Silver, gold, and the steward’s heart

[SPEAKER_00]: All right.

[SPEAKER_00]: Good morning, everyone.

[SPEAKER_00]: Good to see you.

[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome.

[SPEAKER_00]: Here we go.

[SPEAKER_00]: Lights are up and it's good to see everyone.

[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome everyone joining us online, podcast as well.

[SPEAKER_00]: We are going to dive into the scriptures in just a

[SPEAKER_00]: minutes.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I hope you're enjoying this series on influences where kind of taking this our cues from the most clicked on things in social media and on YouTube right now, which is really around three big topics.

[SPEAKER_00]: Anytime someone clicks on something, it's generally to do with health, wealth, or relationships, and they're the things that people are talking about, and it would be

[SPEAKER_00]: but there are things, scriptural things, ancient things, ancient wisdom that we can draw from to help us in our world.

[SPEAKER_00]: How are we all doing this morning, everyone okay?

[SPEAKER_00]: You all right?

[SPEAKER_00]: No worries.

[SPEAKER_00]: Good, good.

[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, cool, cool.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's um, I'm going to talk to the people who've

[SPEAKER_00]: Any radiographer's in the room.

[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks, Tessa.

[SPEAKER_00]: I appreciate that.

[SPEAKER_00]: I told her that I was going to be talking about X-rays today.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so I said, as a radiography, you need to pay special attention.

[SPEAKER_00]: You look fine, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Most of the time you go for an X-ray, your body looks all right.

[SPEAKER_00]: You feel okay.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then,

[SPEAKER_00]: They make you stand in front of that weird board.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's always cold.

[SPEAKER_00]: The radio, if we put on that big lead suit and walks out of the room, while they zap you with radiation.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then what turns out on the screen is that black and kind of gray image, oh, that's what's going on.

[SPEAKER_00]: All right, I didn't break my first bone till I was 17.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I hadn't had that experience, but then when I saw my collarbone, and it was like that, I was like, oh, okay, that's what's going on, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: We start to see something that's happening underneath the surface.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, some injuries, of course, they're obvious, like, okay, you're...

[SPEAKER_00]: your bones out, your arm, or something like that, you know, okay, don't need an x-ray for that one.

[SPEAKER_00]: But for most of them, you're looking at something that looks normal on the outside, but then its diagnosis, something running deeper underneath.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now I'm gonna talk to you guys about

[SPEAKER_00]: stewardship today about money.

[SPEAKER_00]: I get the money one now.

[SPEAKER_00]: Again, I say this every single time.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you're brand new and you've never been in church before, we don't do this every week.

[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is not there.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh my gosh.

[SPEAKER_00]: They always talk about money.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you brought someone and you were saying don't worry.

[SPEAKER_00]: They won't talk about money today.

[SPEAKER_00]: You need to apologize to that person because today that is the day.

[SPEAKER_00]: But here's the thing, money doesn't just live in our wallets, it lives in our hearts.

[SPEAKER_00]: And today is a diagnostic day.

[SPEAKER_00]: To find out, via an x-ray, what's going on in our heart.

[SPEAKER_00]: Because we talk about finances, and we talk about our money, and you've most likely, we're starting a new year, and you've had to think about, OK, 2026.

[SPEAKER_00]: Here's how it's going to go, here's what's coming up.

[SPEAKER_00]: Some of us, the planners that Matt talked about have already started budgeting and making those kinds of decisions, but it's a diagnostic.

[SPEAKER_00]: Money isn't just neutral, it's not just something that we do with lives in our wallet, but it lives in our heart.

[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone talks about it, everyone worries about it, some people argue over it, it's something that can't be escaped in our world.

[SPEAKER_00]: centuries and centuries millennia ago.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so is there some wisdom we can draw from Scripture?

[SPEAKER_00]: that will help us engage with this today.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I'm going to make this theological partly and practical partly.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, and there will be application points.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, if you're a teenager or a kid in the room, this will, there'll be some application for you.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you are post-retirement and you're, there's application for you and everyone in between.

