Spiritual New Year's Resolutions?

The following program is recorded content created by the Truth Network. Yes, believe it or not, live and in person, back from a nice holiday break, a nice Christmas break. Was going to do a couple days last week and then Josh got sick and I'm like, I don't really feel like doing radio in between Christmas and New Year's. So guess what?

I didn't. Let's just play some best of shows and I'm going to chill out and hang with my family and relax and not consume the news of the day every day. I'm just going to kind of push back from the table and enjoy our family. Our oldest son Hayden was in from San Francisco. He was here for a week and that's awesome. Obviously when we live in Raleigh and he lives in SF, we don't get to see him that often, which is a bummer because we all love him and he's a lot of fun.

He's a joy to have around. And so he was here. And then Amelia, our daughter from Manhattan, she lives in Manhattan now she's 24, he's 27. And she was in for like five days, six days. And then all the rest of us, it was just, so it was our immediate family.

And then Paxton was there. Our grandson was there on Christmas day. So that was fun. And my father-in-law was there, so he had a really nice, fun, enjoyable family only Christmas, which was great. And then on New Year's Eve, because this is just the way I roll, the party animal that I am, we did absolutely nothing. I was actually staring at the back of my eyelids when we transitioned, because that's a hip word to use these days. When we transitioned from 2022 to 2023, I was in La La Land. No special dinner.

I think we had, I think I went and grabbed a few slices of cheesecake for dessert and then by like 1130, I was gone. I hope you had a wonderful and Merry, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. And this gets, I don't know, every year when we hit the New Year, I don't know if it, I think it might have less meaning to me.

I don't know how it is for you, but less meaning. I mean, meaning that I'm like not all that introspective about the fact that it's going from 2022 to 2023. The biggest thing that changes for me as we flip the New Year is all of a sudden I got to get back into marketing mode for Noble U. And with my classes, I'm going to add world history next fall. And then I'm going to have all four classes available online.

So I'm going to three, maybe four homeschool conventions where I'm going to be doing a little speaking and having a, we're having a booth designed so that I really want to expand that part of my ministry life, my life in general. So that will be at that point, civics, which is two semesters, US history. So I started teaching civics 11 years ago, US history. Just, this is just my second year teaching that. Christian ethics, I started teaching, I think six or seven years ago, and then I'm adding next fall world history. So those are the four classes I'll be handling myself on Noble U. I'm going to put all four of them online so I can have students both here in the triangle area of North Carolina, across the great state of North Carolina. And right now I even have some students out of state. So going to be working on that.

So that's really the only thing for me that changed. And then we're one month closer to our first wedding and our family, our immediate family as Hayden, the oldest and SF is getting married March 4th. So that'll be awesome.

I'll be gone for a week at that particular time as well and I'll have some people filling in and we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. But New Year's resolution. So maybe the Lord is trying to teach me something today.

I've walked in here dead tired. I've been working on demolishing our bathroom downstairs at our house, which is where my father-in-law lives part time. And so it's like a 1980 version bathroom and we did some things and repainted and picked some stuff and that was nice, but it's got that old tile, you know, that four inch tile. And that was in the shower. So that's like the ceiling, the walls and the floor.

And then the tile that they updated, but that was like 20 years ago. So I'm like taking a sledgehammer and a hammer and goggles and a face mask and a legitimate one and all those things. So I did about three and a half hours yesterday. I did about four hours today. I'm just completely worn out doing demolition, right? Which you think would be fun.

And maybe for the first 10 minutes it was, but not anymore. So dead tired coming here today. I said, I'm going to open up the phones and just ask people that they've contemplated. I don't want to hear New Year's resolutions. Those tend to be the same old, same old.

And they're gone by usually mid January, the end of January. I was wanting to open up the phone calls and ask you about spiritual New Year's resolutions. Like what is it in your walk with the Lord that you would like to really work on this year? Maybe, maybe it's some kind of fruit of the spirit, right?

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. I mean, maybe something in there. Maybe it's a passage of scripture that you wanted to work through this year that you've just, maybe you prayed over it. Maybe you went to church, maybe it was a sign to you.

Maybe you played a little Bible roulette and you just flipped the Bible open and got some obscure passage from Numbers or Leviticus, God help you. And so you're like, oh, I don't know what to do with that. But I've got some things I'm going to go through and I was going to open up the phones and lo and behold, here on the very first day back to live radio, the phone system's got a problem.

