Living Generously| Pastor Brodie Kalamen | PATIO SEASON Series

We want to welcome everyone joining us today from your home.

Presuming you're at home.

Some of you may be at the beach or outdoors enjoying the Okanagan summer.

My name is Brody Calluman.

I pastor Kelowna Christian Center, and we're just so glad to have you with us online.

This has been such an incredible experience for us to be able to enter your homes and be able to share our message with you in the comfort of your home.

Now, to before we begin, I always want to challenge you.

Go ahead, share the stream, share the message, go ahead and text a few of your friends and get them up and uh logged in, just to whether it be Facebook or YouTube or on the website at KCC.net to go ahead and listen along with you and just enjoy the message together and rally together and comment together.

We want to have everyone online at one point.

So go ahead, take a minute to do that.

And while you're doing that, I just want to say that during the season, we've got a lot of things that are still going on at the church.

The church offices are open.

Our connect groups continue to be operating throughout the summer season.

And uh we know that distance creates distortion.

And we know that uh oftentimes during the season, we can start to create some distance between the church and our community, and we just want to encourage you, don't create any distance at all.

Come on now, don't disconnect at all.

We've got groups going.

Go ahead, make phone calls, connect, uh, even watch the sermons together in your own home.

We want people to use this opportunity to actually get closer together.

So go ahead and do that.

As well as I want to take a moment to say thank you to all of you who are just faithfully giving and to the church and giving to our missions and continuing to support the ministry during the season.

We couldn't be doing this without you, but there's still youth programs and young adult programs and small groups and KCC Sunday and kids ministry happening regularly, and you're uh you're a huge part of that, so we want to say thank you.

Now we're in the middle of a series called Patio Season, and for me, I think of Kelowna as some of the most beautiful patios, and our downtown now has been made into one giant patio, and it's so great overlooking the water, the mountainscapes, the people.

But I find patios are often places where you're able to have connection that's a little bit more personal than it would be in a larger group setting.

And it's often a place where you can discuss, have conversate discussions and have conversations about culture, things that you want to either cultivate in your life or cancel in your life.

And this series and these messages have been designed to be an individual message for you as an individual.

I'm speaking directly to you behind this camera lens.

And it's not to the church as a whole, but to you as an individual.

And the challenge is are these values, is this message that we carry and this brand we carry as Christian, is it alive in your heart?

Is it alive in your life the way it ought to be?

Are you representing the kingdom of God?

And are you representing a kingdom citizen in this world?

And so this is a personal message, and I'm just glad that you've given me the opportunity to have that conversation with you.

Now, today I'm going to be sharing on our third value in the church here called living generously.

Living generously, and the Bible calls us to live generous, to be generous in our lifestyle, to be generous in our spirit.

It even promises us that there's a quality of life that happens that is better when we live generously.

And says it in Proverbs 11, 24.

It says, the world of the generous will get larger and larger, but the world of the stingy gets smaller and smaller.

There are two types of worlds.

There are two worlds that we can live in.

And if you've been looking at your life and you've seen it getting smaller and smaller, and you've seen yourself being pulled back in your friendship networks and your community and your experiences, and it's getting smaller and smaller.

I want to challenge you today that perhaps the difference is your generosity, is your lifestyle of generosity.

So the world of the generous gets larger and larger, and my heart for you is that you would live large in generosity.

2 Corinthians 9, 6 says this.

It says, generosity is actually encouraged.

It says, remember this: whoever sows sparingly will reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will reap generously.

Envision your future, envision your life as an empty field.

And what you invest into that field will come back to you and return back to you.

See it as a field.

So are you going to go to that field and are you going to throw lots of seed into it?

Or are you going to sow sparingly, sowing little?

I know a farmer never goes to a field, never goes to a large plot of property and says, give me some corn, give me some wheat, give me some produce.

No, he goes into it with an investment.

He goes into it sowing.

He goes into it thinking about the future, thinking about the opportunity of the land.

It's this principle that we call spiritual circulation.

That everything that is healthy, everything that is growing in life, circulates.

