John Pound: Welcome to the Thee Generation Podcast. My name is John Pound, and I’m coming to you today from Menominee Falls, Wisconsin. Well, Christmas just finished, and I hope that you enjoyed your time. I had some good time away with family. I know that we did. And it’s always an exciting time every Christmas to get to see people you haven’t seen in a while and spend some time making memories. Well, with that in mind, we’re facing the new year, 2020. Hard to believe we’ve gotten this far. And as we come to the new year, I want to share with you just a couple thoughts this morning that I think will be an encouragement to you and a help. When I was a teenager, my youth pastor challenged us in Sunday school one morning on New Year’s Eve with this verse in Philippians chapter number 4. Paul says, Forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. You know, the New Year’s an exciting time. It’s a time when folks usually try to look forward to what’s coming. They oftentimes will make goals. You’ve probably heard of New Year’s resolutions. Maybe you’ve even made some this year. Now, typically those goals don’t go exactly as planned. What most people find is that they maybe start good for a couple of weeks and then fall flat on their face. But oftentimes there’s another thing that happens during the New Year. It’s the guilt of last year. We begin to look over and reflect on what happened this past year. So how did this past year go for you? 2019, what was it like? Maybe for some of you, you got saved this year, and that was an exciting thing. Have you grown since then? Maybe for some of you, you’ve been saved a while, but maybe you didn’t reach your goals in 2019. Well, I want to encourage you about one thing. All of us today, as we face the new year, can do what Paul did. Whether we did well or whether we did poorly, we can forget those things which are behind, and we can fix our eyes, we can reach forth unto those things which are before. So, this new year, 2020, I’d like to focus on four areas of growth that we can all make in this new year. They’re actually areas that Jesus made when he was a teenager. I got saved when I was 15 years old, and at 15, I was in the middle of my teenage years. I had never been to church before. That was not something that we did in my family. And I came to know the Lord Jesus Christ, my Savior, at 15. Well, about a month after I was saved, somebody gave me a book entitled The Teenage Years of Jesus Christ. And that book changed my life. I had never really thought about the fact that Jesus was a teenager I mean sure I believed in Jesus I just accepted him to be my savior and I knew that he came and lived on the earth you know Christmas time we celebrate his birth and Easter we celebrate his death but there’s a lot that happened in between and I didn’t really think about that and this book The Teenage Years of Jesus Christ was all based around one verse it was based around Luke 2.52 because Luke 2.52 is really the only historical reference in Scripture that we have about what happened while Jesus was a teenager. You ever thought about that before? You know, what was Jesus like as a teenager? What are the things that Jesus did? How did he act? What did he do? Where did he go? What were his hobbies? What were his interests? Luke 2.52 gives us a little bit of an insight into that, and here’s what it says. And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man. This is the only recording we have of Jesus in teenage years. This is all that the Bible tells us, but it tells us this for a reason, because it gives us Jesus’ life as an example for our own. The first area of focus I want to look at today is in this passage, and it says, Jesus increased in wisdom. Jesus made a point to purposefully increase in wisdom during his teenage years, And I think that’s an area of focus we should have as we enter the new year. Solomon said, the wisest man in all the Bible, he said, with all thy getting, get wisdom. Well, how do we get wisdom? You ever thought about that? I mean, sure, people grow in wisdom. There are some people that seem wise and there are some people that seem not so wise. But how do we grow in wisdom? What do we do? Well, Proverbs 9.10 gives us a little bit of an answer to that question. And it says this, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And the knowledge of the holy is understanding. You know, today, the way that you can increase in wisdom is very simple. It’s by growing in the fear of the Lord and growing in your knowledge of God. Well, how do we do that? The answer? Knowing God’s word. Knowing God’s word. Do you know God’s word? Are you purposefully spending time in God’s word? Several years ago, I was reading a magazine, and they had mentioned the fact that the average person reads about 250 words a minute. They said that if you were to read less than the average person, you were only to read 200 words a minute. And you were to spend 60 minutes every day reading the Bible that you could actually read through the entire Bible in one month. Now, I want you to think about this. Can you imagine finishing your Bible reading for the entire year by the end of January? you know you can. 60 minutes of Bible reading a day and you could be done with the Bible reading in one month. Now I’m not saying that you need to read the Bible through in January and then just forget about it for the rest of the year. But what I am saying is maybe what you can do is take the beginning month of this new year and spend it focusing on growing in wisdom. You can take some more time. Maybe it’s not an hour. Maybe it’s half an hour. Maybe it’s 20 minutes. But you can spend some time growing and immersing yourself in God’s Word, knowing God’s Word, studying God’s Word. You know, a great thing to do in the new year would be to get with some friends and start a Bible study. I know that in our church, we have Bible study kind of built into our Sunday school classes. We get together in small groups and spend time around God’s Word. That’s a precious time for me. When I get to get around with other believers my age and my same life stage and begin to study through the Word of God what it says, and