[SPEAKER_00]: The anchor text that we're going to use today is this.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to read to you a dangerous first scripture.

[SPEAKER_00]: ready?

[SPEAKER_00]: Here we go.

[SPEAKER_00]: Danger, danger, be aware.

[SPEAKER_00]: It says this, honor the Lord with your wealth, with the first fruits of all your produce, then your barns will be filled with plenty,

[SPEAKER_00]: These are texts that are, this is a beautiful text.

[SPEAKER_00]: Very simple, very clear, very wise, but very able to be mishandled if we do the wrong thing with it.

[SPEAKER_00]: All right, scriptures like this need to be treated with care and with intention and with a sense of knowledge that we need to do a little bit of contextual work to get there.

[SPEAKER_00]: We do have some farmers in our church, but not everyone has a barn.

[SPEAKER_00]: We do have some wine makers in our church, but not everyone has a vat that wine should go in.

[SPEAKER_00]: So what do we do with that?

[SPEAKER_00]: And what do we do with it, particularly as it's a promise that's here in Scripture?

[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, let's take a look at this first word here, honor, honor the Lord with your wealth.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, when we think about honor, you might think about it in a particular way, but the Hebrew way of thinking about honor was thinking about it in terms of weight, heaviness.

[SPEAKER_00]: A glory that can be measured and weighed.

[SPEAKER_00]: So when we honor the Lord, we are making him heavy in our lives.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's a heaviness to it.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, when you paid for something in gold in Old Testament times, the more gold there was, the heavier it was.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so you drag it along.

[SPEAKER_00]: So that weight, that heaviness was what this word, Cabard was.

[SPEAKER_00]: When the glory of God rested on the people of Israel, they said his weight, that the glory was heavy.

[SPEAKER_00]: There was a presence, a thickness to it, and that is the word glory here.

[SPEAKER_00]: So what the Scripture first says is that honor comes before abundance.

[SPEAKER_00]: To honor means not just means more than to say, oh God's important to me.

[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus is an important part of my life.

[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus is in my life.

[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus is part of my life.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's more than that to honor the Lord is to live as though God is ultimate.

[SPEAKER_00]: as though he's everything, the weight and the presence of God, the fact of God in my life is what I build, everything else around.

[SPEAKER_00]: Everything is second as I honor him as he is weighty in my life.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now this is not just a nice sentiment, because how many know that there are other things that can feel weighty in our lives?

[SPEAKER_00]: not least of all money can feel that.

[SPEAKER_00]: Money, in fact, Jesus says, is like a rival God to God himself.

[SPEAKER_00]: So this is not an anti-wealth message.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is an anti-idulatory message.

[SPEAKER_00]: Where we take the God of money, and we push that over here, and we allow the weight and the glory and the majesty of God to be so heavy in our lives.

[SPEAKER_00]: that everything else feels like.

[SPEAKER_00]: Amen.

[SPEAKER_00]: Amen.

[SPEAKER_00]: So what we see here is that honour comes first.

[SPEAKER_00]: Worship proceeds wealth management.

[SPEAKER_00]: When God is heavy, money becomes a tool, but when money is heavy, God is simply a side project.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so this sits inside of something larger.

[SPEAKER_00]: We put God first, not to get more, but because He's worth more.

[SPEAKER_00]: We just sang about it.

[SPEAKER_00]: We just sang worthy.

[SPEAKER_00]: Who else is worthy?

[SPEAKER_00]: There's no one.

[SPEAKER_00]: The weight of God in our lives should be the thing that our wallet feels as well as our heart.

[SPEAKER_00]: So secondly, here is this, the first fruit's train, the heart.

[SPEAKER_00]: We read that here, on of the Lord with your wealth, which is that weight, the weightiness of God, that the glory of God should be heavy in our lives, with the first fruits of all of your produce.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now again, this is speaking into a society that most people,

[SPEAKER_00]: operated and earned their income from running a farm or from having some form of land holding.

[SPEAKER_00]: So when they say, honor the Lord with the first fruits, what are they talking about?

[SPEAKER_00]: First fruit to the first bit that comes in.

