2 Corinthians

This is the third week of our series called Best Practices. The idea is that I believe that there are some habits in life that we can form that if we do, they're the most important possible habits we can have. I believe that these habits, these practices, will make us better at every aspect of our lives. They'll make us better wives and mothers and husbands and fathers. They'll make us better friends, better children, better family members, better employees and employers. And more importantly, they will bring us alive in our walk with God and our knowledge of God and be a part of the answered prayer that Paul prays over us, that we would know God with the depth of all the saints, that there are some practices, some keystone habits that we can develop in our life that if we do, we will become closer to who God created us to be. And so we're taking four weeks and looking at those habits that make us better in every aspect of life. The first week we looked at reading the Bible. I hope that you guys took the challenge from that. I kind of challenge you all to make a goal and make a plan and then let somebody in on that plan for some accountability. So I hope that you've been reading the Bible maybe a little bit more than you're used to and that that's been a blessing for you. Last week, Steve did a phenomenal job talking about worship. If you missed that, which is the summertime and I get it. So if you missed that last week, they're online. You can watch them on video. You can listen on our podcast and catch up with that one. This week, I want us to look at the practice of prayer. And prayer is a huge topic. It's incredibly broad. At the last church I was at, we did a six-part series all on prayer, and it still wasn't adequate to cover everything that the Bible had to say. So this morning, I know that I get to touch on prayer, but I don't get to talk about everything around prayer. Because if you go through the Bible, what you find is that the Bible is replete with verses on prayer. We're told in the Old Testament if we're brokenhearted that we can run to him. That's what David tells us in Psalms. We're told that we should be marked, be characterized by prayer. James says the prayer of the righteous person is powerful and availeth much, does much doing. Jesus tells us that if we're tempted, he tells us in Matthew, if you're tempted, if anyone is tempted, pray. So there's this aspect of prayer that helps us stave off temptation. We're told in Philippians that we should be anxious for nothing, but pray over everything. And that if we do this, that somehow God's peace comes into our life and guards us if we will be people who pray. In Colossians, Paul tells us that we should be devoted to prayer. In Romans, he tells us that we should be devoted to prayer. But there's this peculiar verse. It's not peculiar. It's just kind of famous. It's probably a better word. In 1 Thessalonians 5, verse 17, where Paul is finishing up his letter to the church in Thessalonica, and he's telling them, hey, here's the last things I want you to do. And in the middle of this list of advice, he tells them this really difficult command, pray without ceasing. He says, I want you to do a couple of things. I want you to bless one another. I want you to help one another. I want you to honor God. And I want you to pray without ceasing. And I don't know about you, but I read that verse and I'm like, I don't even know how to do that. I don't know how many in this room would raise their hand and say, you know what? I have been obedient to that command in my life for X amount of weeks, X amount of years, X amount of months. That's a super challenging verse. And so as I thought about the best place to invest our Sunday morning on prayer, I thought it might be best to tackle this verse. Because we can talk about all the things around prayer, postures in praying, different types of prayer. We can go through Psalms and see the different types of prayer that David offers. We could look at the correct format of prayer that Jesus does when he teaches the disciples how to pray. We'll talk about it more later, but he gives a pattern of prayer in the Lord's prayer that we're supposed to follow. We could talk about that. We could talk about this idea of listening prayer. Spurgeon, one of the most influential pastors to ever live, this guy from England in the 1800s when he was 19 years old, he had a multi-thousand person congregation, just an amazing guy. He wrote to his students that if you only pray, and if when you pray, all you do is talk and you don't listen to God, then you are like somebody who dips their toes in the Atlantic and claims to have experienced the whole of the ocean. So there's this whole idea of listening prayer where we clue into God, which I'm being honest, sounds a lot lot like meditation, the Christian version of that. And we could talk about that, and I think there'd be some ground to gain. But where I've landed is, until we get this command down, the command in Colossians to be devoted to prayer, the command in Romans to pray continually, the command in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing, until we become people who are characterized by prayer, then all the different types of prayer and all the different information around prayer really is not as impactful to us. I think the first thing we need to do is become people who are characterized by prayer. And if you think about the biblical heroes that you know, they're characterized by prayer. Moses prayed all the time. David prayed constantly. Hannah, the mother of Samuel, is famous because of her prayer, because she was praying so fervently that Eli, the high priest, thought that she was drunk. She was just praying to God. There's a great prayer from Moses' mother. There's all these great prayers through Scripture. All the biblical heroes that we know are people who are characterized by prayer. And I would bet that the people that you look up to spiritually are people, whether you know it or not, who are characterized by prayer and devoted to prayer. As I think about this idea to pray without ceasing and make that kind of the first goal of our prayer life is to be a people who are devoted to prayer, Spurgeon again said that we cannot be constantly in the act of prayer, but we can be constantly in the spirit of prayer. And I believe that that goal is best illustrated through a super cheesy made-up story that I heard years ago. I heard this story back in high school. It is not true. Somebody made it up, but it makes a good point. There was a guy who was super spiritual, really close to God. Whenever he prayed in public, it was excellent, excellent prayers. People were really impressed with him. For the sake of the story, we're going to call him Nate. So there's Nate, the super spiritual guy. I'm talking about Nate Murray there in the back, not me. Super spiritual guy, and his prayers were incredible. And one day his friend said, I want to hear his nighttime prayers. Like, I want to hear what he prays for at night, at the end of the day. Because that's like the good prayer. Like, you pray in the morning, you pray for the day, then at night you pray again. I want to hear what Nate prays at the end of the day. And so again, this is made up, it's silly, they snuck into his room and they're hiding out somewhere. I don't know if it's in the closet or under the bed, wherever you want. They're hiding out, they're listening to Nate. Nate comes in at the end of the day and they're like, oh, here we go, dude's going to pray, this is going to be some good stuff. They're super excited to hear what Nate says to God at the end of his day. They expect him to get down on his knees next to the bed and double over like you're supposed to. I mean, that's what good believers do. You get on your knees next to the bed. That's part of the deal. And they're waiting for him to do that, and he doesn't do that, and he just gets into bed. And they're like, oh, maybe Nate's having an off night. And as he climbs into bed, he pulls the covers up, and he lays back, and he simply says, good night, God. I'll talk to you tomorrow. That's what it is to pray without ceasing. He didn't have a big, long prayer at the end of the day because he had been in the spirit of prayer communicating with God throughout the day. And so when he got to the end of the day, he had run out of words. He had said everything he needed to say. And so like you say to a good friend or to your spouse when you're roommates or whatever, is you say, hey, good night. Talk to you in the morning. And that's it. That, to me, is a good picture of what it is to be in the spirit of prayer and be praying without ceasing. But just like the Bible, when we talked about in the first week of best practices, we hear this, but we don't do it all the time. Christians, a lot of us are not good at praying. I'm not going to ask you to raise your hands, but man, how hard is it to pray sometimes? You sit down, you're like, I'm going to do the thing, I'm going to pray, and you go for like two minutes. You're like, God, I don't know what else to do. You start thinking about the emails that you're going to have to send out, and your kid starts making noise, and you run upstairs, and that prayer time's done. It's hard to pray. It's hard to be devoted to do. You start thinking about the emails that you're going to have to send out. Your kid starts making noise and you run upstairs and that prayer time's done. It's hard to pray. It's hard to be devoted to prayer. But I think that maybe there's a motivation to go into prayer that we haven't considered that if we do, it would make it a lot easier to approach prayer. Because again, don't raise your hand, but how many here have decided at some point in your life, I want to be better at prayer, I want to pray more regularly, so I'm going to white knuckle this thing and set my alarm and I'm going to get up early and I'm going to pray? How'd that go? So as we think about how can we be obedient to the seemingly impossible command to pray without ceasing, how can we be more like Nate? I now regret using that name. I think it's important to answer this question, and I want you to answer it personally. When do you pray? Like right now in your life, as you go throughout your week, when do you pray? What is it that drives you to prayer? Maybe you're in a habit of praying every morning. Maybe it's specific things that take you to prayer. I mean, a lot of us pray for the meal, right? We know that drill. We're Christians, and so you go out to eat, and you kind of look around the table, and who's the most spiritual one here that's going to say, like, hey, I'll pray. Like, who's going to be the big Christian? And then if you got to eat with me, you have to go like, Nate, you have to pray. You're clearly, you're the pastor. That seems to be the gig. And so like you pray, right? And here's what I would say about meal prayers. If you mean it, pray. If you don't, eat. Okay. It doesn't matter. If you mean it, pray. If you don't mean the prayer, don't pray the prayer, ever. We need to be sincere with prayer. One of the things I try to do about prayer is not pray when we don't mean it on stage. We don't pray as just a way to get people up here awkwardly. It would have been really great to have Jordan pray at the end of worship so that I could hobble up here without all of you guys staring at me, but it wouldn't have been an honest and an earnest prayer. So pray when you mean it. And when you don't mean it, don't pray. But we pray when we have meals. We know that. And some of us are good about having time set aside to pray. But what is it that makes you pray the most? What is it that drives you to prayer most earnestly? Isn't it something that happens in your life that's too big for you? Doesn't anxiety drive you to prayer? When you're so worried about something, when you don't know what's going to happen, isn't that when you run and you go, this is too big for me, and you appeal to the almighty creator God? Isn't that when you appeal to the supernatural is when you realize in life this is too big for me. When the decision is too big and you don't know what to do. Do I take the promotion or do I not? Do we move to the city or do we not? Do we change our kid's school or do we not? When the decision is so big that we don't know what to do, we pray. Because in that prayer is an admission that God is bigger than us, that he's supernatural and we are natural, that he is God and that we are not, that he's a creator and that we're the created and that we need his wisdom for this. When we're walking through the difficult times and our spirits are low, we pray. When the diagnosis comes in, what do we do? We run to God and we pray. When we don't know where our kid is, or we don't know about the decisions that they're making, or we're so worried that they're going to run off the rails, what do we do? We pray. I was just at a wedding last weekend in Dothan, Alabama. And it was a really beautiful experience because it was Jen's cousin. Jen's my wife, not just some lady I talk about. It was Jen's cousin getting married. And she's older. She's like 30? She's 35? Oh, man, she's up there like me. So she's 35 and for years she was dating a guy that wasn't good for her. Just wasn't good for her. I've met the guy. He's a good guy. He's got a sweet heart. He just had stuff going on that made him not husband material just yet. And there was nothing, her dad's name is Edwin. There's nothing that Edwin could do. Edwin and Mary, there was nothing they could do. You guys who have kids who are adults, you know you can't tell them who to date. You can't tell them who to see. That's not going to work out. You just have to hope that they end up with the right people. And so they didn't know what to do. They had no other option, and so they made a space in their home, and every day, Edwin went to the space in his home, getting choked up thinking about it, and got on his knees and prayed for his daughter, that she wouldn't marry this guy, and lo and behold, after years of doing that, she broke the cycle with him, and she met the right guy, a good dude who loves the Lord, who's got a good head on his shoulders. And they got married on Saturday. And as they got married, I looked over at Uncle Edwin down the row, and he has tears streaming down his face because that's an answer to prayer, because the prayers of the righteous are powerful and effective. And what happened to Edwin is he had no other options. He was simply reduced to prayer. And what I want you to see this morning is when we are reduced to prayer, we pray. We pray when we are reduced to prayer. If you think about when I asked you that question, when in your life do you pray? The answer, whether you know it or not, is I pray when I'm reduced to prayer. When I have no other options, when I've exercised everything else to try to exert my control over it, when I've exercised every other avenues to fix it myself, and I realize that I am helpless, then I am reduced where the only thing I have is prayer, and so we cling to prayer, and we appeal to the supernatural God that we know. After we had a miscarriage and we got pregnant again, I wanted desperately to be able to do something to keep this baby safe. There was nothing I could do. I was reduced to prayer. So I prayed. Guys, we pray when we are reduced to prayer. When there's something happening in our life that is so big and so confusing and so difficult that makes us feel so helpless that we get on our knees and we appeal to our God. God, you've got to help me here. And if that's true, if that's true that we pray when we're reduced to prayer, then the opposite is true too. And when I say this, this is going to step on some toes. And I'm sorry about that. But let me just tell you this. Okay, this is not an us or me and you situation. This is not an us and them situation. This isn't staff and elders and then lowly congregation situation. This is a we situation. If this steps on your toes, I promise you it stepped on mine too. My toes hurt literally and figuratively worse than yours. I'm in this with you, okay? So when I say this, I'm not accusing you of anything that I am not guilty of. We are just all a bundle of insecurities and mechanisms trying to go through life, figuring out how to follow God together, okay? All of us. But if it's true that when we pray, we pray because we're reduced to prayer, then it's also true that when we don't pray, we assert our independence, right? When we don't pray, we are asserting our independence. When there's something coming up in life and we don't pray about it, we don't go to God about it, what we're saying implicitly is, I'm good, I don't need you for this one, I got it, right? And I know that's harsh, and I know that's not what you intend when you don't pray, but tell me that's not what we're saying when we don't pray. When I don't pray about a sermon, God, what would you have me do this week? What I'm saying implicitly is, I'm good. This is community. I've done a community sermon twice a year for the past 10 years of my life. I got it, God, I'm fine. When we make a decision at work, when we approach the sales meeting and we haven't prayed over it, what are we telling God? I got this sale, God, don't worry about it. We go into a meeting and we have a blanket of that prayer, blanket of that meeting and prayer. What are we telling God? I got this meeting, God, I'm good. We make decisions with our kids when we interact with our spouses, when we try to build them up, when we make decisions about church or about which small group to join. When we make these day-to-day decisions and we don't pray to God about these decisions, we make them on our own. What are we saying? We're saying, God, I'm good. I got this. And I'm in there too. There's a pastor in Washington, D.C. named Mark Batterson, and he said, you should never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. I don't know about you, but in my life, I've initiated a lot of things that were not saturated in prayer. And when we do that, we claim our independence, don't we? We flex our little independent muscles. We say, God, I'm good. I don't need you for this. And we figure it out on our own. And every day we do that is one more day we convince ourselves that we are adequate for the things that God has called us to in life. It's one more day when we make the argument implicitly by not praying to God that I am enough for today and that I don't need you. Thank you. Every day we go, we get a little bit more independent. We build our sense of self a little bit more. We reduce our dependency and our reliance on God and we build up our independence on and our dependence on ourselves. And then we go through life like this, praying maybe just for meals, praying maybe just for things here and there, praying when we go to Bible study and somebody goes, hey, will you pray? And you're like, okay, I guess I will. But we know in our own life we haven't prayed like that in a while. And every day we do that, we build our independence a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more until something happens and outside forces in life exert themselves on us and act on us to reduce us to a state of prayer. And then we pray again. And then we pray and we pray and we pray. And God in his goodness and his glory, he fixes it. And then what do we start to do? We exercise our independence muscles again and we say, God, thank you for your help over there. I'm good now. If it's true that we pray when we feel reduced to prayer, then it has to be true that we don't pray when we feel adequate for the day's task. Now, there is another reason why some of us don't pray sometimes. And I don't have time to talk about it at length this morning, but it is true and it should be mentioned. Sometimes we don't pray and it's not because we think we are adequate for the task. It's because our faith is a little broken and a little shattered and we don't think God is adequate for the task. And so we don't pray because we're just afraid that it's going to further hurt our faith. And I don't have a lot to say about that this morning, except if that's you, please don't carry that by yourself. If the reason you have not prayed as much as you normally do lately is because you kind of doubt God's ability to answer that prayer, you think he might be inadequate to it, talk to somebody about that. Come talk to me. Talk to one of our elders. Talk to someone that you respect spiritually. Don't carry that by yourself. So I think that that's true. But I think that for most of us, as we walk through our Christian life, if we find ourselves in a season where we are not praying without ceasing, we're not even praying regularly, much less without ceasing, that the reason that is, is because we feel adequate for the task. And if we want to break this cycle of meaning to pray more, but not praying as much as we should, then I think we have to initiate a practice. And we need to understand that every prayer we pray admits dependence. We need to understand that every prayer we pray admits dependence. Every prayer we pray, no matter how flippant, even if it's just a, dear God, thank you for this food, we're so excited for this lunch, amen, that admits some sort of dependence on some level that God, it's because of you and your gifts and your goodness that I get to eat this delicious, this week I had a pot roast and Cajun macaroni and cheese sandwich. I'm in prime condition to recover from my injuries. And when we pray for that, we say, God, it's your goodness that I get to enjoy this. Even in part, every prayer, every prayer admits dependence. Every time we throw anything to God, whether we do it for 45 minutes or for 10 seconds, is a way to go, God, I'm not big enough for this. I need you. That's why I pray every Sunday before I preach. It's honestly not as much to ask God for help as it is to remind me that I need it. I'm not big enough for this. I need you. Every prayer that we pray, no matter how small or how big, admits dependence. And so if we want to make prayer a daily habit, if we want to finally figure out how to persist in prayer and be devoted to prayer and be obedient to all those verses we talked about at the onset, if we want our prayers to be powerful and effective, then I think what we need to do is practice a daily reduction to prayer. I think we need to practice a daily reduction to prayer. I don't think that we need to practice praying every day. I do, but I think it'll come after this. I think we sometimes put the cart before the horse and we skip it. And we go to God with all of our independence and all of our capabilities and we go, well, I know that I should pray to be a good Christian, so let me try to pray. And what we need to do instead is the very first thing we need to do is daily reduce ourself to the need to pray. Do you know that this is actually how Jesus prays? When the disciples went to him and they said, hey, can you teach us how to pray? You pray differently than us. Can you teach us to pray? The very first thing he does, he gives us a pattern, doesn't he? Gives us lines to recite. He gives us a pattern to follow. The very first words out of his mouth, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. God, you are big. We call this adoration. God, you are awesome. God, you are wonderful. God, you are the creator. God, you are holy. You are different. May your will persist here as it does in heaven. May your will be done. We start every prayer. God, you are big and I am small. God, I need you and I am insufficient. God, will your will be done, not my will be done. And it puts us in this place where we are reduced to prayer. So I think we need to practice a daily reduction to prayer. Daily admitting I am insufficient for my tasks today. Now, if you're a thinking person, that exercise of daily reducing yourself to prayer will force you to ask the question, what am I inadequate for? If you're a thinking person at all, you'll want to know, for what am I inadequate? What do I need to get done that I can't handle? What do I need to appeal to God for? And in this exercise of thinking through, for what am I inadequate, we will arrive at these great callings that we have on our life that we sometimes forget. If you're a husband or a wife, do you know that your role is far more than to simply love your spouse? According to Scripture, my understanding is that my goal, my job with Jen, is to serve her like Christ loved the church, to lay my life down for her, and to do everything I can to be a tool in the hands of God to make her as beautiful and as spiritually vibrant as is possible, to help her become the best version of herself. I'm not adequate to that task. Her job is to be a tool in the hands of God that makes me into the most respectable, lovely, godly, spiritually healthy version of myself possible. Nobody is adequate for that task. How can she do that without prayer? Our job is to raise Lily, and not just to raise her so that she goes to a good school and has a nice life, but to raise her, to release her into the wild with as little baggage to undo with a therapist as possible, who loves God, who knows him, and knows him more intimately than Jen and I ever did. That's our job. We're not adequate to that task. You're called to be pastors in your workplace. We are all a member. If you're a Christian, you're a member of the royal priesthood. You are called to be pastors in your workplace. Jesus tells you in the Sermon on the Mount that other people, if you're a Christian, other people should see your good works and so glorify your Father who is in heaven without you ever talking to them about who you believe in. Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians that we are led in procession by Jesus and that through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. You are inadequate to that task. You have no choice but to rely on God to help you accomplish those things in that day. When someone asks you a difficult question and you realize they've opened the door for a spiritual conversation, you're inadequate for that conversation. You need the Spirit. You need to say, God, help me here. Give me ears to hear and give me wisdom to speak. When we practice a daily reduction of ourselves to prayer and admit our inadequacies before God, what he will do is bring to light all the wonderful, beautiful, grand things that his word calls us to, to live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. And in the face of those, we'll have no choice but to say, I can't do that myself. And that will drive us to prayer, to God. And in doing that, in a constant reduction of ourselves, we have reminders of the tasks to which we are called. In the face of those, we feel inadequate. We run to God in prayer. And because of our mindset and our posture before the Lord every day, by to Scripture? Be devoted to prayer? Be a person who is characterized by prayer? You want to be obedient to that seemingly impossible command in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. I think it begins with a daily reduction of ourselves to prayer. Daily admitting our inadequacies and admitting our need for God so that we might accomplish just in that day what he wants us to accomplish in that day and that that knowledge will drive us to a prayer with him all the time. I know it's a lofty goal. Pastors say stuff like this a lot. But I really do want grace to be a place that's devoted to prayer, that's characterized by prayer. I know we have some people here who all you have to do in this sermon is nod your head because you're already doing this stuff. You're some of our warriors and you pray all the time. We need more of those. We need people praying for our families. We need people praying for the children's ministry. We need people who come and sit in this space and touch seats and pray for the people who sit there. We need to be a church that prays. And I think the key to getting into that habit is daily confessing our need to do that, is daily reducing ourselves to prayer. And I hope that we will. If that's not part of your life right now, then I would encourage you, make it a part of your life this week. This week, daily reduce yourself to prayer. This week, every day, just get up and say, God, I need you today, and tell them the things you need them for. And let me also tell you this, if praying isn't part of your normal habit, just pray until you're done praying. If you pray for a minute, nobody cares. Pray for a minute. Pray for 60 minutes, great, good for you. Pray for 60 minutes. Pray until you're done praying and then go and do what God's called you to do that day. But I would challenge you this week, for one week, if it's not a part of your regular habit, to daily this week reduce yourself to prayer. Now, I'd like to invite you all to pray with me, and the band will come up, and we'll have a song, and then we've got a special thing that we're going to do at the end. Father, you're good. You love us. You're merciful to us. You call us back to you. Your goodness, like a fetter, binds our wandering hearts to you. Father, if there's anybody wandering, I pray that you would draw them in. God, I pray that if we are not characterized by prayer, that we would be. Lord, help us reduce ourselves to prayer. Help us not wait for life to do that for us. Show us the things that you've called us to for which we are inadequate. Let us be the husbands and the fathers and the wives and the mothers and the friends and the employees and employers that you've created us to be. May we be a people and a church and individuals who are characterized by a devotion to prayer, Father. God, may you work in my own life that I might set the pace for that too. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Good morning, everybody. If somebody back there could get the lights, that would be great. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Thanks for being here this Sunday morning. If you're like me, this is a big Sunday. This is Master's Sunday. If you're watching online, I'm not supposed to wear this because the design does something weird to the camera and it makes it difficult to watch. But I'm not sorry because it's Master's Sunday. So this is what we get. This is also the seventh part of our series in Lent, where we've been looking at different character traits or ideas that we kind of pull out of the Lenten season and the story of the gospel. It's going to culminate next week with Easter, when we're going to observe some baptisms, baptizing people on Easter is literally one of the oldest, if not the oldest church tradition in all of church. The very early church would only baptize on Easter because it is in and of itself a picture of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. So next week, we have four baptisms right now that we're planning to do, which I'm thrilled about. If any of you feel like you want to be a part of that service as well, if you want to take the step to be baptized and you've never done that before, and the Lord may be tugging on your heart a little bit, get in touch with me this week. It's not too late. We would love for you to be a part of that celebration next week as we celebrate Easter together. This week, we're focused on the topic of generosity. And whenever, in church circles, many of you know this, whenever you mention generosity or the topic this week is going to be generosity, that's code for this is the money sermon, right? This is the giving sermon. Don't bring your friends. I'm going to ask you guys for money, so bring them next week when we talk about other stuff. Don't bring them this week because I don't want to make anybody uncomfortable. But this week is a sermon about generosity, but it is not about that. It's not about strictly financial generosity. And as a matter of fact, I've been saying all along that it's been really great to be able to read the devotionals of others as we kind of approach these topics each week, except for this week. This week was terrible because last week after I finished my sermon, it's just kind of how it goes. Sisyphus pushes the rock up the hill. I write a sermon every week. So I'm driving home from church going, okay, what's next week's topic? How do I want to approach it? That kind of thing. And I'm thinking about generosity and I get this idea. Yeah, that's how we should approach it. That's how we should talk about it. I'm going to explain it in this way and think about it in this way. And I'm feeling good about myself for being very clever, for thinking about generosity in a new, more expanded way. And then I sit down Monday and I open up the devotionals and Doug Bergeson, who was a jerk, he wrote this. Actually, speaking of generosity, no kidding around, Doug and Debbie are in the, I call it the COVID baby room. There's the youngest baby room where my son is. And then there's, and then you graduate into the COVID baby room. These children were born in the midst of the pandemic and have never seen a human face besides their parents. And when you drop them off in that room, they're terrified. They have no idea what's going on. They just have to be gradually weaned through crying and tears. And Doug and Debbie are locked into a mortal combat right now with four of these kids, right? So just talk about generosity. They don't have to do that. They're just doing it because they love the young families that they serve. They love the church and whatever. So it's very generous. Doug is the opposite of a jerk sometimes. Anyways, I opened up the devotional on Monday, authored by Doug. And lo and behold, it's the exact idea that I think I'm so clever for coming up with, which clearly if Doug can also come up with it, not that clever. And so I opened it up to read it and I'm like, golly, this is exactly kind of the same idea that I wanted to communicate. So if you would like like a three minute version of this sermon with fewer jokes, then just read the devotional on Monday and tune me out right now. You'll be fine. But I wanted to approach it this way, and I was happy with the way that Doug approached it, because I think we're often so overly reductive of generosity, that when we think of generosity, particularly in church terms, particularly when the Bible espouses it or encourages it, I think that we think of it in terms of financial giving, of material generosity. And because we do that, what I want to propose to you today is actually the possibility that generosity is the most underrated character trait in the Bible. I think that I would argue with you that generosity, being a person who's generous, is maybe the most underrated character trait in the Bible. Now, the Bible encourages a lot of character traits. We are to be humble, and we are to be kind, and we are to be loving, and we are to be gentle, and we are to try to be lowly, and we are to be forgiving, and we are to be just. And there's a lot of things that the Bible would have us seek to be or that the Spirit would seek to shape us into, and amongst those is generosity. So I'm not saying that generosity is the most important character trait in the Bible, but I am saying that I think it might be the most underrated character trait in the Bible. And in that way, generosity is very similar to Waffle House. Now here's the thing, and it's something that I've noticed over the years about our North Raleigh crowd, and I've wanted to say something. I wasn't sure when it was appropriate, but I'm going to put it to you today. You guys don't eat at Waffle House enough, right? This church has a Waffle House deficiency, and it's high time that we address it. What are you, too good? Waffle House is delicious. And when we think of Waffle House, we think of waffles, which of course we do. They named their home after that particular dish. We think of the waffles, and the waffles are great. I like to get mine crispy, which means leave it in there a little bit longer. A Cajun waffle, blacken it up a little bit. You can get it with chocolate chips, which are miniature and delicious. And if you go during the right season, you can get them with peanut butter chips. Yeah, they're very good. They're very good. What you cannot do is get them with fresh fruit, all right? They don't do fresh fruit at Waffle House. You go to First Watch for that stuff, all right? Fancy pants? We're not doing it. We might have some apple butter somewhere. That's it in terms of fresh fruit. But it's more than just waffles. You don't want waffles? They got a sausage melt that's amazing. Wheat toast, melted American cheese, sausage patty, grilled onions, unbelievable. My wife likes the BLT there. It's not as good as the one you're going to get at Merritt's over in Chapel Hill, but it's cheaper, and the person who serves it to you is more friendly, and it's great. Unless the person serving it to you is on the back end of an overnight shift, if you get somebody at about 7.35 in the a.m., just don't talk to that person. They've had a harder night than you, all right? Otherwise, the service is amazing. The lunch is good. You can even get dinner there. They have T-bone steaks at Waffle House. I've never had one. I respect steak too much to order one from Waffle House, but you can get one there if you want one. And I think that Waffle House is often overly reduced to just waffles when they have so much more to offer. It's delicious. In the same way, we become so overly reductive of generosity, relegating it to financial giving, that we don't think of all the other ways in which we are called to be generous that I would contend are often more difficult than simple financial generosity. And as we've gone through these different topics in this series, I've said, you know, the Bible has a lot to say about this particular topic. But for generosity, I wanted to kind of give us an overview of what does the Bible have to say about this. So I'm going to go through four different passages that will be up on the screen for you to read along with me. But we're kind of just going to rapid fire through these. So in Psalm, Psalm 112, the psalmist writes, good will come to those who are generous and lend freely, who conduct their affairs with justice. In Proverbs, it's written, 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. And then in the New Testament, Luke writes, And finally, I would remind you of the verse that finished up what Kelsey read for us at the beginning of the sermon today. The last verse to God. There's a lot there about generosity. And as we started in Psalms, it zeroes in on financial generosity, the kind that we go to first when we think of someone who is a generous person. It says you should lend freely and you will receive freely. But it very quickly begins to expand it beyond that. It says conduct your affairs with justice. So that's not necessarily money. Now we're talking about offer justice generally to those around you. And then we get into Proverbs and it says a generous person will prosper. Whoever refreshes will be refreshed. So now we're starting to expand our understanding of generosity beyond simply the materials that we give one another, but in ways that we can refresh others. God says he will refresh us. And then it's interesting to me in Luke that this verse that's famous, that's often misused, often by other Christians trying to demean other Christians, or even by people outside the church trying to demean people within the church, judge not lest ye be judged, or judge not or you will also be judged. But it's followed with other character traits that don't condemn or you will be condemned, don't forgive or you won't be forgiven. It's other character traits, and it ends with be fair in your measurements, be generous in how you assess other people and other things. And it basically says, for with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. So as generous as you are towards other people in your judgment, God will be generous to you. As generous as you are with your forgiveness, God will be forgiving to you. As generous as you are with your condemnation, God will be generous with his condemnation towards you. And so we're expanding the view of generosity. And then finally, in Corinthians, there's this kind of wonderful, almost formula there. And I hesitate to use that word because I really don't like it when we reduce scripture to this formulaic approach so that if I do these things, God will give me these things. But in this instance, there does seem to be a cause and effect flow through the passage where he writes, Paul writes, that you will be enriched in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion. And through your generosity, through us, your generosity will result in thanksgiving. It's this idea that God says, I have blessed you in every way so that because of that blessing, you will be generous to others in every way. And because you are generous to others in every way, they will turn in thanks to me. They will be grateful to me. It will point them towards me. It's how God's generosity cyclically works to point other people back towards him, which we'll see more clearly in just a second. But what I want to contend with you this morning is we can only live out the truths of these scriptures if we expand our view of generosity. We can only live out the truth of the scriptures of what is said in these four passages and really throughout scripture and in particular in Corinthians where other people will glorify God because of us if we expand our view of what generosity could possibly be. Because there's so many more ways to be generous than simply financially. We can be generous in our judgment of others, in how we assess others. Some of us are very quick to judge. We see somebody driving a particular kind of car or wearing a particular type of clothes, or we learn the way that someone might have voted in the last election, and we are very quick to judge them and make all sorts of assessments about who they are. We can be more generous in our judgment of others. We can be more generous in our forgiveness that we offer towards others. We can be more generous in the grace that we offer towards people. We can be more generous in the way that we determine who we're going to spend our time with. We can be generous with our time. We can be generous with our attention. We can be generous in conversation. There are so many ways beyond financially to be generous people. And the more I thought about it, the more I reflected on the opportunities that we have for generosity and the generosity of some others that I've experienced in my life, the more I thought that, you know, generosity might be the greatest apologetic. Somebody being generous might be the greatest apologetic. Now, if any pastor has ever couched a note that he's made, it's me, because I just put might there in the middle of it. I'm not saying it definitely is. I'm just saying it could possibly be the greatest apologetic. And in this sense, an apologetic is a defense of the faith. It's an argument for the faith. And I tend to think that acts of generosity and all the different forms that they take can serve long-term to be far more winsome than any theological argument, than any scientific argument that we have crafted, that simply being generous to someone over time, letting other people see you be generous to everyone in your orbit and everyone in your sphere, can over time be more winsome towards Christ, can point people towards Jesus more than any argument that you could ever craft, could point people to Jesus more than even inviting them to church, could point people to Jesus more than challenging them. Hey, if you were to die today, do you know how you would spend eternity? And it's not that I don't want us to be having those conversations. Those conversations are good and we need to be sharing Christ with our neighbors. As a matter of fact, one of the goals of grace moving forward is that we would see God bring more people to faith through the people of grace so that we might celebrate that conversion. We want very much for more people to come to faith as a result of the ministries of this church. And the reason I'm saying that is because I think generosity can be such a big part of that. I think generosity can point us to Jesus in ways that almost nothing else can. Think of the instances in your life when someone has been generous to you. Maybe you know what it is to be someone who feels like they're on the fringe. Maybe you know what it is to be someone who feels like they are always kind of getting an unfair shake from other people. That with you, people tend to judge a book by its cover. And maybe people have treated you unfairly in your life. Maybe people have made assumptions about you because of where you come from or what you drive or what your story is or what your job is. Or just the way that you like to present yourself that may not be indicative of the whole person. It may just be a thing that you enjoy doing. And if you're one of those people that often gets misjudged by others, then you probably also have in your life someone who has just loved you and accepted you for who you are and has refused to judge you like other people do. Who has just heard you out. Who has given you the space to be yourself. Who has met you where you are and loved you there. And isn't that person's love and acceptance of you a far greater argument for Christ than anything else that could happen in your life? I think that generosity is a remarkable apologetic because we remember acts of generosity. When I was about 14 years old, I was coming out of eighth grade, going into ninth grade. I'm not sure how old you are when that happens. I went to Costa Rica on my very first mission trip. And we were building a, I think we were building a house for a university president of a Christian college down there, which you can imagine how useful eighth grade Nate was on a Costa Rican construction site. I'm certain that the workers were very glad that I was there. I know in Mexico, when we go and build walls, they usually have to, not usually, all the time, have to come back and correct all the mistakes that I've made to the point where I'm like, you know what? I'm just not going to do that anymore. I'm just going to mix stuff. I'm going to hand it to Jeffy. Jeff's going to do the blocks. I'm just going to stand here like a dum-dum because I have nothing to contribute to what's happening here. So I can't imagine the detriment that eighth grade Nate was to actually getting anything done in Costa Rica. But my parents paid the thousand dollars. I went down there like everybody else, and I was on a mission trip, and it was a really formative trip. And on the last night that we were there, we did like a little dinner or banquet or whatever it was, and there was one guy. He was, to me, an older man at the time. He was probably mid-40s, so like really close to my current age. And I don't know if you've ever experienced this on a mission trip, but when you go and there's a language barrier, which for me, I knew no Spanish at all at that time. So there was a huge language barrier between me and him. And you can't really communicate, but if you've been on a mission trip and you're kind of wired like me, then you understand that there is the universal language of joking around. There's a universal language of throwing stuff at each other, of stealing each other's tools and messing with each other all week long. And he was right there with us. He was jumping in and he and I had kind of bonded over that. And we seemed to have a similar spirit and enjoy one another. And so on the last night that we were there, he commented on my t-shirt. It was a United States soccer t-shirt. And he commented on it that he liked it. It was new. It was made by Nike in eighth grade. This is a big deal. But he said that he liked it and I wanted to be generous. So I went back to the room. I changed into another t-shirt and I walked out and I handed him this t-shirt. And I just wanted him to take it as a gift. And that man took off his shirt in the middle of the party, put on my T-shirt, folded up his shirt and gave it to me. Now his shirt was this knit pink long-sleeved polo shirt. It had some country club emblem right here that was not Costa Rican. Somehow or another, he had acquired this shirt. But if you've traveled overseas to third world countries, you know a lot of the folks that you interact with, they don't have a lot. By our standards, they have almost nothing. He was wearing one of what I am sure was one of the very few collared shirts that he had to that party that night because everybody was dressed nice. And some snot-nosed kid that was useless on the job site all week gave him a shirt. And so he wanted to return that generosity with his generosity and he gave me a shirt that mattered to him a lot more than some dumb U.S. soccer shirt could have ever mattered to me. And 30 years later, I remember that. And I remember seeing the love of Jesus in his eyes as he did it. Which is why I'm certain that generosity makes an impression. And it's why I think that it might be the single greatest apologetic, and it might make the single biggest difference in times when we're not sure how else to reach people. I said that we could also be generous with our time. This last week, I got an email from one of our families. I'm going to brag on our student pastor, Kyle, a little bit. I got an email from one of the families and the whole email was to tell us, was to tell me that the subject of it was, Kyle's a good dude. Yeah. Yeah. You got no disagreements with me there. They said that he came to our middle school daughter's softball double header. That's a boring sentence to say. I'm not trying to crud on middle school girls or boys, but middle school sports stink, all right? So if you are there and you're not a parent or a grandparent, holy smokes, you're a special human. And listen, they said he stayed for both of them, the whole first game and the second game. And he stayed afterwards for cake. Are you kidding me? I was a student pastor for years. You know what I'd do? I'd get there at the end of the first game. Hey, good job. I saw that bat you had. I was really sorry you didn't get a hit. But, oh, man, you were close. And then as soon as the next game started, I'd be like, okay, well, you know, it's... I put in my time. Kyle stayed for the whole doubleheader and then he stayed for cake. And it made such an impression on the family that they emailed me to say, hey, we got a heck of a guy here. And we do. And she's going to remember that. That she has a student pastor that cares about her that much, that he's going to stay for all those things. And you can remember acts of generosity in your life too. Maybe we know somebody that has access to something that's kind of fun that not everybody has access to, a beach house or a lake house or a box at some sort of sporting event or venue. And you watch them give that out to people who might not otherwise be able to afford it or use it or have access to that over the years. And you're awed by that. I remember watching my father-in-law use his lake house like that weekend after weekend after weekend for the college kids that lived in the area and would come in and want to be pulled by the boat. We've seen people be generous in those ways. And it makes an impression on us, whether it's generosity in conversation or in time or in assessment of one another or in actual material wealth or in opportunity, they make an impression on us. And that impression is important because God's generosity points us to others and then in turn points them back to God. God's generosity points us to others. Christians are generous because God has been generous to us. One of my favorite passages is in the book of John. It says, We know that while we were still sinners that Christ died for us, and that's what love is. We know that while we were very far from God that he pursued us. We know that we have never done anything that will make him love us any less. We know that we are his beloved sons and daughters. And because he lavishes that generous love on us, the more we focus on it, the more aware of it we are, the more we reflect on how generous our father has been with us, the more we are inspired to go and be generous to other people. And if I'm really being honest with you, the most generous people I know, some of whom are in this room, are always people who love God a lot. The most generous people that I know are almost always people who have this very deep walk with God and seem to understand things about God that I don't fully understand. And I'll tell you this too, growing up in an environment, in a church environment in the 80s and 90s where I was told the godliest people are the ones who know the most theology, the godliest people are the ones who can quote the most verses to you, the godliest people are the ones who can win every argument? No. The godliest people are the most generous people. I know jerks who can win lots of arguments. I don't know anybody who's generous with everything they have who doesn't have a faith that I want to seek to emulate. And so when someone is generous to us and we say, why are you doing that? Why are you giving me that? Why are you spending that on me? Why are you investing that in me? Their answer inevitably is because God gave it to me. And then that points us back to God, which is how we bring about the reality of that Corinthians passage. God says, I've blessed you. I've enriched you in every way that you might enrich others in every way so that they might give thanksgiving to me for who I am. Do you see how that works? Someone is generous to you individually. You say, why are you doing this? This is too much. And they go, because I love God and God loves you and I want to do this for you. And then they turn and they praise God for placing you in their life and seek to desire to be generous like they have just been the recipient of. This works corporately as well. When we give to church or we sacrifice for an institution, we do something together and the outside world goes, wow, how'd you guys do that? Why'd you do that? Well, because God loves us, so we do this. And they go, well, that's pretty great. I want to find out more about your God too. I just, I don't want us to reduce generosity to simple financial giving anymore. And as a matter of fact, I would say that financial generosity might just be the easiest kind, especially for those of us with resources. I want to be gentle and careful here, but I also know my audience and I know the neighborhoods that we live in. Sometimes financial generosity is the easiest kind. And I know this because I've bought someone's groceries before because I didn't want to wait for them to go to their car and get their debit card. They said their debit card was in their car. They were fumbling around. And I said, I'm happy to get it. They said, oh, thank you so much. And I wanted to tell them, like, it's just because you're slow. It's not. I'm impatient. It's $20. I'll pay $20 to be in my car right now. I'm tired of watching you fumble with your wallet. Sometimes it's very easy when we have plenty to appear generous and cut a check. Now sometimes that's a real challenge, and that is genuine generosity. But sometimes that's the gateway to actual generosity. These people that we have on the corners, many of us are going to pass them on the way home. It's easy to hang a 20 out the window. It's incredibly generous to stop our plans in our day and get out of our car and talk to them and go have a meal with them. That's generosity. It's easy to donate to a cause. It's harder to go sit with the people to whom that cause ministers. It's easier to give out of plenty and hold back the stuff that we don't have as much of, but I would argue with you, and listen, this is not a sermon trying to denigrate giving. We ought to do that. But sometimes that's the simplest form of it. And what I want to encourage us to be is a people who are generous in spirit, who are generous across the board, who give of all of the resources that we have, who don't relegate it to the easiest ones. Whatever the easiest thing is for us to give, let's not just start there and be done, but let's be generous people. Because I bet, as I've been talking about generosity and the different forms that it takes, that you've thought of people in your life who have been generous to you. People who have been kind to you in their assessment of you or in their time or of their resources. And you're grateful that they are in your life. If you, like me, if you think of people in your life who you consider generous, you are grateful that they are in your life. You're grateful to God that he has placed them in your life. And because of that, you're pointed back to God. So here's the encouragement to us, Grace. Let's go be the kind of person that other people are grateful for. And when we do that, you'll be the kind of person that points people to Jesus. Go from here and be generous in spirit. Go be the kind of person that people are grateful to have in their life. And if you do that over time, you will leave a wake of people who have been pointed to Jesus because you entered into their life. I've mentioned many times that challenging teaching from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount when he said, let your light shine before others so that they might see your good works and glorify the Father who is in heaven. It's this idea that as we move into and out of the lives of other people, that they will be focused more on the Father, more on Jesus because of our simple presence in their life. And as I've reflected this week, that's always seemed like such a challenge to me. But maybe the key to obedience there is being someone who is generous in spirit. So that as we sow those seeds of generosity in the lives of others, we will become the kind of person that they are grateful that God has placed in their life. And in turn, they will be pointed to Jesus. So go from here and be the kind of people that other people are grateful for. And what you'll find is you've just become the kind of person who constantly points people towards the Father. Let's pray. God, we love you. We thank you for being generous to us, for giving us your son whom we did not deserve, for continuing to offer your forgiveness that often, God, we trample on. Lord, I pray that you would remind us, even this morning, of all the ways that you were generous to us, that you would remind us even today of all the people you have placed in our life to model that generosity for us. And God, I pray that we would be people who are acutely aware of the blessings that we have so that we might in turn offer those to others. Lord, make us conduits of your generosity so that we are the kind of people that point people back towards you. It's in Jesus' name that we ask these things. Amen.

