Introduction:
1 Kings 3:5,9 - At Gibeon the Lord appeared to Solomon during the night in a dream, and God said, “Ask for whatever you want me to give you."...9 So give your servant a discerning heart to govern your people and to distinguish between right and wrong. For who is able to govern this great people of yours?"
Lessons from Folly (Prov 6:1):
- Always be a Giver .
Proverbs 11:24-25 - One person gives freely, yet gains even more; another withholds unduly, but comes to poverty. A generous person will prosper; whoever refreshes others will be refreshed.
Malachi 3:8-10 - "Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this," says the Lord Almighty, "and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it."
- Live the life that God is calling you to live.
Proverbs 12:9 - Better to be a nobody and yet have a servant than pretend to be somebody and have no food
Proverbs 11:28 - Those who trust in their riches will fall, but the righteous will thrive like a green leaf.
- Debt is Dumb .
Proverbs 17:18 - One who has no sense shakes hands in pledge and puts up security for a neighbor.
Proverbs 22:7 - The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender.
Ephesians 6:6 - Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart.
Matthew 6:24 - No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money
Proverbs 21:30 - In the house of the wise are stores of choice food and oil, but a foolish man devours all he has.
Sermon Notes (PDF): BLANK
Hint: Highlight blanks above for answers!
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00:47-00:51
Pastor Jeff has been speaking through Proverbs on a variety of topics, right?
00:52-00:59
On adultery, on wisdom, on gluttony, on being lazy, or a Biblical word for lazy is being a sluggard, right?
01:00-01:03
And so, today I'm going to continue on that journey.
01:04-01:09
And Proverbs is primarily written by King Solomon.
01:09-01:12
I think that that's a fairly well-known fact.
01:12-01:18
And it was written to instruct young men so that they can remain true to God.
01:18-01:25
And one thing that I think is really cool is the actual prologue to Proverbs, verses 1 through 7.
01:26-02:05
And it reads like this, "The Proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel, for gaining wisdom and instruction, for understanding words of insight, for receiving instruction in prudent behavior, doing what is right and just and fair, for giving prudence to those who are simple, knowledge and discretion to the young, let the wise listen and add to their learning, and let the discerning get guidance, for understanding proverbs and parables, the sayings and riddles of the wise, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.
02:06-02:27
and my favorite, but fools despise wisdom and instruction." And so, what's really interesting about this, if you know and you've studied the Old Testament and you've read Kings and you know about Solomon, we know from the Scripture that all of his wisdom came directly from God.
02:28-02:40
So 1 Kings 3.5 - I'm not sure if we have that up this morning, but "At Gibeon the Lord appeared to Solomon during the night in a dream, God said, "Ask for whatever you want me to give you." How cool is that?
02:40-02:43
That's the ultimate genie in a bottle thing that we all wish for, right?
02:44-03:08
That God would appear to us and say, "Hey, ask me for whatever you want, "and I'll give it to you." Solomon, who must have already been wise, says, "Give your servant a discerning heart "to govern your people and distinguish "between right and wrong, for who is able "to govern this great people of yours?" Man, Solomon was in his early 20's when he became king.
03:09-03:16
I don't know about you when you were in your early 20's, but there's no way in heck that that's what I'm asking God for.
03:17-03:17
There's just no way.
03:18-03:28
So how amazing, right, is that already, that he had that mindset, that attitude, that his heart was already in the right place to make such a request to God.
03:29-03:32
And Proverbs covers every subject imaginable.
03:33-03:34
You've heard a lot of them.
03:34-03:40
They're very simple and very powerful short statements of truth.
03:41-03:43
It's today's equivalent of Twitter.
03:44-03:45
Right?
03:45-03:48
It's these little tweets that Solomon was putting out there.
03:49-03:50
Solomon's just tweeting his thoughts.
03:51-03:56
He had 3,000 proverbs that at least are attributed to him.
03:57-04:03
And could you imagine being like one of Solomon's scribes, probably constantly rolling their eyes.
04:03-04:13
Solomon has a shower thought and he goes, "Hey, here's a good one, write this down." They're just, "Okay. All right, Solomon, I got you, I got you." But he's coming out with this wisdom stuff.
04:16-04:18
Twitter gets people in trouble, am I right?
04:19-04:20
So, we see this every day.
04:20-04:26
We see it with our own leader in our nation, that oftentimes he gets in trouble for Twitter.
04:27-04:29
Famous people use Twitter all the time.
04:29-04:37
they think that their fame allows them to make sure that all of us want to hear what they think about something, right?
04:38-04:40
And usually it just causes an uproar.
