Rock Solid Finances: Part 1 “Live Simply”
Preached by Jimmy Seibert
4/18/2010
God’s desire for us is that money doesn’t have our heart, but He does. The purpose of money is to fulfill God’s purposes on the earth, not just ours. My prayer is that in this journey over the next few weeks, we would find ourselves not standing on the sand that shifts, but standing on the rock. Let’s pray together.
Spirit of the Living God, would you open your heart and your mind to us. Would you show us how to trust, how to live? Lord, we trust that Your Word is true and accurate. It always has been and it always will be. Lord, I ask that You cut through our culture today and our own ways and would show us Your ways. Lord, we trust You with our lives. Bring Your Word alive today. Take this five loaves and two fish, Lord. Break it for Your glory we pray, in Jesus’ precious Name, Amen.
Well in order to lay the foundations for everything we are going to be talking about , I need to give a little background of Laura’s and mine own journey to frame where I am coming from, Biblically and practically, and even where we are coming from as a church. From the earliest days that I can remember, I wanted stuff. Maybe you are a lot like me. In my household, how I grew up was mom and dad were wonderful. They were good at taking care of our needs, food and shelter; they would take care of our basic needs. Anything we wanted, they said we had to work for yourself. As early as I possibly could remember, I began to work. Whether it was a lemonade stand or mowing lawns, painting houses, building fences, I went to work. I worked in scrap yards, gas stations. I had 25 different jobs from the time I was 5 years old until I graduated from college. Every one of those jobs had one thing in mind: make more money to get more stuff.
Nothing was wrong with the work ethic, it was needed. We’ll talk about that next week. The work ethic was needed, but the motive behind it was so that I could keep up with everybody else, so that I could be the coolest, the biggest, the best. There was something wrong with the heart. When I got to college, and I got to Baylor, I grew up in Beaumont, TX and there were a few wealthy people, but I came to Baylor and WOW! Look at all these people with all this money and power. I thought I want to be like them, and like them, and my heart went out to it all. Then, God got a hold of my heart. As God began to deal with me about loving Him with all my heart, I began to open the Scriptures and begin the Book of Matthew. I read it and said, “I will obey whatever God says.” I ran into some Scriptures early on that have been life-changing. The first one was Matthew 5:32, “If anyone asks for anything, give it. If anyone asks to borrow anything, give it without expecting anything in return.” I thought, wow. I’m actually supposed to give what I have, and Jesus actually asks me to give freely and not get up tight about it when someone doesn’t return something that is mine. I thought, “Well, I’ll obey Lord.” I began to give things away. Over the next year, I gave away just about everything I had.
There was something that God was doing. The big one though was actually Matthew 6:25-33. It’s titled in Bible “The Cure for Anxiety.” It goes through all these things we are not supposed to worry about: food, clothing, what we wear, what we have. Jesus basically reiterates surely your Father knows that you need these things. He ends with Matthew 6:33, “Seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.” I realized that I was seeking things and materialism as a way to satisfy a need in me rather than the Kingdom of God first.
Somewhere in the midst of just these early days, and a number of other situations that happened, I said, “I am going to quit living for myself in grasping for things, and I’m going to open up my hands and trust God, and give freely and live seeking the Kingdom of God first.”
Well those were great days of God defining and changing and rearranging things. As a result, I found myself the next summer, one year later after all these departing things related to finances, I found myself in Papua, New Guinea. I was on an island for two and a half months, in the jungles living with three pairs of shorts and three t-shirts. I was living as simple as I have ever lived in my life and I was the happiest I have ever been in my life.
I was free. I was free, it didn’t have me anymore, it was just serving whatever God wanted to do. A big life defining moment, there will be other things I will share, but now for my wife, for Laura. Laura grew up middle-upper class, in a large house on a cul-de-sac in Houston, Texas. She didn’t only have her needs met, but her wants were met. Her family was frugal Germans; there was a work ethic in there. They weren’t extravagant, but there definitely was no limit to if they wanted something, they could get it. She came to Baylor, and her deal was not materialism as much as it was comparison.
What does someone else look like? What does someone else have as far as popularity? Influence? That comparison, where it drove me to great anxiety to try to get, for her it drove her into anorexia as a way to control. But God broke in. Just as He broke into my heart by reading through the Scriptures, God broke into her heart in her desperation and need and bondage. He met with her and set her free from trying to control her life and to try to be like somebody else, to mirror off this world. He helped her let go of the world so she could be free. She got into such a hole that if she didn’t let go of the world, she couldn’t find God’s deliverance.
