With over a decade of Real Estate experience, Alex began as an investor and at the market's peak in 2006 owned 11 properties including his personal residence. The bubble burst and hit his family hard, but they regrouped and carried on with a No Debt Philosophy thanks to discovering the teachings of Dave Ramsey. Alex and his wife, Stacie, began teaching Dave's course, Financial Peace University and to date have helped hundreds of people to pay off over a million dollars in debt. Alex and Stacie are members of Harvest Bible Chapel with their two college-age boys, Christian and Samuel.
Guest Speaker - Alex Giannetti
alexgiannetti.com
Introduction:
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."
- God wants you to be a Giver .
See: Proverbs 11:23-24
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."
- Be Content . (1 Timothy 6:9-10)
Live the life that God is calling you to live and be grateful for that which he has given you.
See: Proverbs 12:9
- There is no such thing as Good Debt.
Proverbs 22:7 - "The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender."
See: James 4:3-4 | Proverbs 21:20
Sermon Notes (PDF): BLANK
Hint: Highlight blanks above for answers!
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00:00-00:04
All right, we'll talk more about FPU later, but let's go ahead and open in prayer this morning.
00:04-00:05
Please pray with me.
00:05-00:09
Father God, I just thank you for this opportunity to come and share your word this morning.
00:09-00:12
I want to lift up all of the families that are home.
00:12-00:16
We've got a lot of folks here in our Harvest family that are not feeling well.
00:16-00:17
Just want to lift them up in prayer, Lord.
00:18-00:21
We ask for your healing, especially for Pastor Jeff and Aaron and his family.
00:22-00:26
Also just so thankful that you've given us another year.
00:27-00:37
Father, I just pray that for each and every one of us, that we are prayerfully seeking You to see how we can serve You in 2021.
00:38-00:44
There are no promises that 2021 is gonna be any better from a worldly standpoint.
00:46-01:00
And more than ever for that reason, I think, as we look around and we see global events and we see events in our own nation, it's so important, Father, that we are in Your Word, that we are in relation with You, Father God, that we are seeking you in all that we do.
01:00-01:04
And I pray, I pray for that for each and every one of us here today, Lord God.
01:04-01:06
We ask this in Jesus' name, amen.
01:08-01:19
So I remember many, many years ago, I had tickets to see "Phantom of the Opera." And yes, I do listen to musicals.
01:19-01:20
Darren's laughing at me right now.
01:21-01:37
But you know, great musical, "Phantom of the Opera." And Michael Crawford, who was the man, the voice of the Phantom, who was on the album, those folks, they were touring the globe, and they were coming to the Orange County Performing Arts Center in California.
01:38-01:41
And so I was sitting there and I was so excited.
01:42-01:46
And just before the curtains drop, they give this announcement.
01:47-01:52
"Playing the role of Phantom today will be..." And it's the understudy.
01:54-02:01
And of course, they wait until you're already in your seat, you've got your tickets, it's not like I'm going to go anywhere, but I'm not happy.
02:01-02:03
I didn't come to see that guy.
02:03-02:07
I'm like, "What, are you kidding me?" And so I know exactly how you're feeling today.
02:07-02:14
You guys came here to see Big Ben, and you're not getting Big Ben, you're getting Mason Rudolph up here.
02:15-02:18
Big Ben's at home on the sofa right now watching.
02:20-02:26
So I didn't leave the theater that day, mostly because I already had paid for my seats and they weren't cheap.
02:26-02:29
There's nothing stopping you and the exits are clearly marked.
02:31-02:37
But I hope you stick around because I do have some important things to share with you today.
02:38-02:39
I'm not a pastor.
02:40-02:41
Big disclaimer.
02:41-02:51
I'm just a guy who loves Jesus, and I've got a story to tell about being really, really dumb it comes to handling personal finance.
02:52-02:55
So I want to share some of that with you today to help you.
02:55-03:02
I'm going to start with a personal testimony and some of you that have been around Harvest for a while may have heard this.