Good morning, everybody. If somebody back there could get the lights, that would be great. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Thanks for being here this Sunday morning. If you're like me, this is a big Sunday. This is Master's Sunday. If you're watching online, I'm not supposed to wear this because the design does something weird to the camera and it makes it difficult to watch. But I'm not sorry because it's Master's Sunday. So this is what we get. This is also the seventh part of our series in Lent, where we've been looking at different character traits or ideas that we kind of pull out of the Lenten season and the story of the gospel. It's going to culminate next week with Easter, when we're going to observe some baptisms, baptizing people on Easter is literally one of the oldest, if not the oldest church tradition in all of church. The very early church would only baptize on Easter because it is in and of itself a picture of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. So next week, we have four baptisms right now that we're planning to do, which I'm thrilled about. If any of you feel like you want to be a part of that service as well, if you want to take the step to be baptized and you've never done that before, and the Lord may be tugging on your heart a little bit, get in touch with me this week. It's not too late. We would love for you to be a part of that celebration next week as we celebrate Easter together. This week, we're focused on the topic of generosity. And whenever, in church circles, many of you know this, whenever you mention generosity or the topic this week is going to be generosity, that's code for this is the money sermon, right? This is the giving sermon. Don't bring your friends. I'm going to ask you guys for money, so bring them next week when we talk about other stuff. Don't bring them this week because I don't want to make anybody uncomfortable. But this week is a sermon about generosity, but it is not about that. It's not about strictly financial generosity. And as a matter of fact, I've been saying all along that it's been really great to be able to read the devotionals of others as we kind of approach these topics each week, except for this week. This week was terrible because last week after I finished my sermon, it's just kind of how it goes. Sisyphus pushes the rock up the hill. I write a sermon every week. So I'm driving home from church going, okay, what's next week's topic? How do I want to approach it? That kind of thing. And I'm thinking about generosity and I get this idea. Yeah, that's how we should approach it. That's how we should talk about it. I'm going to explain it in this way and think about it in this way. And I'm feeling good about myself for being very clever, for thinking about generosity in a new, more expanded way. And then I sit down Monday and I open up the devotionals and Doug Bergeson, who was a jerk, he wrote this. Actually, speaking of generosity, no kidding around, Doug and Debbie are in the, I call it the COVID baby room. There's the youngest baby room where my son is. And then there's, and then you graduate into the COVID baby room. These children were born in the midst of the pandemic and have never seen a human face besides their parents. And when you drop them off in that room, they're terrified. They have no idea what's going on. They just have to be gradually weaned through crying and tears. And Doug and Debbie are locked into a mortal combat right now with four of these kids, right? So just talk about generosity. They don't have to do that. They're just doing it because they love the young families that they serve. They love the church and whatever. So it's very generous. Doug is the opposite of a jerk sometimes. Anyways, I opened up the devotional on Monday, authored by Doug. And lo and behold, it's the exact idea that I think I'm so clever for coming up with, which clearly if Doug can also come up with it, not that clever. And so I opened it up to read it and I'm like, golly, this is exactly kind of the same idea that I wanted to communicate. So if you would like like a three minute version of this sermon with fewer jokes, then just read the devotional on Monday and tune me out right now. You'll be fine. But I wanted to approach it this way, and I was happy with the way that Doug approached it, because I think we're often so overly reductive of generosity, that when we think of generosity, particularly in church terms, particularly when the Bible espouses it or encourages it, I think that we think of it in terms of financial giving, of material generosity. And because we do that, what I want to propose to you today is actually the possibility that generosity is the most underrated character trait in the Bible. I think that I would argue with you that generosity, being a person who's generous, is maybe the most underrated character trait in the Bible. Now, the Bible encourages a lot of character traits. We are to be humble, and we are to be kind, and we are to be loving, and we are to be gentle, and we are to try to be lowly, and we are to be forgiving, and we are to be just. And there's a lot of things that the Bible would have us seek to be or that the Spirit would seek to shape us into, and amongst those is generosity. So I'm not saying that generosity is the most important character trait in the Bible, but I am saying that I think it might be the most underrated character trait in the Bible. And in that way, generosity is very similar to Waffle House. Now here's the thing, and it's something that I've noticed over the years about our North Raleigh crowd, and I've wanted to say something. I wasn't sure when it was appropriate, but I'm going to put it to you today. You guys don't eat at Waffle House enough, right? This church has a Waffle House deficiency, and it's high time that we address it. What are you, too good? Waffle House is delicious. And when we think of Waffle House, we think of waffles, which of course we do. They named their home after that particular dish. We think of the waffles, and the waffles are great. I like to get mine crispy, which means leave it in there a little bit longer. A Cajun waffle, blacken it up a little bit. You can get it with chocolate chips, which are miniature and delicious. And if you go during the right season, you can get them with peanut butter chips. Yeah, they're very good. They're very good. What you cannot do is get them with fresh fruit, all right? They don't do fresh fruit at Waffle House. You go to First Watch for that stuff, all right? Fancy pants? We're not doing it. We might have some apple butter somewhere. That's it in terms of fresh fruit. But it's more than just waffles. You don't want waffles? They got a sausage melt that's amazing. Wheat toast, melted American cheese, sausage patty, grilled onions, unbelievable. My wife likes the BLT there. It's not as good as the one you're going to get at Merritt's over in Chapel Hill, but it's cheaper, and the person who serves it to you is more friendly, and it's great. Unless the person serving it to you is on the back end of an overnight shift, if you get somebody at about 7.35 in the a.m., just don't talk to that person. They've had a harder night than you, all right? Otherwise, the service is amazing. The lunch is good. You can even get dinner there. They have T-bone steaks at Waffle House. I've never had one. I respect steak too much to order one from Waffle House, but you can get one there if you want one. And I think that Waffle House is often overly reduced to just waffles when they have so much more to offer. It's delicious. In the same way, we become so overly reductive of generosity, relegating it to financial giving, that we don't think of all the other ways in which we are called to be generous that I would contend are often more difficult than simple financial generosity. And as we've gone through these different topics in this series, I've said, you know, the Bible has a lot to say about this particular topic. But for generosity, I wanted to kind of give us an overview of what does the Bible have to say about this. So I'm going to go through four different passages that will be up on the screen for you to read along with me. But we're kind of just going to rapid fire through these. So in Psalm, Psalm 112, the psalmist writes, good will come to those who are generous and lend freely, who conduct their affairs with justice. In Proverbs, it's written, 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. And then in the New Testament, Luke writes, And finally, I would remind you of the verse that finished up what Kelsey read for us at the beginning of the sermon today. The last verse to God. There's a lot there about generosity. And as we started in Psalms, it zeroes in on financial generosity, the kind that we go to first when we think of someone who is a generous person. It says you should lend freely and you will receive freely. But it very quickly begins to expand it beyond that. It says conduct your affairs with justice. So that's not necessarily money. Now we're talking about offer justice generally to those around you. And then we get into Proverbs and it says a generous person will prosper. Whoever refreshes will be refreshed. So now we're starting to expand our understanding of generosity beyond simply the materials that we give one another, but in ways that we can refresh others. God says he will refresh us. And then it's interesting to me in Luke that this verse that's famous, that's often misused, often by other Christians trying to demean other Christians, or even by people outside the church trying to demean people within the church, judge not lest ye be judged, or judge not or you will also be judged. But it's followed with other character traits that don't condemn or you will be condemned, don't forgive or you won't be forgiven. It's other character traits, and it ends with be fair in your measurements, be generous in how you assess other people and other things. And it basically says, for with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. So as generous as you are towards other people in your judgment, God will be generous to you. As generous as you are with your forgiveness, God will be forgiving to you. As generous as you are with your condemnation, God will be generous with his condemnation towards you. And so we're expanding the view of generosity. And then finally, in Corinthians, there's this kind of wonderful, almost formula there. And I hesitate to use that word because I really don't like it when we reduce scripture to this formulaic approach so that if I do these things, God will give me these things. But in this instance, there does seem to be a cause and effect flow through the passage where he writes, Paul writes, that you will be enriched in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion. And through your generosity, through us, your generosity will result in thanksgiving. It's this idea that God says, I have blessed you in every way so that because of that blessing, you will be generous to others in every way. And because you are generous to others in every way, they will turn in thanks to me. They will be grateful to me. It will point them towards me. It's how God's generosity cyclically works to point other people back towards him, which we'll see more clearly in just a second. But what I want to contend with you this morning is we can only live out the truths of these scriptures if we expand our view of generosity. We can only live out the truth of the scriptures of what is said in these four passages and really throughout scripture and in particular in Corinthians where other people will glorify God because of us if we expand our view of what generosity could possibly be. Because there's so many more ways to be generous than simply financially. We can be generous in our judgment of others, in how we assess others. Some of us are very quick to judge. We see somebody driving a particular kind of car or wearing a particular type of clothes, or we learn the way that someone might have voted in the last election, and we are very quick to judge them and make all sorts of assessments about who they are. We can be more generous in our judgment of others. We can be more generous in our forgiveness that we offer towards others. We can be more generous in the grace that we offer towards people. We can be more generous in the way that we determine who we're going to spend our time with. We can be generous with our time. We can be generous with our attention. We can be generous in conversation. There are so many ways beyond financially to be generous people. And the more I thought about it, the more I reflected on the opportunities that we have for generosity and the generosity of some others that I've experienced in my life, the more I thought that, you know, generosity might be the greatest apologetic. Somebody being generous might be the greatest apologetic. Now, if any pastor has ever couched a note that he's made, it's me, because I just put might there in the middle of it. I'm not saying it definitely is. I'm just saying it could possibly be the greatest apologetic. And in this sense, an apologetic is a defense of the faith. It's an argument for the faith. And I tend to think that acts of generosity and all the different forms that they take can serve long-term to be far more winsome than any theological argument, than any scientific argument that we have crafted, that simply being generous to someone over time, letting other people see you be generous to everyone in your orbit and everyone in your sphere, can over time be more winsome towards Christ, can point people towards Jesus more than any argument that you could ever craft, could point people to Jesus more than even inviting them to church, could point people to Jesus more than challenging them. Hey, if you were to die today, do you know how you would spend eternity? And it's not that I don't want us to be having those conversations. Those conversations are good and we need to be sharing Christ with our neighbors. As a matter of fact, one of the goals of grace moving forward is that we would see God bring more people to faith through the people of grace so that we might celebrate that conversion. We want very much for more people to come to faith as a result of the ministries of this church. And the reason I'm saying that is because I think generosity can be such a big part of that. I think generosity can point us to Jesus in ways that almost nothing else can. Think of the instances in your life when someone has been generous to you. Maybe you know what it is to be someone who feels like they're on the fringe. Maybe you know what it is to be someone who feels like they are always kind of getting an unfair shake from other people. That with you, people tend to judge a book by its cover. And maybe people have treated you unfairly in your life. Maybe people have made assumptions about you because of where you come from or what you drive or what your story is or what your job is. Or just the way that you like to present yourself that may not be indicative of the whole person. It may just be a thing that you enjoy doing. And if you're one of those people that often gets misjudged by others, then you probably also have in your life someone who has just loved you and accepted you for who you are and has refused to judge you like other people do. Who has just heard you out. Who has given you the space to be yourself. Who has met you where you are and loved you there. And isn't that person's love and acceptance of you a far greater argument for Christ than anything else that could happen in your life? I think that generosity is a remarkable apologetic because we remember acts of generosity. When I was about 14 years old, I was coming out of eighth grade, going into ninth grade. I'm not sure how old you are when that happens. I went to Costa Rica on my very first mission trip. And we were building a, I think we were building a house for a university president of a Christian college down there, which you can imagine how useful eighth grade Nate was on a Costa Rican construction site. I'm certain that the workers were very glad that I was there. I know in Mexico, when we go and build walls, they usually have to, not usually, all the time, have to come back and correct all the mistakes that I've made to the point where I'm like, you know what? I'm just not going to do that anymore. I'm just going to mix stuff. I'm going to hand it to Jeffy. Jeff's going to do the blocks. I'm just going to stand here like a dum-dum because I have nothing to contribute to what's happening here. So I can't imagine the detriment that eighth grade Nate was to actually getting anything done in Costa Rica. But my parents paid the thousand dollars. I went down there like everybody else, and I was on a mission trip, and it was a really formative trip. And on the last night that we were there, we did like a little dinner or banquet or whatever it was, and there was one guy. He was, to me, an older man at the time. He was probably mid-40s, so like really close to my current age. And I don't know if you've ever experienced this on a mission trip, but when you go and there's a language barrier, which for me, I knew no Spanish at all at that time. So there was a huge language barrier between me and him. And you can't really communicate, but if you've been on a mission trip and you're kind of wired like me, then you understand that there is the universal language of joking around. There's a universal language of throwing stuff at each other, of stealing each other's tools and messing with each other all week long. And he was right there with us. He was jumping in and he and I had kind of bonded over that. And we seemed to have a similar spirit and enjoy one another. And so on the last night that we were there, he commented on my t-shirt. It was a United States soccer t-shirt. And he commented on it that he liked it. It was new. It was made by Nike in eighth grade. This is a big deal. But he said that he liked it and I wanted to be generous. So I went back to the room. I changed into another t-shirt and I walked out and I handed him this t-shirt. And I just wanted him to take it as a gift. And that man took off his shirt in the middle of the party, put on my T-shirt, folded up his shirt and gave it to me. Now his shirt was this knit pink long-sleeved polo shirt. It had some country club emblem right here that was not Costa Rican. Somehow or another, he had acquired this shirt. But if you've traveled overseas to third world countries, you know a lot of the folks that you interact with, they don't have a lot. By our standards, they have almost nothing. He was wearing one of what I am sure was one of the very few collared shirts that he had to that party that night because everybody was dressed nice. And some snot-nosed kid that was useless on the job site all week gave him a shirt. And so he wanted to return that generosity with his generosity and he gave me a shirt that mattered to him a lot more than some dumb U.S. soccer shirt could have ever mattered to me. And 30 years later, I remember that. And I remember seeing the love of Jesus in his eyes as he did it. Which is why I'm certain that generosity makes an impression. And it's why I think that it might be the single greatest apologetic, and it might make the single biggest difference in times when we're not sure how else to reach people. I said that we could also be generous with our time. This last week, I got an email from one of our families. I'm going to brag on our student pastor, Kyle, a little bit. I got an email from one of the families and the whole email was to tell us, was to tell me that the subject of it was, Kyle's a good dude. Yeah. Yeah. You got no disagreements with me there. They said that he came to our middle school daughter's softball double header. That's a boring sentence to say. I'm not trying to crud on middle school girls or boys, but middle school sports stink, all right? So if you are there and you're not a parent or a grandparent, holy smokes, you're a special human. And listen, they said he stayed for both of them, the whole first game and the second game. And he stayed afterwards for cake. Are you kidding me? I was a student pastor for years. You know what I'd do? I'd get there at the end of the first game. Hey, good job. I saw that bat you had. I was really sorry you didn't get a hit. But, oh, man, you were close. And then as soon as the next game started, I'd be like, okay, well, you know, it's... I put in my time. Kyle stayed for the whole doubleheader and then he stayed for cake. And it made such an impression on the family that they emailed me to say, hey, we got a heck of a guy here. And we do. And she's going to remember that. That she has a student pastor that cares about her that much, that he's going to stay for all those things. And you can remember acts of generosity in your life too. Maybe we know somebody that has access to something that's kind of fun that not everybody has access to, a beach house or a lake house or a box at some sort of sporting event or venue. And you watch them give that out to people who might not otherwise be able to afford it or use it or have access to that over the years. And you're awed by that. I remember watching my father-in-law use his lake house like that weekend after weekend after weekend for the college kids that lived in the area and would come in and want to be pulled by the boat. We've seen people be generous in those ways. And it makes an impression on us, whether it's generosity in conversation or in time or in assessment of one another or in actual material wealth or in opportunity, they make an impression on us. And that impression is important because God's generosity points us to others and then in turn points them back to God. God's generosity points us to others. Christians are generous because God has been generous to us. One of my favorite passages is in the book of John. It says, We know that while we were still sinners that Christ died for us, and that's what love is. We know that while we were very far from God that he pursued us. We know that we have never done anything that will make him love us any less. We know that we are his beloved sons and daughters. And because he lavishes that generous love on us, the more we focus on it, the more aware of it we are, the more we reflect on how generous our father has been with us, the more we are inspired to go and be generous to other people. And if I'm really being honest with you, the most generous people I know, some of whom are in this room, are always people who love God a lot. The most generous people that I know are almost always people who have this very deep walk with God and seem to understand things about God that I don't fully understand. And I'll tell you this too, growing up in an environment, in a church environment in the 80s and 90s where I was told the godliest people are the ones who know the most theology, the godliest people are the ones who can quote the most verses to you, the godliest people are the ones who can win every argument? No. The godliest people are the most generous people. I know jerks who can win lots of arguments. I don't know anybody who's generous with everything they have who doesn't have a faith that I want to seek to emulate. And so when someone is generous to us and we say, why are you doing that? Why are you giving me that? Why are you spending that on me? Why are you investing that in me? Their answer inevitably is because God gave it to me. And then that points us back to God, which is how we bring about the reality of that Corinthians passage. God says, I've blessed you. I've enriched you in every way that you might enrich others in every way so that they might give thanksgiving to me for who I am. Do you see how that works? Someone is generous to you individually. You say, why are you doing this? This is too much. And they go, because I love God and God loves you and I want to do this for you. And then they turn and they praise God for placing you in their life and seek to desire to be generous like they have just been the recipient of. This works corporately as well. When we give to church or we sacrifice for an institution, we do something together and the outside world goes, wow, how'd you guys do that? Why'd you do that? Well, because God loves us, so we do this. And they go, well, that's pretty great. I want to find out more about your God too. I just, I don't want us to reduce generosity to simple financial giving anymore. And as a matter of fact, I would say that financial generosity might just be the easiest kind, especially for those of us with resources. I want to be gentle and careful here, but I also know my audience and I know the neighborhoods that we live in. Sometimes financial generosity is the easiest kind. And I know this because I've bought someone's groceries before because I didn't want to wait for them to go to their car and get their debit card. They said their debit card was in their car. They were fumbling around. And I said, I'm happy to get it. They said, oh, thank you so much. And I wanted to tell them, like, it's just because you're slow. It's not. I'm impatient. It's $20. I'll pay $20 to be in my car right now. I'm tired of watching you fumble with your wallet. Sometimes it's very easy when we have plenty to appear generous and cut a check. Now sometimes that's a real challenge, and that is genuine generosity. But sometimes that's the gateway to actual generosity. These people that we have on the corners, many of us are going to pass them on the way home. It's easy to hang a 20 out the window. It's incredibly generous to stop our plans in our day and get out of our car and talk to them and go have a meal with them. That's generosity. It's easy to donate to a cause. It's harder to go sit with the people to whom that cause ministers. It's easier to give out of plenty and hold back the stuff that we don't have as much of, but I would argue with you, and listen, this is not a sermon trying to denigrate giving. We ought to do that. But sometimes that's the simplest form of it. And what I want to encourage us to be is a people who are generous in spirit, who are generous across the board, who give of all of the resources that we have, who don't relegate it to the easiest ones. Whatever the easiest thing is for us to give, let's not just start there and be done, but let's be generous people. Because I bet, as I've been talking about generosity and the different forms that it takes, that you've thought of people in your life who have been generous to you. People who have been kind to you in their assessment of you or in their time or of their resources. And you're grateful that they are in your life. If you, like me, if you think of people in your life who you consider generous, you are grateful that they are in your life. You're grateful to God that he has placed them in your life. And because of that, you're pointed back to God. So here's the encouragement to us, Grace. Let's go be the kind of person that other people are grateful for. And when we do that, you'll be the kind of person that points people to Jesus. Go from here and be generous in spirit. Go be the kind of person that people are grateful to have in their life. And if you do that over time, you will leave a wake of people who have been pointed to Jesus because you entered into their life. I've mentioned many times that challenging teaching from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount when he said, let your light shine before others so that they might see your good works and glorify the Father who is in heaven. It's this idea that as we move into and out of the lives of other people, that they will be focused more on the Father, more on Jesus because of our simple presence in their life. And as I've reflected this week, that's always seemed like such a challenge to me. But maybe the key to obedience there is being someone who is generous in spirit. So that as we sow those seeds of generosity in the lives of others, we will become the kind of person that they are grateful that God has placed in their life. And in turn, they will be pointed to Jesus. So go from here and be the kind of people that other people are grateful for. And what you'll find is you've just become the kind of person who constantly points people towards the Father. Let's pray. God, we love you. We thank you for being generous to us, for giving us your son whom we did not deserve, for continuing to offer your forgiveness that often, God, we trample on. Lord, I pray that you would remind us, even this morning, of all the ways that you were generous to us, that you would remind us even today of all the people you have placed in our life to model that generosity for us. And God, I pray that we would be people who are acutely aware of the blessings that we have so that we might in turn offer those to others. Lord, make us conduits of your generosity so that we are the kind of people that point people back towards you. It's in Jesus' name that we ask these things. Amen.