She finds deliverance, I find a letting go of possessions and we meet each other begin this journey together. We decide as we looked at the Scriptures, and we looked at our life before us and said here are a few key things. Number one, calling won’t be based around money. Whether someone pays us or not, we are going to hear God and do what He says. Whatever job that is, whether the salary is low or high; whatever location that is, whether we like it or not; whatever sacrifice is involved, whatever, it doesn’t really matter, we are not going to make money the centerpiece of our decision making, we are going to make God the centerpiece of our decisions. Let me make sure that you understand, when you choose that way, it does not mean you will be healthy, wealthy and prosperous. It does mean you will prosper in your soul and that God will provide your needs. You also need to be willing to live with that sacrificial attitude, because here is what I have found: when God is central, there are times that you narrow life, and you have very little and there are times that you have much. Paul said he had learned to abase and abound. You will get the full spectrum of life, Congratulations! If you ever wanted to go on a wild adventure, make God the centerpiece and not money.
You have to be willing to live lean, and you have to be able to not get consumed by wealth when God brings abundance. That was one deal, it was we are going to make God the center of our calling. The second key piece for us was that we are going to de-accumulate to deal with the hording and the lifestyle that we came out of. We asked God what to do, and for us it was to return 90% of our wedding gifts. We basically got rid of most everything we had, and literally we could fit our life in the back of a Toyota pick up truck, it was a small pickup truck by the way. We moved into the hood at $185 a month rent. We lived among people that were challenged and struggling in life. We went on this journey to not only live simply, but also to serve others.
We called that journey extracting our suburbian soul. Everything we felt like we had a right to, everything we felt was needful to be okay, we let go of. There was something about the de-accumulation that set us free to respond to God. There was a season, that’s why Jesus speaks at times to sell everything and follow Me, because He wants to set us free to address life in a new way, a new light.
The third thing we committed to was to give generously. We decided before God, whether we have a little or whether we have a lot, we will give abundantly. The first three years of our tax returns, I think the first year we made $6000, the next year was $9,000 and so was the next. We gave away so much money in those next three years, I got audited the third year. They said, “You can’t give this much and make this much, you are basically cancelling yourself out.” I said, “I don’t understand either, it just kind of happens.” They didn’t like that; they wanted to get some figures to go with it all. We worked it out, but here is the point: it was so radical, that it didn’t make sense to anyone and it definitely didn’t make sense to us. Here is what we found out: IF we didn’t give real radically when we had nothing, then we won’t give radically when we have abundance. Can I just tell you that right now? If you are saying, “Hey, why don’t the people with means right now give more? Why don’t you start giving and being an example, and God will set you up for more.”
There were some things we went through, principles we were going to live by. A fourth principle we set is that we are going to work diligently. When God calls us to something, we are going to be faithful to work hard, six days of work and rest the seventh. We are not going to be sitting around waiting for everything to happen. We are going to be diligent to the thing God has called us to, because we believe that if we will be faithful in little, we will be ruler over much and God will provide everything we need, and at times above and beyond what we could need.
One last thing, we would not have a poverty mentality in the midst of our decision making. When we made this decision, we made the decision to follow Jesus. If that led to abundance, praise God! We’d learn how to deal with it. If it led to nothing, praise God! We’d learn how to deal with it. But we would not have a mentality that somebody owes us anything, or that God is holding out on us. For God is an abundant God. He loves to do above and beyond. We would trust Him for those little surprises along the way, and sometimes big surprises. We would not live in a poverty mindset in the choices we made.
Basically, here we are 23 years later. We have been challenged on every one of those deals. One other thing, excuse me, we committed to being debt free. That means when we are in a fix, when it was really tight and we didn’t’ know which was out, we would not pull the credit card out to get out of it. So, 23 years later we don’t owe anybody anything, including our house, our cars, we owe nothing. We have lived through the journey of raising kids, of abounding and abasing. We have had the ups and the downs. We have led this church; we’ve had so many different challenges along the way. We’ve found God to be absolutely faithful with these basic principles.
We have put them into three basic thoughts. As I look at our own and other people’s journeys who find themselves rock solid, at peace in the midst of a changing and crazy world, how can I encapsulate it? We want to say it this way: We want to live simply, we want to work diligently and we want to give generously and we will trust God with our lives. Live simply, work diligently, and give generously.