03:02-03:04
So I apologize in advance for that.
03:04-03:09
Those of you who are new, that may make you run out the door when you hear my story.
03:10-03:14
But I have two kids from a previous marriage that are adult children.
03:15-03:20
When Stacy and I got married, we brought them into our house and we had two big kids.
03:21-03:22
They were bigger than me.
03:22-03:25
Then I had my two little guys that aren't so little anymore.
03:26-03:30
Stacey was homeschooling them and that was what we decided to do.
03:31-03:33
So I was the sole provider for the house.
03:34-03:41
Very stressful as you might imagine, especially in Southern California where things are a bit different price-wise.
03:42-03:47
I was always trying to figure out how to make sure that I could keep balance in the household and keep things going.
03:48-03:51
I was always looking for the next way to make a quick buck.
03:52-04:02
So whatever scheme came along or if there was some side hustle or multi-level marketing gig that I could get involved in, I did it.
04:04-04:07
Then one day I was introduced to a real estate investing club.
04:08-04:13
Started reading books on real estate investing and decided to pull equity out of our house.
04:13-04:24
See, in California or any place in the world at the time, at least in the United States, around 2004, while you were breathing, your house was appreciating in value.
04:24-04:25
You didn't have to do anything.
04:26-04:27
In Southern California, it was ridiculous.
04:27-04:28
It was out of control.
04:29-04:36
So we pulled some money out of our house and started buying residential rental property across the country, sight unseen.
04:38-04:43
In two years, we had accumulated 10 properties, I thought I was a real estate genius.
04:45-04:55
So I quit my job, and then one last time we decided to buy a new house in the gated community with a beautiful swimming pool and we were living the dream.
04:57-05:00
Although we leveraged every one of those properties to the absolute hill.
05:01-05:06
That was the heyday of zero percent down, negative amortization loans, you name it.
05:07-05:29
We did all of it. So then this thing called bubble burst. And everyone remembers probably 2008, 2009, and in California it was brutal. Housing, home values dropped, but your mortgage payment didn't.
05:30-05:42
Foreclosures happened on our personal residence. We had tenants who couldn't pay their rent, so they just didn't pay their rent, which means I couldn't pay that mortgage either, it was rough.
05:43-05:54
One day I remember with two little guys in hand, we went to Costco and we came back, there was a little piece of paper on our door that said, "We didn't live there anymore." It was hard, it was tough.
05:55-06:02
Later on, we lost one more house to foreclosure and eventually two more to a short sale.
06:03-06:04
If you don't know what that is, then good.
06:04-06:05
You don't want to know what that is.
06:08-06:11
And during that time, we didn't talk about it.
06:12-06:14
It wasn't cool to be in debt.
06:14-06:16
It wasn't cool to have hard times.
06:17-06:20
And the last thing we wanted to do was let anybody know that we were hurting.
06:21-06:24
So I remember, I was an elder at the church at the time.
06:24-06:35
We were planning a church in California, and we would have elder meetings in my house, and a really good friend of mine, fellow elder, had mentioned the name Dave Ramsey.
06:36-06:37
Never heard of Dave Ramsey?
06:37-06:39
We were talking about ways that we could help our communities.
06:40-06:48
And he talked about how Dave Ramsey was a Christian and had this amazing podcast that he would listen to and how he was helping people get out of debt.
06:48-06:51
So I wrote Dave Ramsey, his name down in my notes.
06:51-06:57
And as soon as everyone was out of my house, I ran upstairs, Googled Dave Ramsey, realized that this was amazing.
06:58-06:59
And I went and bought his book the next day.
07:00-07:02
Stacy and I read it in a day and a half.
07:02-07:27
and we started our financial peace journey in December of 2007 with zero income coming in and a net worth of negative $750,000. So my message to you this morning is, I'm calling it both God and money. So I'm going to start by reading from Matthew 624.
07:28-07:29
"No one can serve two masters.
