Making Plans - A Simple Exercise

In this podcast, Josh introduces a simple exercise to help you jog through a year of experiences to connect with areas you want to grow or with plans you would like to make for the season ahead.

Reflection is one of the most important steps to planning because it allows us to attach meaning to the things that matter the most.

Bonus Material: Josh also shares a thought on the importance of continuing to meet with one another in the Covid Era. 

Transcript

Hey, I'm Josh Hallmark. And I want to thank you for listening to one of the Oaks podcast. Remember this message from Isaiah chapter 61. God takes the seeds of brokenness and turns them in to observe righteousness. And that you must pray. God will exercise I want to do today. So I'm gonna try to get right to but can we just put our hands over our hearts this morning. And, Lord, we love you. We thank you for this day we bless you, Lord Jesus, we pray that you would move and work in our lives. are you to say this prayer when we say Lord Jesus, speak to my heart, change my life. change my mind. In Jesus name. Amen. All right. Look, I've got a verse that I want to read to you real quick. This is just something. This is this, this thought about this verse during worship. But this is Isaiah 55, verse one says, Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters, you have no money come by and eat, you have no money, you can come by okay? And come by wine and milk. Without money and without cost. Why spend your money on that which is not bread? And why labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me and eat what is good. And you will delight in the richest of fair give ear come to me Listen to me that you may live. You guys understand that it's possible to eat that which does not satisfy the eat that which is not bread. And I was just thinking about that. And I'm like, Can we just put our hand on our heart again, let's just pray this prayer over our lives during 2021 that we will not be consumed or we rather that we would not just consume that which is not bread, that which does nothing for us. So let's pray this purchase based on Isaiah 61. It says when the Lord Jesus help me in 2021 consume that which satisfies, helped me consume the richest of fair and not labor for that which does not satisfy in Jesus name. Amen. Great, great prayer. Okay. Well, Happy New Year. Anybody shoot fireworks? We had a few. We had a few. Got a few left, actually. I want to share a verse with you. We're gonna do an exercise here that was inspired by my wife. But a couple verses I want to share so I'm not really giving a sermon today I'm giving a thought, Okay. But it starts with this verse. And this is Proverbs chapter four, verse 25. It says this, let your eyes look straight ahead, fix your gaze directly before you give careful thought to the pass of your feet, and be steadfast in all your ways. Do not turn to the right or the left keep your foot from evil. So let's look at this real quick, just in terms of bullet points. Number one, I think that this would be the first thing to do in this list is to give the give careful thought to the past for your feet. Instead, fasten all yours, you guys know that? We just ended 2020, which was an unprecedented year, right? And for some of you guys, maybe it was really good. Some of you guys maybe it was really bad. But whether it was good or bad, it was unprecedented. We've never had anything like this, at least in my lifetime. that I know of. And so it's been a very, it's been like a new, just, it's it's just been different. It's been new. We've had to figure out new ways to do things, new ways to have church, new ways to actually just go about our our daily, our daily lives. But God's people God has called us to be intentional. And I want you to think about something for just a moment. We just imagine this and I do this about once a year. Let me see if I brought this book with me or not. I did not bring it with me. There's a here's a book that I really recommend. It's called the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. But I pull this book out every so often to be reminded that I'm responsible for my life. And the things that I invest my life in are the things that, like that I have the power of choice and something Stephen Covey says that I really love, he says, between an action, and our response is our freedom to choose. And God has given us the ability to choose and something he said yesterday, he said it so well, yesterday when I was down by the pond, he said it, I read this is, this is a passage I've read many times. But he said, if we don't deeply accept the reality, that our current life is result of choices we made in the past, then we have no reason to believe that if we change that our future will be any different. And so I think that's a very powerful statement. So I read, I read little bits of this book, occasionally, just to stir that up in myself. And remember that I'm not a victim of my circumstances. And I'm not a victim to COVID. I'm not a victim to whatever. But I do have the ability to do this, to give careful thought to the past of my feet. And one of my favorite verses in the whole Bible is in Proverbs bla bla bla. And it says that the wisdom of the wise, is that they give thought to their ways. And I'm sorry, I can't remember exactly where it is. But this is what makes the wise the wisdom of the wise is that I give thought to their ways. And so we're thinking people, right, so this verse, this is proverbs 426, right here, it says, give careful thought to the path of your feet. Once you give some thought, and