Building Your Ladders

Welcome to Season 2!  Last year we collected 82 episodes designed to help you grow in faith, deepen relationships and get the most out of the life God has given you.  Now, we head into this New Year ready to use all of that experience to reach new heights!  Firstly, you have to decide who you want to become.  What does a better you look like?  Secondly, you must be specific, in terms of a goal to reach that proves that commitment.  Then, you pray for God to provide the pieces that you need to get there.  Finally, if you can build a successful, stress free, month of progress, and repeat 12 times:  you will be standing on that new and higher platform by year's end!  Let's discuss how all of that works, and get moving into a beautiful year to Excel Still More!

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Hello, welcome back for season two of the Excel Stillmore Podcast. I am your host, Chris Emerson, and I'm here to encourage you with tips and strategies to help you build stronger relationships, deepen your faith, and just get the most out of your life. Thank you for joining. Let's get started. Okay, here we are, season two of the Excel Still More podcast. It is January of 2020. I'm your host, Chris Emerson. Thank you for tuning in. If it is your very first time to be a part of one of our episodes, welcome to the family. If you're someone who went through all 82 from season one, welcome back. I am excited about what this year will hold. Everything we accomplished last year, everything we learned and implemented is just setting us up for more success, for better control, for stronger relationships and deeper faith. If the Lord wills, here is our schedule for this year. We hope to release a new episode every Monday morning. If you subscribe on your podcast Apple app or Stitcher or whatever, those episodes will be instantly available to you every Monday all throughout the year. In coordination with that, on Thursdays, we hope to release an email, a blog that echoes some of the sentiments from the Monday episode and gives you some practical things to read and apply. If you're interested in that, just go to excelstillmore.life and there's a tab where you subscribe and give your email, and you will have that in your inbox. Okay, so today's episode is called Building Your Ladders. It will set the tone for the entire year. I will be talking to you about identifying who you want to be by year's end, and then we'll talk about how you build the ladder that allows you to easily and methodically get that done. I believe success, even though it looks like it's out of reach, and right now it may be out of reach, is easily attainable with a clear, specific goal and the proper month-to-month approach. That's where we're going today. But before we dive into that, and I ask you to think about who you want to become this year, give me a couple of minutes to remind you about what this entire podcast is really all about. We are shaped by three specific Bible passages. The first one is found in 1 Thessalonians chapter 4, and it includes the phrase in verse 1 and in verse 10, excel still more. That's where we came up with the title for this program, and that's where our inspiration lies. The Thessalonian church was doing very well. They were walking well in God, they were showing great love for one another, and they were incredibly evangelistic. The Apostle Paul didn't write to them and say, That ought to be about good enough. I'm going to go work on all the broken churches. Oh no. He said, Folks, you are positioned for true greatness. If you will take all that you have done, everything you've accomplished so far, and you will channel it into the next level and use it as momentum, then you can increase and abound for the Lord in ways you never knew imaginable. That is what this program is about. Whether last year was a good year and you accomplished much, or you feel like you just crawled out of it broken and barely still there, we will use what is good in you, what God has blessed you with, and we will increase and abound with it. That's our attitude. The second passage that we referenced often last year is Philippians chapter three, verses about twelve through fourteen, where the apostle Paul talked about how he wanted to reach the resurrection of the dead, and he wanted to be a stronger Christian, but he knew he wasn't there yet. He said, I have not yet attained that level, but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Listen carefully. We are not burdened by the past. Good or bad, major accomplishments or major failures, we learn from them. We'll use what we learned. But people whose eyes are stuck on the rearview mirror are destined for the ditch. We have to press on to what lies ahead. We start from here. The mercies of God are new every morning, and this is about where we're going, not where we've been. So that's been a major part of our theme is to stop being burdened by what is in the past. Which leads us to our third verse, one that we reference frequently. When Jesus described kingdom citizens in the Sermon on the Mount, three times he said explicitly, do not worry. The idea of living with inner turmoil and anxiety and fear, that's going to block the blessings that God has intended for our lives. So, yes, we want to press on, excel, increase, and reach forward, get outside of our comfort zones and work hard, but we will not do so with anxiety and fear. Be anxious for nothing, Philippians 4 says. Take it to God in prayer with thanksgiving and let the peace of Jesus rule in your heart. So that's our setup for this entire