07:30-07:35
"Either you will hate the one and love the other, "or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other.
07:35-07:42
"You cannot serve both God and money." I learned that the hard way.
07:44-07:48
Point number one this morning is that God wants you to be a giver.
07:49-07:53
In a few weeks, each and every one of us is gonna get some stuff in the mail.
07:53-07:56
You're gonna receive your W-2 form.
07:57-08:00
If you're self-employed, you're going to get a 1099 in the mail.
08:00-08:03
It's going to tell you how much money you made in 2020.
08:04-08:08
I remember receiving those, especially back in the day.
08:08-08:22
You look around your house, peek in the garage and look at the car, look at what you're wearing, and you're thinking, "Where is it?" Because I like that number, but where did it go?
08:24-08:30
You know what else is coming in a few weeks, around the same time is your giving statement.
08:33-08:37
And that's kind of piercing when you put both of them together and you start matching those up.
08:39-08:46
I want to talk to you about why it's so important that we give and such a valuable lesson that Stacey and I learned along the way.
08:46-08:52
Proverbs 11, 24, 25 reads, "One person gives freely yet gains even more.
08:53-08:56
Another withholds unduly but comes to poverty.
08:57-09:02
A generous person will prosper whenever, or whoever refreshes others will be refreshed.
09:03-09:04
We were never tithers.
09:04-09:13
When we were at the beginning, when we were going to church, and before we started our financial peace journey, we gave really minimally.
09:14-09:15
It was kind of ridiculous.
09:15-09:19
You might say we were shooting for like a net zero financial footprint.
09:20-09:33
And we literally would say, "Eh, our family probably consumes about X amount of dollars in services, we'll go ahead and make sure that the church is whole." And then you see where that kind of mentality got us.
09:35-09:43
So regardless of what your financial situation might be, God created each and every one of us in His image, and He's a giver. He's the ultimate giver.
09:45-09:49
And so, when we had money, we didn't give.
09:50-09:59
when we didn't have money, when we decided that we were going to start living our finances in a way that was going to honor God, we started giving.
09:59-10:00
Very first thing we did.
10:02-10:03
First line item on our budget.
10:05-10:06
And that was hard.
10:07-10:08
That was really hard to do.
10:09-10:13
Because we, man, when it comes to money, we like to hold on so tight.
10:13-10:16
And it's hard to open up and let that go.
10:17-10:25
But as soon as we began to trust God with our finances, and as soon as we started giving, things started changing in our life.
10:26-10:30
And it became really obvious to us who the real provider was.
10:31-10:34
We thought that my job was a provider.
10:35-10:37
Maybe your spouse's job is a provider.
10:38-10:40
But none of those things are the provider.
10:40-10:41
God is the provider.
10:43-10:48
Many of us are familiar with Malachi 3.10, regarding the tithe.
10:50-10:56
It reads, "Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse that there may be food in my house.
10:57-11:11
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." Now, please be careful.
11:11-12:12
blessing doesn't always mean money. It can mean a lot of things. They're all godly things. For us it was clear. For us the very first thing was we started giving. We changed our behavior when it came to finances. We stopped making it about us and all of a sudden we had this overwhelming peace come over us. And to back my story up a little bit, we started our journey before we lost our personal resident. So the reaction to losing our home was not one you would think. It was almost like in the movie Vacation when they look at the Grand Canyon you know and Clark is sitting there with his son Russ and they're looking at the Grand Canyon you're like yep okay and let's go and that was us that was us because we for the first time we had a plan for the first time we had a plan And so we walk up to the door, there's this note, and we go, "Wow, that stinks.
12:13-12:21
OK, let's move on." And that peace came from just changing our heart with our finances.
12:21-12:26
It wasn't so much internal, and it was all about trying to give back to God.
12:26-12:29
And we weren't giving much, but we were giving, and it was first.
12:31-12:35
Some people get turned off when the church talks about the tithe, and so let me ease your mind a little bit.