So I can't take phone calls. So this has happened to me a few times in my years of broadcasting that my plan for the show just falls apart literally minutes before I go live. And then here I am. Now, I usually would share personal things and little anecdotes and tell stories and yada yada anyway.

But now I've got an entire hour to fill. So what I'd like to do is I'm going to walk through just some thoughts, some various issues that I'll go ahead and show you my cards. I'll put my cards on the table and talk about some things I'd like to change this year in my life as a Christian, as a follower of Jesus Christ. If you happen to be on Facebook, you can go to my personal page or you can go to the Facebook page, personal page just under my name, Steve Noble with the radio show page, Steve Noble Show on Facebook.

And I put up a couple of posts earlier just about an hour ago. And maybe you'd like to comment there and just talk about what you would like to work on this year spiritually, your spiritual New Year's resolution. And Kim on Facebook lives, like grace and encouragement. Well, there's a lot there, right?

How does grace show up in your life? And the gentleman that's going to be helping me this week on redoing the kitchen, redoing the bathroom, not the kitchen. I'm not that crazy. But he was like, I want to talk about what's our role in sanctification versus the Holy Spirit's role. That's an interesting topic and one that you can talk about for hours and days on end.

But what would you like to change? Some thoughts on that when we come back. Welcome back at Steve Noble, the Steve Noble Show.

Happy New Year to you. These years get shorter as we get older. Have you noticed that?

Yeah, it's pretty amazing how quickly they just kind of fade away all the time. So that's what we're talking about today. I was hoping to take phone calls today, but we've got a phone system problem. So I'm just having to kind of rely on the Holy Spirit here and my own ability and experience to go through this.

I was going to do that and just take calls and ask you if you have kind of a New Year's spiritual resolution. For some people, it's a word. They'll pick a word. Some churches do this, too. They'll pick a word and kind of that that it's going to be an all encompassing kind of word.

I saw somebody the other day on Facebook, really sharp, smart, accomplished Christian woman happens to be a judge. And I think hers was I think it was freedom, something like that is something about freedom, like getting away from things that are holding you back. And so it could be something like that. It could be a passage of scripture and or it could be just some aspect of your Christian life. It could be something like if you're going to pick something from the fruit of the Spirit. Right. And it goes to love, joy, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control. It could be something like that. It could just be how about faithfulness or time in the word?

That's kind of like going to the gym. We all like how many of us raise your hand, started a new daily Bible reading plan on the Bible app today or yesterday. Today's the second today. Yesterday was first. How many of you started that?

Hand goes up. OK, so on December 31st, I finished on the Bible app, the New Testament in a year that was in conjunction with. On the Bible app, it was the Bible Project. They do these really cool, what really well done, kind of like animated, more like whiteboard type drawings that they'll take the entire book and break down the book.

Right. So here's how here's the structure of the Book of Genesis or Leviticus or Matthew or I just finished Revelation. So that's really complicated. And by the time that the video is done, seven or eight minutes, you have this big picture where they literally drew out and with words here and there and animations here.

And this is incredibly well done. They drew out the structure of the book. So you're kind of like, OK, this is how it's laid out. Then you start reading. And so you I went through the New Testament in a year. Today, I started the Old Testament in a year. Same thing that was with the Bible app and the Bible Project in conjunction with that.

I have a Christmas gift from now two years ago that our oldest son gave me. That's the ancient faith study Bible. So you guys probably you probably have a study Bible and you've got all the notes in there and like half the page or so is scripture. And then you've got all these notes and some of them can be very, very helpful. And this one, the ancient faith study Bible that I use going through these passages each day, all the all the notes, all the commentaries from church fathers.

I mean, we're going back into the 300s and 400s and 500s and 600s. And a lot of folks that I read a little bit of when I was working on my master's degree at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and some of them I don't know. And then they have bios in there for all of them. And a lot of these people were martyred. And the really cool thing about using that particular study Bible, the ancient faith study Bible, is how consistent Christianity is because things that they were observing about John or 1 Corinthians or Philemon, whatever. You're like, this this could have been written like a year ago, just in terms of biblical application, which has been so consistent and biblical understanding. A little difference here and there, like the church fathers, for example, I just went through Revelation to finish up the year.