[SPEAKER_00]: So imagine, and some of you will get this, but you work all the seasons, all the seasons, all the seasons, comes all the way through, and then harvest time arrives.

[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone, you pee, harvest time.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is the time when all of the food comes in.

[SPEAKER_00]: We bring it all in.

[SPEAKER_00]: And at the start of the season, as they bring it all in, they take the first bit, the first bit that comes in, the called the first fruits.

[SPEAKER_00]: Why?

[SPEAKER_00]: Two interesting things about honoring a log with first fruits.

[SPEAKER_00]: One is, the first fruits get given before you know how the rest of the harvest goes.

[SPEAKER_00]: So it's an active faith.

[SPEAKER_00]: Because I'm going to give the first fruits all the while thinking, mmm, but I don't know what the rest of harvest is going to be like.

[SPEAKER_00]: So there's a,

[SPEAKER_00]: There's something precarious about that if you're doing it outside the frame of honoring and feeling the way to go.

[SPEAKER_00]: Secondly is this, is as the first fruits come in

[SPEAKER_00]: what the way that we treat the first fruits says something about the way that all of it is treated.

[SPEAKER_00]: So for example, you've been to a last concert you went to, or musical you went to, or show that you went to, or ballet, or drama that you went to.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they, you were standing out in the foyer, milling around.

[SPEAKER_00]: the bell rings and you quickly go in and take your seats, push down the little kind of cushiony seat and then sit there and then the lights come down and you're filled with anticipation are you and what's it going to be and then boom lights come up, band starts to play and the first song you're into it and you can tell everything about that show by the

[SPEAKER_00]: The first song determines the way that the rest of the story gets told.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the first song in a concert or something like the first fruits that are here.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're given, and we can see what the rest is like based on the first fruits, based on the first song.

[SPEAKER_00]: So when we honor the Lord with our wealth of the first fruits of our produce, what they were doing in the Old Testament was gathering up the first fruits and saying, because this part is holy, all of it is holy.

[SPEAKER_00]: Because this part has been given and honoured to God, all of it has been given and honoured to God.

[SPEAKER_00]: Does that make sense?

[SPEAKER_00]: You might be thinking to yourself, hold on a second, Matt.

[SPEAKER_00]: You're talking about stuff that happened two and a half thousand years ago.

[SPEAKER_00]: First fruits, we don't do that anymore.

[SPEAKER_00]: Accept that.

[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus himself was called the first fruits.

[SPEAKER_00]: of all creation.

[SPEAKER_00]: What does that mean?

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, if you were to say to me, man, how do you know that you're going to be resurrected?

[SPEAKER_00]: How can you be sure?

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't look at anything else other than well.

[SPEAKER_00]: The first fruits were given and the first fruits were resurrected.

[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus was resurrected so therefore so will I be because whatever happens to the first fruits happens to everything else in the harvest that comes after it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Amen.

[SPEAKER_00]: So God resurrects Jesus and says, He's the first born of all creation and He's been given as the first fruits and so now everyone who comes in harvest after that, you and I included will be resurrected because He was.

[SPEAKER_00]: The first fruit dictates the destiny for everything else that follows it.

[SPEAKER_00]: So when we honor God with our projects, and when we honor Him with our first fruits, it trains our heart and says something about the rest of our life given to God as well.

[SPEAKER_00]: When we build ourselves around the heaviness of God's majesty and our life, everything else becomes light.

[SPEAKER_00]: It becomes peace, it becomes joy.

[SPEAKER_00]: Because abundance follows alignment.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now we get to the tricky part of this verse.

[SPEAKER_00]: On the Lord with the first verse, with the progious and first verse, and then guys, and then your bonds will be filled and your vats will be bursting.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, if we treat this text wrong, I could stand here and tell you that this is get rich quick from the Lord.

[SPEAKER_00]: Good night.

[SPEAKER_00]: We could understand this like, man, all I could do is honor the Lord with my first fruits, and then I'm going to have a full barn and a bursting that, let's go!

[SPEAKER_00]: I've got to get a barn first, and then I've got to have that second, and then they'll be bursting in full.