We sow, we reap, we get more seed, we sow, we reap, we get more seed to sow so we can reap and get more seed.

That things that are circulating, a life that is circulating, is a life that is growing.

I had an experience a number of years ago to go to the Dead Sea.

This sea is dead.

It's dead because it's the lowest part of the earth, and all the water drains into this one location, and in this location there's no more outlet.

So it's a it's a still body of water.

And in that body of water, there is no life.

No fish are living in that body of water.

It is dead.

And that's what happens when a life is not circulating.

Well, in our spiritual life, it's so important that we're circulating our experience.

We're circulating, we're sharing our testimony, we're sharing with others, we're we're uh living in our in generosity, we're sowing to reap, to sow, to reap.

So I'm gonna share with you today this expectation of living generously.

And sometimes if you've had a bad experience, these bad experiences can shut you down for living generously.

And I'm just gonna encourage you now, don't tune out right now.

Don't tune down, don't tune out or turn it down.

Instead, let's just engage for a moment and get challenged in this lifestyle.

So Galatians 6.9 says this says, don't grow weary in doing good.

Don't grow weary in living generously, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we don't give up.

If you keep your heart open, you will reap a harvest.

And so we need to choose and we need to re-choose generosity.

We need to communicate it, we need to circulate it in our life.

And so we're gonna look at some ways to express our generosity.

Uh, we're gonna begin with this first uh area, and this first area is that we're generous with our gestures.

We're generous in gesture.

And this might surprise you as the first time you actually think about generosity, and you heard I was gonna be speaking on this, you think he's right away gonna be talking about money.

But generosity is so much larger in your lifestyle, needs to become so much larger in your lifestyle.

In fact, you can be generous in your gestures.

So, how do we view our gestures?

And I'd like to broaden your view of generosity today.

I'd like you to think that you can be generous in a smile, in a nod, in a high five or air five, in a fist bump, in an elbow tap.

These are ways where you can be generous.

Now you might think this is kind of silly, that, all right, I'm gonna I'm gonna be challenged today to be generous in a gesture, but I'm telling you today, this is a spiritual principle.

When you give something out, you sew a gesture that is generous, it will come back to you.

And so our generous gestures are the type that actually go out to be a blessing and an encouragement to someone else.

That's why we do it.

We we give a high five to be generous, to give a blessing to someone else, to say, I love you, I care for you, I think you're great, I wish you well.

All that type happens when you're giving generously.

You're saying, I value you when you smile at someone.

And this generosity isn't about just doing what you feel inside, it's about saying to your heart, I'm gonna get up today, and no matter what my mood says, I'm going to go ahead and choose to become generous.

And choose generosity.

So I'm gonna become generous in my heart.

We know that people are valuable.

And we know and I know that you love people.

Honestly, I believe you do.

In fact, if there was someone in the mountains today who was who was lost and someone who was in trouble, we send out helicopters, we spend money, we send out crews, everyone gets together and searches for an individual who's lost.

And that's what happens because we believe that people are valuable.

We don't think about their lifestyle or what they did or what they didn't do.

We just say you're an individual, you are valuable.

However, the conflict in our human nature is that we do that for someone who may be lost, but yet we pass by people and sometimes people in our own home we pass by without being generous with them, without giving something of ourselves to them.

We need to be able to gesture generously.

This is our first step today to living a generous life.

A life that honors God, honors the people around us, honors our community, honors the Lord in us.

We gesture generously.

People need it, the world needs it, I need it.

At the gym, uh there's this one individual who comes in and he has special needs, and he comes in with his support coach, and he'll often go between the machines, just walking uh around them, finding a machine that will uh the coach will use to help train him.

And at times I've been seated there and he's looked over my way, and and one time uh about a year ago, he came up and he fist bumped me.

He just came up to me and he just gave me a bump and he just kind of said, you know, you're doing good.

And I remember that from a year ago.

And this last week I was watching as he was walking around the gym, and I saw him look at me, and I thought, oh man, please, just come on over and just give me another fist bump.

And he came over and he walked over to me, and with his fist up, he said, he bumped my fist, and I thought, yeah, that's right.

