process when you get home. Look to God's Word for the aspects that you personally need to develop. Like I said, we all have something to work on. Align your goals according to God's.