this is what we're going to do today, I have a little handout that we're going to do is we're going to we're going to give some thought to 2020. And have just a moment that jog you guys know that I'm all about not just giving you homework, but actually doing work while we're here. But to actually jog our memory. And I've got a creative way for us to do this. But we're gonna give some thought to our 2020 month by month. And anyway, hopefully, that will stir in us some things that we want to be intentional about reflection allows now and this is stuff I've said to you guys before. reflection is a tool that allows us to attach meaning to things that have happened. If you don't reflect, you're not able to attach meaning to the things that mattered. You may have done something that mattered but you don't know that it matters because you have thought about it. But if you can reflect and attach meaning on something that mattered, oh, I spent time with my family at a chalet in Tennessee. that mattered. Okay, that's my reflection, I grab that reflection, and then I'm able to move it into the future through planning. Got that? And you guys, I'm not a big huge planner. Okay. But reflection is so important that it allows me to see what is valuable to me, and then move it into my future by being intentional by the power, my choice, right? So give careful thought of the past of your feet. What's the next thing it says is let your eyes look straight ahead. So once you decide, okay, that chalet thing, I think we might want to do that again next Christmas. Now look to that. Or maybe it's I want to lose 15 pounds, then Okay. Now I can lock on to that. And so this is the look, let your eyes look straight ahead, fix your grip gaze directly before you. And I think the last one is like he's just send the same thing over again, right? Don't turn to the left or right, by the way, don't do evil. Okay. One thing that you should always know in planning is something I was teaching at Chapel before the end of the year, is that when you fix your eyes on what you want to do, sin will always slow you down. If you decide to stay in a Windows and there's always a price tag on and it slows you down in your destiny. That's why God hates sin. It's no good for us. It messes us up and so so the writer of Proverbs if you needed the three points in a poem, three number point number one is be give careful thought your ways. Number two is look straight towards what you want, what you want to do. And then number three is don't sin. And my poem is There once was a boy named Billy. He walked through a land that was hilly. That's it. That's all I got. That's my poem. Okay. Now, that's a thought I want to share. We're gonna do an exercise on this. But I want to say one more thing before we do our exercise and and it's If you can compartmentalised with me, so what I was just talking about, I'm about to talk about something a little bit different, but I want to say it. And this is Hebrews 1025, let us not neglect our meeting together some people do but encouragement others, especially, they have his return is drawing near. I want you guys to, I want you to, I want to say something like, my goal is to not have a long service today. But to and this is like in the coming weeks, is to create space for us to talk and to pray together. And during our little coffee breaks to connect, is because this is something that we don't have in the COVID era. Okay, this is something that we need, in particular, as the body of Christ. And this verse from Hebrews 1025, I want you guys to understand that there is a difference in being careful about COVID. And being lazy about gathering together. So we want to make sure that we're being careful, not not lazy, right, because this is easy. But here's my thought, because we we actually bumped our school back a week, for COVID concerns. I'm starting a week and we considered canceling service today. But one thing we realized, as we were talking about this is this man, ginger, is that we need this, we we need you, we need this, Jesus expressly said, if any two or three would gather in my name, I would be in their midst. And one thing that is so important, I think it's more important than what we really realize is that when we're gathered, with the body of Christ, and I know that people are gathering online, and that's legitimate, I love it, but I don't love it nearly as much as I love actually see in your faces. And was, what I was gonna say is I think there's something that we received from being the presence of God. And, you know, even if we just came in, had worship, and then just talk, of course, I want to be able to teach the Word of God. But as a pastor, I'm often my, my mode of thought is like when I'm preparing is, what can I give? It's gonna, what can I preach? It's gonna equip and empower, strengthen, encourage, feed the sheep, right? That's what I think. But what I'm thinking right now, is not just what can I give, but what can I receive from the body of Christ, I might sound selfish, but it's not. Because we need each other. And so there's something about us, Gavin, I'm just thinking, this might sound simple. But it's not simplistic. It's simple that if we will gather in his name, there is something of substance that we receive. I think sometimes we may not, we may not even know it. Do you know that when you're riding down a dusty road, and you get coated with dust, you don't realize till the end of the ride, Oh, I got dust all over me. I think it's the same way with glory, dust, you know, we're riding together on this, this, this, this path together. And it's dusty in the