12:36-12:38
It's not a salvation issue.
12:39-12:42
The truth is that harvest doesn't need your money.
12:43-12:44
God doesn't need your money.
12:45-12:47
This is simply between you and God.
12:47-12:54
But woven into your DNA is that we are created to be givers.
12:54-12:55
We're all made in his image.
12:56-13:04
And that's why whenever you see a need, whether it's someone on the street, a family that needs help at church, you have that tug on your spirit.
13:04-13:05
Holy Spirit is tugging at your heart.
13:08-13:12
So that leads me to point number two this morning, and that is be content.
13:13-13:20
Live the life that God is calling you to live and be grateful for that which He has given you.
13:21-13:27
This can be hard to do in a social media world.
13:27-13:36
Everyone's putting their best life out there and you see commercials where everyone who's buying whatever product it is, are the happiest people on the face of the earth out there.
13:36-13:40
And I'm not that happy, maybe I should go buy a Coke, you know?
13:41-13:45
And so whatever it is, but we have this pressure that's coming into our house.
13:47-13:58
Proverbs 12, nine reads, "Better to be a nobody and yet have a servant "than pretend to be somebody and have no food." Do you know any pretenders out there in life?
13:59-14:03
People who like to put their best foot forward and yet you know that really that's not what's going on.
14:03-14:11
I vividly remember going to church on Sunday mornings when things were bad, before we started our journey.
14:12-14:22
And I bet that maybe even there might be some folks in here who can relate to what I used to do, but I would go to church on Sundays and lie to people, do their faith.
14:24-14:30
They would say, "Hey, good morning, Alex, how you doing?" And I'd say, "I'm doing great, Darren, how are you?" It's a lie.
14:32-14:33
It's a lie.
14:33-14:34
I was terrified.
14:35-14:36
I was terrified.
14:36-14:49
I was scared, I was humiliated, I was embarrassed, I was angry, I was worried, I was stressed out beyond description.
14:50-14:53
Outwardly though, we were the perfect little family.
14:54-14:57
Dressed really nice, had cute, they were a lot cuter back then.
14:57-15:02
They were really cute, two little brown boys that everybody thought was twins.
15:05-15:14
We had this amazing house with a gated community and a swimming pool, and we would host all the church stuff at the house.
15:15-15:17
But it was all show.
15:21-15:32
1 Timothy 6-9-10 reads, Timothy has gone into before this, just kind of some warnings about finances.
15:32-15:34
And that's where all this is coming from.
15:35-15:38
Where Paul writes to Timothy about warning about finances.
15:38-15:44
"But godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it.
15:44-15:47
But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that.
15:48-16:01
People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap, and into many foolish and harmful desires men into ruin and destruction, for the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.
16:02-16:09
Some people eager for money have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs." This was totally us.
16:09-16:11
We were trying to get rich.
16:12-16:17
I was trying to figure out a way to get money coming into the house, and I was serving the wrong master.
16:20-16:24
Part of our journey was to try to get rid of debt, as you might imagine.
16:24-17:00
was a massive amount and so we were doing everything we can once we got on track and we started selling some of our things to accelerate the debt payoff and that was so hard for us because we had accumulated some stuff and and we get attached to our stuff so I sold my truck so guys you know what that's like could you imagine what it'd be like to have to sell your truck we had purchased a motor home from Stacy's grandparents that she used to camp in as a little girl with her mom and her grandmother, but we couldn't afford to take it anywhere.
17:02-17:04
So it sat in storage, and guess what?
17:04-17:08
I couldn't afford to pay for the storage either, and we sold it.
17:09-17:11
We cried when they drove it away.
17:12-17:26
I sold my golf clubs, a custom surfboard, and even sold my How to Get Rich in Real Estate DVD set. In retrospect, I probably should have just destroyed that.
17:26-17:30
I don't think I did any help to the gentleman that bought it for me.