And then today I started the Old Testament. But the church fathers came to the book of Revelation. Most of them, if not all, did not take it literally. It was very metaphorical to them. A lot of symbolism, a lot of metaphor. This is kind of the this is what's going to happen metaphorically until Jesus comes back. And whether you're talking about a literal, you go, OK, the beast with eyes all over it and six wings. And so you could go read the Left Behind series. And they took everything, literally everything, literally.

The church fathers early on really didn't. But it's fast. It's been fascinating to utilize that. So I will watch the video when applicable and then I read the passages of scripture for the day and then jump into my ancient faith study Bible.

And I generally do that at seven thirty in the morning and that that I did it virtually every day all last year, which was great. It keeps you in the word. Sometimes I am just not feeling it. Well, do it anyway, because God's word never comes back void.

So for a lot of people, there's different things that you can do. This one was great. Somebody on Facebook Live picked a passage of scripture and this one's rich. Psalm 119 37. This is really powerful and really could apply to most of us, if not all of us. Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things and give me life in your ways.

Well, oftentimes, let me work in reverse there. Give me life in your ways, as opposed to our own ways. How often do we follow the ways of the world, the ways of Twitter, the ways of what's trending, the ways of our feelings, our hearts, which can be deceitful and desperately wicked, as opposed to following God's ways for happiness, where we're supposed to deny ourselves certain things. We don't do that very easily, especially here in the American experiment. And so that's sometimes difficult that we don't look for life in God's ways. We look for life in our own ways.

And then the first part of that passage, Psalm 119 37. Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things. Well, goodness gracious, that there's a long list there, right? How many things are worthless that we spend time looking at? All right. There's obvious things, painfully obvious things. Pornography. OK.

Worthless thing. And then there's just daydreaming. Do you ever do this? You do scroll through Facebook or Instagram. Everybody's life looks way better than yours. And you just keep going and keep going and you feel worse and you're worse and worse.

That's worthless. The amount of series that we intake every year. I'm certainly guilty of this. How many of you are watching Jack Ryan, the new Jack Ryan series? There's eight episodes.

I finished number seven last night. Is that a worthless thing? Well, you can make a case that most entertainment is worthless. There are some moments here and there, self-sacrifice.

OK, now I could spiritualize the whole thing. But generally, when I look at Psalm one thirty seven or someone 19, verse thirty seven, turn my eyes from looking at worthless things. It's like, yeah, how much time do we spend really investing through our eyes and things that just don't do you any good? They're worthless. They don't advance your spirit. They don't advance your walk with the Lord.

They don't advance your biblical worldview. They're just, you know, I do it to just kind of lazy past the time for me as somebody that's teaching a lot. I'm on the radio five days a week. My brain is always going, going, going. And so I use movies to kind of shut all that down.

That's like my cave. But I certainly spend more time doing that than I should. And there's certainly things that I ask this question in my classes. I'm like, how many of you are watching something on Netflix, Amazon Prime, whatever? And if Jesus all sudden pops in the room, say, hey, what are you watching? You like fumble for the remote and change the channel.

OK, that would be by definition, you're turning your eye to a worthless thing. OK, so it could be passages of scripture. Got an interesting list that I found online that are some really good ideas in here, except the Catholic part.

I'm not going to use that, but there's some really good ideas in here. We'll keep talking about spiritual resolutions. Welcome back at Steve Noble, The Steve Noble Show, and hope you had a wonderful Merry Christmas.

Happy New Year to you. Can you believe they are definitely getting shorter every year? I think that's definitely a fact. I think there's no denying that.

Of course, that goes with age. But just talking about some spiritual New Year's resolutions tomorrow, my friend Michelle Woodhouse, she's so sharp. You'd know Michelle if you watch on Facebook or Rumble the show. She's filled in for me a few times.

We were trying to shoot for like kind of one Friday a month when she happens to be in town. She lives out in western North Carolina. Really sharp, great political thinker, has run for office, been involved with politics for years. A follower of Christ, very sharp, great communicator. You would recognize her because she's got spiky blonde hair.

She's a lot of fun. So she's going to come in tomorrow. We're going to co-host tomorrow and do a show on, we'll compare our list, the top 10 stories of 2022. We're also going to look at the top 10 stories here in North Carolina, and then we'll look forward into 2023.

What do we see kind of coming down the road in our culture, in our politics, life in America in this new year that have just started. So we're going to do that tomorrow. I've got a really powerful testimony from a new friend on Friday. She's going to share on Friday. A lot of you will be able to relate to that broken families, broken marriage, and what the Lord can do in that kind of situation. We'll do a full Money Monday with David Fisher next week. So Marcus, I think we're closed today, so he's off today. So we'll do a full Money Monday a week from today.

