Happy New Year 2025. What will it be like? Well, we're going to talk about a year of consecration. Hope you enjoy the discussion. 2025, 2025 is here.

It's a wonderful time to revisit how life rolls out. And I want to just use one word to sort of launch the discussion and then, and then let's keep talking about it. Consecration every year should be a year of consecration. You know, I was thinking about Exodus 19, you know, before the giving of the law, God commanded the Israelites to consecrate themselves. He said to Moses, consecrate them today and tomorrow and let them wash their clothes." In Joshua 3 5 before entering the promised land, Joshua said to the people, sanctify yourselves for tomorrow the Lord will do wonders among you.

They're just getting ready to go into the land. Deuteronomy 7 6. Moses is talking about when God brings you into the land he says for you are a holy people to the Lord your God the Lord has chosen you to be a people for himself, a special treasure above all the peoples on the face of the earth. To the New Testament, the Apostle Paul in Romans 12, I beseech you therefore brethren by the mercies of God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is a reasonable service, and do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is good and acceptable and perfect will of God. Here's what's on my mind.

You know, in my life, I've got three things that are going on in my life. I have got three simple things. It's been this way for a long time, and it's gonna be this way in 2025. I have my local church life as a local church pastor. That's one thing.

I also have my family. I've got 28 grandchildren and a super duper sweet wife. And I also am part of Church and Family Life and the Church Network and our conferences and podcasts and publications. I love what I'm doing. I really do.

I don't want to do anything else but within those things the the thing that's on my mind is that each one of those areas would be a consecrated area so you just gave us a number of scriptures let me throw one on the pile okay and it is 2nd Peter 3 18 where Peter writes grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ. So everybody who's lived long knows that there's EBS and flows to life. We want to start the year by saying, Hey, let's resolve together that this would be a year of the tide coming in, not the tide going out. Let's grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus. Amen.

At the beginning of the year is a wonderful time to do that too, as most people are thinking about who they are before the Lord, these most Christians who they are before the Lord, and what the Lord wants them to do. And I know at our church, we literally call it, January is our month of consecration. We literally use that word. And we go through a number of those passages that you read and spend a good chunk of the month in, in consecration in all the areas of life. And so you laid it out that way, Scott, and that's exactly what we do.

We want everything that we do to be holy unto the Lord and to be pleasing to him. And it's a, It's a wonderful time to do it. You know, tis the season for new year's resolutions and you know, the top, the top new year's resolution almost every year is exercise more. The second is eat healthier. The Third is spend more time with family and friends.

And the fourth is lose weight problem. Only one problem. 80% of all those die by February. Yeah. We call them revolutions, not resolutions.

Spins around All the gyms are empty again by February. That's right. Absolutely. So I think probably most people who are watching the podcast have been through the loop multiple times. And so you either throw up your hands because of the spectacular failures of years gone by and having abandoned all your resolutions by February or you're still trying to boil the ocean.

What do I mean by boil the ocean? Like you resolve about how you're going to make every category of your life perfect and you really in that way set yourself up. No, you don't boil the ocean. You can't raise the temperature of the ocean a single degree if you put the most powerful heater in the world in it there's there's too much to even raise a degree let alone boil it you actually focus the energy on a bowl or a teacup or something like that and then you can boil water so it takes focus we want to exhort people not to fall off the horse on either side Don't make resolutions that set yourself up for failure by trying to perfect every category of your life. I mean, it's good to shoot high, but there is also setting yourself up for failure.

But on the other hand, don't because of failures from past years say, I'm not going to aim in anything so that I won't miss the target. No, actually we should be resolving to do a few really important things and then try to bear down on it for the year. Well, here are a couple of things that I wanna try to do more of in 2025. I want to go fishing more with my grandkids. In fact, in fact, I pulled out my old fly rod last week.

I'm going to get that thing cranking back up again. And, and I want to play the guitar more. Those are two things I want to do more in 2025. I didn't do any fly fishing in 2024 or 2023 or 2022. So see I brought things to make me look spiritual and here's what you said.

Well, okay. What do you want to do? Well, I want to do some stuff like that too, but I wasn't going to say that's great. That's great. Yeah.

For me, my, my, the thing I wrote down on the personal side was less media, more reading. So I've become a perpetual consumer of media. Some media consumption is profitable, and you need to have some level of engagement with what's happening in some different categories, but mine is out of hand, so I want to get it back in hand. And I want to read more good books. And I don't have to buy a single one.

I own so many good unread books. So I want to have less good unread books in my house at the end of the year. Yeah. Amen. Amen.

Well, I'm not very spiritual, I guess either, because I'm more along where Scott is right now. I want to have more fun with my children. I have one who's courting now, who's 19, which is amazing to me to think that she could marry at some point in the near future. And I have one who's just barely a teenager at 14, and my son about to be 13. And I just want to spend more time doing fun stuff with them.

I mean, they read a lot, they're homeschooled, they're in church a lot, they all serve. We're always reading the Bible and we need to, we pray together, but I like to do some other things with them to you know Get my son out on the golf course and my daughter as well for that matter And and do a few more fun things with them So I'm kind of in that at groove with Scott where I see them growing and I'm so focused on discipling them and I must stay that I must keep that but boy I want to create a few more memories with them that while they're at this age yeah amen here's a pastoral one okay as a pastor I want more one-on-one time particularly with the men and young men in our church and older boys and also me with families in our church. I want to do more of the pastoral work. For me, preaching always gets like hard effort, always gets the right amount of effort. Some of my sermons are better than others, but they all get like careful study and a lot of work on them.

