What Kind of Year Was 2000?
Tom Shrader challenges East Valley Bible Church to move beyond worldly metrics like income and status and instead assess the past year through six spiritually rooted questions drawn from Scripture. Drawing on passages from Galatians, Psalms, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Ephesians, and 1 Corinthians, he calls believers to practice honest self-evaluation, number their days with wisdom, fight spiritual battles with discipline, contend for sound doctrine, and long for the return of Christ. The message closes with a direct appeal to take personal responsibility for spiritual growth in the year ahead.
“When I understand that my days are numbered, I gain a heart of wisdom, and I think it transforms the way you live.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: Year in Review
Recorded: 2001 at East Valley Bible Church
Duration: 1 hr 19 min
Themes: self-evaluation, spiritual growth, new year, wisdom, sound doctrine, second coming, spiritual discipline, priorities, feeling stuck spiritually, chasing worldly success, new year reflection, struggling with priorities, young adult, new believer, materialism, questioning life direction
Scripture: Galatians 6:3-4, Psalm 90:12, 1 Timothy 6:6-8, 2 Timothy 4:6-8, Ephesians 6:10-12, 1 Corinthians 9:24-25, Jude 3-4
Theological Themes: sanctification, eschatology, hope of christ's return, biblical self-examination, sound doctrine, spiritual warfare, numbering your days, personal holiness
Full Transcript
What Kind of Year Was 2000?
When you came in today, there was electricity in the air, almost like the kickoff of a big game. It's that annual time where we look back at the year. If you're new to the church, you are about to join one of the great traditions of East Valley Bible Church. It really is an important time — a time for us to stop and look in the rearview mirror to see what kind of year we had. Next week, we'll look forward and tell you how to make 2001 the greatest year of your life.
So here's the simple question we pose: what kind of year was the year 2000? We ask you to answer on a scale of one to ten. One being, "I never want to see those four numbers in that order ever again, because it was awful." Ten being, "I wish every year was like the year 2000." Get a number and put it in your head.
The Typical Questions We Ask
What I want you to see is that to answer that question, you inevitably had to work through — maybe consciously or unconsciously — some series of questions. I talked to a guy the other day who had been to a new restaurant. I said, "How was the restaurant?" He said, "It was great." I said, "One to ten." He said, "It was a six." I said, "Well, how do you get there?" And inevitably it came down to the food, the price, the service — whatever those things are.
These are the typical questions the average person asks when trying to answer, "What kind of year was 2000?" Did you make more money than the year before? If you were a struggling player and now you make $25 million a year, you might have had a pretty good year. Or did you acquire more stuff? We always separate these two because you don't need money to get stuff — you do need money to keep it. But if you watch TV, you know you can get a bedroom set right now and not pay for anything until 2002.
I was talking to a guy and I said, "What was the year like?" He said, "It was a great year — I got a new Harley." I said, "No, your insurance agent had a great year. You just got a Harley." Maybe it's that you improved your position — you pull out the org chart from the previous year, and now you have more responsibility, more authority, and people call you vice president. The last two questions get to the real heart of a person: did you advance your image in the eyes of your friends, or did you cause envy in the eyes of your enemies? In other words, the people who hated you in '99 hated you even more in 2000 — then you had a good year.
A More Profound Set of Questions
Now here's what's really important. If I walked over to Fiesta Mall today and interviewed 100 people about how their year 2000 was, those questions — and ones like them — are what they would ask. I'm not saying they aren't important questions. If you made $80,000 in '99 and only $12,000 last year, it has an impact. I was talking to a guy the other day and I said, "How's work?" He said, "My company's downsizing." I said, "Really? I didn't even read it in the paper." He said, "Well, so far I'm the only one." I said, "Oh — you're out of there." That's bound to affect your life.
So I'm not saying those questions aren't important. What I am saying is they aren't *truly* important. There is a more profound set of questions that I think you need to ask yourself when answering, "Did I have a good year? What kind of year was 2000?" Let me share them with you. There are six of them, and you can easily add to this list.
Question One: Did You Recognize the Importance of Self-Evaluation?
You had a great year if you recognized the importance of self-evaluation. Here's what Paul writes in Galatians 6: "If anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself. Each one should test his own actions." Each person should test their own actions — that's what we're saying.