04:40-04:46
I'm sure there's probably a new, it's probably an actual word or term now in Webster's Twitter Wars, right?
04:47-04:49
We see that all the time.
04:49-04:55
So what would happen today to King Solomon if he tweeted 21 .9?
04:56-04:58
You familiar with verse 21.9 in Proverbs?
04:59-05:07
"Better to live on the corner of a roof "than share a house with a quarrelsome wife." Ouch, right?
05:07-05:09
Could you imagine if he tweets that today?
05:11-05:12
He would be in so much trouble.
05:12-05:14
He'd be called a misogynist, right?
05:14-05:17
Immediately there would be all kinds of uproar.
05:18-05:19
PETA would be upset.
05:19-05:19
Why?
05:19-05:21
Just 'cause PETA's always upset.
05:22-05:26
You know, AOC would make her own video now complaining.
05:27-05:35
The roofer union would just absolutely go after King Solomon and ask for his impeachment.
05:36-05:36
Right?
05:38-05:41
Probably better that Twitter wasn't around back then.
05:42-05:48
So this morning I'm going to be talking about what King Solomon had to say about being in debt.
05:48-05:51
I know it's not a sexy topic.
05:53-05:56
Honestly, it's one that, in my opinion, churches don't talk enough about.
05:57-06:12
One thing I love about Pastor Jeff and what I love about Harvest Bible Chapel is just the expository preaching, verse by verse through the scripture, 'cause when you do that, it is impossible to avoid the stuff that is really, really, really important in our lives.
06:12-06:21
It's easy to go out and create a sermon series that's flowery and nice and fills the seats, but at the end of the day, we need to preach the word of God.
06:21-06:23
And so I'm blessed to bring this to you this morning.
06:23-06:26
And so you may be thinking, well, what the heck are you doing up here?
06:26-06:27
Why are you here?
06:27-06:29
And that's a great, great question.
06:29-06:33
And I'll answer that question because I've been just about as stupid with money as you can be.
06:35-06:40
And the title of this is Lessons from Folly.
06:41-06:43
And I got that from Proverbs 6.1.
06:43-06:45
It's warnings against folly.
06:45-06:46
Don't be foolish.
06:48-06:49
Don't be foolish.
06:49-06:53
If you have the message version of the Bible, it's a little different, it's a little stronger.
06:55-06:58
But I was very foolish with my finances.
06:59-07:16
So, way back, my wife and I are fairly newly married, and we've got two little boys in the house, and we decided, we decided, I decided that we were going to be real estate moguls, and pulled equity out of my house, and started buying out-of-state rental properties.
07:16-07:19
We lived in Southern California at the time, sight unseen.
07:21-07:23
I'm going to go more into that a little bit later.
07:24-07:29
But what ended up happening is we accumulated a lot of property.
07:29-07:35
We accumulated 11 properties at 11 mortgages I was paying, one that I was living in and 10 rental.
07:37-07:42
I started that in 2004, we purchased our last home in June of 2006.
07:44-07:59
If you were around in 2006, maybe not in Pittsburgh, but the rest of the country and definitely in Southern California, there was this thing called the mortgage meltdown, and the real estate market absolutely imploded.
08:01-08:04
So I had quit my job to get into real estate full-time.
08:05-08:10
Stacy was homeschooling our boys, and we're at home staring at each other with 11 mortgages to pay and no money coming in.
08:12-08:13
It was brutal.
08:14-08:15
It was absolutely brutal.
08:18-08:22
So God blessed me with an amazing wife, and she stuck around.
08:25-08:25
Thank goodness for that.
08:27-08:28
We fought our way through.
08:29-08:55
I'm going to share some of that with you as we go on, but being through that and understanding what it is to be in debt, understanding what it is to feel absolutely hopeless, understanding that everything that you could possibly feel in that situation, and the struggles that you go through, and how it interferes with your relationships, I absolutely know what that feels like.
08:55-08:58
So I want to be able to come in and speak to you about that today.
09:00-09:02
We learn when we do stupid stuff.
09:02-09:04
I definitely learned when I do stupid stuff.
09:04-09:12
The thing that came to me just the other day was my mom when I was young, we'd have dinner at the table every day.
09:12-09:18
My mom would put down some pot, bowl, casserole or something and she'd say, "Careful, it's hot." What did I do?
09:19-09:21
Always touch it, right?
09:21-09:21
Pow!
09:22-09:22
Burn myself.
09:24-09:26
So I thought, that's dumb.
09:26-09:28
You learn not to touch hot things.