So if, if anything gets shorted, often it's the interpersonal things that are every bit as important as preaching. I'm going to do more of that. Yeah. Yeah. Pastoral.

I'd like to see some of the men use their gifts more at our church and we're trying to call in the entire church really in different ways that are commensurate with who they are. But I love to see some of our brothers using their gifts more. The other ministers maybe preaching more, which means I can't be a pulpit hog all the time. I like. And our deacons as well, just they're so talented and smart and they love God so much.

And even our elders having them teach a little bit more often as well, which is, you know, difficult for the guy who's always teaching, but that's a goal of mine to not feel like it's all on my shoulders. You know, I can relate with this thing about reading more and less audio. I think for me, fewer audio books and more real books right. It's very different. It really is very different.

I mean I I think there's value of listening to audio books you know you can kind of get the big picture. But it's a, for me, it's a different impact. So I'm going to try to inflect, to more, you know, more hard books. I think that would be really helpful for me. Well, What can we expect to see from Church of Family Life in 2025?

Well, of course, you know, coming up real soon is our national conference. Build, dwell, plant, you know, the whole idea out of Deuteronomy 20, the whole idea out of Jeremiah 29 verse five, you know, the instructions that God gives the captives there. And they are real basic things. They're the life giving things. They're the salt of the earth kind of things, you know, really bringing benefit to your family and your, and your city.

So I'm really excited about that. I hope that conference is really super practical. We want to make it very user friendly in the messages that are given. We've got great preachers coming, so I can't wait. We're gonna be publishing a few books in 2025, and we're gonna be relaunching actually some of our some of our older books and really improving them we think theology of the family is one of them we're we're just finishing a redesign of that book we think that's a really significant book It's a big fat book with short articles in it.

And I think it's one of the most significant books we published. And I hope that book makes its way around the world like never before with her, with a redesign. You know, I'm going to be mainly staying home, but I get to go and, preach with, Malachi and Dongo and, in Nigeria next year and, and go to Portugal and preach with Kevin Swanson. So that'll be, that'll be really neat, but, mainly it's going to be kind of normal life around here. Family life, church life, church and family life, and doing podcasts and writing books.

I've got several books in the works that I want to try to finish. I think I can finish a couple more books this in next year. So one on fatherhood, another one on singing. We're getting ready to release In I believe in January my new book called Beyond Modesty The biblical doctrine of clothing really excited about that book got a great design credit book cover design on that So that's what's happening Carl and give us some book recommendations What can people read that'll profit them this year? Well, there are two that I have with me here today that the men in my church are actually going through.

This book is called The Mortification of Sin by John Flavel. And, you know, it was powerfully impactful for me and just thinking about who our men are, wanting to expose them to more of kind of the older authors, the puritan authors. We were going through that one. And then Another book that I read where I was going through a very difficult time called the triumphing over sinful fear again, but by this one's Owen and this one's flavor, but Going through a very difficult time dealing with some sickness I had a couple of years ago. And this book helped me so much to get my focus back on the Lord.

I miss that one. What's that one? I'm sorry. So yeah, this was called Triumphing Over Sinful Fear by John Flavel. The first one was The Mortification of Sin by John Owen.

Wow. And it really helped me deal with just what I was feeling at the moment. And I'm thinking about asking the whole church to kind of to grab that one and read it as well. So I'm kind of in the old author place right now, J.C. Ryle.

There's a new book by J.C. Ryle's daily devotional book by him. I don't have it yet, but I want to get it. Stuff like that is what we'll be doing in 2025. I was going to say, be suspicious of new books by J.C.

Ryle. True. I think these are just some of his writings. Put the format in these time. Oh, right.

The memorable line from the mortification of sin is be killing sin or it will be killing you. And that's right. Yeah, that's got some memorable lines. You know, I bet it was a dozen years ago over a dozen years ago We took our men through that book Yikes, it's a devastating So here's here's a couple of book recommendations for people. Ian Murray has written two companion books.

I didn't read them this year, but I found them really, really profitable. The first one is Revival and Revivalism. It's about the early century of American history and how the Puritans viewed genuine revival and then how people came after them with revivalism which meant that they thought that you could pull certain levers and get a revival didn't view it as necessarily being strictly the work of the Holy Spirit. So, Ian Murray, revival and revivalism is great. And then he has a companion book for that which picks up in the 1950s called Evangelicalism Divided.

When I read those books, I looked at our current Christian culture and said, oh now I know why we are here, how we got here. So those were tremendously helpful books to me. And then a couple of biographies. To the Golden Shores is a biography about Adoniron Judson which is so inspiring and just really helpful to me. And then another one was just simply called William Carey about William Carey biography of William Carey.

It was actually written by his great grandson who never met him, but it's a tremendous book as well written by S. Pierce Carey. But if you're contemplating missions, endeavors, reading about William Carey and what, he and his, fellow workers did in India is tremendous. Oh, those are great. Yep.

Those are wonderful. Wonderful. Mix. Well, let it be a year of consecration, you know, day after day to arise, to meet the Lord and to consecrate ourselves and all the different things that we're doing. Carlton, I love what you said about the month of January being that month of deliberate consecration.

I think that is brilliant and that's worthy of replication. It really is. Well, okay. It's a new year again. Praise the Lord.

The Lord has given us another year and to live and move and have our being to relate with him to experience his goodness, to rejoice in his sovereign hand. And, I'm excited about the year coming up Okay, man. Thanks for joining us and thank you for joining us on the church and family life podcast And I hope you have a consecrated year to the Lord. Hope to see you next time. Www.churchandfamilylife.com