Every year, in conjunction with these two weeks, Jim Harper produces a personal evaluation exercise. It's a very helpful tool for evaluating how you're doing spiritually, which is why we put it in every bulletin. I would say you ought to take it, put it in your Bible, and bring it out once a quarter and go through it. How am I doing? Ed Koch, when he was mayor of New York, used to walk through the city, hang out the window, and yell, "How am I doing? How am I doing?" By the way, they didn't re-elect him, so I think he got the answer — but that's the spirit of it. I want to know how I'm doing.
Now there's something in this verse that's significant and can be easily overlooked. Each person should test their own actions. Let me digress for a moment. There's a phrase I used to hear all the time that I rarely hear anymore: midlife crisis. There used to be books in the bookstore — I have a couple at home — basically about avoiding the midlife crisis. None of that conversation anymore. How come? That crisis
The Midlife Crisis We No Longer Wait For
A midlife crisis is nothing more than a point in time in life, male or female, when we take an evaluation — we do what we are doing here. We can look at it in a material way. For example, we said by the time I am 40, I want to have a million dollars. Now I am 39, I am $200,000 in debt, I do not have a job, and I turn 40 in a week. I will buy one more lottery ticket, but it is unlikely I am going to make it. And so I get discouraged.
I will tell you who is even more discouraged: the ones who have that same goal and at age 39 they have $10 million, and they say, "That's not so hot." A midlife crisis is when you stop, take evaluation, and look around — maybe after not having done that for a while. I think the reason we do not have a midlife crisis anymore is that we are not patient enough to wait for it to come. We just have a series of annual crises that we deal with.
We are succeeding at an extraordinary rate and the milestones are arriving earlier. I was talking to a young man who became the principal of an elementary school at age 32, which is an incredible accomplishment. He said it used to be that you would be 45 or older before reaching that, but he achieved it at 32 — and then realized he did not want to be a superintendent. He said, "What do I do?" He is having his midlife crisis at 32, not 45. One of the good things is that we are now people who evaluate ourselves more frequently, so we do not let it all build up until it explodes.
The Importance of Honest Self-Evaluation
Here is the key: if you think you are something when you are nothing, you deceive yourself. You have to test yourself, but you have to do it with accurate information. Every person has a blind spot — or blind spots — things you do not see, areas where you may even think you are doing well. For many of you in this worship center, God has given you someone who will help you spot these things, called a spouse.
We left church about six weeks ago, and driving home I asked Susan how the service was. She said it was good, it was fine. I pressed her — how was the message? She said it was okay. When I asked what she did not like, she described a point I had made and said she thought I was way over the edge, that what I said could have been said much better, that she was not even sure it needed to be said at all, and that if it was going to be said, it could have been said much more gently than the way I said it.
She did not even need to describe the point, because I knew exactly what she was talking about. As I was making it, my lips were moving and I was thinking, "You don't need to go down this road." It is helpful to have people like that. That, by the way, is why we do not let her come until the 6 o'clock service — so that by the time I have worked out all the bugs, I do not have to listen to her start chopping things up at 8 o'clock. I can create an environment where she knows her input is welcome. Most people will simply say, "Nice job." Susan will break it down and say she does not have a clue what I am saying — and that is very helpful.
Spotting Gifts as Well as Blind Spots
Let me add one more point here. Not only is it helpful to have that person tell you these things, but the tendency is to think all the feedback will be criticism. It is not. Sometimes that person spots a giftedness in you that you do not see yourself. I was telling a man the other day that every time he uses his gift, things happen. He said he did not think so. I told him he was wrong — and he simply does not see it. He does not see that God has given him a gift. So you need to understand the importance of self-evaluation.
Understanding the Value of Your Time
Here is the second thing. You had a great year if you understood the value of your time. In 2 Timothy chapter 4, verse 6, Paul tells us he understands the time of his departure has come — he understands he is at the end of his life. That is one of the reasons I love this kind of book. Last summer, and the summer before, I read about the last years of Napoleon and the last years of Robert E. Lee. If there are three volumes in a man's life, I always buy volume three. First of all, there ought to come some wisdom with life, and there is a certain honesty that happens toward the end of it.
Here is the key, and this is a really important point. Psalm 90, verse 12, the psalmist cries out, "Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom." We are not talking about what you know here. Every person in this room understands that you have a finite amount of time. Every person in this room understands you are going to die. The psalmist does not say gain a heart of knowledge — he says gain a heart of wisdom. It is now a matter of living in light of that truth. The psalmist says help us understand the finiteness of time so that it translates and changes the way we live.
I was not here last week because Sarah and I were traveling. Sarah turned 21 on New Year's Eve, and I am not a very good gift person — I miss it completely. So Susan asked Sarah what she would like for her birthday, and Sarah said she did not care what it was, as long as Dad picked it out. So I said, "Honey, what are you going to do with this five iron?"