Good morning, everybody. If somebody back there could get the lights, that would be great. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Thanks for being here this Sunday morning. If you're like me, this is a big Sunday. This is Master's Sunday. If you're watching online, I'm not supposed to wear this because the design does something weird to the camera and it makes it difficult to watch. But I'm not sorry because it's Master's Sunday. So this is what we get. This is also the seventh part of our series in Lent, where we've been looking at different character traits or ideas that we kind of pull out of the Lenten season and the story of the gospel. It's going to culminate next week with Easter, when we're going to observe some baptisms, baptizing people on Easter is literally one of the oldest, if not the oldest church tradition in all of church. The very early church would only baptize on Easter because it is in and of itself a picture of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. So next week, we have four baptisms right now that we're planning to do, which I'm thrilled about. If any of you feel like you want to be a part of that service as well, if you want to take the step to be baptized and you've never done that before, and the Lord may be tugging on your heart a little bit, get in touch with me this week. It's not too late. We would love for you to be a part of that celebration next week as we celebrate Easter together. This week, we're focused on the topic of generosity. And whenever, in church circles, many of you know this, whenever you mention generosity or the topic this week is going to be generosity, that's code for this is the money sermon, right? This is the giving sermon. Don't bring your friends. I'm going to ask you guys for money, so bring them next week when we talk about other stuff. Don't bring them this week because I don't want to make anybody uncomfortable. But this week is a sermon about generosity, but it is not about that. It's not about strictly financial generosity. And as a matter of fact, I've been saying all along that it's been really great to be able to read the devotionals of others as we kind of approach these topics each week, except for this week. This week was terrible because last week after I finished my sermon, it's just kind of how it goes. Sisyphus pushes the rock up the hill. I write a sermon every week. So I'm driving home from church going, okay, what's next week's topic? How do I want to approach it? That kind of thing. And I'm thinking about generosity and I get this idea. Yeah, that's how we should approach it. That's how we should talk about it. I'm going to explain it in this way and think about it in this way. And I'm feeling good about myself for being very clever, for thinking about generosity in a new, more expanded way. And then I sit down Monday and I open up the devotionals and Doug Bergeson, who was a jerk, he wrote this. Actually, speaking of generosity, no kidding around, Doug and Debbie are in the, I call it the COVID baby room. There's the youngest baby room where my son is. And then there's, and then you graduate into the COVID baby room. These children were born in the midst of the pandemic and have never seen a human face besides their parents. And when you drop them off in that room, they're terrified. They have no idea what's going on. They just have to be gradually weaned through crying and tears. And Doug and Debbie are locked into a mortal combat right now with four of these kids, right? So just talk about generosity. They don't have to do that. They're just doing it because they love the young families that they serve. They love the church and whatever. So it's very generous. Doug is the opposite of a jerk sometimes. Anyways, I opened up the devotional on Monday, authored by Doug. And lo and behold, it's the exact idea that I think I'm so clever for coming up with, which clearly if Doug can also come up with it, not that clever. And so I opened it up to read it and I'm like, golly, this is exactly kind of the same idea that I wanted to communicate. So if you would like like a three minute version of this sermon with fewer jokes, then just read the devotional on Monday and tune me out right now. You'll be fine. But I wanted to approach it this way, and I was happy with the way that Doug approached it, because I think we're often so overly reductive of generosity, that when we think of generosity, particularly in church terms, particularly when the Bible espouses it or encourages it, I think that we think of it in terms of financial giving, of material generosity. And because we do that, what I want to propose to you today is actually the possibility that generosity is the most underrated character trait in the Bible. I think that I would argue with you that generosity, being a person who's generous, is maybe the most underrated character trait in the Bible. Now, the Bible encourages a lot of character traits. We are to be humble, and we are to be kind, and we are to be loving, and we are to be gentle, and we are to try to be lowly, and we are to be forgiving, and we are to be just. And there's a lot of things that the Bible would have us seek to be or that the Spirit would seek to shape us into, and amongst those is generosity. So I'm not saying that generosity is the most important character trait in the Bible, but I am saying that I think it might be the most underrated character trait in the Bible. And in that way, generosity is very similar to Waffle House. Now here's the thing, and it's something that I've noticed over the years about our North Raleigh crowd, and I've wanted to say something. I wasn't sure when it was appropriate, but I'm going to put it to you today. You guys don't eat at Waffle House enough, right? This church has a Waffle House deficiency, and it's high time that we address it. What are you, too good? Waffle House is delicious. And when we think of Waffle House, we think of waffles, which of course we do. They named their home after that particular dish. We think of the waffles, and the waffles are great. I like to get mine crispy, which means leave it in there a little bit longer. A Cajun waffle, blacken it up a little bit. You can get it with chocolate chips, which are miniature and delicious. And if you go during the right season, you can get them with peanut butter chips. Yeah, they're very good. They're very good. What you cannot do is get them with fresh fruit, all right? They don't do fresh fruit at Waffle House. You go to First Watch for that stuff, all right? Fancy pants? We're not doing it. We might have some apple butter somewhere. That's it in terms of fresh fruit. But it's more than just waffles. You don't want waffles? They got a sausage melt that's amazing. Wheat toast, melted American cheese, sausage patty, grilled onions, unbelievable. My wife likes the BLT there. It's not as good as the one you're going to get at Merritt's over in Chapel Hill, but it's cheaper, and the person who serves it to you is more friendly, and it's great. Unless the person serving it to you is on the back end of an overnight shift, if you get somebody at about 7.35 in the a.m., just don't talk to that person. They've had a harder night than you, all right? Otherwise, the service is amazing. The lunch is good. You can even get dinner there. They have T-bone steaks at Waffle House. I've never had one. I respect steak too much to order one from Waffle House, but you can get one there if you want one. And I think that Waffle House is often overly reduced to just waffles when they have so much more to offer. It's delicious. In the same way, we become so overly reductive of generosity, relegating it to financial giving, that we don't think of all the other ways in which we are called to be generous that I would contend are often more difficult than simple financial generosity. And as we've gone through these different topics in this series, I've said, you know, the Bible has a lot to say about this particular topic. But for generosity, I wanted to kind of give us an overview of what does the Bible have to say about this. So I'm going to go through four different passages that will be up on the screen for you to read along with me. But we're kind of just going to rapid fire through these. So in Psalm, Psalm 112, the psalmist writes, good will come to those who are generous and lend freely, who conduct their affairs with justice. In Proverbs, it's written, 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. And then in the New Testament, Luke writes, And finally, I would remind you of the verse that finished up what Kelsey read for us at the beginning of the sermon today. The last verse to God. There's a lot there about generosity. And as we started in Psalms, it zeroes in on financial generosity, the kind that we go to first when we think of someone who is a generous person. It says you should lend freely and you will receive freely. But it very quickly begins to expand it beyond that. It says conduct your affairs with justice. So that's not necessarily money. Now we're talking about offer justice generally to those around you. And then we get into Proverbs and it says a generous person will prosper. Whoever refreshes will be refreshed. So now we're starting to expand our understanding of generosity beyond simply the materials that we give one another, but in ways that we can refresh others. God says he will refresh us. And then it's interesting to me in Luke that this verse that's famous, that's often misused, often by other Christians trying to demean other Christians, or even by people outside the church trying to demean people within the church, judge not lest ye be judged, or judge not or you will also be judged. But it's followed with other character traits that don't condemn or you will be condemned, don't forgive or you won't be forgiven. It's other character traits, and it ends with be fair in your measurements, be generous in how you assess other people and other things. And it basically says, for with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. So as generous as you are towards other people in your judgment, God will be generous to you. As generous as you are with your forgiveness, God will be forgiving to you. As generous as you are with your condemnation, God will be generous with his condemnation towards you. And so we're expanding the view of generosity. And then finally, in Corinthians, there's this kind of wonderful, almost formula there. And I hesitate to use that word because I really don't like it when we reduce scripture to this formulaic approach so that if I do these things, God will give me these things. But in this instance, there does seem to be a cause and effect flow through the passage where he writes, Paul writes, that you will be enriched in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion. And through your generosity, through us, your generosity will result in thanksgiving. It's this idea that God says, I have blessed you in every way so that because of that blessing, you will be generous to others in every way. And because you are generous to others in every way, they will turn in thanks to me. They will be grateful to me. It will point them towards me. It's how God's generosity cyclically works to point other people back towards him, which we'll see more clearly in just a second. But what I want to contend with you this morning is we can only live out the truths of these scriptures if we expand our view of generosity. We can only live out the truth of the scriptures of what is said in these four passages and really throughout scripture and in particular in Corinthians where other people will glorify God because of us if we expand our view of what generosity could possibly be. Because there's so many more ways to be generous than simply financially. We can be generous in our judgment of others, in how we assess others. Some of us are very quick to judge. We see somebody driving a particular kind of car or wearing a particular type of clothes, or we learn the way that someone might have voted in the last election, and we are very quick to judge them and make all sorts of assessments about who they are. We can be more generous in our judgment of others. We can be more generous in our forgiveness that we offer towards others. We can be more generous in the grace that we offer towards people. We can be more generous in the way that we determine who we're going to spend our time with. We can be generous with our time. We can be generous with our attention. We can be generous in conversation. There are so many ways beyond financially to be generous people. And the more I thought about it, the more I reflected on the opportunities that we have for generosity and the generosity of some others that I've experienced in my life, the more I thought that, you know, generosity might be the greatest apologetic. Somebody being generous might be the greatest apologetic. Now, if any pastor has ever couched a note that he's made, it's me, because I just put might there in the middle of it. I'm not saying it definitely is. I'm just saying it could possibly be the greatest apologetic. And in this sense, an apologetic is a defense of the faith. It's an argument for the faith. And I tend to think that acts of generosity and all the different forms that they take can serve long-term to be far more winsome than any theological argument, than any scientific argument that we have crafted, that simply being generous to someone over time, letting other people see you be generous to everyone in your orbit and everyone in your sphere, can over time be more winsome towards Christ, can point people towards Jesus more than any argument that you could ever craft, could point people to Jesus more than even inviting them to church, could point people to Jesus more than challenging them. Hey, if you were to die today, do you know how you would spend eternity? And it's not that I don't want us to be having those conversations. Those conversations are good and we need to be sharing Christ with our neighbors. As a matter of fact, one of the goals of grace moving forward is that we would see God bring more people to faith through the people of grace so that we might celebrate that conversion. We want very much for more people to come to faith as a result of the ministries of this church. And the reason I'm saying that is because I think generosity can be such a big part of that. I think generosity can point us to Jesus in ways that almost nothing else can. Think of the instances in your life when someone has been generous to you. Maybe you know what it is to be someone who feels like they're on the fringe. Maybe you know what it is to be someone who feels like they are always kind of getting an unfair shake from other people. That with you, people tend to judge a book by its cover. And maybe people have treated you unfairly in your life. Maybe people have made assumptions about you because of where you come from or what you drive or what your story is or what your job is. Or just the way that you like to present yourself that may not be indicative of the whole person. It may just be a thing that you enjoy doing. And if you're one of those people that often gets misjudged by others, then you probably also have in your life someone who has just loved you and accepted you for who you are and has refused to judge you like other people do. Who has just heard you out. Who has given you the space to be yourself. Who has met you where you are and loved you there. And isn't that person's love and acceptance of you a far greater argument for Christ than anything else that could happen in your life? I think that generosity is a remarkable apologetic because we remember acts of generosity. When I was about 14 years old, I was coming out of eighth grade, going into ninth grade. I'm not sure how old you are when that happens. I went to Costa Rica on my very first mission trip. And we were building a, I think we were building a house for a university president of a Christian college down there, which you can imagine how useful eighth grade Nate was on a Costa Rican construction site. I'm certain that the workers were very glad that I was there. I know in Mexico, when we go and build walls, they usually have to, not usually, all the time, have to come back and correct all the mistakes that I've made to the point where I'm like, you know what? I'm just not going to do that anymore. I'm just going to mix stuff. I'm going to hand it to Jeffy. Jeff's going to do the blocks. I'm just going to stand here like a dum-dum because I have nothing to contribute to what's happening here. So I can't imagine the detriment that eighth grade Nate was to actually getting anything done in Costa Rica. But my parents paid the thousand dollars. I went down there like everybody else, and I was on a mission trip, and it was a really formative trip. And on the last night that we were there, we did like a little dinner or banquet or whatever it was, and there was one guy. He was, to me, an older man at the time. He was probably mid-40s, so like really close to my current age. And I don't know if you've ever experienced this on a mission trip, but when you go and there's a language barrier, which for me, I knew no Spanish at all at that time. So there was a huge language barrier between me and him. And you can't really communicate, but if you've been on a mission trip and you're kind of wired like me, then you understand that there is the universal language of joking around. There's a universal language of throwing stuff at each other, of stealing each other's tools and messing with each other all week long. And he was right there with us. He was jumping in and he and I had kind of bonded over that. And we seemed to have a similar spirit and enjoy one another. And so on the last night that we were there, he commented on my t-shirt. It was a United States soccer t-shirt. And he commented on it that he liked it. It was new. It was made by Nike in eighth grade. This is a big deal. But he said that he liked it and I wanted to be generous. So I went back to the room. I changed into another t-shirt and I walked out and I handed him this t-shirt. And I just wanted him to take it as a gift. And that man took off his shirt in the middle of the party, put on my T-shirt, folded up his shirt and gave it to me. Now his shirt was this knit pink long-sleeved polo shirt. It had some country club emblem right here that was not Costa Rican. Somehow or another, he had acquired this shirt. But if you've traveled overseas to third world countries, you know a lot of the folks that you interact with, they don't have a lot. By our standards, they have almost nothing. He was wearing one of what I am sure was one of the very few collared shirts that he had to that party that night because everybody was dressed nice. And some snot-nosed kid that was useless on the job site all week gave him a shirt. And so he wanted to return that generosity with his generosity and he gave me a shirt that mattered to him a lot more than some dumb U.S. soccer shirt could have ever mattered to me. And 30 years later, I remember that. And I remember seeing the love of Jesus in his eyes as he did it. Which is why I'm certain that generosity makes an impression. And it's why I think that it might be the single greatest apologetic, and it might make the single biggest difference in times when we're not sure how else to reach people. I said that we could also be generous with our time. This last week, I got an email from one of our families. I'm going to brag on our student pastor, Kyle, a little bit. I got an email from one of the families and the whole email was to tell us, was to tell me that the subject of it was, Kyle's a good dude. Yeah. Yeah. You got no disagreements with me there. They said that he came to our middle school daughter's softball double header. That's a boring sentence to say. I'm not trying to crud on middle school girls or boys, but middle school sports stink, all right? So if you are there and you're not a parent or a grandparent, holy smokes, you're a special human. And listen, they said he stayed for both of them, the whole first game and the second game. And he stayed afterwards for cake. Are you kidding me? I was a student pastor for years. You know what I'd do? I'd get there at the end of the first game. Hey, good job. I saw that bat you had. I was really sorry you didn't get a hit. But, oh, man, you were close. And then as soon as the next game started, I'd be like, okay, well, you know, it's... I put in my time. Kyle stayed for the whole doubleheader and then he stayed for cake. And it made such an impression on the family that they emailed me to say, hey, we got a heck of a guy here. And we do. And she's going to remember that. That she has a student pastor that cares about her that much, that he's going to stay for all those things. And you can remember acts of generosity in your life too. Maybe we know somebody that has access to something that's kind of fun that not everybody has access to, a beach house or a lake house or a box at some sort of sporting event or venue. And you watch them give that out to people who might not otherwise be able to afford it or use it or have access to that over the years. And you're awed by that. I remember watching my father-in-law use his lake house like that weekend after weekend after weekend for the college kids that lived in the area and would come in and want to be pulled by the boat. We've seen people be generous in those ways. And it makes an impression on us, whether it's generosity in conversation or in time or in assessment of one another or in actual material wealth or in opportunity, they make an impression on us. And that impression is important because God's generosity points us to others and then in turn points them back to God. God's generosity points us to others. Christians are generous because God has been generous to us. One of my favorite passages is in the book of John. It says, We know that while we were still sinners that Christ died for us, and that's what love is. We know that while we were very far from God that he pursued us. We know that we have never done anything that will make him love us any less. We know that we are his beloved sons and daughters. And because he lavishes that generous love on us, the more we focus on it, the more aware of it we are, the more we reflect on how generous our father has been with us, the more we are inspired to go and be generous to other people. And if I'm really being honest with you, the most generous people I know, some of whom are in this room, are always people who love God a lot. The most generous people that I know are almost always people who have this very deep walk with God and seem to understand things about God that I don't fully understand. And I'll tell you this too, growing up in an environment, in a church environment in the 80s and 90s where I was told the godliest people are the ones who know the most theology, the godliest people are the ones who can quote the most verses to you, the godliest people are the ones who can win every argument? No. The godliest people are the most generous people. I know jerks who can win lots of arguments. I don't know anybody who's generous with everything they have who doesn't have a faith that I want to seek to emulate. And so when someone is generous to us and we say, why are you doing that? Why are you giving me that? Why are you spending that on me? Why are you investing that in me? Their answer inevitably is because God gave it to me. And then that points us back to God, which is how we bring about the reality of that Corinthians passage. God says, I've blessed you. I've enriched you in every way that you might enrich others in every way so that they might give thanksgiving to me for who I am. Do you see how that works? Someone is generous to you individually. You say, why are you doing this? This is too much. And they go, because I love God and God loves you and I want to do this for you. And then they turn and they praise God for placing you in their life and seek to desire to be generous like they have just been the recipient of. This works corporately as well. When we give to church or we sacrifice for an institution, we do something together and the outside world goes, wow, how'd you guys do that? Why'd you do that? Well, because God loves us, so we do this. And they go, well, that's pretty great. I want to find out more about your God too. I just, I don't want us to reduce generosity to simple financial giving anymore. And as a matter of fact, I would say that financial generosity might just be the easiest kind, especially for those of us with resources. I want to be gentle and careful here, but I also know my audience and I know the neighborhoods that we live in. Sometimes financial generosity is the easiest kind. And I know this because I've bought someone's groceries before because I didn't want to wait for them to go to their car and get their debit card. They said their debit card was in their car. They were fumbling around. And I said, I'm happy to get it. They said, oh, thank you so much. And I wanted to tell them, like, it's just because you're slow. It's not. I'm impatient. It's $20. I'll pay $20 to be in my car right now. I'm tired of watching you fumble with your wallet. Sometimes it's very easy when we have plenty to appear generous and cut a check. Now sometimes that's a real challenge, and that is genuine generosity. But sometimes that's the gateway to actual generosity. These people that we have on the corners, many of us are going to pass them on the way home. It's easy to hang a 20 out the window. It's incredibly generous to stop our plans in our day and get out of our car and talk to them and go have a meal with them. That's generosity. It's easy to donate to a cause. It's harder to go sit with the people to whom that cause ministers. It's easier to give out of plenty and hold back the stuff that we don't have as much of, but I would argue with you, and listen, this is not a sermon trying to denigrate giving. We ought to do that. But sometimes that's the simplest form of it. And what I want to encourage us to be is a people who are generous in spirit, who are generous across the board, who give of all of the resources that we have, who don't relegate it to the easiest ones. Whatever the easiest thing is for us to give, let's not just start there and be done, but let's be generous people. Because I bet, as I've been talking about generosity and the different forms that it takes, that you've thought of people in your life who have been generous to you. People who have been kind to you in their assessment of you or in their time or of their resources. And you're grateful that they are in your life. If you, like me, if you think of people in your life who you consider generous, you are grateful that they are in your life. You're grateful to God that he has placed them in your life. And because of that, you're pointed back to God. So here's the encouragement to us, Grace. Let's go be the kind of person that other people are grateful for. And when we do that, you'll be the kind of person that points people to Jesus. Go from here and be generous in spirit. Go be the kind of person that people are grateful to have in their life. And if you do that over time, you will leave a wake of people who have been pointed to Jesus because you entered into their life. I've mentioned many times that challenging teaching from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount when he said, let your light shine before others so that they might see your good works and glorify the Father who is in heaven. It's this idea that as we move into and out of the lives of other people, that they will be focused more on the Father, more on Jesus because of our simple presence in their life. And as I've reflected this week, that's always seemed like such a challenge to me. But maybe the key to obedience there is being someone who is generous in spirit. So that as we sow those seeds of generosity in the lives of others, we will become the kind of person that they are grateful that God has placed in their life. And in turn, they will be pointed to Jesus. So go from here and be the kind of people that other people are grateful for. And what you'll find is you've just become the kind of person who constantly points people towards the Father. Let's pray. God, we love you. We thank you for being generous to us, for giving us your son whom we did not deserve, for continuing to offer your forgiveness that often, God, we trample on. Lord, I pray that you would remind us, even this morning, of all the ways that you were generous to us, that you would remind us even today of all the people you have placed in our life to model that generosity for us. And God, I pray that we would be people who are acutely aware of the blessings that we have so that we might in turn offer those to others. Lord, make us conduits of your generosity so that we are the kind of people that point people back towards you. It's in Jesus' name that we ask these things. Amen.