That is what we want to go over the next three weeks. How do we stand rock solid? We live simply, we work diligently and we give generously and we trust God with our lives.
Let’s begin the first one with living simply. What does this mean? Is it a particular lifestyle, type of house, car or pair of clothes? I would say no, it is not in essence about judging one another by what is or what is not, what you have or do not have. It is all about the heart. Simplicity is a thing of the heart, not an external expression. Adam and Eve were living in Eden, the Garden of Eden, and the Garden of absolute abundance. They were the wealthiest people in the world (They were the only people in the world, but they were the wealthiest people in the world). They were living in the Garden, they were loving it. They had everything that was good for sight, for food. They had abundance. They had love unending, the presence of God. They had a job to do, to cultivate and take care of the earth and it was bearing fruit all the time. Everything they needed was there in absolute abundance. They were loving it.
But then they got greedy. They said, “This abundance is not enough.” Genesis 3:6-7 “When the woman saw that the tree, the tree they were told not to eat from was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes, and the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate. She gave it also to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were open and they knew that they were naked and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings.”
Here’s what happened. They were given everything, except one thing. But they said, “We must have that one thing too.” That one more thing, they had the mentality of more is better. Can I say that what God gives is enough? If you go for more is better, you will be on that train for the rest of your life that will carry you into every sin there is out there. For Adam and Eve, they said more is better. They went for more because it looked good and seemed like they could have even more than they needed. They went for more and it opened the gate, all of a sudden they got blinded, they couldn’t see. They began to cover themselves and to feel okay about themselves.
Do you know that is why many times we pursue material possessions? To cover ourselves, to feel good about ourselves. Why do you have to have the latest style clothes? Because it makes you feel better about yourself. Right? Have you ever thought that? Why don’t you get a new outfit, you’ll feel better about yourself…
C’mon, let’s dissect that statement fellow believers... “Let’s go get a new outfit so that I feel better about myself.” Let me go get some fig leaves and some other coverings because I don’t feel good about myself. We could just stop right there and repent, couldn’t we? Nothing is wrong with looking nice; that is not my point, my point is the heart. What are we trying to cover? Let me get a nicer house, because I compare myself to other people with other houses and I don’t feel good about where I am. We cover ourselves with houses, with cars, with clothes. We cover ourselves with money to have power and influence because we don’t feel okay with God and with ourselves. Remember, sin made life complex. Before sin, life was simple. They lived simply, loved by God, loving one another and working with joy in the job they had to cultivate the earth. They were free, the complexity of your heart and your mind and all the complexities of finance and everything, are a result of the fall, not a result of God’s intention for us.
He wants to set us free into simplicity; to set us free from the need to cover ourselves, because we’re not okay with God. You know that feeling, when you feel like you need something other than God to satisfy you – it should be the absolute “Woo! Woo!” red flag. Run to God, and be satisfied in Him, and you’ll have the right answer, whether or not to buy the house, the clothes or the car. It’s all about the heart.
In the New Testament, Jesus reiterates this in Mark 12:30-31, “and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” God is after your heart. In the Scriptures, the most spoken about issue is about money and possessions; 2,350 scriptures are used to talk about money and possessions. Sixteen of Jesus’ thirty-eight parables are about money and possessions. Why? Because God wants our heart, and we want stuff. We want something to replace the place that God has made for Himself.
It is not that God is against blessing, He is absolutely a God of blessing. The Scriptures say that He has created things for us to enjoy. It is not a sin to enjoy the blessings of God. But it is a sin to put your hope in the things, in the possessions you are getting a blessing from. God is after your heart. He is after my heart, He’s after your heart. He is asking us to return to Him first, so that we can see rightly to navigate the financial issue.
2 Corinthians 11:3 “But I am afraid that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds will be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.”
Why is it such a big deal that we rightly deal with money and possessions? So that our hearts and our minds would not be led away from simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ. How was Eve deceived? By wanting more.
Fellow Americans, this is our deal. We want more. We grasp to hide what is really going, and mask our heart that is in need of finding satisfaction in God Himself. When we are fully satisfied in Him, we can rightly deal with possessions in a way that is God honoring.
In the parable of the seed and the sower, Jesus says there is a soil that receives the Word, but because of the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things, they miss God. The deceitfulness of riches: it is a thing that draws us away to believe that it has satisfaction, yet it is only temporary. It is not what will satisfy you. We are made for more than that; we are made for God.