[SPEAKER_00]: But if we treat this text wrong, we will treat it like a proof text or an iron-clad guarantee that whatever you give to God, God's going to give back to you, fill you up and it's going to, and you're just never going to worry ever again.

[SPEAKER_00]: Someone nefarious or with kind of weird motives might say that to you, but we need to talk about something here in wisdom literature called the retribution principle.

[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, theology can't a time, here we go.

[SPEAKER_00]: The retribution principle is something that is built into or baked into all of wisdom literature.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's baked into Proverbs, it's baked into songs, it's baked into Ecclesiastes, into Job, into all of those texts where we would say there is wisdom and it's written in this genre of wisdom literature.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's in there.

[SPEAKER_00]: And what it assumes is this.

[SPEAKER_00]: God has set up creation and created things with a moral order and a moral structure and it's running in one direction.

[SPEAKER_00]: It assumes a moral order to the universe.

[SPEAKER_00]: And when we walk flow and we swim in the current of that moral order things go better for us than worse.

[SPEAKER_00]: The way that it gets expressed in Scripture is, when God says in Judah on me, here I've set before you blessings and curses, life and death, now choose life, because if you choose life, everything's gonna go good.

[SPEAKER_00]: And if you choose death, while you're only gonna get curses.

[SPEAKER_00]: So the retribution principle that's baked into Proverbs, says this, righteousness, if you're a righteous person, good things will happen to you.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you're an evil person, what will happen?

[SPEAKER_00]: Curse is what will happen to you.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's the retribution principle.

[SPEAKER_00]: God will return to you what you put into the world.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you flow with his structure, accept that.

[SPEAKER_00]: Who knows that doesn't always the case?

[SPEAKER_00]: Or is it always the case?

[SPEAKER_00]: Or have you ever met a good person where something bads happen to them?

[SPEAKER_00]: Which is kind of what Jovis all about, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: They spend 35 chapters trying to ask Job.

[SPEAKER_00]: May everything's been taken from you.

[SPEAKER_00]: What did you do?

[SPEAKER_00]: And he's like, honestly, guys, I do not know.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they're like, it must be something.

[SPEAKER_00]: Because all this bad stuff has happened to you.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's gotta be something hidden in there that we don't know about.

[SPEAKER_00]: Can you talk to us about that?

[SPEAKER_00]: Just be honest.

[SPEAKER_00]: I promise you, I don't know, and they're like, yeah, but look at, this is the way that something that what happened with the retribution principle is this, is that blessing usually follows righteousness, that's cool, we're all cool with that cursing, usually follows evil, that's all cool, except that when we see someone with abundance and blessing, what gets imputed to them, well, they must be righteous.

[SPEAKER_00]: And if we see someone who's having a hard time of it, what do we think of them?

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, what have they done?

[SPEAKER_00]: Timber in John 9, Jesus walking down the road with the Pharisees, and they see the man born, he was blind from birth, and the Pharisees said to him, hey, Jesus, who sinned him or his parents that he turned out like that?

[SPEAKER_00]: Remember that?

[SPEAKER_00]: That's the retribution principle in their culture, which was, if something's wrong with you, either you or your parents had done it to get you to there.

[SPEAKER_00]: And what was Jesus' response?

[SPEAKER_00]: Neither.

[SPEAKER_00]: Not his, not his parents.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is an opportunity for the glory of God.

[SPEAKER_00]: So we can't absolutise this text.

[SPEAKER_00]: But what we can do is allow it to lead us to abundance, because the Jewish notion of abundance was more than financial.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was shalom, wholeness, peace, security, joy, happiness, connectedness.

[SPEAKER_00]: And now, I think we can all affirm, when God is heavy and weighty, His majesty is in our world.

[SPEAKER_00]: always financial blessing?

[SPEAKER_00]: Nope.

[SPEAKER_00]: But what about joy?

[SPEAKER_00]: What about peace?

[SPEAKER_00]: What about patience?

[SPEAKER_00]: What about kindness?

[SPEAKER_00]: What about faith?