A Gift Worth More Than Things
Susan asked if I could handle the gifts, and I told her I just needed a little time to think about it. I came up with what I thought was the ideal gift. When the moment came and the presents were gathered, Sarah unwrapped one of mine and said, "Ooh, a dictionary. Thank you, Dad. That's a good gift." She opened another and found a concordance. Then I told her to save the envelope for last, because I didn't want it to affect how she received the other gifts.
At the end, she opened the envelope and said, "It's perfect." I told her I knew it would be. Since 1983, every August, we go on vacation to the same place — Sea Ranch in Northern California, 114 miles north of San Francisco. Sarah and I, in particular, much more than Susan and Haley, love that place. The gift was a trip for just the two of us: into San Francisco, up to Sea Ranch for a couple of days, then back down for a night at our favorite hotel in the city.
We landed and drove up with the convertible top down. It was freezing cold, so we had the heat on and the music blaring. I kept saying to turn it up louder, and she kept saying we had to turn it down. I told her the fortunate thing about years of sitting in front of speakers is that you can't hear anything anymore.
We stopped at the same place in Bodega Bay — the restaurant where they filmed *The Birds* — and ate there. As we drove up, she asked what house we had, and I told her that was the surprise. When we arrived, she said she didn't even remember the house. I told her it was the first house we had ever stayed in, back in 1983. She thought for a moment and then said she remembered.
Finding the Stump
The next morning she asked what we were going to do. I told her not to dirty anything, since we didn't have anyone there to clean up. We wouldn't cook, and I figured we could probably skip bathing too. Then I said I wanted to walk down the path and look for something.
As you face the house, the ocean is out front and a redwood forest is out the back. I told her I wanted to go find the stump. Back in 1983, when she was four years old, I used to take her on that walk, and looking at it now I understood why she got so tired — it is a hard walk. Along the way we would always stop at the same spot, where there was a stump left from some logging, flat on the bottom and cut at an angle at the top. She would sit and rest on it in the middle of the walk. We had moved it and hidden it, thinking that someday we would want to come back and find it again. This was that day.
As we searched, I said it had to be right in that area. Parents, if you think your kids don't remember things, consider this: she was four years old at the time, yet she said, "Do you remember, Dad? We were trying to hide the stump, and you kept throwing it up the hill and it kept rolling back down, and you had to carry it up and wedge it in place." I had forgotten that entirely. I told her to go one way while I went another, and then she called out, "Look." You pulled back a bush, and there it was — with seventeen years of dead leaves and debris around it — the stump.
I picked it up, brought it out, and set it down. I told her to sit on it and let me take her picture. I got down low, brought the viewfinder up to my eye, and my throat got tight and my eyes got watery. It wasn't because of new information. I could look at her and tell that when she was four she was a girl, and now she was a woman. I already knew that. What hit me in that moment was not where those seventeen years had gone — it was the question of what I was going to do with the next seventeen years.
The Value of Numbered Days
That is the value of time, and it is so important to understand. When I understand that my days are numbered, I gain a heart of wisdom. I believe that understanding transforms the way you live.
There is a passage I return to constantly, and I want to spend a moment on it. First Timothy 6:6–8 reads: "Now godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. If we have food and clothing, with those we shall be content."
I know God wrote this. I know it is perfect and without error. Yet to me, verse 7 breaks the flow, and I studied these three verses for two years and taught them for three years before I understood why. No one seemed uncomfortable with verse 7, but the passage seems to read more smoothly without it: *Godliness with contentment is great gain, and having food and clothing we should be content.* But verse 7 is there — *we brought nothing into the world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out of it* — and then one day, in the middle of teaching, the meaning became clear.
well, Chaz just doesn't have the discipline yet. He said, Tom, do you know what it takes to be an Olympic swimmer? I said, I can imagine. He said, you've got to be in the water, training hard, every day, sometimes twice a day. He said, there's no shortcuts. There's no off season. He said, it takes that kind of discipline to compete at that level.
The Eternal vs. The Temporal
I will never be content unless I understand that I came in with nothing and I leave with nothing. That is the secret to contentment. We have a finite amount of time, and the question is: where are you going to invest your time, energy, effort, and money? In the temporal — the stuff you accumulated while you were here — or the eternal? When my eye goes to the eternal rather than the temporal, I will have contentment, happiness, and joy in my life.