17:31-17:46
But that was the beginning of our realization of a more minimal lifestyle, that Stacy and I realized that the only thing that mattered, was who was sitting at our dinner table.
17:47-17:51
If we lost everything else, That is enough.
17:54-17:56
We all struggle with this though.
17:56-18:03
Part of what I do for a living, I'm in people's homes all the time, and the number one issue for folks is storage.
18:03-18:05
Man, we don't have enough storage in this house.
18:06-18:07
We need more storage.
18:08-18:22
Then you walk through someone's house, and I walk through people's homes, and I go into the attic, and the basement, and the closets, and this and that, and I see everything, and it's like, "Oh my gosh, you guys are bursting at the seams." That's what, we love our stuff, right?
18:22-18:24
And that's what makes this verse so powerful.
18:24-18:27
We brought nothing into this world.
18:27-18:32
We're taking nothing with us when we go.
18:32-18:36
So where exactly is it that we are storing our treasure?
18:38-18:44
Point number three this morning is, there is no such thing as good debt.
18:44-18:50
And I know we've got probably some brilliant financial minds in here that would want to argue that.
18:51-18:53
The Bible says there's a lot of things that are good.
18:55-18:59
Genesis starts off with all these things that are good, that God says are good.
18:59-19:00
Debt is not one of them.
19:02-19:11
Proverbs 22.7 reads, "The rich rule over the poor and the borrower is slave to the lender." I have lived this very well.
19:11-19:16
I've got scars to prove it, and so I'm very passionate about this verse.
19:16-19:19
Because when you're in debt, money consumes your life.
19:20-19:28
When I was in debt and before I had started this financial peace journey of mine, everything we did was about getting that next dollar.
19:29-19:30
Where was that next dollar going to come from?
19:31-19:32
Was it going to be enough?
19:32-19:33
We need a bigger dollar.
19:33-19:34
We need more dollars.
19:35-19:37
Your bills come, it was stressful.
19:38-19:39
It was non-stop.
19:39-19:43
When money consumes your life, money becomes an idol.
19:45-19:48
That's the definition of an idol.
19:50-19:55
And when it comes to God money, it's almost impossible to get that order correct when you're in that state.
19:57-19:58
Satan knows this.
20:00-20:06
And Satan's job, his goal, is just to keep us separated from God in any way possible.
20:06-20:09
He knows our weaknesses, he knows how to get us.
20:10-20:11
And he's going to play us.
20:14-20:18
And so when money becomes an idol, that makes us an enemy of God.
20:19-20:20
I know that sounds harsh.
20:22-20:29
James 4, 3-4 says, or reads, "You do not have because you do not ask God.
20:30-21:04
When you ask, you do not receive because you ask with the wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures." You adulterous people, do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God. Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God." And I remember being in those prayerful situations. "Lord, help me. Help me get out of this. Help me get out of this. My mind wasn't in the right place. My heart wasn't in the right place." It's like God's like, "I'd love to bless you, but you're kind of being a moron right now.
21:05-21:20
I can't give this to you right now." So if you make payments to anyone for anything, then you'd know exactly what it likes to feel like a slave to whoever that lender is.
21:21-21:24
Financial stress destroys marriages and relationships of all kinds.
21:24-21:26
It's the absolute number one cause of divorce.
21:27-21:33
When you think about it, you're fighting over money, you get divorced, now there's two households that have no money.
21:34-21:38
Satan for the win. Students dropping out of college.
21:39-21:41
Number one reason for finances.
21:42-21:48
If you've already started taking out student loans and you quit school, guess what comes in the mail a few months later immediately?
21:49-21:58
Your first payment. Yet you don't have an education maybe to get a job that's going to help you to pay that debt.
21:59-22:02
It's brutal and it destroys lives.
22:02-22:04
So yeah, I'm going to double down on the statement.
22:04-22:10
If you want to stay away from debt with everything you can, You don't want to dance with disaster.
22:12-22:14
It's even worse when we do this to each other.