09:29-09:43
But then I was laughing because when we go out to eat, to this day, and usually if it's at a Mexican restaurant, the server will come and they'll be holding my plate with a four inch pad and they say, "Hey, careful, this is hot." And they put it down.
09:43-09:44
I always touch the plate.
09:45-09:46
I always touch the plate.
09:46-09:47
So I still haven't learned to this point.
09:47-09:51
So some lessons we learn quickly, some lessons maybe not so quickly.
09:52-10:02
But the first lesson that I learned during this whole part going through this is that you need to always be a giver.
10:03-10:04
Always be a giver.
10:05-10:10
Proverbs 11, 24 says, "One person gives freely, yet gains even more.
10:12-10:15
Another withholds unduly, but comes to poverty.
10:16-10:18
A generous person will prosper.
10:19-10:22
Whoever refreshes others will be refreshed.
10:24-10:30
So during the time when things were going well, and when I say things are going well, we were going well.
10:31-10:38
Technically, you could say if you were to add up all of our assets, we were a millionaire in Southern California, living the dream.
10:38-10:44
We had worked our way up to a gated community with an awesome swimming pool.
10:44-10:48
And we would open it up to everyone to come hang out at our house any time we wanted, even if we weren't home.
10:48-10:50
We just said, just let yourself in, enjoy the pool.
10:51-10:52
And we were just kind of living the dream.
10:53-10:54
But we never gave.
10:54-10:55
We weren't tithers.
10:56-10:57
We weren't tithers.
10:58-11:08
We would do whatever was minimally required of us at church, or whatever we thought that the church was kind of spending on us, we would kind of give that back.
11:09-11:12
Kind of like, OK, we're going to make sure that we're whole with the church.
11:14-11:14
But we weren't givers.
11:15-11:23
So we deliberately withheld from God, and just as these verses foretell, we ended up in a financial mess.
11:24-11:31
And so, no matter where you are today financially, no matter where you are, you need to be a giver.
11:32-11:39
See, in the middle of our mess, when everything imploded, we walked up to our house one day, and there's a note on it that said we didn't live there anymore.
11:40-11:46
We were in the middle of a disaster, but we had already started our journey back, and we had started tithing.
11:48-11:51
And from the moment we started giving, everything changed in our life.
11:54-11:55
We started working our way out of the mess.
11:55-11:57
For the first time, we had a plan.
11:57-12:00
For the first time, we felt like we could see the blessings of God.
12:02-12:04
And it didn't make any sense.
12:04-12:05
It doesn't make sense.
12:06-12:17
Right? If I don't have anything, yet I'm giving fully my tithe the Lord and to my church every Sunday, how is it that I can end up with more?
12:18-12:24
Then I think that what we ended up understanding very clearly is that we're not the provider.
12:26-12:28
Stacy went back to work, got a full-time job.
12:28-12:33
I stayed home and homeschooled the boys and continued to work from home.
12:34-12:38
But she was the main breadwinner of the household, still is today.
12:39-12:44
And what we learn in that whole process is that Stacy's not the provider.
12:46-12:48
Chevron Corporation is not the provider.
12:50-12:55
The economy, up or down, isn't the provider or the blame.
12:57-12:59
What the minimum wage is, is not going to provide.
13:01-13:02
Overtime is not the provider.
13:03-13:04
The government is not the provider.
13:05-13:07
God is the provider.
13:08-13:10
Absolutely. 100%.
13:11-13:21
And when you come to understand this, and when you come to realize that 90% - mathematically, I get this doesn't make sense - 90% is greater than 100%.
13:23-13:26
God challenges us with this very thing.
13:27-13:34
Malachi 3.10 "Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house.
13:34-13:53
Test me in this, says the Lord Almighty, and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be enough room to store it." You know, there's no promise here that the blessings you receive from giving, from tithing, are going to be financial.
13:53-13:55
For me, yes, some of them were.
13:55-13:56
Absolutely.
13:56-13:58
We had money show up that we couldn't explain.
13:59-14:01
You know, things just started happening.
14:01-14:09
And I always tell the story that I felt like God was saying, "Hey, listen, I'm kind of being a fool right now.
14:10-14:12
I have all these blessings for you, but I can't give it to you.
14:12-14:13
You're just going to waste them.
14:14-14:17
So you get your act together, and I'll give these to you.
14:17-14:23
And as soon as we started behaving, as soon as we started trusting in God, then these blessings started showing up in our lives.
14:24-14:27
So yes, there was some financial blessing that we received, absolutely.
14:28-14:30
But the majority of those blessings were not financial.
14:31-14:36
Man, the majority of those blessings or things that are priceless.