I am not saying the temporal is not important. What I am saying is that the eternal is what is significant. If you are one of those people who is frustrated spiritually, that does not necessarily mean you are not growing. In fact, oftentimes the more you grow spiritually, the more frustrated you get, because you look at your life and see that the majority of your time, energy, effort, and money is being spent on the temporal rather than the eternal.
When you understand the value of time, when you understand the temporariness of this life, when you understand that you do not know how long you have — and even if you have a hundred years, there is a point at which this life is over — then you can live this life with a heart of wisdom.
Victories That Exceeded Your Defeats
Here is a third thing: you had victories that exceeded your defeats. Paul says, "I fought the good fight." He does not mean this metaphorically. He means it literally. We are in a battle.
"Put on the full armor of God," Ephesians 6:10. The tense in the Greek is a little different than what you get in the English. In English, when you hear "put on the armor," your tendency is to think: put on the armor, fight a battle, get sweaty, take it off, let it dry out, put it on again. The tense in the Greek says put on the full armor of God and leave it on. Put on the things of God and leave them on. Don't take them off. "Put on the full armor of God and take your stand" — it means to stand firm. Don't give up any ground against the devil's schemes. "For our struggle" — the word literally means hand-to-hand combat — "is not against flesh and blood. It is against rulers and authorities. It is against the powers of the dark world." There is a real enemy out there.
Two Dangerous Extremes Regarding Satan
We can go to one of two extremes when it comes to Satan, and both are dangerous. The first extreme sees Satan in everything. I was speaking at a church once where the sound system was not working, and the man in the front was making small talk while it was being fixed. He said, "Brother Thomas, you must have a really anointed, powerful message for us tonight, because Satan is attacking us right here in the sound system." My thought was: not really. You bought cheap equipment. That is the problem. That is one extreme — Satan is behind everything.
Then there is the other extreme. Consider this statistic: eighty percent of people who identify themselves as born-again Christians do not believe Satan is real. Eight out of ten born-again Christians do not think Satan is real. How happy is Satan with that? What an advantage that gives him.
Satan is real. The Bible tells us he is like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. He is like an angel of light, or a subtle serpent, and you are at war with him. His desire is to destroy you. His strategy is to make you as useless as possible in the things that are eternal, and he often does that by distracting you with the things that are temporal. He plays by jungle rules.
You had a great year if your victories exceeded your defeats.
Finishing the Race
Paul says, "I fought the good fight," and then he says, "I finished the race." He hung in there all the way to the end. In the Christian community, we seem to do fairly well at placing an emphasis on starting the race — that would be evangelism. I am not sure we do an equally thorough job on discipleship and training. It is not just important that you start your walk with the Lord; it is that you finish your walk with Him. As the old phrase goes, the Christian life is a marathon, not a sprint.
In 1 Corinthians 9, Paul writes: "Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets a prize? Run in such a way to get the prize." He is writing to the church at Corinth, and they would have understood this athletic metaphor, because second only to the Olympic Games in Athens in prestige were the games at Corinth. He says everyone runs, but only one gets a prize. Now, it is not the same in the Christian life — we all receive that crown of righteousness — but he is saying: run in such a way as to get the prize.
Verse 25: "Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training." He is talking about discipline. I was talking with a friend of mine the other day who won three gold medals and a silver medal at the 1968 Olympics. When I introduce him to people I say, "Have you ever met Charlie? Charlie won a silver medal in the '68 Olympics," and then I leave it at that — which kills him, because he won three golds as well, but he is not arrogant enough to correct me. It is perfect. His son has recently taken up swimming, and I asked him how his son Chaz was doing. He said Chaz just does not have the discipline yet.
He said, "Tom, do you know what it takes to be an Olympic swimmer? You have to be in the water, training hard, every day — sometimes twice a day. There are no shortcuts. There is no off season. It takes that kind of discipline to compete at that level."
Discipline and the Crown That Lasts
He is built about like I am, and he is not very strong, but he said, "I'll tell you something, Tom — boy, does he work." He is doing what I did. He is perfecting the stroke. It is discipline. The same thing is true in the Christian life.
I was at the gym the other day, on a machine, talking to a guy. I said, "This is great — there's nobody in here." He said, "It'll be different in January." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Oh, it'll be awful in January." I said, "I don't know what you're talking about." He said, "Don't you remember last January?" I said, "No, I've only been working out since July." He said — well, he said something complimentary, or at least that's what he was thinking. You can tell. That's one of those moments when you knew what someone was thinking. I said, "No, I just really started." He said, "July's awful. I work out less in July than any month because it's so crowded, and then by February it's okay. By March it's back to normal."
