GOLFERS HAVE A CHANGE OF HEART
When you willingly give Jesus all that you are and all that you have, you receive so much more in return.
I heard a story once about a group of guys who were returning from playing golf in rural Georgia. As they drove down a two-lane road they came up on a smoldering house. It was obvious it had burned during the night. Standing in front of the smoldering ashes was a distraught woman with a small child. The men were Christians, so they stopped the car and asked if she was okay. She said nobody was hurt but she had lost all she had. The men each pulled a few dollars out of their pockets and handed it to the woman and said, "God bless you."
They drove off in silence. After a couple of miles the driver stopped the car and took off his golf hat. He turned to his buddies and said, "Okay, take out your wallets and give me all the money you have and we’re going to go back and give it to her." They emptied their wallets and one man even wrote a large check. The amount in the hat totaled over $1,000.
When they returned, they found the woman standing in the same place. The driver got out and said to the woman, "We just gave you some money, but we made a mistake. Would you be willing to give me all that money back?"
The woman looked at him as if he was crazy, but without complaining she gave him the few dollars they had given her. The driver then added that money to that inside his hat and handed her the whole hat. Then he said, "We’ll be sending you more."
What a great picture of the fulfillment of this parable. God asks us to give Him all we have—and we don’t have that much—and what we have He gave to us in the first place. But when we willingly surrender everything to Him, He pours out so much blessing we can’t even contain it all!
(From a sermon by David Dykes, Sell Out and Buy Up! 8/17/2012)