And interesting and looking forward to this. This will be an honor to do a radio show with my oldest sister, Catherine. You may remember this back early, about a year ago when my mother passed away. My dad passed a couple of years before that. He was 91.

She was 90. And then as the executor, as the oldest of the four kids, she had to deal with a lot of just kind of dealing with all the loose ends. If you can imagine both of your parents dying. And then if you're the executor, if you have to deal with that, if you're the only sibling, whatever the case may be, then there's a lot to go through that. And I don't think most people know what's coming their way. I'm 56.

And so I know that likely you are somewhere in my ballpark age-wise. And so this is on everybody's radar screen as we get a little older. And so we're going to go through the things that my sister, Catherine, learned in having to kind of go through all that kind of stuff as an executor.

Very practical show. We're going to do that on Tuesday, January 17th. So that's going to be really important.

I think that's going to be a great blessing to a lot of people because there were things that she was sharing and things that she and my sister had to do that were really difficult and dealing with banks and all. I mean, cell phone stuff. I mean, crazy. And you have to be prepared because that's coming to all of us. Some of you are like, yeah, been there, done that. Yeah, I've never heard anybody talking about this on the radio, on Facebook.

I just haven't seen that. So I'm looking forward to having my sister. She'll be on Zoom that day on Tuesday, January 17th. And she will lead us down that road and share what she's learned and having to deal with kind of shutting down the accounts and everything else for my mother.

And so that will be powerful. So talking today about some spiritual resolutions now, here's one that I found. This is actually a Catholic website. And you may already know that I am not Catholic.

I have plenty of problems with Catholic theology. Although on Christmas Eve, my son and I went to the cathedral here in Raleigh, one of the biggest Catholic cathedrals in America, I believe. Absolutely stunning. I asked him when we got there. And we went to the midnight mass and it was an hour and a half.

But an absolutely stunning place. And I said, when we got there, I said, do you? And because it's me, right? Oftentimes, if I'm going to ask our kids a question. In the past, that would be a loaded situation, like I'm walking them into a debate.

OK, I'm much better about that today than I was, let's say, 10 years ago. But I said, what do you think about spending, obviously, millions and millions and millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars on something like this? And now my oldest son, Hayden, the 27-year-old, is highly intellectual, probably the most intellectual Christian I know, a voracious reader. And he's like, I love it. I'm like, all right, explain that, because obviously there's a lot that we could be doing with those tens of millions of dollars.

He goes, yes, of course. But most art today, most architecture today in the postmodern world is like they don't understand beauty. Nothing points people ultimately to the Lord and to his majesty and this kingdom mindset. And just a glimpse at our best attempt at making this incredible cathedral, which is here in Raleigh, just this soaring architecture. And it's and it's really something that's built, hopefully, to the glory of God.

And so it was a really interesting. I really appreciated his perspective because he's like most art these days is garbage because we've detached ourselves. Most of the culture has detached itself from a Christian worldview. And so that's where you get modern art and all this just bizarre stuff.

It doesn't have any anchoring in biblical reality. So what's beautiful to the world is not beautiful to the Lord. And so that's what he sees in this cathedral. And that was really challenging and encouraging to me. So as we sat and went through that and, you know, there are parts of that where I'm OK, I'm fine with this and I'm not fine with that. OK, that's a problem. But the edifice itself and the cathedral itself just.

Just turned my thoughts, heaven, heaven work, which is cool. So I do have a lot of problem with Catholic theology. I would never be a Catholic myself, would never join the Catholic Church. But this is from a website.

It's Catholic in nature. Then I thought it had some pretty good ideas on here. Ten amazing New Year's resolutions for your spiritual life. The first one being simplify your life.

That's very anti 2023. This isn't just about reorganizing yourselves or cleaning out closets. Those are important. And feel free to make that part of your resolution to simplify. But in a spiritual sense, simplicity involves decluttering our mental and emotional states of being, too. It means getting rid of the cobwebs and distractions that might deter us from focusing on what really matters.

Right. Start to simplify by cutting out 10 minutes of wasted time each day and using it for something productive. For example, if you spend an inordinate amount of time playing Internet or video games, scanning your social media accounts or watching hours of television, time yourself to see how long you spend doing these activities, then cut out 10 minutes. Set a timer for a reminder.