14:37-14:42
That Stacey and I, you know, when you get in a situation like that, it's so easy to fight.
14:43-14:44
But we fought.
14:45-14:46
It wasn't against each other.
14:47-14:50
We fought with each other to get out.
14:51-14:53
We fought together to get out.
14:53-14:55
We had an incredible bond.
14:55-14:56
It strengthened our marriage.
14:56-14:58
It didn't divide our marriage.
14:58-15:08
Our family, you know, you get a household full of kids and you show them a certain lifestyle, and then all of a sudden it goes away and you start having new rules.
15:09-15:13
It's hard. Honestly, it's not fair for the kids and most kids rebel.
15:13-15:16
If you have teenagers and you're in that situation, that's a tough place to be.
15:16-15:20
I get it. Kids get upset and honestly, they probably have every right to.
15:20-15:23
That's uncool of us to do that to them.
15:23-15:26
But man, our kids were awesome throughout the whole process.
15:28-15:31
Then just the piece that we had amidst our storm.
15:32-15:59
walking up to a house and realizing that it's been foreclosed, you don't live here anymore, and we were like, "Eh, that stinks." "All right, let's move on." "God has a plan." And that's how we handled that. And then the diligence, the diligence to fight and claw and do everything possible to make sure that not only were we going to get out of this, but there's no way in heck I'm allowing my family to suffer anymore from this day forward. We're going to work our way out.
16:00-16:01
And that's what we did.
16:04-16:24
So, another thing is, as important as the offering is, as important as tithing is, I think the church as a whole doesn't do a good enough job at making sure we understand that giving is an act of worship.
16:25-16:27
And let me explain to you exactly what I mean.
16:29-16:33
How many times, or how easy is it to just pretend that that offering isn't coming around?
16:34-16:38
And the reason that it's easy to pretend it's not coming around is because it's halftime at the church.
16:41-16:43
What do we do at halftime, right?
16:43-16:54
If you're at Heinz Field today and it's halftime, you're gonna go to a concession stand, you're gonna get a beverage of choice, you're gonna go to Primanti Brothers, you're gonna work your way back to your seat.
16:56-17:02
But halftime at church, we get up, we worship, we sing and praise to the Lord, and then here comes halftime.
17:02-17:27
Halftime is we're gonna have announcements, we're gonna show a video, oh by the way, that thing's coming around, and it's easy just to mentally in our mind go to the concession stand and conveniently forget that that's the time that we are supposed to really, really do some introspective, be so grateful for what God has given to us, and trust Him then with what He has given us and say thank you.
17:29-17:31
You know, it's hard and we don't get it.
17:32-17:39
And I think that part of the reason we don't get it is we don't put the right emphasis on what a tithe is, what the offering is.
17:40-17:42
God doesn't need our money.
17:43-17:45
God created everything from nothing.
17:46-17:48
And if He needed money, He could print it.
17:48-17:50
It's not an issue, right?
17:51-17:53
The church doesn't need our money.
17:54-17:56
I know Jeff is freaking out right now.
17:57-17:59
The church doesn't need our money.
17:59-18:00
You see statements every month.
18:00-18:01
We've got a lot of money coming through here.
18:03-18:04
You need to give.
18:04-18:05
I need to give.
18:06-18:09
Because we need to make that offering.
18:11-18:12
It's about us.
18:14-18:16
It's about us trusting in God.
18:16-18:20
It is in order for us to be Christ-like, You have to be givers.
18:21-18:32
And the act of worship, the act of trusting in the Lord and saying, "Okay, Lord, I believe that 90 is greater than 100, and I am giving this to You." That is what grows us.
18:33-18:39
And as a result, what happens in this church when we become givers is unbelievably phenomenal.
18:40-18:42
And that's how the church is blessed.
18:44-18:51
The second lesson that I learned back when I went through this mess is to live the life that God is calling you to live.
18:53-18:54
We see it all day, right?
18:55-19:02
Facebook, Instagram, and you see everybody's living this amazing online, look-at-me life.
19:03-19:07
And we really like to kind of boast and brag about all the cool things that we do.
19:08-19:10
And we live in that social media world today.
19:10-19:10
I get it.
19:12-19:26
But I've seen so many people, and I was one of them, live their life in an outwardly fashion to please others at the expense of your own family.
19:29-19:44
Wow, that's rough. Why do we do that? Why do we do that? Contentment has to be the absolute first and foremost for us. We need to be content with where we are with who we are and most importantly with whose we are.