That is a pretty good picture of what we see oftentimes in the Christian life. A lot of people buying a lot of books with a lot of dedication, and then pretty soon those books just gather dust. This Christian life takes discipline.
By the way, this will be the third time we have made this point. Paul says they do it to get a crown that will not last; we do it to get a crown that will last forever. Paul does not say they are wasting their time because they get a crown that does not matter. He says they get a crown.
Here is what success in the Corinthian games meant to the winner of a race. Number one, a lifetime exemption from income tax. Number two, a lifetime exemption for all your children so they never had to fight in a war. Number three, a lifetime status as hero in the land. Those are significant things. It is temporal, but it is important. Paul does not say they do it to get a crown that is unimportant. He says they do it to get a crown — but here is the context — it does not last. We are racing to get a crown that will last forever.
The Anticlimactic Nature of Temporal Achievement
You have four teams right now getting ready to play. The Vikings getting ready to play the Giants. The Ravens getting ready to play the Raiders. Two of these teams will emerge, and then in two weeks they will play the Super Bowl, and one of them will win. In a sense, the one that wins is worse off than the one that loses — for those that do not know Christ — because they will understand the futility of trying to find significance there. Not saying it is not important.
Here is Bobby Stoops. Bobby Stoops, the coach of Oklahoma, just won the national title, going 13-0. Here is what he said afterwards, and I quote: "After it's over, you say, 'Now what?' The best part of it is the pursuit, the preparation. Once it's over, it's a little anticlimactic. The best part is going for it." These temporal achievements, important as they are, are never going to fulfill or satisfy. They are always anticlimactic.
Maybe you will never play in the Super Bowl or win a national title, but you were salesman of the year. You were in the top ten in the year 2000. Did you notice that on Monday of 2001 they said, "You know we're all at zero now, don't you?" Or maybe — and this is worse — you were salesman of the year in 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, and 2000, and now they say, "What happened?" because you only won by about ten percent. Not saying these things are not important. Just saying you are not going to find satisfaction or fulfillment there.
Keeping the Faith: Guarding the Body of Truth
Paul says, "I fought the good fight, and I finished the race, and I kept the faith." This is really important. Paul uses a definite article: I kept the faith. This body of truth that was given to me, I passed it on, and I did not change it. I was faithful to the teaching that God had entrusted to me.
Jude 3 and 4 says this: "Dear Christians, although I was eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt I had to write to you and urge you to contend" — it is the same word we had before, translated struggle, hand-to-hand combat — "for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints." In other words, there is an enemy out there.
Now, if you read my mail, you might think that the enemy is the ACLU, or the media, or the liberal left. But that is not the enemy Jude identifies. He says, "Certain men whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you." The enemy is not out there — the enemy is in here. They have slipped in secretly. You know where they are? They are leading Sunday school classes. They are in pulpits. They are in seminaries.
Two Marks of Those Who Corrupt the Faith
Here is how you can identify them. There are two ways. First, they are those who change the grace of our Lord into license for immorality. They take grace and they abuse it, so that when you come to them and say, "Aren't you involved in some pretty hideous sin here?" they say, "Yes, I am — but do you understand that God forgives sin? I can just keep on sinning."
This is the real debate raging in church culture right now. Can I accept Jesus as my Savior without having Him as my Lord? There are two very distinct views. One says that if there is a point at which I believe that Jesus is who He said He is, I am going to heaven based on that — He is my Savior — but it does not necessarily have to affect the way I live. The other view — the correct view, our view — says no. You accept Jesus as Savior because He is Lord, you understand that, and your life will be changed.
I did a radio interview this week, just a short interview on trends in the church. They said, "We want to know what you're seeing in the church." I said, "I don't know anything about—"
Trends in the Church
They said they would fax me some material and have me react to it, and I said I could do that. They sent it over, and they used George Barna, who always has helpful insights. But he found two discouraging trends. One: born-again Christians are more likely to get divorced than other people. Two: large portions of lay leaders hold unbiblical doctrinal views.
The first one sets me off like a rocket. I don't believe it for a second. It used to be that churchgoers are as likely to get divorced as ordinary people — now it says born-again adults are more likely to get divorced. There is no way this is true. It cannot be true.
Here is how you get that result. You have had twenty-five years of saying to people: come to church, be inspired, be welcomed. We will make it as comfortable for you as we can. We will dumb it down and make it weak because we want to be sensitive to you — which is a good thing, we care about people. The problem is those people have now hung out in church long enough to learn the lingo and declare themselves born-again, but their hearts have never been regenerated.