The Scriptures are clear: He is enough. So, what is our problem? Why is this a difficult message? It is because we are attached to this world more than we are to God. Here’s how you know: can you walk away from it all? Could you walk out of your house and give it to somebody else if God asked you to walk away? Can you walk away from it all? That means you are free. You are free to love God, to love others. One of the things that Laura and I have done is look through our finances to keep them as simple and clear as possible so we can walk away at any time. If God asks us to walk away, or give away, or sell something, we can do it without any major entanglements to move. We can move with God on any day, can you? That is the desire of God. That is what you are made for.
Let’s keep going with this. This is a prophetic word, a heart-word. 1 John 2:15-17. John is the one who loved Jesus more than anyone else. In the New Testament, he is the love guy. “Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world. The world is passing away, and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God lives forever.”
Now here it is, it’s back to the garden again: the lust of the eye, the boastful pride of life. It’s the things of the world, not the things of the Father. Again, I will balance this in a moment, but don’t miss the chance to repent. Don’t miss it. This is a great opportunity. I am setting you up. You can’t love two things. The Bible says you will love one and hate the other. You can’t love both God and money. It is the love of money that leads to all kinds of evil Money is not the problem, it is our attachment to it. It is not possessions that are the problem, wealth is not the problem. Actually, the Scriptures says that wealth is a blessing and it will add no sorrow to those who love God. So it’s not wealth that’s the problem, it’s our heart attachment to it. If we can deal with the heart, God can rightly let us be stewards of a little or a lot and it’s not a big deal. God has called us to Himself, and not to another.
Hebrews 12:1-2, speaking of the desire for you and I, “Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us [those who have gone before us], let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” There is a race to run brothers and sisters. You cannot run with your arms full of stuff and your longing going this way and that way. You will run into walls, you won’t fit through doors. You have got to let go of some stuff to get through the door. Narrow is the way that leads to life, and broad is the road that leads to destruction. If you keep accumulating, that stuff eventually traps you, even if it started out with good intentions. You have to consistently prune this area of your life or you will never stay where God has you.
We’ve got this stuff on the side of our house, this little planting-area. Someone told us it was good ground cover and it looks nice, so it’ll be fine. We put the ground cover down to keep the dirt from blowing around. It grew and it grew, and now I can’t even back my car out of the driveway. It grew way too much, now I have to get these huge clippers and I am procrastinating because I know how hard it’s going to be to prune this sucker so that the nice ground cover doesn’t take over my house! I can’t get my car out of the driveway; I can’t function because the ground cover got out of control.
Can somebody translate that for me? We have this deal about accumulation that takes us over and if you don’t prune that thing consistently, it ends up running your life. It’s amazing to think about America: stuff just shows up. There’s all these garage sales to raise money. Somehow, every year there is another garage sale full of stuff, yet “we don’t buy that much stuff.” It just shows up, right? You have to keep de-accumulating to be free.
God wants our heart. Are you satisfied today? I know it’s complex. I know there are so many issues. Let me try to get a little more practical: let’s take it up another level. God wants our heart. “God, You have my heart. I repent of taking things and possessions and trying to cover myself up and feel better about myself with what someone else has. God, I love You and I trust You. My desire is to be content.”
Contentment. What are you contending for? It’s not a particular lifestyle, you are contending for contentment, to not be restless anymore. You want to be at rest with God with what you have and who you are. That is what you are looking for. That is what God promises with the New Covenant, with the inner man. We have got to get there through the outer man.
Philippians 4:11-13 “Not that I speak from want [this is Paul], for I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am. I know how to get along with humble means, and I also know how to live in prosperity; in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need. I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.” Don’t you love it? He said “I have LEARNED” to be content. You know you came out of the womb discontent? You came out screaming for something, right? You came out discontent. Babies are always fussing because of something they need. I was in the store the other day and a kid was fussing for every little thing while his mom went along with every whim, and I just wanted to “lovingly discipline” the kid. That is discontentment. Mom thought it was okay, so she wasn’t going to do anything about it.