Good morning, everybody. If somebody back there could get the lights, that would be great. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Thanks for being here this Sunday morning. If you're like me, this is a big Sunday. This is Master's Sunday. If you're watching online, I'm not supposed to wear this because the design does something weird to the camera and it makes it difficult to watch. But I'm not sorry because it's Master's Sunday. So this is what we get. This is also the seventh part of our series in Lent, where we've been looking at different character traits or ideas that we kind of pull out of the Lenten season and the story of the gospel. It's going to culminate next week with Easter, when we're going to observe some baptisms, baptizing people on Easter is literally one of the oldest, if not the oldest church tradition in all of church. The very early church would only baptize on Easter because it is in and of itself a picture of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. So next week, we have four baptisms right now that we're planning to do, which I'm thrilled about. If any of you feel like you want to be a part of that service as well, if you want to take the step to be baptized and you've never done that before, and the Lord may be tugging on your heart a little bit, get in touch with me this week. It's not too late. We would love for you to be a part of that celebration next week as we celebrate Easter together. This week, we're focused on the topic of generosity. And whenever, in church circles, many of you know this, whenever you mention generosity or the topic this week is going to be generosity, that's code for this is the money sermon, right? This is the giving sermon. Don't bring your friends. I'm going to ask you guys for money, so bring them next week when we talk about other stuff. Don't bring them this week because I don't want to make anybody uncomfortable. But this week is a sermon about generosity, but it is not about that. It's not about strictly financial generosity. And as a matter of fact, I've been saying all along that it's been really great to be able to read the devotionals of others as we kind of approach these topics each week, except for this week. This week was terrible because last week after I finished my sermon, it's just kind of how it goes. Sisyphus pushes the rock up the hill. I write a sermon every week. So I'm driving home from church going, okay, what's next week's topic? How do I want to approach it? That kind of thing. And I'm thinking about generosity and I get this idea. Yeah, that's how we should approach it. That's how we should talk about it. I'm going to explain it in this way and think about it in this way. And I'm feeling good about myself for being very clever, for thinking about generosity in a new, more expanded way. And then I sit down Monday and I open up the devotionals and Doug Bergeson, who was a jerk, he wrote this. Actually, speaking of generosity, no kidding around, Doug and Debbie are in the, I call it the COVID baby room. There's the youngest baby room where my son is. And then there's, and then you graduate into the COVID baby room. These children were born in the midst of the pandemic and have never seen a human face besides their parents. And when you drop them off in that room, they're terrified. They have no idea what's going on. They just have to be gradually weaned through crying and tears. And Doug and Debbie are locked into a mortal combat right now with four of these kids, right? So just talk about generosity. They don't have to do that. They're just doing it because they love the young families that they serve. They love the church and whatever. So it's very generous. Doug is the opposite of a jerk sometimes. Anyways, I opened up the devotional on Monday, authored by Doug. And lo and behold, it's the exact idea that I think I'm so clever for coming up with, which clearly if Doug can also come up with it, not that clever. And so I opened it up to read it and I'm like, golly, this is exactly kind of the same idea that I wanted to communicate. So if you would like like a three minute version of this sermon with fewer jokes, then just read the devotional on Monday and tune me out right now. You'll be fine. But I wanted to approach it this way, and I was happy with the way that Doug approached it, because I think we're often so overly reductive of generosity, that when we think of generosity, particularly in church terms, particularly when the Bible espouses it or encourages it, I think that we think of it in terms of financial giving, of material generosity. And because we do that, what I want to propose to you today is actually the possibility that generosity is the most underrated character trait in the Bible. I think that I would argue with you that generosity, being a person who's generous, is maybe the most underrated character trait in the Bible. Now, the Bible encourages a lot of character traits. We are to be humble, and we are to be kind, and we are to be loving, and we are to be gentle, and we are to try to be lowly, and we are to be forgiving, and we are to be just. And there's a lot of things that the Bible would have us seek to be or that the Spirit would seek to shape us into, and amongst those is generosity. So I'm not saying that generosity is the most important character trait in the Bible, but I am saying that I think it might be the most underrated character trait in the Bible. And in that way, generosity is very similar to Waffle House. Now here's the thing, and it's something that I've noticed over the years about our North Raleigh crowd, and I've wanted to say something. I wasn't sure when it was appropriate, but I'm going to put it to you today. You guys don't eat at Waffle House enough, right? This church has a Waffle House deficiency, and it's high time that we address it. What are you, too good? Waffle House is delicious. And when we think of Waffle House, we think of waffles, which of course we do. They named their home after that particular dish. We think of the waffles, and the waffles are great. I like to get mine crispy, which means leave it in there a little bit longer. A Cajun waffle, blacken it up a little bit. You can get it with chocolate chips, which are miniature and delicious. And if you go during the right season, you can get them with peanut butter chips. Yeah, they're very good. They're very good. What you cannot do is get them with fresh fruit, all right? They don't do fresh fruit at Waffle House. You go to First Watch for that stuff, all right? Fancy pants? We're not doing it. We might have some apple butter somewhere. That's it in terms of fresh fruit. But it's more than just waffles. You don't want waffles? They got a sausage melt that's amazing. Wheat toast, melted American cheese, sausage patty, grilled onions, unbelievable. My wife likes the BLT there. It's not as good as the one you're going to get at Merritt's over in Chapel Hill, but it's cheaper, and the person who serves it to you is more friendly, and it's great. Unless the person serving it to you is on the back end of an overnight shift, if you get somebody at about 7.35 in the a.m., just don't talk to that person. They've had a harder night than you, all right? Otherwise, the service is amazing. The lunch is good. You can even get dinner there. They have T-bone steaks at Waffle House. I've never had one. I respect steak too much to order one from Waffle House, but you can get one there if you want one. And I think that Waffle House is often overly reduced to just waffles when they have so much more to offer. It's delicious. In the same way, we become so overly reductive of generosity, relegating it to financial giving, that we don't think of all the other ways in which we are called to be generous that I would contend are often more difficult than simple financial generosity. And as we've gone through these different topics in this series, I've said, you know, the Bible has a lot to say about this particular topic. But for generosity, I wanted to kind of give us an overview of what does the Bible have to say about this. So I'm going to go through four different passages that will be up on the screen for you to read along with me. But we're kind of just going to rapid fire through these. So in Psalm, Psalm 112, the psalmist writes, good will come to those who are generous and lend freely, who conduct their affairs with justice. In Proverbs, it's written, 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. And then in the New Testament, Luke writes, And finally, I would remind you of the verse that finished up what Kelsey read for us at the beginning of the sermon today. The last verse to God. There's a lot there about generosity. And as we started in Psalms, it zeroes in on financial generosity, the kind that we go to first when we think of someone who is a generous person. It says you should lend freely and you will receive freely. But it very quickly begins to expand it beyond that. It says conduct your affairs with justice. So that's not necessarily money. Now we're talking about offer justice generally to those around you. And then we get into Proverbs and it says a generous person will prosper. Whoever refreshes will be refreshed. So now we're starting to expand our understanding of generosity beyond simply the materials that we give one another, but in ways that we can refresh others. God says he will refresh us. And then it's interesting to me in Luke that this verse that's famous, that's often misused, often by other Christians trying to demean other Christians, or even by people outside the church trying to demean people within the church, judge not lest ye be judged, or judge not or you will also be judged. But it's followed with other character traits that don't condemn or you will be condemned, don't forgive or you won't be forgiven. It's other character traits, and it ends with be fair in your measurements, be generous in how you assess other people and other things. And it basically says, for with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. So as generous as you are towards other people in your judgment, God will be generous to you. As generous as you are with your forgiveness, God will be forgiving to you. As generous as you are with your condemnation, God will be generous with his condemnation towards you. And so we're expanding the view of generosity. And then finally, in Corinthians, there's this kind of wonderful, almost formula there. And I hesitate to use that word because I really don't like it when we reduce scripture to this formulaic approach so that if I do these things, God will give me these things. But in this instance, there does seem to be a cause and effect flow through the passage where he writes, Paul writes, that you will be enriched in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion. And through your generosity, through us, your generosity will result in thanksgiving. It's this idea that God says, I have blessed you in every way so that because of that blessing, you will be generous to others in every way. And because you are generous to others in every way, they will turn in thanks to me. They will be grateful to me. It will point them towards me. It's how God's generosity cyclically works to point other people back towards him, which we'll see more clearly in just a second. But what I want to contend with you this morning is we can only live out the truths of these scriptures if we expand our view of generosity. We can only live out the truth of the scriptures of what is said in these four passages and really throughout scripture and in particular in Corinthians where other people will glorify God because of us if we expand our view of what generosity could possibly be. Because there's so many more ways to be generous than simply financially. We can be generous in our judgment of others, in how we assess others. Some of us are very quick to judge. We see somebody driving a particular kind of car or wearing a particular type of clothes, or we learn the way that someone might have voted in the last election, and we are very quick to judge them and make all sorts of assessments about who they are. We can be more generous in our judgment of others. We can be more generous in our forgiveness that we offer towards others. We can be more generous in the grace that we offer towards people. We can be more generous in the way that we determine who we're going to spend our time with. We can be generous with our time. We can be generous with our attention. We can be generous in conversation. There are so many ways beyond financially to be generous people. And the more I thought about it, the more I reflected on the opportunities that we have for generosity and the generosity of some others that I've experienced in my life, the more I thought that, you know, generosity might be the greatest apologetic. Somebody being generous might be the greatest apologetic. Now, if any pastor has ever couched a note that he's made, it's me, because I just put might there in the middle of it. I'm not saying it definitely is. I'm just saying it could possibly be the greatest apologetic. And in this sense, an apologetic is a defense of the faith. It's an argument for the faith. And I tend to think that acts of generosity and all the different forms that they take can serve long-term to be far more winsome than any theological argument, than any scientific argument that we have crafted, that simply being generous to someone over time, letting other people see you be generous to everyone in your orbit and everyone in your sphere, can over time be more winsome towards Christ, can point people towards Jesus more than any argument that you could ever craft, could point people to Jesus more than even inviting them to church, could point people to Jesus more than challenging them. Hey, if you were to die today, do you know how you would spend eternity? And it's not that I don't want us to be having those conversations. Those conversations are good and we need to be sharing Christ with our neighbors. As a matter of fact, one of the goals of grace moving forward is that we would see God bring more people to faith through the people of grace so that we might celebrate that conversion. We want very much for more people to come to faith as a result of the ministries of this church. And the reason I'm saying that is because I think generosity can be such a big part of that. I think generosity can point us to Jesus in ways that almost nothing else can. Think of the instances in your life when someone has been generous to you. Maybe you know what it is to be someone who feels like they're on the fringe. Maybe you know what it is to be someone who feels like they are always kind of getting an unfair shake from other people. That with you, people tend to judge a book by its cover. And maybe people have treated you unfairly in your life. Maybe people have made assumptions about you because of where you come from or what you drive or what your story is or what your job is. Or just the way that you like to present yourself that may not be indicative of the whole person. It may just be a thing that you enjoy doing. And if you're one of those people that often gets misjudged by others, then you probably also have in your life someone who has just loved you and accepted you for who you are and has refused to judge you like other people do. Who has just heard you out. Who has given you the space to be yourself. Who has met you where you are and loved you there. And isn't that person's love and acceptance of you a far greater argument for Christ than anything else that could happen in your life? I think that generosity is a remarkable apologetic because we remember acts of generosity. When I was about 14 years old, I was coming out of eighth grade, going into ninth grade. I'm not sure how old you are when that happens. I went to Costa Rica on my very first mission trip. And we were building a, I think we were building a house for a university president of a Christian college down there, which you can imagine how useful eighth grade Nate was on a Costa Rican construction site. I'm certain that the workers were very glad that I was there. I know in Mexico, when we go and build walls, they usually have to, not usually, all the time, have to come back and correct all the mistakes that I've made to the point where I'm like, you know what? I'm just not going to do that anymore. I'm just going to mix stuff. I'm going to hand it to Jeffy. Jeff's going to do the blocks. I'm just going to stand here like a dum-dum because I have nothing to contribute to what's happening here. So I can't imagine the detriment that eighth grade Nate was to actually getting anything done in Costa Rica. But my parents paid the thousand dollars. I went down there like everybody else, and I was on a mission trip, and it was a really formative trip. And on the last night that we were there, we did like a little dinner or banquet or whatever it was, and there was one guy. He was, to me, an older man at the time. He was probably mid-40s, so like really close to my current age. And I don't know if you've ever experienced this on a mission trip, but when you go and there's a language barrier, which for me, I knew no Spanish at all at that time. So there was a huge language barrier between me and him. And you can't really communicate, but if you've been on a mission trip and you're kind of wired like me, then you understand that there is the universal language of joking around. There's a universal language of throwing stuff at each other, of stealing each other's tools and messing with each other all week long. And he was right there with us. He was jumping in and he and I had kind of bonded over that. And we seemed to have a similar spirit and enjoy one another. And so on the last night that we were there, he commented on my t-shirt. It was a United States soccer t-shirt. And he commented on it that he liked it. It was new. It was made by Nike in eighth grade. This is a big deal. But he said that he liked it and I wanted to be generous. So I went back to the room. I changed into another t-shirt and I walked out and I handed him this t-shirt. And I just wanted him to take it as a gift. And that man took off his shirt in the middle of the party, put on my T-shirt, folded up his shirt and gave it to me. Now his shirt was this knit pink long-sleeved polo shirt. It had some country club emblem right here that was not Costa Rican. Somehow or another, he had acquired this shirt. But if you've traveled overseas to third world countries, you know a lot of the folks that you interact with, they don't have a lot. By our standards, they have almost nothing. He was wearing one of what I am sure was one of the very few collared shirts that he had to that party that night because everybody was dressed nice. And some snot-nosed kid that was useless on the job site all week gave him a shirt. And so he wanted to return that generosity with his generosity and he gave me a shirt that mattered to him a lot more than some dumb U.S. soccer shirt could have ever mattered to me. And 30 years later, I remember that. And I remember seeing the love of Jesus in his eyes as he did it. Which is why I'm certain that generosity makes an impression. And it's why I think that it might be the single greatest apologetic, and it might make the single biggest difference in times when we're not sure how else to reach people. I said that we could also be generous with our time. This last week, I got an email from one of our families. I'm going to brag on our student pastor, Kyle, a little bit. I got an email from one of the families and the whole email was to tell us, was to tell me that the subject of it was, Kyle's a good dude. Yeah. Yeah. You got no disagreements with me there. They said that he came to our middle school daughter's softball double header. That's a boring sentence to say. I'm not trying to crud on middle school girls or boys, but middle school sports stink, all right? So if you are there and you're not a parent or a grandparent, holy smokes, you're a special human. And listen, they said he stayed for both of them, the whole first game and the second game. And he stayed afterwards for cake. Are you kidding me? I was a student pastor for years. You know what I'd do? I'd get there at the end of the first game. Hey, good job. I saw that bat you had. I was really sorry you didn't get a hit. But, oh, man, you were close. And then as soon as the next game started, I'd be like, okay, well, you know, it's... I put in my time. Kyle stayed for the whole doubleheader and then he stayed for cake. And it made such an impression on the family that they emailed me to say, hey, we got a heck of a guy here. And we do. And she's going to remember that. That she has a student pastor that cares about her that much, that he's going to stay for all those things. And you can remember acts of generosity in your life too. Maybe we know somebody that has access to something that's kind of fun that not everybody has access to, a beach house or a lake house or a box at some sort of sporting event or venue. And you watch them give that out to people who might not otherwise be able to afford it or use it or have access to that over the years. And you're awed by that. I remember watching my father-in-law use his lake house like that weekend after weekend after weekend for the college kids that lived in the area and would come in and want to be pulled by the boat. We've seen people be generous in those ways. And it makes an impression on us, whether it's generosity in conversation or in time or in assessment of one another or in actual material wealth or in opportunity, they make an impression on us. And that impression is important because God's generosity points us to others and then in turn points them back to God. God's generosity points us to others. Christians are generous because God has been generous to us. One of my favorite passages is in the book of John. It says, We know that while we were still sinners that Christ died for us, and that's what love is. We know that while we were very far from God that he pursued us. We know that we have never done anything that will make him love us any less. We know that we are his beloved sons and daughters. And because he lavishes that generous love on us, the more we focus on it, the more aware of it we are, the more we reflect on how generous our father has been with us, the more we are inspired to go and be generous to other people. And if I'm really being honest with you, the most generous people I know, some of whom are in this room, are always people who love God a lot. The most generous people that I know are almost always people who have this very deep walk with God and seem to understand things about God that I don't fully understand. And I'll tell you this too, growing up in an environment, in a church environment in the 80s and 90s where I was told the godliest people are the ones who know the most theology, the godliest people are the ones who can quote the most verses to you, the godliest people are the ones who can win every argument? No. The godliest people are the most generous people. I know jerks who can win lots of arguments. I don't know anybody who's generous with everything they have who doesn't have a faith that I want to seek to emulate. And so when someone is generous to us and we say, why are you doing that? Why are you giving me that? Why are you spending that on me? Why are you investing that in me? Their answer inevitably is because God gave it to me. And then that points us back to God, which is how we bring about the reality of that Corinthians passage. God says, I've blessed you. I've enriched you in every way that you might enrich others in every way so that they might give thanksgiving to me for who I am. Do you see how that works? Someone is generous to you individually. You say, why are you doing this? This is too much. And they go, because I love God and God loves you and I want to do this for you. And then they turn and they praise God for placing you in their life and seek to desire to be generous like they have just been the recipient of. This works corporately as well. When we give to church or we sacrifice for an institution, we do something together and the outside world goes, wow, how'd you guys do that? Why'd you do that? Well, because God loves us, so we do this. And they go, well, that's pretty great. I want to find out more about your God too. I just, I don't want us to reduce generosity to simple financial giving anymore. And as a matter of fact, I would say that financial generosity might just be the easiest kind, especially for those of us with resources. I want to be gentle and careful here, but I also know my audience and I know the neighborhoods that we live in. Sometimes financial generosity is the easiest kind. And I know this because I've bought someone's groceries before because I didn't want to wait for them to go to their car and get their debit card. They said their debit card was in their car. They were fumbling around. And I said, I'm happy to get it. They said, oh, thank you so much. And I wanted to tell them, like, it's just because you're slow. It's not. I'm impatient. It's $20. I'll pay $20 to be in my car right now. I'm tired of watching you fumble with your wallet. Sometimes it's very easy when we have plenty to appear generous and cut a check. Now sometimes that's a real challenge, and that is genuine generosity. But sometimes that's the gateway to actual generosity. These people that we have on the corners, many of us are going to pass them on the way home. It's easy to hang a 20 out the window. It's incredibly generous to stop our plans in our day and get out of our car and talk to them and go have a meal with them. That's generosity. It's easy to donate to a cause. It's harder to go sit with the people to whom that cause ministers. It's easier to give out of plenty and hold back the stuff that we don't have as much of, but I would argue with you, and listen, this is not a sermon trying to denigrate giving. We ought to do that. But sometimes that's the simplest form of it. And what I want to encourage us to be is a people who are generous in spirit, who are generous across the board, who give of all of the resources that we have, who don't relegate it to the easiest ones. Whatever the easiest thing is for us to give, let's not just start there and be done, but let's be generous people. Because I bet, as I've been talking about generosity and the different forms that it takes, that you've thought of people in your life who have been generous to you. People who have been kind to you in their assessment of you or in their time or of their resources. And you're grateful that they are in your life. If you, like me, if you think of people in your life who you consider generous, you are grateful that they are in your life. You're grateful to God that he has placed them in your life. And because of that, you're pointed back to God. So here's the encouragement to us, Grace. Let's go be the kind of person that other people are grateful for. And when we do that, you'll be the kind of person that points people to Jesus. Go from here and be generous in spirit. Go be the kind of person that people are grateful to have in their life. And if you do that over time, you will leave a wake of people who have been pointed to Jesus because you entered into their life. I've mentioned many times that challenging teaching from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount when he said, let your light shine before others so that they might see your good works and glorify the Father who is in heaven. It's this idea that as we move into and out of the lives of other people, that they will be focused more on the Father, more on Jesus because of our simple presence in their life. And as I've reflected this week, that's always seemed like such a challenge to me. But maybe the key to obedience there is being someone who is generous in spirit. So that as we sow those seeds of generosity in the lives of others, we will become the kind of person that they are grateful that God has placed in their life. And in turn, they will be pointed to Jesus. So go from here and be the kind of people that other people are grateful for. And what you'll find is you've just become the kind of person who constantly points people towards the Father. Let's pray. God, we love you. We thank you for being generous to us, for giving us your son whom we did not deserve, for continuing to offer your forgiveness that often, God, we trample on. Lord, I pray that you would remind us, even this morning, of all the ways that you were generous to us, that you would remind us even today of all the people you have placed in our life to model that generosity for us. And God, I pray that we would be people who are acutely aware of the blessings that we have so that we might in turn offer those to others. Lord, make us conduits of your generosity so that we are the kind of people that point people back towards you. It's in Jesus' name that we ask these things. Amen.