And then you know what it did to me?

It is, it was this generous gesture to me that made me feel good inside.

And this is what we do.

This is who we are.

As believers, we go, we let our light shine, and we're the salt of the earth.

We go out and live generously through our gestures.

Secondly, we live generously in our judgment.

We're generous in our judgment.

Matthew 7 says this.

Let me read it to you.

It says, Do not judge, or you will be judged.

For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and paying no attention to the plank, the telephone pole that's in your own eye?

How can you say to your brother, let me take the speck out of your eye when you yourself have a plank in your own eye?

Jesus was challenging the community around them.

He's saying, Listen, don't be quick to judge.

Be generous with people when it comes to judgment.

Realize that we're not perfect, and you and I know that we all have faults.

And it might not be as visible as other people, but we have faults.

So we look, we need to look at our lives and we need to say, I'm gonna, I'm gonna choose the best.

I'm gonna choose to believe the best about an individual without first choosing judgment.

I'm gonna be generous today.

There's a great illustration of a woman who was in an airport, and uh she her plane was delayed, and so she went to the concession and she picked up a book and she picked up a bag of cookies, and she found a corner where she could sit down and read her book, and the person next to her, uh this fellow reached down and grabbed one of the cookies that were in her bag.

And she was just so upset, she started to get irritated.

What who does he think he is?

So she grabbed a cookie, and with each cookie she took, he took a cookie.

And when it came to the last cookie, he kind of gave a nervous laugh, took the cookie, broke it in half, gave her half.

And she was just irritated.

And when her uh plane uh boarding call came up, she made her way onto the plane and she got seated at her seat, and as she started moving her bags, she realized inside of her bag there was her bag of cookies.

In fact, she was eating his bag of cookies, and all of a sudden the table got turned, and the way she was judging another individual was uh wrong, and it was it was an assumption that she had made about a person.

Let me say this to you today.

Harsh judgment is usually the result of wrong assumptions.

We often make assumptions, and when we don't know the full story, an assumption can be dangerous.

I found myself uh working and serving in our in our uh food services here as a church, and people have come from the street and they've come into our facilities to receive food.

And each person who comes in, there's this inner judgment that I make it, and I'm thinking, who are they?

Are they trying to use the system?

Where are they from?

Their experience.

And I remember initially coming into the into serve here, and and it took me a little while to hear their stories, but as I began to hear their stories, I began to have compassion and understanding on the individual on the other side of the counter.

And now I reserve any, I don't give judgment at all to the people coming.

In fact, it's a mercy ministry.

We don't ask questions, you come, you can receive a gift, you can receive food, you can receive services.

And we just say, if you you have a need, then we're gonna serve your need.

Because each of us have a story and each individual has a story.

So don't be too quick to judge.

We can't judge the poor, we can't judge the rich, we don't want to judge the old or the young, we don't want to judge the famous or the non-famous.

We don't want to be judging leaders, organizations, churches, government, businesses.

We don't want to pass judgment.

It's just not wise.

To be generous with our judgment is just to refrain, to hold back from placing judgment on other people.

Instead, we choose the good side of assumption, to choose the best about an individual and not worry about the speck in their eye.

In fact, instead choose to say, How can I help you?

How can I help in your life?

How can I help be a blessing to you?

Being generous.

So let's not be too quick to judge.

Number three, let's be generous in gratitude.

Being generous in gratitude is simple.

It's saying thank you, it's being appreciative, it's continuing to be grateful in the situations that you're in.

And I'm gonna say to you today, we're we are at our best.

We're not acting like someone who's entitled.

We're at our best when we see everything as a blessing from God, an undeserved gift from God.

To be generous and to get this generous spirit, we need to see ourselves as and everything that we have as a generous gift from God.

And in turn, respond with gratitude, respond with thank you, respond with a thank you that this message can come into my house today.

Since we can't gather for groups of over 50, thank you that the church is still meeting together online.

Thank you for the teams that have set are setting up and serving.

Thank you for those who are making sure that the service gets into my home.

Thank you.

When people are grateful, this appreciation makes a difference.