room, except the dust that I'm talking about is what gives you life. It's the stuff that we labor for that satisfies there's something about being together that is bred for us. And so anyway, I know I'm preaching the choir here, right? But my courage in these days ahead is to see the value in us being together there is there is there is tremendous value in US gathering and I know, especially maybe this COVID time, it's easier to say Hey, man, I think I'm just gonna stream Mark batterson or somebody like that, you know who's really great a great preacher, you know, I mean, don't preach nearly as good as Pastor Josh, but I'm just going I'm just gonna stream stream that today. And, and, and I you know, I'm not knocking you I'm not your I'm not the church police. Right. But when we didn't know some of there's tremendous value in being together with brothers and sisters. And yeah, that's almost say about that. Now, I've got some helpers that are going to pass out this sheet. And this is gonna be fun by the way. Let's go back to our verse. Let your eyes look straight ahead. you're careful thought of the past. Have your feet. And here's what we're going to do. This is actually, you know, I talked about reflection and then planning. reflection is a necessary step before planning, in my opinion, because you don't want to plan to be stupid, right? You want to plan something that matters. So reflection is that step that enables you to grab hold of something that you thought about, and move it into the future. Now, one thing that you're gonna need is your phone. You're gonna need your phone. So ginger, you spontaneously did this. Would you like to tell us what you did you have any? any input? Or you did? Okay. Yeah, so yesterday, I wanted to sit down and before like making goals or plans kind of reflecting over the last year. So I just got my phone out. And you know how you can go through month by month. And so I just went through each month and made a few points from you know, January, here are a few things that happened. And it's surprisingly, you almost don't remember January and February of last year, because March and COVID. Just everything changed so much. But we had a huge January in February, our school got accredited with something we worked really hard for a few months on. And we were able to get that in and after after March, they didn't do any more accreditation visits. So looking back through that, so I was looking through my phone, at pictures, and basically reminded me of things that happen. So instead of just trying to remember actually going through my mind each picture on my phone, another one in February, we started looking at houses. So I'm looking through my phone, I started seeing all these houses we looked at. And so we started thinking I think we want to move, you know, we were looking at houses, and no doors really opened, you know, things kind of closed. And then in March, when everything shut down, we ended up moving back to our Well, we didn't really move we just said, okay, kids Pack your things, we're going back to this, our house out in the country that previously was too far out for us to live there. So we ended up renting it, when COVID happened, all of our rentals were canceled. So we're like, okay, we don't have to go anywhere. So we can be 30 minutes out in the country. And anyway, that has been a huge source of life for us the rest of the year, being out there. So anyway, just looking month by month kind of triggered, the good things and bad things that happen. And so what she ended on there was and bad things. So we're here's what you want to do. So get out your phone, go to your pictures, app. iPhone, it's just called photos. And you want to scroll back all the way to January 2020. And let the pictures kind of help jog your memory, like and here's the deal is that, um, some of the things that you have pictures of that might not be the actual thing that you write down, but it might just remind you of something. So if you'll notice, you guys see on your sheet, you see that little arrow, guess how many of those arrows are on your sheet, prepare to be blown away. There's 12 of them. Okay, so the top one would be January. And let's go through, you can write down something, you're just remembering something. But you might remember something that was good luck, Ginger doing this. This allowed her to see a narrative of how we, we honestly didn't know if we would ever move back into that place out in the county until our kids graduated from high school. That's kind of what we thought. And now we're back and we love it. And so we've got land, we got space, shot a deer almost off the front porch this past week. Anyway, that was glorious. So um, so let's take this, we're gonna turn some music on. And we're going to take about 10 minutes to do this. Let's see, we probably need more than 10 minutes, we might take about 15 minutes. And then we're going to end our service today by actually doing some committing of 2021 into the Lord's hands. And I have a microphone up here. So we want to get to that. But let's let this be a moment. Hey, you might see a picture that triggers a bad memory. And that's actually okay. Because it might be something that you want to think I would like to address that in 2020 more Tracking with me. It's okay to make mistakes if you learn from them, right? I heard somebody say this we don't learn from experience we learn from evaluated experience. That's what we learn from. So anyway, I'm going all the way back. Do you have some music back there? For more information about the visit the OIC dot o RG. Thanks for listening