19:46-20:26
Proverbs 12.9 reads, "Better to be nobody and to have a servant than pretend to be somebody and have no food." So I was thinking about that and just this morning I made an adjustment and I thought, you know that's great and a lot of these, you know, Proverbs and parables and we hear them all the time, they're, you know, it was written at a time when and everyone could understand what they said because the culture was very, you know, it was all about agriculture and people understood these things and people understood really what it was like to have a servant back in these times and they certainly understood what it was like to be a servant.
20:27-20:34
And it's not the kind of slavery that you and I think of when we think of slavery and the horrific things that happened here in the United States.
20:34-20:39
There was servanthood that had to happen where you just had to go work for somebody.
20:40-20:42
Right, we're all servants to our job in a sense.
20:42-20:45
You show up and you have to keep working in order to pay things off.
20:46-20:57
And so sometimes you had to do that for a farmer or a land owner, et cetera, so that you could earn something, so that you could pay something, so that you could, you know, able to court their daughter.
20:57-21:03
I mean, there's all kinds of things in the Scripture where people became servants to do these kinds of things.
21:03-21:05
And I thought, what would this look like today?
21:06-21:10
If I could tweet out a Solomon proverb today, what would that tweet look like?
21:12-21:14
Here's what I came up with, I had a couple of them.
21:15-21:23
Better to drive a used pay for a car and put money away for retirement than to drive a payment and retire broke.
21:26-21:33
Better to live in a humble home and have money for your kids college than in a castle with kids who have student loan debt.
21:35-21:36
That's what that's saying to us.
21:38-21:56
You know, I think about my personal testimony and I realized, at the time that all this stuff was going on, Stacy and I were part of a church plant, a young church, and we were, you know, just like we started here at Harvest, we were meeting in elementary school, set up, tear down each and every Sunday, and I was an elder at that church.
21:57-22:05
We were so involved and 100% in on our faith, on everything that we were doing.
22:06-22:14
Christ was the absolute center of our marriage, of our parenting, our prayer life, with the exception of one area.
22:15-22:17
And when it came to finances, I was like, "Hey God, I got this.
22:18-22:23
"I don't need you here, I'm good." And that's exactly where I dropped the ball.
22:26-22:29
And so, who was I trying to please?
22:31-22:33
I had everything in the wrong place.
22:34-22:40
There's a picture up here that was taken back in 2005.
22:41-22:47
Stacy and I bought this house for $227,000 in Chino Hills, California back in 1999.
22:47-22:52
We sold it for $589,000 in 2005.
22:54-22:59
Why? Because that's what appreciation and real estate was doing in California right before it imploded on.
23:00-23:02
Look at those two little boys.
23:03-23:06
The smallest one is sitting here today, the bigger one is in college.
23:08-23:12
So that was the beginning of the end for us.
23:13-23:15
That was the beginning of our downward spiral.
23:17-23:20
I haven't done the math on the difference between those numbers because it makes me sick.
23:22-23:27
But instead of trusting in God, we decided to trust in our wealth.
23:28-23:35
It was right about this time, maybe a little before that, I would say maybe a year or so before that.
23:35-23:40
Christian, who's the oldest in that photo, was about three years old.
23:41-23:47
I remember he had found three pennies, and he was so excited.
23:47-23:54
If you have little kids or have had little kids, and you just remember you give a kid like a couple of coins, and they just think it's the coolest thing in the world.
23:55-23:59
He had found three pennies, and he was so excited and he put them in his pocket.
24:00-24:16
And so we get to worship and I get to church and I'm getting ready to grab him out of the car seat and lift him up and put him down so he could walk and unload the family and all the stuff that you guys do today, but our stuff wasn't nearly as cool as the stuff you parents have today.
24:16-24:21
So I'm grabbing him and he's not grabbing onto me because he's quickly reaching into his pocket.
24:22-24:28
And I'm like, "Christian, what are you doing?" And so I put him down and then he digs I'm just waiting for him to take my hand so I can get going.
24:28-24:29
We got to go.
24:29-24:30
We're always rushing a little bit late.
24:32-24:35
And he hands me this, and he says, Daddy, will you hold my monies?
24:36-24:37
Three pennies.
24:38-24:40
And I thought, oh, that's so sweet.
24:41-24:41
How cool is that?
24:42-24:47
You know, he didn't trust in his ability to not lose his money.
24:48-24:53
And he wanted his father to hold his money for him.
24:54-24:55
And we need to do the same.
24:56-25:05
And today when I think about that story, and as I was preparing, that accounting of that entered my mind, and it did two things.
25:05-25:07
It made me smile immediately, because I just thought how cute.
25:08-25:09
My little son, I remember that.
25:10-25:14
And then it absolutely pierced my soul at the same time.