program. Excel from where you are and focus optimistically on where you're going. So to be clear, we will be talking about some hard choices, some hard work, some challenging outside of comfort zone activities, but we don't do that with worry and anxiety. We challenge barriers that are in front of us. We do not battle against barriers within ourselves. So I hope that you're ready. Are you ready to get to that next level, to excel still more, to forget what lies behind, and to shed yourself of inner turmoil and anxiety and enjoy a beautiful year of growth in Jesus? If you are, then I want to start with the idea of building your ladders. And let me explain this through a bit of imagery. I want you to imagine right now that you are standing on a platform. That platform is quite a distance off of the ground and it represents how far you've come. In any given category, as we'll talk about in a bit, you are elevated to the level where you're currently standing. Now I want you to look just a bit in front of you and above your head at the next platform. There is one before you that is too high to reach. No matter how high you jumped right now, you could not get there. But I want you to look up at that next platform and imagine yourself standing there. That's the close of 2020. That is you at the next level. You could never have gotten there from the ground. But from the platform where you're now standing, it is totally achievable. You just need to build a ladder. If you figure out exactly what kind of a ladder to build and the size that it needs to be, and you stand it up from where you are and lean it against that next platform, if that ladder is well built, you can very easily climb to the next level. That is our plan for this year. Let me explain and get very real with you about this. When you visualize yourself at the next level, I want you to make some decisions today. Who do you want to be by the end of this year? Who will you have become? What will be different about you at the end of 2020 than the you that is listening to this episode now? What does a next level you look like? Let me give you a bit of guidance. And you can be very broad stroke with this so far. You look at the next level and you say, I see myself as a better parent, I see myself as a more committed spouse, I see myself more involved in the local church where I attend. I see myself spiritually stronger as a better Bible student. I see myself more financially secure than I am now. What I ultimately need you to do is just write down or note a few of those things. You can't pick 10 or 20 of them, but a few of those areas where you want to be better. Once you have chosen those categories, like let's say I chose I want to be more financially stable, I want to be a better Bible student, and I want to be a more involved local church member. Maybe those are my three things. Now what I have to do is select very specific goals, which if I achieved them by the end of the year, they would prove my point. They would serve as evidence that I really am a better Bible student, that I really have become more financially secure. So you've got to figure out what those are. Do you think you could do that? Pick a few categories of what a better you looks like, and then decide exactly what specific ladder you need to build to verify it. Let me give you a few instances in my own past and life. One year I said, I need to be more in tune with the scripture, more connected with the word. I'm not exactly sure what that's going to feel like, but it's what I want to be. So a buddy and I made the decision that we were going to read through the whole Bible twice in a year. Now you can't just sit down and do that in a week. It was going to take the whole year, but we believed that if we did that, it would be the ladder that would allow us to access that new level of what we hope to become. And the results were pretty transformative. I'll give you one from this year. I have decided that I want to be more financially independent of debt. Now, to be honest, 2019 went pretty well on that. We made some progress, I'm pretty proud of what we did. That has gotten me to this current platform. But I see myself standing at the next one, even happier. The ladder to get there is to pay off our van. That's the last outstanding debt that we have besides our home. And so I feel like if I could find a way to get there, can't do it in a week or a month, but by the end of this year, then it would be proof that I truly am a different person in terms of financial independence and security. A few years ago, and I'm just giving you some random examples, though you'll need to write down your own specifics. A few years ago, Summer and I wanted to be more connected to the members of our church. We wanted to have better relationships and build some new ones. So we made a specific ladder building decision that we would have 100 members of the church in our home for dinner that year. Took all year to do, but we built that ladder, and by the end of the year, we were standing on a different platform in terms of relationships and connection, and really it was very rich. That's what you need to do this week. Generically think about a better you in some categories that matter, and then decide what specifically would prove that point. Now then, let's talk about how this ladder thing works. I mean, you're a smart person. You know that this is not enough. People fail year after year because this is about as far as they go. I want to be a better this, and if I accomplish that goal, it'll prove it, and then everything begins to fall apart. So let's talk