22:15-22:18
You ever loan money to a friend or a co-worker, family member?
22:19-22:21
That's the true power right there.
22:21-22:24
That's where the spiritual truth of this verse comes in.
22:24-22:29
Because you're no longer a co-worker, friend, family member, you just became servant and master.
22:31-22:41
There are grandparents who never get to hear from their grandkids again, because they lent the money and the grandkids can't pay it back, and so they're embarrassed, ashamed, and they don't even pick up the phone to call anymore.
22:43-22:49
And so it's really, really hard to go through this.
22:49-22:55
It's really, really tough to be in this place, and the reason it's so troubling is because our soul is in conflict.
22:57-23:02
We're not supposed to be slaves to the lender or to any person other than a slave for Christ.
23:04-23:34
And so, Ephesians 6.6, Paul writes, and he's writing specifically to people who are slaves and having to serve their masters, and he writes, "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 in Romans 1.1, Colossians 3.24, 1 Peter 2.16, it's clear Paul's telling us that we need to serve Christ, we need to be slaves for Christ.
23:35-23:43
And as soon as we substitute Christ for anything else, then we stop focusing on who God created us to be.
23:44-23:45
We do that all the time, right?
23:46-23:57
So instead of being a slave for Christ, instead of working for Christ and doing all the things that we're supposed to be doing for Christ, we become a slave to MasterCard, Visa, Toyota, Ford, Sallie Mae, Tesla.
24:01-24:04
So the hard part is making the transition.
24:05-24:14
How do we go from dealing with debt to the struggle that we have as believers in building wealth?
24:14-24:20
'Cause there's this weird guilt that comes with Christians and building wealth.
24:20-24:22
It's almost like if you have money, you're evil.
24:22-24:24
But that's not what the scripture said.
24:25-24:27
The scripture said it's the love of money.
24:29-24:31
You can love Jesus and be wealthy.
24:32-24:48
As a matter of fact, Proverbs 21.20 reads, "In the house of the wise are stores of choice food and oil, but a foolish man devours all he has." A wealthy believer who's serving Christ can do some amazing things for God's people.
24:50-24:55
So don't feel guilty in any way, shape, or form if you are building wealth.
24:56-24:58
You have things if you have money.
24:58-25:03
Make sure that those things and that money doesn't have you, ultimately.
25:03-25:05
That's the most important part.
25:05-25:07
It's all about our relationship with Jesus.
25:08-25:12
When Stacey and I teach FPU, we always ask every class the same question.
25:12-25:24
We ask them, we say, "Hey, listen, if money was not an issue for you, if we could take that off the table, tell us one thing that you would like to do." Any guess what that answer is?
25:26-25:26
Give.
25:27-25:29
I wish I could give more.
25:31-25:34
Every class, it's not the only answer.
25:34-25:35
It's the number one answer, though.
25:37-25:38
So I want you to think for a second.
25:39-25:40
We're light this morning.
25:41-25:46
We've got people out on the DL, right?
25:46-25:49
But we still have plenty of people here today.
25:49-26:00
And so just imagine for a second if every single person sitting in here this morning, and everyone at home, for that matter, what if everyone in the room was debt free?
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How many of God's people do you think we could feed together?
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How many of God's people do you think we could clothe?
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How many servants can we send to go share the gospel across the globe?
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Imagine what God could do with the loaves and fishes just out of this room alone as He multiplies those exponentially.
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Absolutely powerful.
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God already uses this church in an amazing way.
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And so here at Harvest, we bless churches, other churches in Thailand.
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We've helped countless number of families that are in our own personal body that are here in our family.
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We've helped to just grow this building and our footprint here in this church to expand because our family has grown.
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And those are just some first-hand examples that when we have the right heart, that God is glorified.
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When you give and you give correctly, you give in an honoring way to God, both the giver and the receiver glorify God.
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And that's how you can tell when it's done with the right heart.
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But there's one thing you got to know, and that is that broke people have a really, really hard time giving.