I love the story Danny Mulkey shared from a few years ago at an airport in Toronto. He was on the bus from one terminal to the next, and a kid is just yanking on his mom’s arm, saying “I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do that,” and the mom is just standing there silently. Another person on the bus started to pass a lollipop through the bus to pacify the little boy. It gets to the mom, and the person who passed it said, “Can we give this to your little boy? We thought it might make him happy…” The mom said, “I’m not bowing to that. Don’t give that to him.” Everyone in the bus started clapping. She was not going to justify that kind of activity with reward. I thought “Way to go, mom!” She stood up to discontentment.
Here’s the deal: we are all that little boy. C’mon… you may have learned to socially guard it a little bit, you are more under control. I promise you that if given the right circumstances you would be throwing the same temper-tantrum, “I don’t have enough! I don’t want that to happen! Why doesn’t anyone like me?! I don’t have enough stuff! I wanted this, I wanted that..” We all act like little children discontented.
Paul said, “I have learned the secret of contentment.” What is the secret of contentment? 1 Timothy 6:6-8 “But godliness actually is a means of great gain when accompanied by contentment. For we have brought nothing into the world, so we cannot take anything out of it either. If we have food and covering, with these we shall be content.” Why is America so discontented? Because food and covering is not enough - It’s got to be really cool covering, a big covering, ever-increasing covering. The food is not enough to have just enough to eat. We need to be able to go here and there and eat wherever we want. We are out of control. When your expectations get down to Biblical portion, you’ll be content. With food and covering I shall be content. Hallelujah! There’s a chance for you to walk out of here content, if you open your hands and say, “With food and covering I shall be content. I will let go of this world and it’s ways.” The problem is that everything around us swirls discontentment. Our economy runs off discontentment. If the marketers can’t make you discontent, they can’t make you buy something you don’t need. Then they can’t keep the economy running based on something that is false anyway, like rocket science.
Some of you are saying, “I can’t believe the economy is falling apart – it must be the government’s fault.” Oh my goodness, listen! This thing has been destined to tank since 1950 with all of this running and gunning and making people have to have bigger profits this quarter than last quarter based off errors in the stock market. Everything else under the sun is driven by emotionalism and spending and garbage and sin and everything else, and you are wondering why it all fell apart?! C’mon, you are a believer! You know what the Bible says, we are destined for destruction until we deal with the heart and change. An economy based on greed and dissatisfaction will eventually implode. So will a family, and so will you. That is why God calls us to Himself, to His way and not another way.
How do you find contentment? It must be in another spouse, in another possession, in another house, or job or church. You know what? If you are discontent now, you will be discontent there. You will not become content with something other than Jesus and your attentiveness to righteousness and submission to Him. It’s just not going to happen. When you get the bigger house or the new car, it’s not going to be enough.
Here’s the latest thing: now, what I really am grateful and thankful for is we realized debt is driven by this. Why are we in debt? Because we don’t have, and we want, therefore we leverage ourselves to get. Listen, let me make a little caveat here, there are a few people that are in debt because they could not take care of food and covering and they were desperate. I believe the Scripture speaks absolute mercy to that and speaks to us to help you. That is a very small percentage in this room. The majority of us are in debt for varied reasons, but the main one is that we want something now instead of waiting for when God provides it. When you decide that debt is an option, you will always go there. Until you have decided it is not an option, it will never change.
Listen, the Bible says in Romans 13:8 “Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another” Proverbs 22: 7 says, “The borrower is the lender’s slave.”
Okay? Here’s the deal. I want to make a little plug for Financial Peace University. We’ve had such a great run over the last 18 months. It’s a class we do on finance. They have eradicated, through the 180 people that have been through there, $698,000 in debt. That is how much they have eradicated. I need to get my number, but that is probably less than half of it, but that is amazing that there is that much debt in this room. Yes, it is encouraging. But on the other hand, oh my goodness! That doesn’t include home mortgages. That’s how much we have eradicated in the last 18 months. That means somewhere we accumulated this because we bought into the world’s system and not God’s.
Here’s a classic. The MasterCard priceless commercials: they build, they make you cry and want to run out and get into debt… I was deeply moved as a dad by seeing the “Hotdogs: $10… Baseball Cap: $40… A ball for your son at the game: $15… Time with your son: Priceless… MasterCard.” I thought “Oh! I must go in debt, because I want to love my kid and if I don’t go into debt, I don’t love my kid. I’m going to do it, we’ll go to the ballgame we can’t afford and get all the stuff!” What’s wrong with that? Go spend time with your kid! How about spending three hours throwing the ball with the guy? How about you go out in your backyard, or go to the park and get a ball (I will let you have one of mine if you don’t have one), someone has a glove, go throw the ball with your kid. If you want to be really loving, maybe include 3 or 4 other kids in the neighborhood and become one that loves others and teach your kid to live outside of themselves. Maybe watching the ballgame is okay, you know? Probably cut the commercials, but watching it at home is okay. In the end, they want you, not stuff.