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Because he trusted me with his pennies, and yet I was there at the same time, where I literally had the thought when he handed it to me, I thought, wow, that preacher's right there.
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That's awesome.
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I didn't get it.
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He's trusting me with pennies and I'm not trusting God with my dollars.
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Proverbs 11, 28.
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"Those who trust in their riches will fall, "but the righteous will thrive like a green leaf." And we fell.
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Debt is dumb.
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Flat out, debt is dumb.
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Proverbs 17, 18, "One who has no sense shakes hands in pledge and puts up security for a neighbor." If you're familiar with the Message version of the Bible, the Message version of the Bible is in absolute plain language, plain English, and it literally translates that to being stupid.
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It says that this is stupid.
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And we don't use that word.
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That used to be the S word in our house.
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We don't do that.
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no thank you word in the Gennetti house.
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You may be thinking, "Well, really, everyone has debt, right?
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I mean, why does God really care if we have debt?
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What's the big deal? I mean, do we even know someone who doesn't have debt?" If you do, they're probably a little weird. Am I right?
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Like in the world we live in, when we finance everything, everyone's owing on everything.
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But God cares because there's such a spiritual truth that's found in Proverbs 22.7.
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The rich rule over the poor and the borrower is slave to the lender.
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If you think about it, we all understand how this feels.
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If you have to make a payment to anyone for anything, absolutely know what this feels like.
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You know what it's like to be enslaved to whoever that is that you're making payments to.
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Financial stress destroys every relationship we have.
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It's the number one cause of divorce.
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You know what's the worst part about that?
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A couple who cannot get together financially and they struggle and they fight and they argue and they split up and now all we do is multiply because guess what?
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Now I've got two broke households that are miserable and that perpetuates.
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Kids get caught up in that mess and we all learn from our parents.
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I learned how to handle money from my broke parents and I decided that I was going to change my family tree and stop that immediately.
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Number one reason that students drop out of college isn't because it's hard or they can't make it or because of the workload or grades, it's because of student loan debt and the stress that that puts on them.
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Here's the worst part about that.
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The day you drop out, guess what starts coming?
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Your payments. It's the absolute worst time to have to start paying things back.
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If you graduate, you get a bit of a grace period.
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But when you stop and quit, come right after you.
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So I'm going to double down and I'm going to say that to dance with debt is dancing with disaster.
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It's not the server telling you your plate is hot.
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It's God telling you, "This plate is hot, don't touch it." That's no way for any of us to live.
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Chris Hogan is a personal finance expert.
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My wife showed me a Prager University video that he was on and it was amazing.
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There were so many things on there that I would love to share with you this morning.
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There's just not enough time, but the one thing that caught my eye was one in three people in America today could not cover a $2,000 emergency if they had to pay it in cash.
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We live in the greatest country in the world.
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We could go out right now, each and every one of us, if we were willing to go work our tails off and make $2,000 today somehow, someway.
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Whether it's selling stuff that we're not using and stuck in our closet, we could figure out a way to do it.
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Yet, one in three, 33 percent can't cover $2,000?
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Something's wrong. That's sad.
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I want to give you some encouragement this morning.
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If you're losing sleep at night because you're worried about finances, I've been there, I get it.
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If there's too much month at the end of your money and it's keeping you up, it's stressing you out, maybe you're living in a way that you're not even fully insured.
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you're driving your car and hoping that nothing happens.
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You're hoping nothing happens to your house because you're not insured properly.
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Or worse yet, maybe you don't have life insurance, and your family is just literally hanging out there on the edge.
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You know what makes me more sad than anything is when there's a tragedy that happens, someone's house burns down, someone passes away, and then there's a GoFundMe account for whoever was left behind.
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No reason for that.
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There's none.
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For so many years, Stacy and I stuck our head in the sand when it came to the things that we weren't doing right.
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I promise you that's the wrong way to go.
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Because eventually the light switch comes on, you can't hide anymore.
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Maybe you have no idea how your kid's going to go to college.
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Maybe you don't have a penny in savings or anything in your retirement account.
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I hear commercials where people quote that, Forget what the number is, but there's so many people today who think they're going to die with debt.
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They're going to have to work until the day they die to pay off the debt or they just don't have money to retire.
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I thought every bit of that too.
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In a few weeks, Stacy and I are going to be teaching another round of Financial Peace University.
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So if that's you, I want you to think about whether that might be the right class for you to attend.
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It's easy to tune out.
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Every time that we talk about this kind of thing and we talk about debt, and I know that it's uncomfortable and I get it.