[SPEAKER_00]: The shalom of God starts to flow into our life as we

[SPEAKER_00]: So abundance does include all of these things, but we can hold onto this knowing that God is doing something beyond us, deeper than us.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so Solomon's writings become a warning light, don't they?

[SPEAKER_00]: They be put us to show us that you can have it all, but you can still lose your way.

[SPEAKER_00]: You can still lose your way.

[SPEAKER_00]: OK.

[SPEAKER_00]: We can't treat Proverbs like a promise of profit, but it's like a roadmap.

[SPEAKER_00]: We can help us to align ourselves with what God's doing.

[SPEAKER_00]: All right, four things.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then we will finish up for the day in the bank and come in a minute in a little while.

[SPEAKER_00]: Firstly, stew it your words before you stew it your wealth.

[SPEAKER_00]: Proverbs 18, verse 21, says, the tongue has the power of life and death.

Proverbs 18:21

[SPEAKER_00]: and those who love it will lead its fruit.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, each of you have got a narrative or a story that you've grown up in around money.

[SPEAKER_00]: Some of you grew up in a house where everyone said, we can't afford that, we can't afford that, we can't afford that, we can't afford that, we can't afford that.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not good or bad, but it does train you.

[SPEAKER_00]: So who's ever grew up and heard the phrase money doesn't grow on trees, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that trains us.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not good or bad, but it's discipling you.

[SPEAKER_00]: Has anyone grabbed say, God helps those who help themselves, or see that wealthy person, that's because they're greedy.

[SPEAKER_00]: There is things that we say that train us and disciple us around how we stewed and managed finances.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so we've just got to check and steward our words, the things that come out of our mouth, before we steward our wealth.

[SPEAKER_00]: Because you've been entrusted with something as a manager, not as an owner.

[SPEAKER_00]: What do you have that you did not first receive?

[SPEAKER_00]: Everything you have you've received.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so we manage it.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we live out of that, but we've got to think through how we use our words.

[SPEAKER_00]: Secondly, let's see money as an entrustment

[SPEAKER_00]: not as a trophy.

[SPEAKER_00]: This was Solomon's big failure.

[SPEAKER_00]: The finance, the opulence, the power, the glory it got to his head, and the story doesn't end well.

[SPEAKER_00]: Money always already amplifies what's in your heart.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's an amplifier.

[SPEAKER_00]: So as a young person, 19, 20 year old, I would say it's myself this.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'd love to be able to give to that, but I can't right now, but once I'm earning X, then I'll give to it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Once I'm in this place, then I will.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, having more money made no one generous ever.

[SPEAKER_00]: Generosity is either in you or it's not, and I've seen people be generous with $2 a day, and I've seen someone be super stingy with $200,000 a day, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: It's an amplifier of what's already there.

[SPEAKER_00]: So see money as an entrustment, something you've been given not as a trophy or a sign of prestige or honor or something like that.

[SPEAKER_00]: There is something in there that God is trying to do.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's trying to unseat money from the center of our hearts and have Jesus sit at weighty and glorious in our lives.

[SPEAKER_00]: Within our finances and entrustment to be able to be generous with.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's never neutral.

[SPEAKER_00]: An owner asks, what can I afford?

[SPEAKER_00]: and a steward asks, what has got entrusted to me, and what is he forming in me through it?

[SPEAKER_00]: Thirdly, let money serve the season you are in.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, money's with us throughout our entire lives.

[SPEAKER_00]: You kind of scape it.

[SPEAKER_00]: You're born into an economic world.

[SPEAKER_00]: But money needs to serve us differently through different seasons of our life.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I want to speak to the teenagers and the kids first sleep and say, guys, this is your season for learning before earning.

[SPEAKER_00]: Right?

[SPEAKER_00]: You can do a lot of good work as a kid or as a teenager.

[SPEAKER_00]: Before you hit a 14 or nine months and before you go out and get your first Mac is job or whatever it is, you can learn.

[SPEAKER_00]: You can ask people, ask why is people in your life ask your parents, find out, hey, how do you guys manage this stuff?