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The thing is that many of us feel like we can't give.
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And I remember being in a situation where I was losing sleep at night because I was worried about finances.
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There was too much month left at the end of the money.
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I had accumulated so much debt and did so much harm to my family, I thought there's no way that we will ever, ever, ever get out from under this mountain.
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So honey, you and I, we're done, put a fork in us, but there's no way that I'm going to allow my kids to have to deal with this burden.
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So we fought like crazy to make sure that that didn't happen.
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But I had pretty much counted myself, we had taken Yale.
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So I don't know where you are today, if you're worried about that, are you worried about retirement?
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I never dreamed that retirement would be a possibility.
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I never, we were 40 years old and had zero say for retirement.
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How are my kids going to go to school?
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What are we going to do? We were an absolute mess.
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So I know if you're feeling that way today, how you feel.
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That list was my own personal list.
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There is a way out and in a couple of weeks on January 11th, you're going to have the opportunity maybe to take Financial Peace University here at Harvest and if you have even the slightest inkling, just come.
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The course isn't just for our Harvest family.
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So if you know people you want to invite, I would encourage you to invite them.
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Make sure that you check it out.
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I believe that registration is on our homepage.
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So Matthew 7, 9-11 reads this.
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Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?
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Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake?
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If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in Heaven give good gifts to those who ask?" One cool thing about being a parent is I feel like I can really relate to God in so many different ways.
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You know, you understand unconditional love.
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You understand what it is to be just when payments and penalties need to be given.
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Yet you also understand mercy and grace.
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And you also understand giving and what it is to give and what it is to bless.
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So technically we're still in the Christmas season.
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We just went through Christmas Day and Christmas Eve and we gave gifts to each other.
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Did you give a gift to somebody that you were super excited to give?
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Did you have that feeling of, "Man, I can't wait for them to get that gift." Maybe it's something they needed.
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Maybe it's something they wanted.
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Maybe it was a juju jersey, apparently.
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Maybe it was something they had no clue was coming, but they were going to be extremely blessed by it.
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And so we have a tradition in our house.
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Ever since the boys were little, whatever their big gift was for the year, we would send them on a scavenger hunt.
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It would be like a note hidden in the tree, and they'd find it at the very end of opening all the gifts, and they'd have to go and find other notes, and then they would open up whatever this gift was.
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And so this year, their big gift was a used Nintendo Wii from Facebook Marketplace.
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It was a box that was full of Wii games and every kind of attachment and whatever.
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You would think two college boys wouldn't give a rip about that, but I knew they were going to lose their mind when they saw it, because it would take them back to their childhood.
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The anticipation for me in giving that gift that they did not expect was crazy.
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I was so excited.
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Stacy and I were so excited.
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We couldn't wait to give them that gift.
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And I feel like, I remember telling Stacy, wow, this is preaching to me.
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This feeling that I'm having right now is preaching to me.
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I wonder if this is how God feels like when he wants so badly to bless us with something.
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And we have experienced God's blessings when it comes to the promises that he makes in Malachi 3.10 and Matthew 7 firsthand.
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Because in the middle of our storm, when we were on our knees and praying, And we had submitted our finances to God.
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He already had our heart, we were just hanging on to our money.
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But when we finally turned our money over to Him as well, we created a budget each and every month, and we tithed, we lived on less than we made, we stopped borrowing money, and we paid cash for everything, we still do that today.
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Several times we just had stuff show up, unexpected.
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Couldn't explain it, but I feel like God is telling us, and I tell this to folks in our FPU class all the time, I would have given this to you earlier, you moron, but you weren't honoring me and you would have messed it up.
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And then he just drops this love bomb on us.
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And so we need to honor God with our blessings.
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When he blesses us, we need to honor him with that.
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If you check your bank account, probably have a stimulus check deposited in there.
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We're going to do the right things with it.
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Those are things that are so important.
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I want to make sure that you understand this is not prosperity gospel.