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There might be some people in this room actually who are really good with their finances, and so it's easy to tune that out.
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But here's one thing that really came to me and it was powerful.
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Because Stacy and I have done a complete 180, and we definitely have been honoring God in our finances long enough to the point where we have been very blessed.
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And so for me to come up here and tell you that we went from a place that was absolutely horrific To a place where we feel honored and blessed To come through it and I told you that I wanted to change our family tree and we've done that Both my boys know if they ever borrow money from anyone. I'm gonna kill them So it's easy to tune out about financial stuff and I get it But I want you to think about this for a second.
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Rich rule over the poor, I get that.
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That clearly was written with a financial mindset.
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But I want you to focus on the second part of that verse and it says, "The borrower is slave to the lender." You know that's true no matter what type of debt you owe.
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Have you ever owed someone an apology?
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How did that feel, knowing that you weren't willing to pay that back?
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How did that make you feel?
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Have you ever owed someone a favor?
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Have you ever owed someone an explanation or a response?
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Email, text, phone call.
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There's some calls that I get we don't want to make.
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I understand that.
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Maybe you owe someone a thank you.
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A debt of gratitude.
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Have you ever borrowed something from someone and you just feel really uneasy until you can get it back in their hands either because it has value or if you ever borrowed someone's car.
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How terrifying is that?
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Why do we feel that way?
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Regardless of what it is that you owe somebody else, money, some kind of emotion, or something else of value, it changes the relationship.
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You are no longer neighbors or friends or even family.
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You are master and servant.
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At that very moment, we'll drive a wedge between the two of you.
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You can't stop it.
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It's unavoidable.
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It's in the Scripture.
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It is a spiritual truth.
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And you're not going to be able to interact in a normal way until you are able to make whole with that individual.
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And even then, sometimes, depending how that went, if it took too long, if it was awkward, The relationship is never the same.
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And when that's family, that's really, really sad.
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And that's why so many times we just avoid contact with people that we owe something to.
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You have grandkids who don't talk to their grandparents for years.
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All of us have some kind of personal or relational debt.
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Even if you're a kid in this room today, teenager in this room today, you know that you have debt, emotional debt.
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If you're a young adult in this room today, you have emotional debt.
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If you're a parent of young ones, you have emotional debt. Let me tell you what I'm talking about.
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If you, yesterday, Stacy and I were at an event and someone referred to us as post midlife.
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Yeah, I thought, "Oh, it's a bit rough." If there's anyone else post-midlife in here like me, you have kids, or you, you know, maybe you come to the realization, if you're a teenager here today, what happens is you get into your early 20s and you start adulting for real, maybe get out on your own, and then you realize, "Wow, you know what? My parents had to put up with a lot of stuff for me." And you pick up the phone and you make that call, and you say, "You know what? Mom and Dad, I know that wasn't easy.
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And then what happens is you find your spouse and you get married and you have kids, and then you think, "This is a disaster.
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This is insane. I'm not sleeping. It's a nightmare." If you're the Howells, you're definitely not sleeping. They've got like nine kids over there.
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I mean, get a hobby. So it's just one of those things, you know.
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And so you call your parents and you say, "Mom, Dad, how did you do this without iPads?" iPads, right? How did you do this without YouTube? There's no internet. I don't understand.
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This is hard. Thank you. Thank you for what you've done. Sometimes you don't even know, we don't even know what we owe to others. But when you have that and you owe something, a servant. And it's crazy. And if you're not a believer today and you're here, man I am so impressed by your faith. Because to believe that there is no God, to believe that what we see and read in the Scriptures isn't true, takes a lot more faith than I have. Proverbs 22 7 is so powerfully true in any sense. No matter what you owe to someone it absolutely cuts you to the core and that's why we cannot enter into that relationship of servant and master. And why is this so troubling to us? Why does this cut us no matter what? I don't care if you have the hardcore believer, someone who's sold out for Jesus Christ, or someone who's has no Someone who's an atheist, I promise you they feel the same things we feel when it comes to this. And why is that true? Because it conflicts with our true calling. We're all called to be servants, but we're supposed to be servants for Christ. Ephesians 6.6 Paul writes, and he's writing to slaves and he's talking to them about being obedient to their master and he says, "Obey them not only to win favor when their eye is on you, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart. Over and over Romans 1.1, Colossians 3.24, 1 Peter 2.16, it's very clear Paul's telling us we are supposed to be servants for Christ Jesus. And the second that we substitute Jesus for MasterCard, or Ford Motor Company, or Sally Mae, or your neighbor, or a family member, we stop focusing on who God created us to be.
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And we start serving a new master.