[SPEAKER_00]: It's a season of learning before earning as a kid.

[SPEAKER_00]: You can grow in it, you can seek to understand it.

[SPEAKER_00]: You can find out, from people around you, how they did it.

[SPEAKER_00]: As a young adult, you might want to think about foundations

[SPEAKER_00]: So you're in any young adult world, you're, you don't realize it, but you're in such a sweet spot.

[SPEAKER_00]: Most of you will live in a home.

[SPEAKER_00]: You're only more money than you know what to do with, and you're so tempted to just jump on every afterpaving or every social media flashy thing that you think's gonna like be cool or make you look cool.

[SPEAKER_00]: Go for foundations before flash.

[SPEAKER_00]: start putting into practice, figure out where you're going to give, figure out what you need to invest, and then figure out the rest how much you need to live under your means, and be generous, foundations before flash.

[SPEAKER_00]: So many young adults, see, oh my gosh, I've got so much here, and like Uber Eats doesn't even need the map on your house.

[SPEAKER_00]: They just, they just know exactly where you are, all right?

[SPEAKER_00]: The Uber Eats driver just could close his eyes and turn up there because they are there like every day, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Foundations, foundations, foundations.

[SPEAKER_00]: Build Good Habits first before you build Good Assets.

[SPEAKER_00]: Remember Jesus spent 30 years hidden before public ministry.

[SPEAKER_00]: You don't have to have it all now.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's called Away.

[SPEAKER_00]: For families, Jody and I had more arguments about money when our kids were born than ever before, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Once our kids are around, because when you're just the two of you, you can, you know, if money gets tight, you split a happy meal and it's all good, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: It's all good, we just manage.

[SPEAKER_00]: But kids will not accept splitting a happy meal.

[SPEAKER_00]: They will not accept that, and so, but when you go underneath it, all fights about money are actually fights about priorities.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so, as a couple, as a family, you can work to being aligned on your values before you're aligned on your budgets.

[SPEAKER_00]: What do we value?

[SPEAKER_00]: Which direction are we going?

[SPEAKER_00]: What's important to us?

[SPEAKER_00]: And then,

[SPEAKER_00]: we can figure out how we're gonna manage what we've got coming in and how we're gonna do it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Does that make sense?

[SPEAKER_00]: Alignment is really, really important.

[SPEAKER_00]: Shared values.

[SPEAKER_00]: Teaching kids generosity by example, not just by telling them, or you should be generous.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're not gonna be generous if they're not watching you do it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Solumins household collapsed.

[SPEAKER_00]: when abundance replaced attentiveness to what was going on in his house.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then for over 55s, I want to encourage you guys to invest in legacy, not just in comfort.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, as comfort is important, and comfort is okay, and you've lived a lot of life, and there are some things that you should have that's cool.

[SPEAKER_00]: No one's saying, that's not a bad thing, but you've got to start thinking now about legacy.

[SPEAKER_00]: What comes after you?

[SPEAKER_00]: What surviving you?

[SPEAKER_00]: What's beyond your life?

[SPEAKER_00]: How can you bless, release and set others up in your world?

[SPEAKER_00]: So start thinking legacy.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's good a question shift from how do I secure my future to what kind of future am I shaping for others?

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not just what you leave two people either.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's what you leave in them that makes a big difference.

[SPEAKER_00]: Fourthly and finally, practice generosity somewhere concrete and consistent.

[SPEAKER_00]: So a lot of people would say, I am a generous person, and then what do you regularly give to or nothing, I just give when I kind of feel the vibe?

[SPEAKER_00]: Not.

[SPEAKER_00]: Anything we do that's important to us, we plan it.

[SPEAKER_00]: I do not go, oh yeah, I really, really love Jodie, really love spending time with her, really love that she's my wife, and then I, yeah, just whenever we feel like, you know, I don't know, when I think about it, we'll go on a date sometime, maybe.

[SPEAKER_00]: When I'm just feeling it, nah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Every Friday made, it's planned, why?

[SPEAKER_00]: Because it's in there so that we remind ourselves that we love each other.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's important, time together is important.