I could share stories here all day long about people who have had everything and lost their family. They really did buy into the MasterCard commercial. The reason they give you a MasterCard is to make money off of you. C’mon… if they didn’t make money, they wouldn’t give you a card. Do you know that actually several years ago, when BankAmerica was restructuring a while back, they cancelled the credit card we had with them because we had not paid them anything in five years? They cancelled us. I called and asked why because we had great credit. They said exactly, they had made no money off of us in the last five years, so they cancelled anyone they hadn’t made money off of. I was thankful for the honesty.
Let me tell you, if they don’t make money off of you, they don’t do it. They know that when you have a credit card you will buy the $25 meal instead of the $10 meal with the money you have. They just know it.
When you decide on what principles you live by, Biblical principles, you cover the heart first. When you decide how you are going to live, it runs over into other areas of your life, into your workplace. It effects how you run your business and how you run this church. Here’s the deal: the reason we commit to only doing our buildings debt free, is first to honor Jesus because He spoke to us. That is supreme, bottom-line. Number two is this: if there is money in this congregation to do something God has called us to do, I am not going to go get a loan and then pressure you to pull it off. If the family doesn’t want to do it, why would we do it? Why should I go leverage us out and then convince you to do something you are not willing to sacrifice for? That is not a family. We all sacrifice, or we don’t do it.
That is the deal at our house. We sit the kids down when we look at a vacation and say this is how much money we have, so this is what we can do or can’t do. God can do something wild outside of that, but He is going to have to do it, because this is what we have. We are not going over that, we are bringing cash on this vacation, and not coming out in debt. Right? That is how we run this church. We got together when we first started and asked how we live according to Biblical principles? We decided on a simple pay structure where everybody gets the same base and based on need and kids, you get different portions. It was going to be simple and straightforward, not on a hierarchy basis. We made it straight across the board, so everybody can be free from money. Noone would show up here for the money, but because they have been called by God. We are going to help take care of their needs, but they will have to believe God for their wants. And we will all trust God with our lives.
So the way our pay structure works here is that there are a lot of people on staff that make the exact same amount of money I do, they have the same amount of kids and a spouse. Other than that, we just live a simple middle-of-the-road life because we want to be free. We’re not trying to accumulate in this life. We are trying to serve Jesus in this life. Please hear me, if you make a lot of money may you be blessed and it is the blessing of God. If you have a particular car or house, may you be blessed! But here is what the Scripture says, if you make a lot, share. Do not be arrogant as if others were smaller than you. Share with those in need, cover your needs. Wealthy people are often so leveraged that if someone called the card on them, their legs would be knocked out from underneath them.
One time, God told me to give $100 to a very wealthy businessman. The guy broke down in my arms weeping because he was going bankrupt that week. Nobody in the room would’ve known it. He had millions of dollars of holdings, but he had more millions of debt and it all got called on him. That is foolish. If you have been blessed, then deal righteously with your money. Be free with your money. Be debt-free, be free to share. Be blessed for everybody’s sake.
If you have a little in this room, if you have nothing, quit pointing fingers at everybody that does. They are not your problem. If you work diligently, live simply and give generously, God will bless you to take care of your needs. It’s nobody else’s fault. It’s your responsibility. We will talk about that specifically next week. Here’s the deal: God’s desires is for our focus to be on Him, not abundance or abasement. We are not focused on money. Our goal is to be free from money. If we have a little, we rejoice. When we have a lot, we rejoice. Money is not the centerpiece of the world, God is. When He becomes central, then He begins to clean up our lives and we being to align our life.
I find to be true as a general rule that for sure your needs will be met, usually above and beyond and then you will have to deal with the abundance issue. But God wants our heart. If there is anything I want to say today it is that God wants our heart. He wants us to be content in His presence and to say “God, thank You for what You have and what You have done. Lord, I trust You.” We want to get back to the garden of simplicity and get out of complexity. You’re not looking at how many deals you can swing, because it’s just going to distract you. Stay clear, stay simple, stay free. And God will be glorified.
Amen. Let’s stand together.