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That's exactly what Jesus was talking about in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6.24.
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No one can serve two masters.
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Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will "You will be devoted to one and despise the other.
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"You cannot serve both God and money." And this verse gets so turned around.
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You can take anything in scripture and make it the way you want.
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This verse is often used to argue that it's evil to have wealth.
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And I want to tell you, there's nothing further from the truth.
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Ironically, I think God wants us to have wealth.
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Is it a stumbling block for us?
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Absolutely, for the reasons I just outlined.
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Because our heart's not in the right place.
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But for His people, for the people who are sold out believers in Jesus Christ, who are servants for Jesus Christ, absolutely God wants you to have wealth.
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Because it's an amazing tool, and it will further the Kingdom of God.
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Proverbs 21.30, I'm wrapping up with this this morning.
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"In the house of the wise are stores "of choice food and oil, The foolish man devours all he has.
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Man was I foolish.
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Man was I foolish.
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Money came in, money came out.
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We live paycheck to paycheck.
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My wife read something today that cracked us up this morning and it said, "Oh, I no longer live paycheck to paycheck.
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I'm sophisticated.
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Now I live direct deposit to direct deposit." Whether you have money or don't have money has nothing to do with your relationship Jesus. Having your heart in the right place has everything to do with your relationship with Jesus. So let's think about this for a minute. Even though we're a smaller group today, in this room right here right now, if every single one of us in this room were a hundred percent debt-free, you owe nothing to anyone? How many of God's people from this room alone could we feed? How many of God's people could we clothe?
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How many of God's people could we send? Think of all the, you know, we got four guys in Thailand right now. How many people could we send all over the globe to do God's work? What do you think God could do with the loaves and fishes that come out of this room alone and multiply them and multiply them and multiply them all for the glory of God. You know many of us have heard over time and over the years I've heard this a thousand times well there's good debt and there's bad debt and I'm here to say that's absolutely false. I think we just confirmed that there is no good debt.
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In all the debt that we have, whether it's emotional, whether it's personal, whether it's financial, we made a choice and we entered into that debt knowingly and willingly.
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But there are two types of debt.
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There's one debt that we can't repay.
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No matter what we do, no matter how hard you work, There's no way to repay it, and that's the debt of our sin.
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Jesus canceled that debt for us.
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On the cross, he took our sin, past, present, and future.
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And we just sang about that in the last song that we sang.
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And that cuts me every time to think about, my debt put Jesus on the cross.
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My sin put Jesus on the cross.
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And yet, he canceled that debt for us.
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and it is absolutely mind-blowing.
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There's nothing we can do to pay it back.
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We can, however, live our lives as servants to Christ Jesus.
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Working for Him in everything that we do.
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Living for Him in a way that brings glory to God the Father, so that at the end of the day, we'll be servants.
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We're going to be servants one way or another.
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Let it be servants to Christ Jesus.
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to have no one and put no thing before Him.
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Please pray with me.
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Father God, thank You for the opportunity to come and share this morning.
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I just pray, Lord, for everyone in this room today that Your Word would take root.
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I pray, Father God, that we all examine ourselves as it relates to the death that we owe.
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If there are relationships that need to be mended, let us mend those relationships.
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If there are ways that we can improve the way that we honor You with what You have entrusted us, Father God, I ask that we would seek help and do that.
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But first and foremost, Lord, I pray for each and every one of us that we would live out our servanthood to You.
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That we would honor You in all that we do, our words and our actions and our deeds would bring glory to You.
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So often, we hear the word "small church." Oh, we're a small church.
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There is no small church.
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We serve an awesome, amazing God.
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And with a small group of believers, we can do incredible things through You.
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Thank You, Father God, for Your provision.
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Thank You, Father God, for Your wisdom.
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In Jesus' name we pray, Amen.
Small Group Discussion
Read Proverbs 6:1
(If you like, review any other Proverbs on money we covered on Sunday!)
Have you ever known of a relationship strained or destroyed due to unpaid financial or emotional debt? If so what happened and how could it have been prevented?
Have you ever found yourself trying to keep up with the Jones'? What were you doing and how did you stop?
1 in 3 Americans cannot cover a $2,000 emergency in cash. When you read that, how does that make you feel?
Read Proverbs 21:30 then respond with how that Scripture speaks to you.
The world says that there is 'good' debt and bad debt. the Bible says all debt is to be avoided. Who is right? Why do we continually try to justify the world's view?
BREAKOUT
Pray for one another. Are you struggling with money? Get an accountability partner - now - from your group on your spending. Pray about and dedicate to joining the upcoming Financial Peace University class.