All right. Well, good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here and making grace a part of your Sunday. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service if you'd like to do that as well. This is the fourth part of our series that we're kicking the year off with called Prayers for You. So it's different aspects of life and kind of prayers over those things for 2025. And so we've looked at marriage, and we've looked at kids and legacy. We've looked at life in general. And this morning, we're going to talk about finances. We have a prayer for you with your finances in 2025. And now as I say that, that this morning, I'm going to do the sermon about money, the whole room tightens up, right? Some of you brought guests and you just thought, are you serious right now? This is their first time and this is what you're going to preach. Some of you are probably here for the first time. You wandered in, maybe you've watched a few online and now you're like, okay, I'm going to go kick the tires. And on your very first Sunday, you're like, I'd like a pass, please. Can I come back next Sunday when we're not talking about money? And so I know that the room gets tight when this topic comes up. I'll be honest with you. I don't love talking about this either. And I'm going to tell you why in a minute. But just because I know that that's in the room, I want to say the quiet part out loud to diffuse maybe some of the discomfort around this topic, particularly in a church setting. This is the first thing on your notes. If you have a bulletin on the top of your notes, there's no fill in the blanks. This is just a statement that I'm writing for you that I'm going to say out loud and we are going to acknowledge. This morning is not a thinly veiled attempt to use the Bible to guilt you into giving us your money. Okay? That is not what we are doing. I've been in those. I've sat in those sermons. And they strike me as incredibly disingenuous. And if you have been a part of Grace for any length of time now, I've been here since 2017, April of 2017. I'm finishing up, believe it or not, my eighth year here. You know that I don't preach like that about money. You know that it is really important to me that this not be self-serving. And that's why I don't love to talk about it all the time, because it's really, really hard to thread the needle of appropriate biblical teaching on the topic that doesn't come across as self-serving for me. Because, let's say this part out loud too, I have a vested personal interest in you getting good at this. Right? I do. But that's not the place that I'm coming from. I just have to acknowledge that as true. I actually, and so I know that this is going on. This is kind of the reason why I don't, I'm not, I don't just jump at the chance to preach about money all the time. I was talking to a buddy yesterday and he said, what are you preaching about tomorrow? He doesn't go to church here. He lives, he lives down in Fuqua. He said, what are you preaching about tomorrow? And I said, I'm preaching about money. And he goes, ah, the obligatory money sermon so you can get that building built, huh? And I went, sure. But we know that that's in the mix, right? We know that those thoughts exist. And I can acknowledge that too. And I've been on both sides of it. So the absolute last thing I want to do is be disingenuous in what I'm sharing with you this morning. But here's the reality. The Bible talks about giving and finances a lot. If you do a quick Google, you'll find people out there who say that money is the topic that Jesus spoke about the most in his ministry. Now that is misleading because I'm not going to get into why because I have a lot to cover and I don't have time to get into why. That's misleading. I don't think it's fair to say that the most important topic to Christ in his lifetime was money. He gave a lot of examples that involved money, but he wasn't talking specifically about giving or about finances. But the reality is that this topic comes up a lot in the Bible. And if you were to make a grid of all the topics in the Bible, all the things that show up throughout Scripture, and then look at how often in my nearly eight years I've addressed those things, one of the things that the grid would reveal is that I have fallen woefully short of my responsibility to teach us about this topic because it is one that shows up with great frequency in Scripture and does not show up with great frequency in my preaching calendar. So let's talk about money this morning because the Bible talks about it way more than we do. To illustrate this point and to give us just a good swath of the philosophy of giving from Scripture, and then to draw out a singular point that I believe jumps out of the text of all of these verses, I want to read to you six different passages on money. It sounds like a lot. It is a lot. They're going to be on the screen. You read with me. This is an overview beginning all the way back in Deuteronomy, moving all the way to the book of James, kind of a sweeping view of how God thinks about giving in his children. We're going to start in Deuteronomy chapter 15. He writes, there will always be poor people in the land. Therefore, I command you to be open-handed toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land. There's always going to be poor people, and you should always give to them. This is an instruction from very, very early on. Deuteronomy is the fifth book of the Bible, and it means the law repeated. So it's really just a summary of the first four books, more specifically Leviticus and Numbers. So this is the very beginning, the foundation of faith. He is saying from the get-go, you will always have needy people around you. Be the people who give to them. And then we jump to the end of the Bible, James chapter 2, suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, go in peace, keep warm and well fed, but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? What good are you? You're just a well-wisher. I remember years ago, and I told, sorry, Andrea, I told Andrea, who's running our slides very faithfully this morning, that I wasn't going to talk in between these verses so she could leave them up there. So now there should be a blank slide, but there's not because I'm going to tell you something real quick. I remember a few years ago when Jen and I first moved here, we lived off of Tealbrier, right there off of Spring Forest. And so we would go to the Harris Teeter and there's a St. Jacques used to be in there. And next to it, some store went out of business. And then another store called Pet Wants was going up in there. And because I frequented the Harris Teeter, I noticed that they were there. And I noticed it was kind of a mom and pop operation. It looked like family was doing it. They were working really hard in the store for several weeks to revamp it. And one night I was at the grocery store late. Probably when you live 35 seconds away from the grocery store, your nine o'clock purchase of Ben and Jerry's statistic goes through the roof. Okay. So I was heading over there probably to get a pint of Ben and Jerry's Americone Dream. Thank you very much. And I noticed that they were working in there. And I was just touched by how hard they're working on this place and the hopes that they must have for this place. And so I went and I knocked on the door and some guy looks at me like, what, we're closed, you know? And I go, and so he opened the door and I said, hey, I just want to say, I've seen you working really hard. I've seen what you guys are doing here. I think it's great. I hope it goes really well for you. I hope this is a fantastic store. And he goes, thanks so much. We're actually having a friends and family sale tomorrow if you'd like to stop by and get anything. And I went, okay, yeah, great, thank you. And the door shut, and I was like, no way. I'm not buying anything from there. I don't like my dog. I'm not going to go spend money on a thing I don't want. I don't even want to spend the money we do spend on her. I'm not going in your store ever. I just hope it goes well. And what I realized is it's one thing to be a well-wisher. It's another thing to be bought in. James says, don't be a well-wisher. Oh, you're cold and you're hungry and you need? Be warm and well-fed. I'm going to keep my wallet in my pocket. Don't be a well-wisher. Malachi 3, 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. Then Jesus in Mark chapter 12 tells us this, but a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins worth only a few cents. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. In 2 Corinthians, Paul writes about giving. Remember this, whoever then last, Jesus in Matthew chapter 6. This is a big verse about giving that is really indicative of the culture of giving a grace. And so while we're here, I just wanted to share this little bit about the way that money is handled here, because if you haven't been going here for a long time, you may actually not know this. But at Grace, this predates me. This was the culture when I got here. They've always taken very seriously, we've always taken very seriously, this direction from Christ to not let your right hand know what your left hand is doing, to give in secret and to give in private and not ostentatiously. And because of that, when you give, there are only two people on the planet who see what you give. One is our office manager, Julie, our children's assistant office manager, Julie Sauls, but that's because someone has to manually process the check. So if you write a check, someone has to fill out a deposit slip and put that in. Someone has to see it, and so that's her job. That falls to her to do it. The only other person who sees what is given, this includes elders and this includes our finance committee, is our finance manager, a guy named Tom Ledoux. Tom lives in Michigan, and you never have to look him in the eye, so it's a really great setup for you, right? You won't find yourself in Bible study with Tom feeling uncomfortable because he knows some things. Those are the only two people. No one else knows, no one else has access, no one else sees, and so this is something we take very seriously. But as I looked at all of these verses, I don't know as I read through those what kinds of themes leapt out to you. I don't know what you perceived. I don't know what kind of impression they made. And we could probably look through those six verses and do 12 sermons out of them. There's enough things in there that are worth talking about and unpacking. But the thing that I saw the most as I went through those verses, because it wasn't just those verses that I read. When I sat down to do this and to start preparing for the sermon, I just read all the verses I could find on giving in Scripture. And one of the things that was incredibly apparent as I read through those, and I think is's highlighted specifically in these verses is this. Giving has never been optional. Giving for God's children. If you call God your father and Jesus your savior. Giving has never ever been optional. If you look back through the verses. Especially that last one. Jesus' words about giving to the needy and not letting your right hand know what your left hand is doing, how does it start out? So when you give to the needy, not if, when you do it. Deuteronomy, very beginning, there will always be poor people. Be people who give to the poor people. James, when you encounter someone who is needy, and you will, be the person that gives to them. Malachi, bring the whole tithe into the storehouse. The tithe that you're giving, that you're expected to give, that's going to be given, bring it into my temple. When Jesus looks at the poor widow and she gives two cents, I think sometimes we would think that he would go to her and he would say, hey, you take that back. You need that more than the church does. You take it. That's not what he does. Instead, he honors it because of the assumption that this is something that she is going to do. In Corinthians, whoever sows sparingly will reap sparingly and vice versa. But he says, when you give, not if you decide to give, but when you give, determine what you want to do, not out of a sense of ought, but out of a sense of want to, because God loves a cheerful giver. But what I see as I read through these scriptures and I read through the rest of the Bible about these scriptures or about this topic is that giving is not optional at all. In fact, giving is essential to becoming a mature, healthy believer. It is part of the essential nature of sanctification and growing in our spiritual maturity and in the depth of our spiritual lives. As a matter of fact, I would say it like this. Thinking that you can become a healthy Christian without the discipline of giving is like thinking you can become a healthy person without the discipline of exercise. If you want to be healthy, if you want a good heart rate, if you want your blood work to come in right, and I'm about to be 44 next month, so I'm getting to an age where I have to start caring about those things, and I'll probably know what my cholesterol is here in the next few months. If you want to be a healthy person, you can eat right. You can eat like a rabbit. You can monitor what goes into your system. You can be careful about not consuming alcohol or not consuming other chemicals or whatever it is. You can be careful about what goes into your body. You can be careful about what you eat. You can be diligent about your sleep time. You can do a lot of healthy things. But until you're exercising, until you're getting your heart rate up for 30 minutes a day, you will not be a healthy person. And I believe that trying to be a healthy Christian, trying to grow in our faith and in our spiritual maturity without the discipline of giving is just as silly and as much of a pipe dream as it is to try to be a healthy person who does not exercise. Which is why it's important for us as we look through scripture to acknowledge giving, in God's view, has never been optional. And I don't think that that's how we think about it. I think for a lot of us, we do think of it as optional. Maybe not intentionally, but by default and behaviorally, we approach it as something that maybe I need to do one day sometimes. I used to joke, I used to be, when I would drive, I was a bit of a speeder. Our state patrol person is not here today. So yeah, I speed all the time. And the older I get, the less I do it. This morning I was driving in, it's 0 dark 30 on 540 to get here. And I looked down, I went, because I was driving and I literally thought, am I going too fast? And I looked down and I was doing 58 miles an hour. So I was, it was under control. So I don't speed very much anymore, but I'll still do it sometimes. And I'm always going to go a little bit over the speed limit because, come on, no one wants to be. Don't be the jerk that goes to speed limit. Nobody likes you on the road if that's what you do. Get out of the way. And so I used to joke because sometimes it would come up in different circles, especially like pastor circles where you're trying to out-compete each other in righteousness, and someone would be like, yeah, I don't speed because I believe it's a sin and it's wrong. And I would just say like, you may be right, but God hasn't gotten that far down the conviction tree on me yet. All right? There's some bigger fish to fry in my life than going eight over. All right? So I haven't gotten to that portion of conviction. I think some of us think about giving that way. Yeah, that's a thing I need to do one day. I know that's an essential part of the Christian life, but, but not yet. There's some bigger fish to fry. And I think what these, what these scriptures show us is no, no, that's a pretty important one. That's what, that's essential to the nature of being a Christian. It's an expected thing of believers. But I think that even in light of that, maybe we don't put it off and go, gosh, one day I'm just not there yet. Later on in my spiritual maturity, I will get there. Maybe we think of it like this. Maybe it's just hard for us to do it. Maybe we don't have a lot of extra right now. I mean, inflation's up. Things are tough. That's a bit, I mean, everybody, a lot of people that I know have had to tighten the purse strings a little bit in the last two years. And so maybe for us, the idea of giving is something that we want to do, but we just don't feel like we can afford it. Or we just don't feel like it's wise. And so we put it off. But whenever I think about that, first of all, if you look at the way that Jesus applauds the old lady who gives out of little, that's a good indicator that that may not be a good way to think about giving. I can't afford it, so I'm not going to do it. Another thing that informs my thinking on this is a conversation I had with Jen years ago. Early on in our marriage, I was a poor student pastor and she was a poor private school teacher. And we bought our house. We got married in 2006. We bought our first house in 2007. Excuse me. We bought our first house in 2007, which is wonderful because we bought it, I think, for like $180,000, our very first house. It took 10 years for that house to be worth $180,000 again. It was just right at the brink of the recession. By the next year, that thing was worth $125,000. Great. So we're not living in plenty. We are living in very close to want. We don't have a lot. And Jen's dad has always been a remarkably generous man. And I remember making the comment to her, I hope one day we make more money and live more comfortably so that we can be generous like your dad is. I want to have that experience and be that kind of, now the word I would use is be that conduit of grace to other people. And Jen said, yes, I hope so too, but my daddy always taught me that the way you give when you don't have a lot is the way that you will give when you do have a lot. So the generosity trait starts early. And his larger point was, if we are people who think one day when I have more margin, I'll be more generous. There's no magical generosity button that gets hit when you have plenty. However generous you are with little is how generous you will be with a lot. So if you want to be generous one day, then you need to start being generous today. It's never been optional. And because of that, the encouragement today, what I want to press upon you is just the idea of being faithful in your giving. My prayer for you, these are prayers for you. My prayer for you for your finances this year is very, very simple. My prayer is that you would be faithful in your giving, whether you're giving out of little or you're giving out of much. Each one has different kinds of pains associated with it. But my prayer is that you would be faithful to what God expects of his children, understanding that giving is what's best for you. Being a generous person is what's best for you. Understanding that you will not mature as a Christian into full maturity if this is not a part of your regular discipline. So my prayer for you is that whether you give out of little or you give out of a lot, that you would simply be faithful in that giving. And like everything else, when God tells us we have to do something, when God says do this or don't do that, it is always because he has our best interest in mind. So giving and being a generous person is actually what's best for us, which is why I'm preaching the sermon today. Because if you study scripture, it's very clear that this is what God wants for us. And if I don't tell you that, then I'm derelict in my duty. So we can be adults and have an honest conversation about it. Giving is something that God wants you to do. It has never, ever been optional. Now, the question then becomes, okay, if it's what's best for me, why is it what's best for me to give away the money that I feel like I've earned? Here's why. Three reasons. There's more than this, but three reasons. Giving reminds us, invites us, and fuels us. The act of giving reminds us, invites us, and fuels us. Here's what I mean. The act of giving reminds us, first and foremost, that what we're giving is not ours to give. We are simply giving back to God what he has entrusted us with. It is the idea of stewardship. The act of giving, whether it's to the church or to a nonprofit that you believe in or to anything else that's going on in God's kingdom, the act of giving to God's kingdom is a reminder every time I am giving out of my allotment that God has assigned to me, I am not giving out of my possessions. Do you see the difference? God has allocated his resources out amongst us, and he's trusted us to be good stewards of those resources and to direct those in ways that build his kingdom, not our own. This is the idea of kingdom builders. This is also the idea of being a conduit of grace. A conduit connects to one source and funnels those resources to another source. So when I say at grace, we are conduits of grace. Yes, we offer grace to one another, but we're also, we also understand and see our lives as a conduit from God to the people and to building his kingdom. And so when we give, we are reminded of that conduit status. We are reminded of who we are and what we have. And we're even reminded if we're willing to take it a step further. Okay, I have these resources and I'm reminded that they're God's, they're not mine. I would take it a step further and I would say, yes, and the talents and abilities that you applied to garner those resources were also given to you by God to be a steward of and to use. So the fact that he allowed us to have resources is his gift and grace anyway, so we continue to be a funnel and let those resources flow out of us in generosity. It reminds us of how we should think about our finances and our resources. It puts us in the proper perspective. A wonderful thing about giving, maybe the best part, is that it invites us. You could say it invests us here too, but giving invites us into ministries that we might not be capable of doing ourselves. It's one thing to go to a charity dinner, to a charity gala where they're going to give you a cold chicken or a cold barbecue or something and a salad that's really terrible. Like we've all been. It's like $150 a plate and I'd rather go to McDonald's. But you go and you sit and you hear about the ministry and you hear about the thing and maybe you write a check for $200 or whatever it is you do. It's one thing to go to a charity gala or a charity dinner. It's another thing to be a giver to that ministry and go participate in the blessing of what God is doing and where he is doing it, to be invested in this ministry so that when you hear the stories of the families that are reached, when you hear the stories of the children that are no longer orphaned, when you hear the stories of the women in third world countries who have been equipped with skills and have been running a successful small business on their own that is sustaining their family in ways that they were never capable of, you get to feel like a participant in that. You realize that your participation in that nonprofit, in that entity, in that institution is something that can be celebrated by you because I'm a part of this. It invites you into areas of God's kingdom that you might not otherwise go, and it invests you in what those people are doing. And I say this with all candor. God may not have put you in a situation in your life where you have the time, the skill set, the life circumstances that allow you to go to an African country and start a ministry that prohibits children from becoming orphans and trains up their moms so that they can sustain their family. You might not have the bandwidth to go to another country and start that ministry. But somebody else has had that bandwidth. And somebody else has done that. And you've got the bandwidth to go make money. God's given you those gifts to do that and you're good at it. Maybe you're good at it so that you can funnel those gifts into other areas of God's kingdom where his work is being done and where God is showing up. And now I might not have the skill set to go down the street and start the nonprofit and do English as a second language for Spanish-speaking parents who are just trying to navigate their kids through middle school. But I have the resources to help and to fund those who do have those gifts and talents. And so the opportunity to give invites us into ministries and into opportunities and into blessings that we might not otherwise have based on our gifting and our life circumstances and where we are. It invests us in what's happening there. And it's a tremendous privilege to do that. I think one of the great benefits of investing our lives in things that build God's kingdom is that he gives us front row seats into places where we would not otherwise get to go. One of my great joys of being a pastor is the sacred spaces that I get invited into because of my position. Sitting in the hospital room in the middle of fear and praying with people. I realize that's not a normal place for people to get invited. Being entrusted with people who come and sit down in my office and ask for help in certain areas of their life or ask for prayer about this or advice about this, I realize that that's not a typical life experience for everyone. Having the opportunity when there's something on my heart that I really feel like I need to say, I have a platform where I can do that. There's different things about my position that give me access to front row seats to what God is doing in different places that I might not otherwise get. And by being a person who is a generous giver, we now have front row seats into different places where God is doing work and we're showing up to build his kingdom and we get a unique perspective there. It's an invitation into the blessing of what God is doing. And then finally, candidly, giving fuels us. It fuels our desire to give more, to be more, to be involved more, but it also fuels the ministries of God. This is an undeniable fact. The very first time God instructs his people to give is in the book of Numbers. And do you know why he does it? He says, bring your tithe to the temple because the Levites are not allowed to have jobs. They do this all the time and we need to be able to sustain them as a society. So the other 11 tribes, you give 10% of what you have to the Levites so that they can serve us as our priests. It's God said to begin to give, to fuel the ministries that he is doing. And so giving, quite literally, fuels the ministries going on around us. To this end, grace is fueled by our partners. And this is where I just want to speak to you directly because you're grownups. This church is fueled by the generous giving of our partners. If you guys don't give generously, this all goes away. We have four full-time staff people. We have three part-time staff people. We pay them. If we don't give, Miss Erin is the first one on the chopping block. Out of here. Right away. No kids ministry. We have to pay rent. We pay $13,000 a month for this dump. All right? We do. We can't even get the pole removed. And every year they charge us more for common area maintenance so that our grass can look cruddy out there and we don't have any. We have to keep the lights on. We fund different ministries through the church. The reality of this place is that it is fueled by the partners. And if that's not happening, then this place doesn't happen. So one of the things that I've started doing in our Discover Grace class, if you want to be a partner of grace and you come to the class, I think we're going to have one in February or later this month, I guess. At some point we go, okay, what is required to be a partner here? And it's not in the writing yet, but I've started to say, if you want to be a partner with us, nothing's compelling you to do that. If you're here this morning and you're not a partner of grace, which we have partners, we don't have members because members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. That's how we do it here. If you're here and you're just like, man, I'm kicking the tires, then what I would tell you is this part's not for you. It's for you one day, wherever you go, what I'm about to say is for you. But if you don't call yourself a partner at grace, then this part's not for you. But for the folks who come to Discover Grace, we say there's nothing compelling you to be a partner. You can come, and you can volunteer, and you can be in small group, and you can be an active participant in our church to whatever degree you want to be besides sitting on a committee or becoming an elder. But if you want to partner with us, then partner with us and support us financially. So here's what I would say about that. Scripture, and this is important, does not explicitly say anywhere that you should give to your local church. It does not come out and say that anywhere. But I think that's because the concept of a local church hadn't yet been, it was just the church, the church in Ephesus, the church in Rome, the church in Thessalonica. It was just the church. And in those churches, the expectation is you are giving because that's always been the expectation because the entire scope of scripture assumes that we know that. So what I would say is, even though it doesn't explicitly say it in the Bible, that I believe that you should give to your local church. I really do think that, and it took me some years to be able to say that, but the more I think about it, the more I study, the more I talk about it, the more I'm convinced that if you are a Christian, you should A, be a part of a local church, and B, you should give to that church. So I know the implications of that. We can all connect the dots. If you're a part of grace, you should give to grace. That's what Nate's saying. Sure. But here's what else I'll say. If you are a part of grace, and I don't think a lot of pastors would say this, and maybe the finance committee will get mad at me for saying this, but if you are a part of grace, but you don't give to grace, you need to find a church that compels you to give and go there. You need to go to a church that does inspire you to give. Because what I believe is, if you're here and you're thriving and your spiritual life is becoming healthy and your kids are thriving and they're being taught about Christ and you're experiencing community community. And you would call grace a blessing in your life. And you feel like you or your family or you and your spouse have benefited from grace. Then you ought to support grace so that other people can benefit in the same way. Because we are fueled by that giving. And if the ministry that you are experiencing from us is not compelling enough to make you want to partner with us in giving, then because I believe you should give to a local church, I have to believe that you should find one that compels you. But that's the encouragement this morning. Plain and simple. Adult to adult. This is what scripture teaches. We should be givers. We should be compelled to give to God's kingdom, particularly the parts of it where we are personally benefiting from that. So if we are a part of grace, we should give. Which brings me back to my prayer for you this year, that you would simply be faithful in your giving. I always say this, and I know a little bit contradictory to what I just said, but I can also be honest with you enough to say this. If you are someone, or if you are a couple, who is not in the habit of giving, and this is going to be a new exercise for you, and it feels remotely manipulative or self-serving that I'm trying to get you to give to grace, I would encourage you, as your brother in Christ, begin to give to things that aren't grace but that God is still doing. Begin to give to God's kingdom. Become a giver. And then in time, as it feels right, because God loves a cheerful giver, direct some of that towards your local church. But if you think that what I'm saying is self-serving, then don't give to grace. Don't do it under compulsion. But I would encourage you to begin that discipline and watch what God does as you become generous with your resources. So that's my prayer for you this year. And every year as we move forward. That as God's children, as believers, you would take seriously the teaching about giving in Scripture. And that you would be a person who is a giver. My prayer is that whether you have a little or a lot, that you would simply be faithful. Because that's what God calls us to. Let me pray that over us. Father, thank you for what we have. Thank you for what you've entrusted to us. I pray, God, that we would be good stewards of the resources that you've allocated to us, whether that's time or talent or treasure. Father, I pray that for those of us who are not yet people who give, for whatever reason, that we would be convicted and compelled to take steps towards becoming those people. That we would quit viewing this as something that's optional for your children, but view it as something that's necessary and good. Let us step into that generosity. Father, for those of us who were convicted by this long ago and are regular givers, I pray that we would be inspired. That we would be encouraged. That we would be grateful for all the opportunities we've had to give and all the times we got to sit on the front lines of what you were doing because you invited us in there through giving. But God, more than anything, I just ask that grace would be a church filled with faithful people, faithful to your word, faithful to obedience in you, and faithful to entrust you with their finances. God, we ask these things in your son's name. Amen.