we begin to talk over how it applies to our lives, it really is a dynamic thing. And that’s an area that Jesus focused on, growing in wisdom. But number two, we see that he also focused on stature. The Bible says, and Jesus increased in wisdom and stature. Now, when we think about stature, usually we think about size. That’s what I think about. You talk about the stature of a football player. You think about somebody who’s big. You think about their size. But the word stature here really carries with it the idea of more than just size. It carries with it the idea of maturity. You ever been around somebody who was really immature? Everything’s a joke, nothing serious. I remember when I was in high school, I played soccer for a little bit of time. And I remember we had this guy that came out to play soccer with us and his name was Lucas. He was a new kid at the school. It was his first year and he was really, really immature. I mean, it was bad. We’d be in the middle of class and Lucas would say something dumb. He’d just kind of yell it out and try to be funny, but it wasn’t really that funny, you know what I mean? Everything was a joke. Nothing was ever serious. I remember actually playing a soccer game one time, and it was terrible. We’re on the one end of the field, and we’re playing as hard as we can. We’re kicking the ball around. We’re slide tackling and all this stuff. And then the other team gets the ball and they begin to run towards our goal. Well, we made Lucas our goalie because we felt like it was the only thing he could really do. And so we turn around, and no kidding, here is Lucas literally with his finger in his nose, picking his nose, just staring at the ground. And he’s not even in front of the goal. He’s off to the sidelines, and we’re all screaming at the top of our lungs, Lucas, look, Lucas, don’t need to stop. And sure enough, the other team scored, and it’s no wonder why we lost that day. Maybe you’ve been around somebody who’s immature. Maybe you have somebody that you know closely that’s immature. It can be frustrating at times. But you know, the only thing worse than an immature person in the middle of a soccer game is an immature Christian in the middle of a spiritual battle. You know, sometimes when we see somebody who’s immature, we want to walk over to them. We want to say, just grow up, man. Can’t you just grow up? But young person, I want to tell you, you’re part of a battle. There’s a battle going on in your public school right now. There’s a battle going on in your neighborhood. There’s a battle raging in your family. There’s a battle happening in your church. There’s a battle in your youth group. And God wants you to grow up. He wants you to be mature. He wants you to take it seriously. You know, I meet young people every day who go to a public school and never witness one time to anybody in their school. They go to a public school, they don’t pray for their schoolmates. Frankly, they don’t even really think about it. They just think, well, that’s just the way that people are at my school. They’re never going to change, so I’m just going to do my thing. They can do their thing, and we’ll just kind of get along and try not to get in each other’s way. But in reality, that’s not what God has called you to do. God’s called you to be spiritually mature, to spiritually grow up, to take responsibility not just for yourself but for those around you. You see, young person, one day you’ll answer to God for what you did with the opportunities he gave you. And if you’re here today, maybe you have a public school that you go to every single day. You know, you can witness to folks there. Maybe you have a Christian school that you go to. You have a responsibility there to stand for what’s right. You have a responsibility to pray for other people around you. Maybe you have a neighborhood. One day you’ll answer to God for people that lived in your neighborhood, whether you went and witnessed to them, whether you went and talked to them about the Lord. Maybe you have family members that are unsaved. And God says very specifically that in the day of judgment, we’ll give an account of our life. In fact, we’ll answer for every idle word that we’ll speak. Young person, you know one of the things that you can do in 2020 is focus on growing in your stature, in your spiritual maturity. It’s time to grow up. It’s time to get serious about the things of God and what he’s called you to do. Maybe some of you need to start prayer meetings in your school. Maybe you need to start witnessing more. Maybe you need to focus on just encouraging other believers to walk with God. I don’t know. But today, God has a plan for you. He has something he wants you to accomplish in 2020, and you need to make it an area of focus in your life. Number three, we see that Jesus not only increased in wisdom and stature, but the Bible says he also increased in favor with God. Now, this is kind of a perplexing part of this passage because oftentimes you hear somebody say, you know, you can never increase in favor with God. God loves you perfectly. He loves you completely, exactly the way that you are. and you can’t earn God’s love, you can’t earn God’s favor, it’s not possible. That’s true. You know, the Bible says that God does love us with a perfect love. There is no more love. It’s not that God loves somebody else more than he loves us. We already have his favor. His favor is called his grace, and it’s not deserved. So if we can’t deserve his grace, then it’s not possible for us to get more of his favor in that way. But you know what’s interesting about this word here, the word for the word favor, we also find it in 2 Peter 3.18. It’s the exact same word for the word grace. The Bible says in 2 Peter 3.18, but grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. You know, you can’t earn more of God’s grace, but you can experience more of it. You know, you can’t earn more of God’s love, but you can experience more of it. You say, well, how’s that? By growing in your relationship with God. Did you know the more that you spend time with God, the more you grow in his grace? The more that you spend time with Jesus, the more that you