about how the ladder works. First of all, I want you to imagine the two beams of the ladder on the left side and the right, the things that truly connect the platform you're on to the platform to which you're going. I've got news for you. You don't build those. Those represent the presence and the providence of God. If God does not put those two wooden rails in place and keep them there, no amount of rung building or effort will get you to the next place. So let me begin by talking about prayer. If you've decided that something is worth doing and you know exactly what you want to do, you need to pray for God's presence on that. God, I pray that you approve this. I'm praying for your help. I'm praying that you'll be there with me all year and you'll make it possible. I mean, think about the examples that I gave you. I can pay off the van this year, but not if there are other financial stresses that come, which I know nothing about. So I'm praying, God, if it be your will, would you keep things in place so that I can get there? And Father, if it's your will that something else happens instead, I accept that you move the rails or you replaced them with something else. So firstly understand you're going to need God with you, so pray about your goals, pray about what you're doing all throughout the year. But then it comes down to you, and here is how. Each and every month you have to build a rung. Whatever that goal is to get to the next level, it consists of God's part, the side rails, and 12 rungs. If you figure out how to build those 12 rungs and you put them in one at a time, January, February, March, by the time you get to December, they're all in place and you simply walk to that next level. So what you need to do on those specific goals is decide what they look like if broken down into 12 pieces, and then just focus on accomplishing the first rung, January. If it's a Bible reading program, you want to read the word all the way through, find a program that's broken into weeks or months, and just focus on making sure that by the end of January you've accomplished that month's reading. That's all you need to focus on. And then if you're able to repeat that month after month after month, just through that consistency, you will have accomplished it by the end of the year. I've done this in the approach to paying off that van. I started by looking at how much we owed, and then I subtracted what the normal payments are going to be and how that's going to affect the total. And then I divided what I still owed by 12. So I have an exact number of what I need to put down on that car's principle in January. And I'm building a January budget that allows for that amount of money to be shifted in that direction. If I can do that in January, then I can do that in February. And if I can do it in March and April and May, and it just becomes a part of my monthly approach to budgeting, guess what happens in December? I send in the last payment. I own the van. So whatever goal specifically you choose, whatever ladder you want to build, if God is there, all you need to do is strategize a powerful January, something well planned, well placed, anxiety-free. Don't worry about July, don't worry about September, and stop worrying about the total accomplishment. Just focus on whittling out a perfect first rung. And if you can repeat on and on, you get there. You accomplish something that seemed impossible and you do it without stress. Remember, I told you about having a hundred members over? Can you imagine how daunting such a project would be? Well, it ended up not being that difficult at all. We divided the 100 by 12, so we knew about what we needed to do every month. As that month began, I budgeted out right off the bat the amount of money I would need to buy food. I selected two dates on the calendar that were open, and then we went about inviting that eight to ten people. It wasn't that big of a deal. It was just a January with a bit of a budget choice, a couple of calendar choices, and just some cordial invites. Not stressful, not hard. We repeated that month after month. God stayed there with us, he kept the rails in place, and by the end of the year, we'd accomplished it actually kind of with ease. So that's your project for this week, and you need to get this done. Determine some areas where you want to be better, pick one specific lofty goal for each of those categories, and then just try to decide what kind of progress you can make in January that feels doable and fruitful, and try to set yourself up to repeat that all year long. Oh, and be sure you tune in for next Monday's episode. Thinking in terms of a year and 12 months is an important way to set up goals and checkpoints. But the real progress occurs when you zoom in a little bit tighter and you think in terms of a seven-day week and maximizing the input of each day. We're going to dig in on that next week, and I think both episodes will come together to give you every possible opportunity to reach your goals this year. In the meantime, go ahead and make those lists that we talked about today, and don't forget to keep praying. If God supports you and you put in the work, nothing is out of reach. So long as you are building your ladders. Thank you so much for tuning in today. If you enjoyed the program, please remember to share with your family and your friends. Also, you can go to excelstillmore.life to sign up for emails, order the three month journals, or just catch up on old episodes. So until next time, let me leave you with this whatever you choose to do today in the name of the Lord Jesus, excel stillmore.