All right. Well, good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here and making grace a part of your Sunday. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service if you'd like to do that as well. This is the fourth part of our series that we're kicking the year off with called Prayers for You. So it's different aspects of life and kind of prayers over those things for 2025. And so we've looked at marriage, and we've looked at kids and legacy. We've looked at life in general. And this morning, we're going to talk about finances. We have a prayer for you with your finances in 2025. And now as I say that, that this morning, I'm going to do the sermon about money, the whole room tightens up, right? Some of you brought guests and you just thought, are you serious right now? This is their first time and this is what you're going to preach. Some of you are probably here for the first time. You wandered in, maybe you've watched a few online and now you're like, okay, I'm going to go kick the tires. And on your very first Sunday, you're like, I'd like a pass, please. Can I come back next Sunday when we're not talking about money? And so I know that the room gets tight when this topic comes up. I'll be honest with you. I don't love talking about this either. And I'm going to tell you why in a minute. But just because I know that that's in the room, I want to say the quiet part out loud to diffuse maybe some of the discomfort around this topic, particularly in a church setting. This is the first thing on your notes. If you have a bulletin on the top of your notes, there's no fill in the blanks. This is just a statement that I'm writing for you that I'm going to say out loud and we are going to acknowledge. This morning is not a thinly veiled attempt to use the Bible to guilt you into giving us your money. Okay? That is not what we are doing. I've been in those. I've sat in those sermons. And they strike me as incredibly disingenuous. And if you have been a part of Grace for any length of time now, I've been here since 2017, April of 2017. I'm finishing up, believe it or not, my eighth year here. You know that I don't preach like that about money. You know that it is really important to me that this not be self-serving. And that's why I don't love to talk about it all the time, because it's really, really hard to thread the needle of appropriate biblical teaching on the topic that doesn't come across as self-serving for me. Because, let's say this part out loud too, I have a vested personal interest in you getting good at this. Right? I do. But that's not the place that I'm coming from. I just have to acknowledge that as true. I actually, and so I know that this is going on. This is kind of the reason why I don't, I'm not, I don't just jump at the chance to preach about money all the time. I was talking to a buddy yesterday and he said, what are you preaching about tomorrow? He doesn't go to church here. He lives, he lives down in Fuqua. He said, what are you preaching about tomorrow? And I said, I'm preaching about money. And he goes, ah, the obligatory money sermon so you can get that building built, huh? And I went, sure. But we know that that's in the mix, right? We know that those thoughts exist. And I can acknowledge that too. And I've been on both sides of it. So the absolute last thing I want to do is be disingenuous in what I'm sharing with you this morning. But here's the reality. The Bible talks about giving and finances a lot. If you do a quick Google, you'll find people out there who say that money is the topic that Jesus spoke about the most in his ministry. Now that is misleading because I'm not going to get into why because I have a lot to cover and I don't have time to get into why. That's misleading. I don't think it's fair to say that the most important topic to Christ in his lifetime was money. He gave a lot of examples that involved money, but he wasn't talking specifically about giving or about finances. But the reality is that this topic comes up a lot in the Bible. And if you were to make a grid of all the topics in the Bible, all the things that show up throughout Scripture, and then look at how often in my nearly eight years I've addressed those things, one of the things that the grid would reveal is that I have fallen woefully short of my responsibility to teach us about this topic because it is one that shows up with great frequency in Scripture and does not show up with great frequency in my preaching calendar. So let's talk about money this morning because the Bible talks about it way more than we do. To illustrate this point and to give us just a good swath of the philosophy of giving from Scripture, and then to draw out a singular point that I believe jumps out of the text of all of these verses, I want to read to you six different passages on money. It sounds like a lot. It is a lot. They're going to be on the screen. You read with me. This is an overview beginning all the way back in Deuteronomy, moving all the way to the book of James, kind of a sweeping view of how God thinks about giving in his children. We're going to start in Deuteronomy chapter 15. He writes, there will always be poor people in the land. Therefore, I command you to be open-handed toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land. There's always going to be poor people, and you should always give to them. This is an instruction from very, very early on. Deuteronomy is the fifth book of the Bible, and it means the law repeated. So it's really just a summary of the first four books, more specifically Leviticus and Numbers. So this is the very beginning, the foundation of faith. He is saying from the get-go, you will always have needy people around you. Be the people who give to them. And then we jump to the end of the Bible, James chapter 2, suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, go in peace, keep warm and well fed, but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? What good are you? You're just a well-wisher. I remember years ago, and I told, sorry, Andrea, I told Andrea, who's running our slides very faithfully this morning, that I wasn't going to talk in between these verses so she could leave them up there. So now there should be a blank slide, but there's not because I'm going to tell you something real quick. I remember a few years ago when Jen and I first moved here, we lived off of Tealbrier, right there off of Spring Forest. And so we would go to the Harris Teeter and there's a St. Jacques used to be in there. And next to it, some store went out of business. And then another store called Pet Wants was going up in there. And because I frequented the Harris Teeter, I noticed that they were there. And I noticed it was kind of a mom and pop operation. It looked like family was doing it. They were working really hard in the store for several weeks to revamp it. And one night I was at the grocery store late. Probably when you live 35 seconds away from the grocery store, your nine o'clock purchase of Ben and Jerry's statistic goes through the roof. Okay. So I was heading over there probably to get a pint of Ben and Jerry's Americone Dream. Thank you very much. And I noticed that they were working in there. And I was just touched by how hard they're working on this place and the hopes that they must have for this place. And so I went and I knocked on the door and some guy looks at me like, what, we're closed, you know? And I go, and so he opened the door and I said, hey, I just want to say, I've seen you working really hard. I've seen what you guys are doing here. I think it's great. I hope it goes really well for you. I hope this is a fantastic store. And he goes, thanks so much. We're actually having a friends and family sale tomorrow if you'd like to stop by and get anything. And I went, okay, yeah, great, thank you. And the door shut, and I was like, no way. I'm not buying anything from there. I don't like my dog. I'm not going to go spend money on a thing I don't want. I don't even want to spend the money we do spend on her. I'm not going in your store ever. I just hope it goes well. And what I realized is it's one thing to be a well-wisher. It's another thing to be bought in. James says, don't be a well-wisher. Oh, you're cold and you're hungry and you need? Be warm and well-fed. I'm going to keep my wallet in my pocket. Don't be a well-wisher. Malachi 3, 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. Then Jesus in Mark chapter 12 tells us this, but a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins worth only a few cents. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. In 2 Corinthians, Paul writes about giving. Remember this, whoever then last, Jesus in Matthew chapter 6. This is a big verse about giving that is really indicative of the culture of giving a grace. And so while we're here, I just wanted to share this little bit about the way that money is handled here, because if you haven't been going here for a long time, you may actually not know this. But at Grace, this predates me. This was the culture when I got here. They've always taken very seriously, we've always taken very seriously, this direction from Christ to not let your right hand know what your left hand is doing, to give in secret and to give in private and not ostentatiously. And because of that, when you give, there are only two people on the planet who see what you give. One is our office manager, Julie, our children's assistant office manager, Julie Sauls, but that's because someone has to manually process the check. So if you write a check, someone has to fill out a deposit slip and put that in. Someone has to see it, and so that's her job. That falls to her to do it. The only other person who sees what is given, this includes elders and this includes our finance committee, is our finance manager, a guy named Tom Ledoux. Tom lives in Michigan, and you never have to look him in the eye, so it's a really great setup for you, right? You won't find yourself in Bible study with Tom feeling uncomfortable because he knows some things. Those are the only two people. No one else knows, no one else has access, no one else sees, and so this is something we take very seriously. But as I looked at all of these verses, I don't know as I read through those what kinds of themes leapt out to you. I don't know what you perceived. I don't know what kind of impression they made. And we could probably look through those six verses and do 12 sermons out of them. There's enough things in there that are worth talking about and unpacking. But the thing that I saw the most as I went through those verses, because it wasn't just those verses that I read. When I sat down to do this and to start preparing for the sermon, I just read all the verses I could find on giving in Scripture. And one of the things that was incredibly apparent as I read through those, and I think is's highlighted specifically in these verses is this. Giving has never been optional. Giving for God's children. If you call God your father and Jesus your savior. Giving has never ever been optional. If you look back through the verses. Especially that last one. Jesus' words about giving to the needy and not letting your right hand know what your left hand is doing, how does it start out? So when you give to the needy, not if, when you do it. Deuteronomy, very beginning, there will always be poor people. Be people who give to the poor people. James, when you encounter someone who is needy, and you will, be the person that gives to them. Malachi, bring the whole tithe into the storehouse. The tithe that you're giving, that you're expected to give, that's going to be given, bring it into my temple. When Jesus looks at the poor widow and she gives two cents, I think sometimes we would think that he would go to her and he would say, hey, you take that back. You need that more than the church does. You take it. That's not what he does. Instead, he honors it because of the assumption that this is something that she is going to do. In Corinthians, whoever sows sparingly will reap sparingly and vice versa. But he says, when you give, not if you decide to give, but when you give, determine what you want to do, not out of a sense of ought, but out of a sense of want to, because God loves a cheerful giver. But what I see as I read through these scriptures and I read through the rest of the Bible about these scriptures or about this topic is that giving is not optional at all. In fact, giving is essential to becoming a mature, healthy believer. It is part of the essential nature of sanctification and growing in our spiritual maturity and in the depth of our spiritual lives. As a matter of fact, I would say it like this. Thinking that you can become a healthy Christian without the discipline of giving is like thinking you can become a healthy person without the discipline of exercise. If you want to be healthy, if you want a good heart rate, if you want your blood work to come in right, and I'm about to be 44 next month, so I'm getting to an age where I have to start caring about those things, and I'll probably know what my cholesterol is here in the next few months. If you want to be a healthy person, you can eat right. You can eat like a rabbit. You can monitor what goes into your system. You can be careful about not consuming alcohol or not consuming other chemicals or whatever it is. You can be careful about what goes into your body. You can be careful about what you eat. You can be diligent about your sleep time. You can do a lot of healthy things. But until you're exercising, until you're getting your heart rate up for 30 minutes a day, you will not be a healthy person. And I believe that trying to be a healthy Christian, trying to grow in our faith and in our spiritual maturity without the discipline of giving is just as silly and as much of a pipe dream as it is to try to be a healthy person who does not exercise. Which is why it's important for us as we look through scripture to acknowledge giving, in God's view, has never been optional. And I don't think that that's how we think about it. I think for a lot of us, we do think of it as optional. Maybe not intentionally, but by default and behaviorally, we approach it as something that maybe I need to do one day sometimes. I used to joke, I used to be, when I would drive, I was a bit of a speeder. Our state patrol person is not here today. So yeah, I speed all the time. And the older I get, the less I do it. This morning I was driving in, it's 0 dark 30 on 540 to get here. And I looked down, I went, because I was driving and I literally thought, am I going too fast? And I looked down and I was doing 58 miles an hour. So I was, it was under control. So I don't speed very much anymore, but I'll still do it sometimes. And I'm always going to go a little bit over the speed limit because, come on, no one wants to be. Don't be the jerk that goes to speed limit. Nobody likes you on the road if that's what you do. Get out of the way. And so I used to joke because sometimes it would come up in different circles, especially like pastor circles where you're trying to out-compete each other in righteousness, and someone would be like, yeah, I don't speed because I believe it's a sin and it's wrong. And I would just say like, you may be right, but God hasn't gotten that far down the conviction tree on me yet. All right? There's some bigger fish to fry in my life than going eight over. All right? So I haven't gotten to that portion of conviction. I think some of us think about giving that way. Yeah, that's a thing I need to do one day. I know that's an essential part of the Christian life, but, but not yet. There's some bigger fish to fry. And I think what these, what these scriptures show us is no, no, that's a pretty important one. That's what, that's essential to the nature of being a Christian. It's an expected thing of believers. But I think that even in light of that, maybe we don't put it off and go, gosh, one day I'm just not there yet. Later on in my spiritual maturity, I will get there. Maybe we think of it like this. Maybe it's just hard for us to do it. Maybe we don't have a lot of extra right now. I mean, inflation's up. Things are tough. That's a bit, I mean, everybody, a lot of people that I know have had to tighten the purse strings a little bit in the last two years. And so maybe for us, the idea of giving is something that we want to do, but we just don't feel like we can afford it. Or we just don't feel like it's wise. And so we put it off. But whenever I think about that, first of all, if you look at the way that Jesus applauds the old lady who gives out of little, that's a good indicator that that may not be a good way to think about giving. I can't afford it, so I'm not going to do it. Another thing that informs my thinking on this is a conversation I had with Jen years ago. Early on in our marriage, I was a poor student pastor and she was a poor private school teacher. And we bought our house. We got married in 2006. We bought our first house in 2007. Excuse me. We bought our first house in 2007, which is wonderful because we bought it, I think, for like $180,000, our very first house. It took 10 years for that house to be worth $180,000 again. It was just right at the brink of the recession. By the next year, that thing was worth $125,000. Great. So we're not living in plenty. We are living in very close to want. We don't have a lot. And Jen's dad has always been a remarkably generous man. And I remember making the comment to her, I hope one day we make more money and live more comfortably so that we can be generous like your dad is. I want to have that experience and be that kind of, now the word I would use is be that conduit of grace to other people. And Jen said, yes, I hope so too, but my daddy always taught me that the way you give when you don't have a lot is the way that you will give when you do have a lot. So the generosity trait starts early. And his larger point was, if we are people who think one day when I have more margin, I'll be more generous. There's no magical generosity button that gets hit when you have plenty. However generous you are with little is how generous you will be with a lot. So if you want to be generous one day, then you need to start being generous today. It's never been optional. And because of that, the encouragement today, what I want to press upon you is just the idea of being faithful in your giving. My prayer for you, these are prayers for you. My prayer for you for your finances this year is very, very simple. My prayer is that you would be faithful in your giving, whether you're giving out of little or you're giving out of much. Each one has different kinds of pains associated with it. But my prayer is that you would be faithful to what God expects of his children, understanding that giving is what's best for you. Being a generous person is what's best for you. Understanding that you will not mature as a Christian into full maturity if this is not a part of your regular discipline. So my prayer for you is that whether you give out of little or you give out of a lot, that you would simply be faithful in that giving. And like everything else, when God tells us we have to do something, when God says do this or don't do that, it is always because he has our best interest in mind. So giving and being a generous person is actually what's best for us, which is why I'm preaching the sermon today. Because if you study scripture, it's very clear that this is what God wants for us. And if I don't tell you that, then I'm derelict in my duty. So we can be adults and have an honest conversation about it. Giving is something that God wants you to do. It has never, ever been optional. Now, the question then becomes, okay, if it's what's best for me, why is it what's best for me to give away the money that I feel like I've earned? Here's why. Three reasons. There's more than this, but three reasons. Giving reminds us, invites us, and fuels us. The act of giving reminds us, invites us, and fuels us. Here's what I mean. The act of giving reminds us, first and foremost, that what we're giving is not ours to give. We are simply giving back to God what he has entrusted us with. It is the idea of stewardship. The act of giving, whether it's to the church or to a nonprofit that you believe in or to anything else that's going on in God's kingdom, the act of giving to God's kingdom is a reminder every time I am giving out of my allotment that God has assigned to me, I am not giving out of my possessions. Do you see the difference? God has allocated his resources out amongst us, and he's trusted us to be good stewards of those resources and to direct those in ways that build his kingdom, not our own. This is the idea of kingdom builders. This is also the idea of being a conduit of grace. A conduit connects to one source and funnels those resources to another source. So when I say at grace, we are conduits of grace. Yes, we offer grace to one another, but we're also, we also understand and see our lives as a conduit from God to the people and to building his kingdom. And so when we give, we are reminded of that conduit status. We are reminded of who we are and what we have. And we're even reminded if we're willing to take it a step further. Okay, I have these resources and I'm reminded that they're God's, they're not mine. I would take it a step further and I would say, yes, and the talents and abilities that you applied to garner those resources were also given to you by God to be a steward of and to use. So the fact that he allowed us to have resources is his gift and grace anyway, so we continue to be a funnel and let those resources flow out of us in generosity. It reminds us of how we should think about our finances and our resources. It puts us in the proper perspective. A wonderful thing about giving, maybe the best part, is that it invites us. You could say it invests us here too, but giving invites us into ministries that we might not be capable of doing ourselves. It's one thing to go to a charity dinner, to a charity gala where they're going to give you a cold chicken or a cold barbecue or something and a salad that's really terrible. Like we've all been. It's like $150 a plate and I'd rather go to McDonald's. But you go and you sit and you hear about the ministry and you hear about the thing and maybe you write a check for $200 or whatever it is you do. It's one thing to go to a charity gala or a charity dinner. It's another thing to be a giver to that ministry and go participate in the blessing of what God is doing and where he is doing it, to be invested in this ministry so that when you hear the stories of the families that are reached, when you hear the stories of the children that are no longer orphaned, when you hear the stories of the women in third world countries who have been equipped with skills and have been running a successful small business on their own that is sustaining their family in ways that they were never capable of, you get to feel like a participant in that. You realize that your participation in that nonprofit, in that entity, in that institution is something that can be celebrated by you because I'm a part of this. It invites you into areas of God's kingdom that you might not otherwise go, and it invests you in what those people are doing. And I say this with all candor. God may not have put you in a situation in your life where you have the time, the skill set, the life circumstances that allow you to go to an African country and start a ministry that prohibits children from becoming orphans and trains up their moms so that they can sustain their family. You might not have the bandwidth to go to another country and start that ministry. But somebody else has had that bandwidth. And somebody else has done that. And you've got the bandwidth to go make money. God's given you those gifts to do that and you're good at it. Maybe you're good at it so that you can funnel those gifts into other areas of God's kingdom where his work is being done and where God is showing up. And now I might not have the skill set to go down the street and start the nonprofit and do English as a second language for Spanish-speaking parents who are just trying to navigate their kids through middle school. But I have the resources to help and to fund those who do have those gifts and talents. And so the opportunity to give invites us into ministries and into opportunities and into blessings that we might not otherwise have based on our gifting and our life circumstances and where we are. It invests us in what's happening there. And it's a tremendous privilege to do that. I think one of the great benefits of investing our lives in things that build God's kingdom is that he gives us front row seats into places where we would not otherwise get to go. One of my great joys of being a pastor is the sacred spaces that I get invited into because of my position. Sitting in the hospital room in the middle of fear and praying with people. I realize that's not a normal place for people to get invited. Being entrusted with people who come and sit down in my office and ask for help in certain areas of their life or ask for prayer about this or advice about this, I realize that that's not a typical life experience for everyone. Having the opportunity when there's something on my heart that I really feel like I need to say, I have a platform where I can do that. There's different things about my position that give me access to front row seats to what God is doing in different places that I might not otherwise get. And by being a person who is a generous giver, we now have front row seats into different places where God is doing work and we're showing up to build his kingdom and we get a unique perspective there. It's an invitation into the blessing of what God is doing. And then finally, candidly, giving fuels us. It fuels our desire to give more, to be more, to be involved more, but it also fuels the ministries of God. This is an undeniable fact. The very first time God instructs his people to give is in the book of Numbers. And do you know why he does it? He says, bring your tithe to the temple because the Levites are not allowed to have jobs. They do this all the time and we need to be able to sustain them as a society. So the other 11 tribes, you give 10% of what you have to the Levites so that they can serve us as our priests. It's God said to begin to give, to fuel the ministries that he is doing. And so giving, quite literally, fuels the ministries going on around us. To this end, grace is fueled by our partners. And this is where I just want to speak to you directly because you're grownups. This church is fueled by the generous giving of our partners. If you guys don't give generously, this all goes away. We have four full-time staff people. We have three part-time staff people. We pay them. If we don't give, Miss Erin is the first one on the chopping block. Out of here. Right away. No kids ministry. We have to pay rent. We pay $13,000 a month for this dump. All right? We do. We can't even get the pole removed. And every year they charge us more for common area maintenance so that our grass can look cruddy out there and we don't have any. We have to keep the lights on. We fund different ministries through the church. The reality of this place is that it is fueled by the partners. And if that's not happening, then this place doesn't happen. So one of the things that I've started doing in our Discover Grace class, if you want to be a partner of grace and you come to the class, I think we're going to have one in February or later this month, I guess. At some point we go, okay, what is required to be a partner here? And it's not in the writing yet, but I've started to say, if you want to be a partner with us, nothing's compelling you to do that. If you're here this morning and you're not a partner of grace, which we have partners, we don't have members because members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. That's how we do it here. If you're here and you're just like, man, I'm kicking the tires, then what I would tell you is this part's not for you. It's for you one day, wherever you go, what I'm about to say is for you. But if you don't call yourself a partner at grace, then this part's not for you. But for the folks who come to Discover Grace, we say there's nothing compelling you to be a partner. You can come, and you can volunteer, and you can be in small group, and you can be an active participant in our church to whatever degree you want to be besides sitting on a committee or becoming an elder. But if you want to partner with us, then partner with us and support us financially. So here's what I would say about that. Scripture, and this is important, does not explicitly say anywhere that you should give to your local church. It does not come out and say that anywhere. But I think that's because the concept of a local church hadn't yet been, it was just the church, the church in Ephesus, the church in Rome, the church in Thessalonica. It was just the church. And in those churches, the expectation is you are giving because that's always been the expectation because the entire scope of scripture assumes that we know that. So what I would say is, even though it doesn't explicitly say it in the Bible, that I believe that you should give to your local church. I really do think that, and it took me some years to be able to say that, but the more I think about it, the more I study, the more I talk about it, the more I'm convinced that if you are a Christian, you should A, be a part of a local church, and B, you should give to that church. So I know the implications of that. We can all connect the dots. If you're a part of grace, you should give to grace. That's what Nate's saying. Sure. But here's what else I'll say. If you are a part of grace, and I don't think a lot of pastors would say this, and maybe the finance committee will get mad at me for saying this, but if you are a part of grace, but you don't give to grace, you need to find a church that compels you to give and go there. You need to go to a church that does inspire you to give. Because what I believe is, if you're here and you're thriving and your spiritual life is becoming healthy and your kids are thriving and they're being taught about Christ and you're experiencing community community. And you would call grace a blessing in your life. And you feel like you or your family or you and your spouse have benefited from grace. Then you ought to support grace so that other people can benefit in the same way. Because we are fueled by that giving. And if the ministry that you are experiencing from us is not compelling enough to make you want to partner with us in giving, then because I believe you should give to a local church, I have to believe that you should find one that compels you. But that's the encouragement this morning. Plain and simple. Adult to adult. This is what scripture teaches. We should be givers. We should be compelled to give to God's kingdom, particularly the parts of it where we are personally benefiting from that. So if we are a part of grace, we should give. Which brings me back to my prayer for you this year, that you would simply be faithful in your giving. I always say this, and I know a little bit contradictory to what I just said, but I can also be honest with you enough to say this. If you are someone, or if you are a couple, who is not in the habit of giving, and this is going to be a new exercise for you, and it feels remotely manipulative or self-serving that I'm trying to get you to give to grace, I would encourage you, as your brother in Christ, begin to give to things that aren't grace but that God is still doing. Begin to give to God's kingdom. Become a giver. And then in time, as it feels right, because God loves a cheerful giver, direct some of that towards your local church. But if you think that what I'm saying is self-serving, then don't give to grace. Don't do it under compulsion. But I would encourage you to begin that discipline and watch what God does as you become generous with your resources. So that's my prayer for you this year. And every year as we move forward. That as God's children, as believers, you would take seriously the teaching about giving in Scripture. And that you would be a person who is a giver. My prayer is that whether you have a little or a lot, that you would simply be faithful. Because that's what God calls us to. Let me pray that over us. Father, thank you for what we have. Thank you for what you've entrusted to us. I pray, God, that we would be good stewards of the resources that you've allocated to us, whether that's time or talent or treasure. Father, I pray that for those of us who are not yet people who give, for whatever reason, that we would be convicted and compelled to take steps towards becoming those people. That we would quit viewing this as something that's optional for your children, but view it as something that's necessary and good. Let us step into that generosity. Father, for those of us who were convicted by this long ago and are regular givers, I pray that we would be inspired. That we would be encouraged. That we would be grateful for all the opportunities we've had to give and all the times we got to sit on the front lines of what you were doing because you invited us in there through giving. But God, more than anything, I just ask that grace would be a church filled with faithful people, faithful to your word, faithful to obedience in you, and faithful to entrust you with their finances. God, we ask these things in your son's name. Amen.