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It's not blabbing, grab it.
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This is God keeping his promise to us.
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We have seen the same scenario in FPU classes every single time, where people start the course and then weeks later, they come back and they say, "Oh my gosh, the most amazing thing happened." We had one family, their daughter had a full ride, University of Tennessee as a volleyball player, blew her knee out her junior year, and they told her, "We're not going to honor your full ride scholarship anymore, you have to pay for college." The parents were in our class and they said, "We don't have a dime.
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I'm going to have to break her heart, she cannot go to that school." Well, miraculously, God came through.
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School came back to her and said, "You know what?
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We're going to go ahead and honor our original commitment to you, and keep your full ride even though you are no longer able to play for us." What a blessing that was.
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Incredible. I could count time after time after time where money showed up, something showed up at the house, different kinds of blessings showed up that people couldn't explain other than God clearly was involved.
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We have people in this room today that have taken FPU.
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If you've taken FPU and you can collaborate my testimony this morning, put your hand in the air. I want to see your hand nice and high.
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Look around the room. Don't take it from me today.
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Come talk to one of these folks after service.
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We didn't prep that. I didn't tell anyone I was going to ask them to do that today.
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So, before I finish and I'm going to wrap up with this, it's really important, it's more important than anything else we talked about today.
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We need to understand that we cannot serve two masters.
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We talked about Satan wanting nothing more than to distract us with money, so that we can take our eyes off of him instead of serving God.
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Romans 3.23, "For we have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God." You and I have this condition. It's called being human. It's being selfish.
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And as much as maybe we try with all our might, we can never be good enough, and it's too late for us to do anything to earn our way into God's good graces. It doesn't happen that way.
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There's a penalty for that.
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And Romans goes on to say in 6.23 that the wages of sin is death.
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The penalty for our sin is death.
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Blood has to be spilled to pay for what we've done.
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But God loves us.
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He's a gracious and merciful God.
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He is also a just God, which means that He's not going to sweep things under the rug.
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He doesn't say, "Well, you know what? You're mostly a good guy, so we're just going to give you a pass on that." That's not how this works.
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The penalty has to be paid.
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Jesus paid that debt for us.
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One that there's no way we could ever possibly pay.
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So, He took on the cross, He took our sin.
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Our past, our present, and our future sins.
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We haven't even committed yet.
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We don't even have the ability to imagine what that must be like.
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Romans 5:8 says, "God demonstrates His own love for us in this, while we are still sinners, Christ died for us." Isaiah foretold this in 53.5, "But He was pierced for our transgressions.
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He was crushed for our iniquities, and the punishment that brought us peace upon Him. So we can't pay back God for what He's done, but we can honor God by becoming slaves for Christ. By honoring Christ in all that we do, by seeking to honor Him in the workplace, in our marriages, in our bodies, with our tongue, honoring Him with our money, honoring Him for living in a way that brings glory to God in all that we do. So rather than to be slaves to debt, that we would be slaves to Christ and put no one or nothing above Him. Let us go ahead and pray this morning as we as we finish up. Father God, I want to thank you, Lord, for your word.
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I pray Father anyone here this morning and finds himself Serving the wrong master, Lord, I pray that You will open their eyes, that You will open their heart, that they would humbly seek You.
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Father, we thank You for the gift of Your Son Jesus, who took our sin and our shame.
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Help us to keep our eyes fixed on You, and not the things of this world.
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In Jesus' name, Amen.
Small Group Discussion
Read Matthew 6:24
What was your big “take-away” from this passage / message?
Have you ever experienced first hand that the borrower is slave to the lender? (Proverbs 22:7)
When was the last time that you wanted to give but didn’t? How did that make you feel?
Do you feel pressure to ”keep up with the Jones’?” Do you cave in? If not, how do you fight the urge?
Is it ok for a follower of Christ to have abundant wealth?
Tell us about a time when you received a perfectly timed blessing that could only have come from God.
Breakout
Pray for one another.