Just a little thing. By the way, have you ever looked on your iPhone? I have an iPhone, so I don't know how Google phone works or an Android. But you can look at your screen time.

Gird up your loins, friend. When you do that, go look at your screen time. That's how often you pick up your you can look at pickups, too. You can do this on an iPhone.

How many times do I pick my phone up every day? That's going to that's going to get your attention. Okay. Unless you're way ahead of me.

And hopefully you are. But we're all probably spending a little too much time with this device than we should. But go look at your screen time and your pickups.

That'll show you how much screen time you're spending on average every day. Alarm me. Okay.

Simplify. I like that. I read one spiritual book per month.

That's great. The average adult in America leads reads less than one full book per year now, which explains a lot. But only really one full book a year.

Okay. So this is a spiritual book. I picked up a book recently over Christmas break that was written in the late eighteen hundreds.

It's actually the origin of the whole WWJD movement. What would Jesus do? A fascinating little spiritual fiction book of a town and a church. It's kind of uppity church in this town back in the late eighteen hundreds that the pastor one day on a Sunday, a homeless guy comes in and he's just looking for a job and he's looking for help. And he's he's he's polite, but he's firm. He's like, listen, I visited a bunch of your homes, including the pastor. Nobody would bother to even talk to me much.

Yes, sorry, I can't help you. God bless you. And then the guy died a couple of days later. So the pastor gets moved by the spirit and decides that he is going to start living his life, making his decisions, spending his time by asking that question before he makes any decision. What would Jesus do? Which, of course, it's an incredible book.

I'm about halfway through it and start. He's got he's just asked on a Sunday. He's a great orator, but this is a different kind of sermon. And he asked on a Sunday that, well, would anybody want to do this with me? And so like the guy that owns the local town newspaper, he agrees, a guy that works in the railroad company agrees and this girl who's got this spectacular singing voice agrees.

All these other people agree. And you can imagine in a small town, if people started to ask that question, imagine how your life would be different if you started to ask that question before every decision. Well, what would Jesus do? The next thing you know, the guy with the paper, he's removed a bunch of the stories that they usually put in there. That's gossip and salacious and doesn't really build anybody up. He shuts down the Sunday version of the paper.

He changes, dumps a bunch of the advertising that makes him money. And everybody's convinced this thing that you're going to train wreck the whole business. Right. But he's like, I'm going to trust the Lord on this fascinating book. So that's an example of a spiritual book.

I don't remember the title off the top of my head, you know, because I'm 56, but I'll, I'll, I'll look it up over the break and I'll tell you when we come back. So read one spiritual book per month. I like that attend a weekend retreat. Have you ever done that? I used to do that pretty regularly. Once a year for about the past 13 years, we get away me and about seven other guys. And we do that every year, which is wonderful. And we study some scriptures. We spend some time praying and just enjoying one another, but I've been to men's retreats. I used to do that regularly. I don't anymore. I'd like to get back to that one.

Have you ever done that? Just a weekend away, ladies, get, get, go to a women's Bible, Bible retreat men, same thing. Men's retreat. Just get out of here, right? Get out of here, get out of your regular life, the daily grind and go spend one weekend getting closer to the Lord. We'll pick it up there. When we come back, welcome back at Steve noble and Steve noble show. Oh, I just came up with a new new year's resolution for the show. I'm going to change out all my bump music. That's been like almost two years now.

I just got to get rid of that. The book that I was talking about, by the way, I was going through a list of some things that you might consider doing a spiritual new year's resolutions. And one of them was reading a spiritual book once a month. And I was talking about that book. That was really the, where the whole, what would Jesus do movement started. It's called what would Jesus do a contemporary retelling of Charles M. Sheldon's classic and his steps. Okay. That's what it was called. Charles Sheldon in his steps.

Okay. That was the original book in the late 18 hundreds in his steps, which asked the question, what would Jesus do? And I'm about halfway through it. It's a spiritual fiction. So it's not like a Bible study or anything, but it's powerful. It's pretty short and a couple of hundred pages at the most, but it's a really small book.

Hard bound books. The one I got in, man, it's just an incredibly convicting people in this small town, starting with the pastor, just start making every decision by first asking the question, what would Jesus do? And then between you and the Lord, you got to figure out what to do. I mean, your walk is your walk and my walk is my walk. Sometimes we can all agree on things, but the spirit's going to move differently in your life sometimes than it does in mine. And so you're, you're don't let people judge you.