[SPEAKER_00]: We plan it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Your generosity needs to be planned and consistent, something concrete.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is what we talk about when we talk about giving first fruits or a tired that goes to church is because it's a concrete and consistent way for you to be generous.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not an obligation, it's something that we get to participate in because our heart needs to be trained.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's important to us, so we plan it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Throughout all of our lives, Jody, and I have a portion, as well as our regular church giving, a tiny little bit every month, just for spontaneous generosity acts.

[SPEAKER_00]: Because there are those times when you're talking to someone, you think, oh man, it'd be great to be able to buy them a meal or law.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'd be great to be able to buy them a coffee or, you know, I was at an event and I really want to give to that thing once off, but, ah,

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't have, I don't have any spare cash for that.

[SPEAKER_00]: Whereas if you plan it, it's tiny bit.

[SPEAKER_00]: I come talking like we had like $40 a month that was just there for random stuff on top of our church giving.

[SPEAKER_00]: Just so that when it came time, we weren't like, it's just something you can just do.

[SPEAKER_00]: Concrete and consistent.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you want to factor that in into your life, you might want to be just another concrete and consistent thing you can do is what Carl let us in before, which is just being grateful.

[SPEAKER_00]: Having a heart of gratitude is a concrete and consistent way that you can actually be generous because it's flowing from a place that's like, oh, man, I'm so grateful.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm so glad.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm so thankful for what God has done in my life and through me for everything that He's given me, whether it be a little or a lot.

[SPEAKER_00]: All right, team, you can come.

[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.

[SPEAKER_00]: Guys, we're going to finish up.

[SPEAKER_00]: But in a minute, I just want to lead us in a time in a prayer to help us just think about how we got to where we are.

[SPEAKER_00]: And what is it that the Lord is doing in us,

[SPEAKER_00]: And it has his weight is so heavy on our lives.

[SPEAKER_00]: How do we honor him with that?

[SPEAKER_00]: Because we see a real contrast, don't we in the life of Solomon to the life of Jesus?

[SPEAKER_00]: Solomon had silver and gold and palaces.

[SPEAKER_00]: And what did Jesus say?

[SPEAKER_00]: Son of man has no place to lay his head.

[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, Paul would go on to say that Jesus had everything, but became Paul so that he could make us rich and not rich financially, but rich in life, in abundance, in his given us life and breath, and everything, friends.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's defeated sin and death in our behalf, set a spree, skewed our future, or because the glory of God was heavy,

[SPEAKER_00]: and it made everything else light.

[SPEAKER_00]: Let's stand together.

[SPEAKER_00]: So guys, I want to challenge you know, it's not just about what you accumulate.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's who you trust.

[SPEAKER_00]: Who do you trust?

[SPEAKER_00]: Because Jesus trusted the Father with everything, even his life.

[SPEAKER_00]: not my will, but yours be done.

[SPEAKER_00]: And because he did, we're free now to hold everything lightly.

[SPEAKER_00]: We can unseat the power of money in our life and allow Jesus to be the Lord of it all.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we can say Lord, give us wisdom that I might manage or even trust it with entrusted to me for this season.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that I might be a good steward if what it is that you've given.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so far today, we want to thank you for the tremendous privilege that we have for the entrustment that you've given each one of us in varying ways in different places, but God together collectively as a church we come and lay it before you.

[SPEAKER_00]: We want to honor you.

[SPEAKER_00]: We want to honor you.

[SPEAKER_00]: Our worship is to you.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, just important to us, God, you are everything to us.

[SPEAKER_00]: May your glory weigh heavily, heavily on our lives.

[SPEAKER_00]: Right now, I pray, inspire us, give us wisdom, give us ideas, to help us devise generous plans.

[SPEAKER_00]: And every time would be a testimony a story of who's really in charge.

[SPEAKER_00]: Throughout every season of our life, God would you.

[SPEAKER_00]: Show us and shape us, challenge us and change us in Jesus' name.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is for you, God.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's all for you, for you alone.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh worthy, we'll change it soon.