I think back at the story of Jesus when he healed the ten lepers, and only one individual came back to say, Thank you.

And Jesus acknowledged his heart of gratitude.

I want Jesus to acknowledge my heart.

I wanted Jesus to acknowledge the gratefulness I have for all that he has done, not only in my life, but in my family, in my community, in my church, in my nation, being grateful.

Gratefulness is also contagious.

This last week, my wife had the kids and uh their cousins, and they went downtown early in the morning and were longboarding and swimming and jumping off into the lake and sitting in the sun, and they ended the afternoon with an ice cream.

And as they were walking up Bernard, uh, there was an opportunity, and one of them, I won't tell you which of the kids, but one of them decided to say, thank you, mom, for the ice cream.

And it was like a choir after that of other children starting to pipe up afterwards.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

You see, you could be the one who's generous in gratitude that starts a chain reaction off that affects other people.

If you want to see an area, a place of gratitude, then the place to begin is with yourself, and maybe you can be that change agent.

Maybe you can become that catalyst for change.

Fourthly, we want to be generous by overlooking offense.

If there's one guarantee.

In life, I'll tell you this guarantee.

You will have opportunity of offense and for offense.

In this culture, particularly that we're living in, in the social age, we can be offended with something that's happening on the other side of the world.

And we can carry that offense in our heart.

And there's only two ways to approach offense.

And you can either look at offense or you can overlook offense.

Look at offense or overlook offense.

And living generously, our lifestyle generosity suggests that the best way to live is by looking, overlooking offense in people's lives.

Overlooking offense.

You always move in the direction of that attention.

Wherever you're looking, it's so important.

My friend was gaining his motorcycle license.

And the first thing the instructor told him when it came to navigating his bike down the street, it says, your bike is going to go where you look.

And some people, when they see an obstacle or an offense in their way, they're going to steer right towards that obstacle and that offense.

And it will do you no good.

You'll end up riding right into that barrier, right into that telephone pole.

Instead, be the type of individual who's generous by overlooking offense.

Generous and overlooking it.

And look down the road and overlook people's offense.

And you might think, well, that doesn't sound biblical, but it actually is.

In Proverbs chapter 12, verse 16, it says, a fool shows their annoyance at once.

Proverbs 12:16

But a prudent or a wise person overlooks an insult.

Be an overlooker.

Proverbs 19, 11, a person's wisdom yields patience.

It's to one's glory to overlook an offense.

We need to be the type of people who are overlooking offense.

And I'll tell you right now, I'm the first to say, as a justice-based individual, I think that's a challenge.

Because I want to see right and wrong.

If someone's insulted, if someone's offended, I want them to address it.

I want them to say they're sorry and repent.

But instead, the scripture says, be generous.

Go ahead.

Err on the side of mercy.

Err on the side of overlooking.

Be the bigger person in this picture.

Don't allow the offense to get in your spirit.

But move past it.

Overlook it for your good, for the good of other people, for their good.

Just go ahead and choose as best you can to be generous by overlooking offense.

There will be times where you'll have to address an offense.

But be generous.

If you can, overlook it.

And today there are so many people who are offended with small things that are easy to overlook.

Go ahead and be the type to overlook those small things.

Lastly, and I know you were waiting for this, I want to talk to you about being generous with your finances.

Generosity in our finances is such an important life lesson.

If we want to keep this spiritual circulation happening in our lives, it keeps us healthy.

We have blood circulating, we have respiratory circulation.

That's why exercise is so important and you want to be eating well and keep digestive circulation happening.

This is a spiritual circulation message.

Keep generosity alive within your finances.

I'm a firm believer in giving.

When I keep the flow, I allow God to bring to me, and I allow God to work, allow it to move through me.

And so He can bring it to me, to move it through me.

And it circulates financially in my life.

And I want to see you as an individual, you as a family, you as a business, blessed financially.

And I know how many of you have been affected positively by putting God first in your finances, by putting God first in your homes, by honoring Him with your finances, honoring Him with your resources that come into your home.

And we do that because it's a part of our lifestyle.