You're accountable to the Holy Spirit of God himself, obviously through that. So that's something to consider, but that's, it's a great book. I'm about halfway through it right now in his steps by Charles Sheldon. So that was written in the late 18 hundreds, over a hundred million copies sold. That's mind boggling. I was like, I've never, how have I never read this book in his steps by Charles Sheldon, S H E L D O N. I'll put the link up on Facebook live right now.

So you can go jump in there or just look it up yourself. Charles Sheldon in his steps, late 18 hundreds. And then that came back around and around the 19 nineties.

Remember when WWJD came out, that was all over the place. So that's a great one. This one on the list, attend a weekend retreat.

So I was just sharing with some of my friends on Facebook live. If you live anywhere near, or you can get to Asheville, North Carolina out in the mountains, beautiful, really beautiful area. If you've never been to the Billy Graham training center at the Cove, you're denying yourself something that you should not deny yourself. Cause a lot of people, a lot of folks on Facebook live today have never really been on a spiritual retreat or haven't been in years since the youth group or whatever.

It's 20, 30, 40 years and they haven't been. So if you, if you can get to Asheville two, three hours, even four hours, you would drive four or five hours. If you've ever been to this place, you'd be like, okay, that's worth the drive. It's absolutely spectacular.

Beautiful. The Billy Graham, they bought 1200 acres. They built this incredible retreat center, no TVs and stuff, spectacular food, incredible stuff. So it's like top notch meals.

They have a soda machine, a coffee machine and a frozen yogurt machine running all the time. And it's just an incredible place. All they're all volunteers that work there and they they've been praying for you before you come for the whatever weekend event you go to.

And it's just, it's just amazing. I've probably been 10 or 12 times. I used to go every year for a men's retreat that was done by some churches here in the Raleigh area. But for example, here's their 2023 ministry schedule. So they've they've just about every weekend and they have people booked.

Okay. So there's evening women's Bible study. They have daytime stuff. They have weekend things. They have some great teachers.

I mean, it's a huge list. Jim Cymbala doing a pastor renewal retreat. That's Brooklyn Tabernacle. That's April 10th to 12th. And you go for the weekend and it's an absolutely incredible place. Tony Dungy and James JB Brown, a men's retreat, uncommon influence.

That's April, April 21st. That would be great. Mike Weaver from Big Daddy Weave. Richard Blackaby, a three day seminar, becoming a friend of God. That's a Genesis Bible study with Richard Blackaby, which will be awesome.

He's hilarious. Steven Annie Chapman. That would be great. A marriage retreat. If you want to focus on your marriage. I mean, we have Caroline, our youngest.

We have her because of a marriage retreat that we went to at the Cove. I don't take that the wrong way. That Saturday night, Friday night, they gave a message of the former professional football player and his wife, and they gave a message about let God decide the size of your family.

Well, nobody does that anymore. Right. We don't do that. We're going to we're going to decide the size of our family.

Thank you very much. But we were really convicted by that message. I had a vasectomy scheduled for the following week. And we went up and talked to him.

I think it was that Friday night or that Saturday night after the session. And we had a fairly in-depth conversation with him. And we prayed about it and talked about it over the weekend. And on Monday I canceled my vasectomy. Our youngest daughter, who's an incredible blessing.

See, I'm emotional right now. She was the result. And it took a little while to get pregnant. But that's what that marriage retreat weekend did for us. It gave us our daughter, Caroline.

And I wouldn't want to live life without her. So there you go. It's an incredible opportunity. Chip Ingram, Mac Powell, Erwin Lutzer. These are just some of the people that are going to be there this year. Crawford, the Ritz, James Merritt, and Graham Lotz. A three day seminar.

She does that, which she's an incredible teacher. November 3rd through the 5th. I mean, Al Mohler's going to be there. Jonathan Falwell.

It's just, the lineup's insane. So that's the CO. Billy Graham Training Center at the CO. So I like that idea. A spiritual retreat. That's a good one.

Good New Year's resolution. This is a Catholic website. So they say pray a decade of the Rosie daily.

Well, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to pray the rosary. But do you pray daily? There's a bunch of good Bible, good prayer apps out there. I use one called Echo. And it actually pulls from my list of prayers and sends me an email each day.

Just of one of them, just to remind me. It's great. I use that. Volunteer.

