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Replay 1 Week

The Point Your past leads you to your present, and your present shapes your future.

Live Speak 2015 has been an incredibly crazy year. So many bad things have happened, but there were also so many great things that happened.

Here are some things that you might remember from 2015:

- “Whip and Nae Nae” was the iconic dance of 2015

- John Stewart left the Daily Show, David Lettermen left the Late Show and Stephen Colbert took over

- The pure evil of ISIS and their horrible attack in Paris claiming a number of innocent lives

- The new Star Wars is released in theaters.

- Uptown funk with Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars tops charts

- Police brutality allegations frequent news headlines

- Donald Trump actually runs for president—and is actually the front runner for the Republicans

- Drones have been a big thing this year

- Liquid water was found on Mars

- Add any other big things that happened in 2015 (both positive and negative) that you think should be on the list.

Talk about some things that happened in your life in 2015 (good things, hard things, things you’ve learned, ways you’ve grown).

We get so busy in life that sometimes we forget to just stop … to just stop and think about all the things that have happened in our lives … to stop and celebrate the great things … and to think about how we’ve grown through the hard things.

For some of you, 2015 was a blast. For others of you, you just can’t wait for 2016 to roll in and just move on and move forward.

2015 for some of you brought about good grades while for others of you it was the year of that hard break up. Some of you tried so hard and made the team, others of you stopped hanging out with some of your best friends.

But here’s what we need to remember and hold on to:

Our past determines our present, and our present is what shapes our future.

We’ve been shaped by people, events, successes, failures, and our own perspectives. All those things in our past have made us who we are right now.

So, it’s important for us to look back on all the good and bad that’s brought us to where we are right now, so that we can be purposeful about where we want to go in our lives.

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Tell a story about how you were purposeful in your life and it paid off. It could be going after and pursuing someone that you wanted to date, a job that you wanted to get, or anything you can think of.

That’s the important part … being purposeful about moving forward. We don’t just want to dwell on our past or stay victims of things that have happened to us. We need to move forward.

Look at what it says in Philippians 3:13-14 NLT … I focus on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us.

So what we’re going to do, is spend some time looking at all the things that have happened to us throughout 2015—both the good and the bad. We’re going to see how those things have brought us to where we are right now … in this very moment. But we’re not just going to stop there. We’re going to determine where we want the direction of our lives to go in 2016, where we want to end up, and what we want to accomplish by the end of next year. And here’s how we’re going to do it …

Explain the various stations, how they’ll work, and what they mean (see Experiential Options).

Let students spend time going through the stations while soft worship music plays. When they’re done, have them come back to their seats and finish in worship together.