There is no way that born-again people are more likely to sin than other people. It does not happen. Do we sin? We do, but there is a change in our life.
Unbiblical Views in the Church
As for the second finding — that large portions of laypeople hold unbiblical doctrinal views — she asked if that upset me, and I said not really. Here is the problem: large portions of people in the clergy hold unbiblical doctrinal views, and once you understand it in that context, everything else makes sense. What is so sad is that you can talk to clergy — or worse yet, go to seminary — where they are arguing over whether this is really the Word of God or not. That is how far we have down-cycled in some areas.
I ended the interview by saying I see a trend that looks pretty good. I see people who are very serious about their faith. When you go chapter by chapter, verse by verse — which is what we do here forty-six weeks of the year — I see the church explode. People are desperately concerned about biblical truth and want to live their lives accordingly. There is a genuine desire among people who know Christ in a personal way to be in a church that teaches the Word.
Contending for the Faith with Grace
Now, let me give you a brief warning. Sometimes you can be so fired up, so certain you have the answers — maybe you came from a difficult background, there was a lot of sin in your life, and now you have been redeemed. Sometimes those people are the toughest, because all of a sudden everything is black and white, and grace becomes a word removed from the vocabulary. We contend for the faith, but we do it with love and grace, with concern for people who are lost, with brokenness over their sin, and with a desire to see them come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.
Longing for the Return of Christ
Here is the last thing. You had a great year if you understood and anticipated the return of Christ. Paul writes: "There is in store for me a crown of righteousness, which the righteous judge will award me on that day, and not just me, but all who long for His appearing."
Do you long to see Jesus? Do you long to be with Him? You will receive a crown on that day. I know people who long for that moment on April 14th — the day before taxes are due — and they say, "Oh Jesus, come again." So often people say that in the context of suffering, meaning simply, get me out of here. That is not what we are talking about. We are saying, God, I love what is going on here — it is like Paul saying, my desire is to be with You, and yet I know You have work for me here.
What Kind of Year Was 2000?
In light of this series of six questions, what kind of year was the year 2000 for you? Maybe you came in at two and you are going out at eight, or maybe you came in at eight and you are going out at two. Let me speak briefly to each group.
If you had a great year, let me say something you do not hear very often: congratulations. Hang in there. Knock yourself out. Dairy Queen has a two-for-two-dollar deal — go get a Blizzard. Oreo cookie and Nestlé Crunch combo — that is what I get. Eating is how I celebrate. If you had a good year, that is wonderful. Just remember: past performance is not an indicator of future results. Just because you had a good 2000 does not mean you will have a good 2001, but you do have a foundation to build on.
A Word to Those Who Had a Hard Year
If you had a bad year, let's run through this briefly. We sat here a year ago and told you exactly the six questions we were going to ask. I can tell you right now that on the first or second Sunday of next January, we are going to ask you exactly the same questions. So let's be clear: if you had a bad year, it is not your boss's fault, it is not your spouse's fault, it is not your parents' fault, it is not your teacher's fault. If you had a bad year, it is your fault. You made those choices. Now you fix it. You do what is right. You know what is right.
You understand that this life is temporary, and I will tell you who that is a really hard lesson for — those of you in junior high and high school. It is very hard at that age to grasp the full weight of how life ends and what that means for how you live now. What happens to many people is that they dwindle away the first three or four decades of life. Maybe you hang out at a couple of church camps, or you spend some time with Tim or Jamie or Matt, or some time with Michelle or Cindy or Karen — but you do not
How much I wish I would have understood this when I was your age. You have your whole life to live. Here is the deal: you do not have a clue how long that life is, and I am telling you right now, it is going to go by so fast you will not even believe it. And if you are really Christians, there is going to come a point when you are about 30 or 35, when you start having kids and they start to grow up, that you are going to say, "I wasted 30 years. Saved, but totally ineffective." You do not need to live that way. You live that way because you have chosen to live that way.
Next week we are going to give you some helpful advice on how to make 2001 the greatest year of your life.
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Father, thank You for Your Son Jesus. Thank You that You have taught us the truth and that we know the truth, and God, we can live a life that reflects that. I pray for each person here that they would understand what it means to follow You. God, I pray that when we do this test a year from now, every person here will say 2001 was an 8 or a 9 or a 10. God, we pray that to You in Christ's name. Amen.