It's a part of living a lifestyle of generosity.

And Jesus said it this way: He said, give.

Go ahead and give.

This is a spiritual lesson.

Go give.

That's why we have a giving tab on our website, giving tab on our app.

Go ahead and give, and it will be given to you.

Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over.

It'll run into your lap.

It'll be put in your lap.

And the same measure that you give out will be the same measure that will come back to you.

Incredible.

You cannot outgive God.

You cannot outgive him.

Go ahead and give, and it will come back.

Jesus said that is a promise to you.

So we have to look at where our treasure is.

Because that's where your heart is.

Where is your treasure?

What is your heart fixated on?

That's where your resources are going.

And I'm saying to you today, go ahead and give generously.

Go ahead and move towards generosity.

Move in the direction of an opportunity to give.

Taking the opportunity to give, using an opportunity to give.

Be the giver that God has called you to be.

My role in your life is really to help you move the needle.

Help you move the needle to be more like Christ.

And for some of you today, that needle needs to move towards generosity with your finances.

And I see it like a tipping point, a bucket tipping point.

And maybe you've seen this game before, maybe you've seen it on Survivor or at Scandia, where you fill a bucket with water, and one last, the person who puts that last cup of water into that bucket sends it into a critical place where it pours out, and the bucket pours out over your life.

And what I'm seeing about this tipping point here is you may have given, you may have given before in the past, but you've never really decided to commit to living a generous lifestyle with your finances.

That may be the tipping point for you.

That might be the point where you say, I'm gonna go online, I'm gonna set up my account on the app, I'm gonna give for the first time today.

Even if it's a dollar, I'm gonna move in the direction of giving.

And by doing that, you're moving in the direction of becoming more like Christ that way.

So generosity is how we change the world.

We change the world by being generous.

Matthew 5 says it this way: He says, in the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds, your generosity, and glorify your Father in heaven.

The world is gonna see our good deeds.

The world is gonna see the generosity that's in our lives and see Christ.

It will glorify Jesus.

It'll glorify the Father in heaven, and they'll look at him and they'll say, Wow, I see what other people see.

And it's gonna be because of your good deeds, it's gonna be because of your generosity.

So we not only do we need to live generous, for our sake, we want to live generously for his sake and for our community's sake.

So when other people aren't kind, we are generous.

When other people are offended, we're generous.

When other people are ungrateful, we're generous.

When other people get easily offended, we're generous.

When other people are judgmental, we're going to move in the side of generosity.

When other people are looking for ways to be stingy, we're going to say, no, we're going to be generous.

We're going to live towards generosity.

And I'm so excited for this message because I've been given so much.

And Jesus was the first giver.

In fact, he gave everything for our sake.

He gave it all.

The Father gave his precious son for us.

He was the giver.

The first giver, the most valuable giver.

And in my life, that has made the difference.

And I want to become like him.

So today, in your own lives, if you've never experienced the generosity first of our Father, who first loved us, then today's the day for you.

And it comes very simply.

It comes by accepting Jesus Christ to become your Lord and your Savior, by making a decision to choose Him and make Him first in your life.

Believing in your heart that He actually paid the penalty for your sin and gave you an opportunity for a new life.

And it comes by saying, Lord, I'm sorry for living life according to my own standards.

I'm sorry for being stingy.

I'm sorry for my selfishness of living for myself.

I want to choose you.

So today I'm going to lead you in a prayer.

The prayer will be at the bottom of the screen here.

But I'm going to pray this prayer along with you.

And if this is for you today, go ahead and pray it aloud in the space where you might be in.

Pray this today.

Lord Jesus, thank you for coming to earth.

I believe you died and rose again so that I could be forgiven and have a friendship with you.

Right now, I ask you to forgive me from all my sin.

And I let the past go.

By receiving Christ, you become a new person.

I ask you to come into my life, change my life, be my savior, and I receive you today as my savior and my Lord.

Make me the person you want me to be.

Thank you, Lord.

Amen.

God bless you.

Thank you for joining in with us today.

We love you.

Go live out your life generous today.

Amen.