Emily mentioned this on Facebook Live. Volunteer. That can be for anything. You might discern that volunteering suits your entire family.

Discuss with your spouse and children, or maybe your kids are older. And you just go volunteer. Where? Well, there's all kinds of places. I mean, just pray and ask the Lord, hey, what do you have a heart for?

By the way, when you look at ministries and say, wow, there's this one in town here in Raleigh called With Love From Jesus, an incredible ministry. It's like a kind of a shopping experience for people that are struggling to pay the bills. And they come in there, they can get certain things. They can get groceries, they can get some clothing items. There's some other things that are available.

And you can go there and just help and serve and help stock shelves and help check people out. I mean, it's incredible. And if you've never done that, you're missing out.

I mean, the Bible is explicit when it comes to God's care and concern for the less fortunate. And is that a regular? It's not a regular part of my life. Is it a regular part of yours?

Doing anything to help the poor and the needy? It's a big part of scripture and most of us are terrible at it. And I don't think that's a guess. I think that's just a reality. Keep the Sabbath holy.

I like that idea. I mean, I can be very busy on a Sunday. Sundays do not feel like a day of rest most of the time for me.

It's a makeup day, right? So keep the Sabbath holy, which is a commandment. Go to confession once a month. Again, that's a Catholic thing, but there's something about confession. We're supposed to confess our sins one to another. Most of us, I would say probably never do that or rarely do that. But I would go a little more introspective on this one and say, often do you confess to the Lord? I mean, just when you're aware of sin during the day, just confess it.

Or before you go to bed at night, take five minutes, 10 minutes. And Graham Lotz, who's been on the show many times, she's a friend of mine. One time she went to prepare for a weekend and she's like, I just felt like I needed to start confessing. And she went on for hours and hours and hours. And God just was doing a unique thing in her life and just wrecked her. But God generally, I mean, I can't remember who said that.

For God to use so many greatly has to break them deeply. So confession, that's good. Listen more.

I don't like that one. Listen more, slow to speak, slow to anger, quick to listen. That's good.

Give your failures, weaknesses and sins to God. How often do we carry more than we should? And for a lot of people, I think we saw this over the last few years. Fear. Fear is an enormous problem for many of us, many of you. And we haven't been given a spirit of fear, but of love, power and a sound mind, right? But a lot of people really struggle with that. So perhaps there might be a passage of scripture you need to hold on to.

Have you ever done that? If you're struggling with fear, look up passages, scripture about fear, and there's going to be several websites and then just start working your way through it. And one of those is going to really speak to your heart and grab on to that.

Put it on a little note card, put it on your phone. Preach to yourself every day that. And that's good. A lot of different things. I know the gym or what you're going to do with your diet or whatever you want to get out more, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's all those. But what about our spiritual lives?

Do you have a New Year's resolution for that? Or it could be a passage of scripture, right? A few people share that. Here's a good one.

Paula said this. Steve, my spiritual resolution for 2023 is to gain confidence that I can lead a woman's Bible study. Also to use my Plymouth Rock statue and do presentations then lead discussions. I've started a Bible app of the Bible in a year. Genesis and Matthew and Psalms and Proverbs is how it has started.

Yeah. So let me just give you a little encouragement there. Paula and anybody else that needs to hear this. I didn't choose to be a teacher. The first time I started teaching, I've led young people for years in a lot of different ways, not spiritually. But it wasn't my idea to be a Sunday school teacher, an adult Sunday school teacher. That was kind of God just kind of threw that at me. As our Sunday school teacher, we had started a new class, 830 in the morning. Nobody goes to that one, right?

830 in the morning and then they'd left to go start a new church. And he says, Steve, I think you can do this. I'm like, oh my goodness. Seriously?

I don't. And I dove in and God did literally miraculous things in that classroom for the next four and a half years. And that was just him using a moron like me. And at one point we had like 90 people in that class.

It was insane. I didn't know I could do that. I didn't know I could teach a Bible study, teach a Sunday school, but God did.

And sometimes you just have to give him your yes. And then teaching, like all the classes I teach now, that wasn't my idea. That was one homeschool mom. Thank you, Ellen Weibel, who talked to my wife. Thank you, Gina. And then Gina said, Hey, Ellen and I were talking. We really think you should teach a class on government for homeschoolers.

That wasn't my idea either. And here we are. Noble, you exist. I have 167 students every week and hopefully God will maybe another program powered by the truth network.