grow in knowledge of him. I wonder, what is it that you’re going to do to develop your relationship with God in 2020? Maybe it’s devotions. You know, for a lot of us, it’s easy to start the year strong in our devotional life and then kind of fall off the cliff. A lot of people have Bible reading schedules. They never make it through because they lose their faithfulness maybe halfway through the year. Things get busy. Life gets tough. Things happen, and then they get discouraged, and that’s the end of it. You know, maybe it’s time for you to start again. In an earlier podcast, I talked about how to have consistent devotion, keys to consistent devotions, and there were three of them. Have a place, have a time, have a plan. Have a time, have a place, have a plan. You know, God wants you to have consistent time with him every day. Why? Because he loves you. He wants to spend time with you. At The Generation, we often talk about the hour with God. Maybe some of you have been to our conference and you’ve gone through the hour with God. Maybe you’ve gotten one of those Christ Walk journals. I wonder, have you stopped doing that recently? Have you kind of fallen off keeping up with that? You know, 2020 is a great time to restart that journey. It’s a great time to commit to, once again, those 21 days of prayer. Spending time every single day spending an hour with God. It’d be a great thing to do. You know, maybe church attendance is something that you need to start spending more time with. I meet young people all the time who struggle in just coming to church consistently. Can I encourage you to get back in church in 2020? To make that a priority in your life? You’re never going to grow unless you’re consistently under the preaching of God’s word and around other believers. So if you want to grow in your relationship with God, you need to get under his word. You need to get under preaching. And that happens by going to a good, solid church. Maybe for you, you already go to church, but honestly, your involvement’s kind of slacked off. I know that Christmas time’s busy. And for all of us, it’s easy to get distracted with family, with responsibilities, with different things. And we lose focus on our involvement in God’s church. hey can I tell you January would be a great time for you to go to your pastor and say hey pastor I really want to get involved this year what can I do what are some steps I can take what are some ministries I can get involved in how can I help maybe you want to go to your youth pastor or youth pastor’s wife and say hey is there anything I can do for you is there anything I can do around the church building maybe it’s just cleaning up maybe it’s just cleaning the youth room vacuuming some floors, cleaning some toilets I don’t know but I’m sure that if you make yourself available God has something he’d have you to do increasing in favor with God, your relationship with him. But finally and fourthly, the last thing that Jesus did during his teenage years was the Bible says he increased not only in favor with God, but in favor with man. He increased in his relationships with others. For many families, Christmas is hard. Holidays are hard because it’s a reminder of the brokenness in their home. Many families are estranged. Children haven’t talked to parents in years. Maybe they’re grown-up children. They live far away. Maybe there are divorced families. I come from a divorced home where mom and dad were never together. Since I was five years old, I lived in a divorced home, and I would spend Christmas and summer with my dad, and I would spend the rest of the time with my mom. Maybe that’s you. You come from a situation like that. Can I tell you, if there’s some strained relationships in your life, then what you need to do is you need to make an area of focus your life this year developing those relationships. Maybe there’s somebody you’ve hurt and you need to go and apologize. Maybe there’s somebody who’s hurt you that you need to forgive. I wonder, what relationships do you need to focus on? My wife and I were ministering last year to a young lady named Mackenzie. She was here in the Wisconsin area. We were sitting down with her and I asked her, I said, You know, Mackenzie can ask you a question. On a scale of 1 to 10, how’s your relationship with your dad, or with your mom? Excuse me. And she said, my mom is probably about a 6. My mom and I get along fairly okay. Okay. Well, Mackenzie, how’s your relationship with your dad? She looked at me, and she very angrily said, my relationship with my dad is probably a negative 10. Then she said these words. She said, I hate my dad. There had been something that had happened earlier in her life between her and her father that had caused some division, and she had some deep bitterness pent up towards her father that she’d never dealt with. Because of that, she had grown estranged from her father, and anything she could do to get away from him, she did. She lived in the same house with the man, and yet said, I hate my dad. You know, that’s not God’s intention for the home. That’s not God’s intention for the family. Can I encourage you? Maybe this year you need to take a look and say, how’s my relationship with mom and dad? How’s my relationship with my brothers and sisters? How’s my relationships with the people around me? Are they broken? Do they need to be healed and fixed? Jesus Christ is the only one that can heal them. He’s the only one that can take care of them. But if you bring those broken relationships to him, he can heal them. If you bring those wounds and scars to Jesus, he can fix them. He’s the only one who can. So I wonder, what are you going to do in 2020? Maybe 2019 wasn’t such a great year for you. But like Paul, we can forget those things that are behind. Our failures and our successes. And we can reach forth under those things which are before. And like Jesus, we can increase in wisdom, stature and maturity, and favor with God and with men. But it all happens through this simple process. Total surrender to God’s will and total dependence on His strength to enable you to do what He’s called you to do.

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