All right. Well, good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here and making grace a part of your Sunday. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service if you'd like to do that as well. This is the fourth part of our series that we're kicking the year off with called Prayers for You. So it's different aspects of life and kind of prayers over those things for 2025. And so we've looked at marriage, and we've looked at kids and legacy. We've looked at life in general. And this morning, we're going to talk about finances. We have a prayer for you with your finances in 2025. And now as I say that, that this morning, I'm going to do the sermon about money, the whole room tightens up, right? Some of you brought guests and you just thought, are you serious right now? This is their first time and this is what you're going to preach. Some of you are probably here for the first time. You wandered in, maybe you've watched a few online and now you're like, okay, I'm going to go kick the tires. And on your very first Sunday, you're like, I'd like a pass, please. Can I come back next Sunday when we're not talking about money? And so I know that the room gets tight when this topic comes up. I'll be honest with you. I don't love talking about this either. And I'm going to tell you why in a minute. But just because I know that that's in the room, I want to say the quiet part out loud to diffuse maybe some of the discomfort around this topic, particularly in a church setting. This is the first thing on your notes. If you have a bulletin on the top of your notes, there's no fill in the blanks. This is just a statement that I'm writing for you that I'm going to say out loud and we are going to acknowledge. This morning is not a thinly veiled attempt to use the Bible to guilt you into giving us your money. Okay? That is not what we are doing. I've been in those. I've sat in those sermons. And they strike me as incredibly disingenuous. And if you have been a part of Grace for any length of time now, I've been here since 2017, April of 2017. I'm finishing up, believe it or not, my eighth year here. You know that I don't preach like that about money. You know that it is really important to me that this not be self-serving. And that's why I don't love to talk about it all the time, because it's really, really hard to thread the needle of appropriate biblical teaching on the topic that doesn't come across as self-serving for me. Because, let's say this part out loud too, I have a vested personal interest in you getting good at this. Right? I do. But that's not the place that I'm coming from. I just have to acknowledge that as true. I actually, and so I know that this is going on. This is kind of the reason why I don't, I'm not, I don't just jump at the chance to preach about money all the time. I was talking to a buddy yesterday and he said, what are you preaching about tomorrow? He doesn't go to church here. He lives, he lives down in Fuqua. He said, what are you preaching about tomorrow? And I said, I'm preaching about money. And he goes, ah, the obligatory money sermon so you can get that building built, huh? And I went, sure. But we know that that's in the mix, right? We know that those thoughts exist. And I can acknowledge that too. And I've been on both sides of it. So the absolute last thing I want to do is be disingenuous in what I'm sharing with you this morning. But here's the reality. The Bible talks about giving and finances a lot. If you do a quick Google, you'll find people out there who say that money is the topic that Jesus spoke about the most in his ministry. Now that is misleading because I'm not going to get into why because I have a lot to cover and I don't have time to get into why. That's misleading. I don't think it's fair to say that the most important topic to Christ in his lifetime was money. He gave a lot of examples that involved money, but he wasn't talking specifically about giving or about finances. But the reality is that this topic comes up a lot in the Bible. And if you were to make a grid of all the topics in the Bible, all the things that show up throughout Scripture, and then look at how often in my nearly eight years I've addressed those things, one of the things that the grid would reveal is that I have fallen woefully short of my responsibility to teach us about this topic because it is one that shows up with great frequency in Scripture and does not show up with great frequency in my preaching calendar. So let's talk about money this morning because the Bible talks about it way more than we do. To illustrate this point and to give us just a good swath of the philosophy of giving from Scripture, and then to draw out a singular point that I believe jumps out of the text of all of these verses, I want to read to you six different passages on money. It sounds like a lot. It is a lot. They're going to be on the screen. You read with me. This is an overview beginning all the way back in Deuteronomy, moving all the way to the book of James, kind of a sweeping view of how God thinks about giving in his children. We're going to start in Deuteronomy chapter 15. He writes, there will always be poor people in the land. Therefore, I command you to be open-handed toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land. There's always going to be poor people, and you should always give to them. This is an instruction from very, very early on. Deuteronomy is the fifth book of the Bible, and it means the law repeated. So it's really just a summary of the first four books, more specifically Leviticus and Numbers. So this is the very beginning, the foundation of faith. He is saying from the get-go, you will always have needy people around you. Be the people who give to them. And then we jump to the end of the Bible, James chapter 2, suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, go in peace, keep warm and well fed, but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? What good are you? You're just a well-wisher. I remember years ago, and I told, sorry, Andrea, I told Andrea, who's running our slides very faithfully this morning, that I wasn't going to talk in between these verses so she could leave them up there. So now there should be a blank slide, but there's not because I'm going to tell you something real quick. I remember a few years ago when Jen and I first moved here, we lived off of Tealbrier, right there off of Spring Forest. And so we would go to the Harris Teeter and there's a St. Jacques used to be in there. And next to it, some store went out of business. And then another store called Pet Wants was going up in there. And because I frequented the Harris Teeter, I noticed that they were there. And I noticed it was kind of a mom and pop operation. It looked like family was doing it. They were working really hard in the store for several weeks to revamp it. And one night I was at the grocery store late. Probably when you live 35 seconds away from the grocery store, your nine o'clock purchase of Ben and Jerry's statistic goes through the roof. Okay. So I was heading over there probably to get a pint of Ben and Jerry's Americone Dream. Thank you very much. And I noticed that they were working in there. And I was just touched by how hard they're working on this place and the hopes that they must have for this place. And so I went and I knocked on the door and some guy looks at me like, what, we're closed, you know? And I go, and so he opened the door and I said, hey, I just want to say, I've seen you working really hard. I've seen what you guys are doing here. I think it's great. I hope it goes really well for you. I hope this is a fantastic store. And he goes, thanks so much. We're actually having a friends and family sale tomorrow if you'd like to stop by and get anything. And I went, okay, yeah, great, thank you. And the door shut, and I was like, no way. I'm not buying anything from there. I don't like my dog. I'm not going to go spend money on a thing I don't want. I don't even want to spend the money we do spend on her. I'm not going in your store ever. I just hope it goes well. And what I realized is it's one thing to be a well-wisher. It's another thing to be bought in. James says, don't be a well-wisher. Oh, you're cold and you're hungry and you need? Be warm and well-fed. I'm going to keep my wallet in my pocket. Don't be a well-wisher. Malachi 3, 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. Then Jesus in Mark chapter 12 tells us this, but a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins worth only a few cents. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. In 2 Corinthians, Paul writes about giving. Remember this, whoever then last, Jesus in Matthew chapter 6. This is a big verse about giving that is really indicative of the culture of giving a grace. And so while we're here, I just wanted to share this little bit about the way that money is handled here, because if you haven't been going here for a long time, you may actually not know this. But at Grace, this predates me. This was the culture when I got here. They've always taken very seriously, we've always taken very seriously, this direction from Christ to not let your right hand know what your left hand is doing, to give in secret and to give in private and not ostentatiously. And because of that, when you give, there are only two people on the planet who see what you give. One is our office manager, Julie, our children's assistant office manager, Julie Sauls, but that's because someone has to manually process the check. So if you write a check, someone has to fill out a deposit slip and put that in. Someone has to see it, and so that's her job. That falls to her to do it. The only other person who sees what is given, this includes elders and this includes our finance committee, is our finance manager, a guy named Tom Ledoux. Tom lives in Michigan, and you never have to look him in the eye, so it's a really great setup for you, right? You won't find yourself in Bible study with Tom feeling uncomfortable because he knows some things. Those are the only two people. No one else knows, no one else has access, no one else sees, and so this is something we take very seriously. But as I looked at all of these verses, I don't know as I read through those what kinds of themes leapt out to you. I don't know what you perceived. I don't know what kind of impression they made. And we could probably look through those six verses and do 12 sermons out of them. There's enough things in there that are worth talking about and unpacking. But the thing that I saw the most as I went through those verses, because it wasn't just those verses that I read. When I sat down to do this and to start preparing for the sermon, I just read all the verses I could find on giving in Scripture. And one of the things that was incredibly apparent as I read through those, and I think is's highlighted specifically in these verses is this. Giving has never been optional. Giving for God's children. If you call God your father and Jesus your savior. Giving has never ever been optional. If you look back through the verses. Especially that last one. Jesus' words about giving to the needy and not letting your right hand know what your left hand is doing, how does it start out? So when you give to the needy, not if, when you do it. Deuteronomy, very beginning, there will always be poor people. Be people who give to the poor people. James, when you encounter someone who is needy, and you will, be the person that gives to them. Malachi, bring the whole tithe into the storehouse. The tithe that you're giving, that you're expected to give, that's going to be given, bring it into my temple. When Jesus looks at the poor widow and she gives two cents, I think sometimes we would think that he would go to her and he would say, hey, you take that back. You need that more than the church does. You take it. That's not what he does. Instead, he honors it because of the assumption that this is something that she is going to do. In Corinthians, whoever sows sparingly will reap sparingly and vice versa. But he says, when you give, not if you decide to give, but when you give, determine what you want to do, not out of a sense of ought, but out of a sense of want to, because God loves a cheerful giver. But what I see as I read through these scriptures and I read through the rest of the Bible about these scriptures or about this topic is that giving is not optional at all. In fact, giving is essential to becoming a mature, healthy believer. It is part of the essential nature of sanctification and growing in our spiritual maturity and in the depth of our spiritual lives. As a matter of fact, I would say it like this. Thinking that you can become a healthy Christian without the discipline of giving is like thinking you can become a healthy person without the discipline of exercise. If you want to be healthy, if you want a good heart rate, if you want your blood work to come in right, and I'm about to be 44 next month, so I'm getting to an age where I have to start caring about those things, and I'll probably know what my cholesterol is here in the next few months. If you want to be a healthy person, you can eat right. You can eat like a rabbit. You can monitor what goes into your system. You can be careful about not consuming alcohol or not consuming other chemicals or whatever it is. You can be careful about what goes into your body. You can be careful about what you eat. You can be diligent about your sleep time. You can do a lot of healthy things. But until you're exercising, until you're getting your heart rate up for 30 minutes a day, you will not be a healthy person. And I believe that trying to be a healthy Christian, trying to grow in our faith and in our spiritual maturity without the discipline of giving is just as silly and as much of a pipe dream as it is to try to be a healthy person who does not exercise. Which is why it's important for us as we look through scripture to acknowledge giving, in God's view, has never been optional. And I don't think that that's how we think about it. I think for a lot of us, we do think of it as optional. Maybe not intentionally, but by default and behaviorally, we approach it as something that maybe I need to do one day sometimes. I used to joke, I used to be, when I would drive, I was a bit of a speeder. Our state patrol person is not here today. So yeah, I speed all the time. And the older I get, the less I do it. This morning I was driving in, it's 0 dark 30 on 540 to get here. And I looked down, I went, because I was driving and I literally thought, am I going too fast? And I looked down and I was doing 58 miles an hour. So I was, it was under control. So I don't speed very much anymore, but I'll still do it sometimes. And I'm always going to go a little bit over the speed limit because, come on, no one wants to be. Don't be the jerk that goes to speed limit. Nobody likes you on the road if that's what you do. Get out of the way. And so I used to joke because sometimes it would come up in different circles, especially like pastor circles where you're trying to out-compete each other in righteousness, and someone would be like, yeah, I don't speed because I believe it's a sin and it's wrong. And I would just say like, you may be right, but God hasn't gotten that far down the conviction tree on me yet. All right? There's some bigger fish to fry in my life than going eight over. All right? So I haven't gotten to that portion of conviction. I think some of us think about giving that way. Yeah, that's a thing I need to do one day. I know that's an essential part of the Christian life, but, but not yet. There's some bigger fish to fry. And I think what these, what these scriptures show us is no, no, that's a pretty important one. That's what, that's essential to the nature of being a Christian. It's an expected thing of believers. But I think that even in light of that, maybe we don't put it off and go, gosh, one day I'm just not there yet. Later on in my spiritual maturity, I will get there. Maybe we think of it like this. Maybe it's just hard for us to do it. Maybe we don't have a lot of extra right now. I mean, inflation's up. Things are tough. That's a bit, I mean, everybody, a lot of people that I know have had to tighten the purse strings a little bit in the last two years. And so maybe for us, the idea of giving is something that we want to do, but we just don't feel like we can afford it. Or we just don't feel like it's wise. And so we put it off. But whenever I think about that, first of all, if you look at the way that Jesus applauds the old lady who gives out of little, that's a good indicator that that may not be a good way to think about giving. I can't afford it, so I'm not going to do it. Another thing that informs my thinking on this is a conversation I had with Jen years ago. Early on in our marriage, I was a poor student pastor and she was a poor private school teacher. And we bought our house. We got married in 2006. We bought our first house in 2007. Excuse me. We bought our first house in 2007, which is wonderful because we bought it, I think, for like $180,000, our very first house. It took 10 years for that house to be worth $180,000 again. It was just right at the brink of the recession. By the next year, that thing was worth $125,000. Great. So we're not living in plenty. We are living in very close to want. We don't have a lot. And Jen's dad has always been a remarkably generous man. And I remember making the comment to her, I hope one day we make more money and live more comfortably so that we can be generous like your dad is. I want to have that experience and be that kind of, now the word I would use is be that conduit of grace to other people. And Jen said, yes, I hope so too, but my daddy always taught me that the way you give when you don't have a lot is the way that you will give when you do have a lot. So the generosity trait starts early. And his larger point was, if we are people who think one day when I have more margin, I'll be more generous. There's no magical generosity button that gets hit when you have plenty. However generous you are with little is how generous you will be with a lot. So if you want to be generous one day, then you need to start being generous today. It's never been optional. And because of that, the encouragement today, what I want to press upon you is just the idea of being faithful in your giving. My prayer for you, these are prayers for you. My prayer for you for your finances this year is very, very simple. My prayer is that you would be faithful in your giving, whether you're giving out of little or you're giving out of much. Each one has different kinds of pains associated with it. But my prayer is that you would be faithful to what God expects of his children, understanding that giving is what's best for you. Being a generous person is what's best for you. Understanding that you will not mature as a Christian into full maturity if this is not a part of your regular discipline. So my prayer for you is that whether you give out of little or you give out of a lot, that you would simply be faithful in that giving. And like everything else, when God tells us we have to do something, when God says do this or don't do that, it is always because he has our best interest in mind. So giving and being a generous person is actually what's best for us, which is why I'm preaching the sermon today. Because if you study scripture, it's very clear that this is what God wants for us. And if I don't tell you that, then I'm derelict in my duty. So we can be adults and have an honest conversation about it. Giving is something that God wants you to do. It has never, ever been optional. Now, the question then becomes, okay, if it's what's best for me, why is it what's best for me to give away the money that I feel like I've earned? Here's why. Three reasons. There's more than this, but three reasons. Giving reminds us, invites us, and fuels us. The act of giving reminds us, invites us, and fuels us. Here's what I mean. The act of giving reminds us, first and foremost, that what we're giving is not ours to give. We are simply giving back to God what he has entrusted us with. It is the idea of stewardship. The act of giving, whether it's to the church or to a nonprofit that you believe in or to anything else that's going on in God's kingdom, the act of giving to God's kingdom is a reminder every time I am giving out of my allotment that God has assigned to me, I am not giving out of my possessions. Do you see the difference? God has allocated his resources out amongst us, and he's trusted us to be good stewards of those resources and to direct those in ways that build his kingdom, not our own. This is the idea of kingdom builders. This is also the idea of being a conduit of grace. A conduit connects to one source and funnels those resources to another source. So when I say at grace, we are conduits of grace. Yes, we offer grace to one another, but we're also, we also understand and see our lives as a conduit from God to the people and to building his kingdom. And so when we give, we are reminded of that conduit status. We are reminded of who we are and what we have. And we're even reminded if we're willing to take it a step further. Okay, I have these resources and I'm reminded that they're God's, they're not mine. I would take it a step further and I would say, yes, and the talents and abilities that you applied to garner those resources were also given to you by God to be a steward of and to use. So the fact that he allowed us to have resources is his gift and grace anyway, so we continue to be a funnel and let those resources flow out of us in generosity. It reminds us of how we should think about our finances and our resources. It puts us in the proper perspective. A wonderful thing about giving, maybe the best part, is that it invites us. You could say it invests us here too, but giving invites us into ministries that we might not be capable of doing ourselves. It's one thing to go to a charity dinner, to a charity gala where they're going to give you a cold chicken or a cold barbecue or something and a salad that's really terrible. Like we've all been. It's like $150 a plate and I'd rather go to McDonald's. But you go and you sit and you hear about the ministry and you hear about the thing and maybe you write a check for $200 or whatever it is you do. It's one thing to go to a charity gala or a charity dinner. It's another thing to be a giver to that ministry and go participate in the blessing of what God is doing and where he is doing it, to be invested in this ministry so that when you hear the stories of the families that are reached, when you hear the stories of the children that are no longer orphaned, when you hear the stories of the women in third world countries who have been equipped with skills and have been running a successful small business on their own that is sustaining their family in ways that they were never capable of, you get to feel like a participant in that. You realize that your participation in that nonprofit, in that entity, in that institution is something that can be celebrated by you because I'm a part of this. It invites you into areas of God's kingdom that you might not otherwise go, and it invests you in what those people are doing. And I say this with all candor. God may not have put you in a situation in your life where you have the time, the skill set, the life circumstances that allow you to go to an African country and start a ministry that prohibits children from becoming orphans and trains up their moms so that they can sustain their family. You might not have the bandwidth to go to another country and start that ministry. But somebody else has had that bandwidth. And somebody else has done that. And you've got the bandwidth to go make money. God's given you those gifts to do that and you're good at it. Maybe you're good at it so that you can funnel those gifts into other areas of God's kingdom where his work is being done and where God is showing up. And now I might not have the skill set to go down the street and start the nonprofit and do English as a second language for Spanish-speaking parents who are just trying to navigate their kids through middle school. But I have the resources to help and to fund those who do have those gifts and talents. And so the opportunity to give invites us into ministries and into opportunities and into blessings that we might not otherwise have based on our gifting and our life circumstances and where we are. It invests us in what's happening there. And it's a tremendous privilege to do that. I think one of the great benefits of investing our lives in things that build God's kingdom is that he gives us front row seats into places where we would not otherwise get to go. One of my great joys of being a pastor is the sacred spaces that I get invited into because of my position. Sitting in the hospital room in the middle of fear and praying with people. I realize that's not a normal place for people to get invited. Being entrusted with people who come and sit down in my office and ask for help in certain areas of their life or ask for prayer about this or advice about this, I realize that that's not a typical life experience for everyone. Having the opportunity when there's something on my heart that I really feel like I need to say, I have a platform where I can do that. There's different things about my position that give me access to front row seats to what God is doing in different places that I might not otherwise get. And by being a person who is a generous giver, we now have front row seats into different places where God is doing work and we're showing up to build his kingdom and we get a unique perspective there. It's an invitation into the blessing of what God is doing. And then finally, candidly, giving fuels us. It fuels our desire to give more, to be more, to be involved more, but it also fuels the ministries of God. This is an undeniable fact. The very first time God instructs his people to give is in the book of Numbers. And do you know why he does it? He says, bring your tithe to the temple because the Levites are not allowed to have jobs. They do this all the time and we need to be able to sustain them as a society. So the other 11 tribes, you give 10% of what you have to the Levites so that they can serve us as our priests. It's God said to begin to give, to fuel the ministries that he is doing. And so giving, quite literally, fuels the ministries going on around us. To this end, grace is fueled by our partners. And this is where I just want to speak to you directly because you're grownups. This church is fueled by the generous giving of our partners. If you guys don't give generously, this all goes away. We have four full-time staff people. We have three part-time staff people. We pay them. If we don't give, Miss Erin is the first one on the chopping block. Out of here. Right away. No kids ministry. We have to pay rent. We pay $13,000 a month for this dump. All right? We do. We can't even get the pole removed. And every year they charge us more for common area maintenance so that our grass can look cruddy out there and we don't have any. We have to keep the lights on. We fund different ministries through the church. The reality of this place is that it is fueled by the partners. And if that's not happening, then this place doesn't happen. So one of the things that I've started doing in our Discover Grace class, if you want to be a partner of grace and you come to the class, I think we're going to have one in February or later this month, I guess. At some point we go, okay, what is required to be a partner here? And it's not in the writing yet, but I've started to say, if you want to be a partner with us, nothing's compelling you to do that. If you're here this morning and you're not a partner of grace, which we have partners, we don't have members because members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. That's how we do it here. If you're here and you're just like, man, I'm kicking the tires, then what I would tell you is this part's not for you. It's for you one day, wherever you go, what I'm about to say is for you. But if you don't call yourself a partner at grace, then this part's not for you. But for the folks who come to Discover Grace, we say there's nothing compelling you to be a partner. You can come, and you can volunteer, and you can be in small group, and you can be an active participant in our church to whatever degree you want to be besides sitting on a committee or becoming an elder. But if you want to partner with us, then partner with us and support us financially. So here's what I would say about that. Scripture, and this is important, does not explicitly say anywhere that you should give to your local church. It does not come out and say that anywhere. But I think that's because the concept of a local church hadn't yet been, it was just the church, the church in Ephesus, the church in Rome, the church in Thessalonica. It was just the church. And in those churches, the expectation is you are giving because that's always been the expectation because the entire scope of scripture assumes that we know that. So what I would say is, even though it doesn't explicitly say it in the Bible, that I believe that you should give to your local church. I really do think that, and it took me some years to be able to say that, but the more I think about it, the more I study, the more I talk about it, the more I'm convinced that if you are a Christian, you should A, be a part of a local church, and B, you should give to that church. So I know the implications of that. We can all connect the dots. If you're a part of grace, you should give to grace. That's what Nate's saying. Sure. But here's what else I'll say. If you are a part of grace, and I don't think a lot of pastors would say this, and maybe the finance committee will get mad at me for saying this, but if you are a part of grace, but you don't give to grace, you need to find a church that compels you to give and go there. You need to go to a church that does inspire you to give. Because what I believe is, if you're here and you're thriving and your spiritual life is becoming healthy and your kids are thriving and they're being taught about Christ and you're experiencing community community. And you would call grace a blessing in your life. And you feel like you or your family or you and your spouse have benefited from grace. Then you ought to support grace so that other people can benefit in the same way. Because we are fueled by that giving. And if the ministry that you are experiencing from us is not compelling enough to make you want to partner with us in giving, then because I believe you should give to a local church, I have to believe that you should find one that compels you. But that's the encouragement this morning. Plain and simple. Adult to adult. This is what scripture teaches. We should be givers. We should be compelled to give to God's kingdom, particularly the parts of it where we are personally benefiting from that. So if we are a part of grace, we should give. Which brings me back to my prayer for you this year, that you would simply be faithful in your giving. I always say this, and I know a little bit contradictory to what I just said, but I can also be honest with you enough to say this. If you are someone, or if you are a couple, who is not in the habit of giving, and this is going to be a new exercise for you, and it feels remotely manipulative or self-serving that I'm trying to get you to give to grace, I would encourage you, as your brother in Christ, begin to give to things that aren't grace but that God is still doing. Begin to give to God's kingdom. Become a giver. And then in time, as it feels right, because God loves a cheerful giver, direct some of that towards your local church. But if you think that what I'm saying is self-serving, then don't give to grace. Don't do it under compulsion. But I would encourage you to begin that discipline and watch what God does as you become generous with your resources. So that's my prayer for you this year. And every year as we move forward. That as God's children, as believers, you would take seriously the teaching about giving in Scripture. And that you would be a person who is a giver. My prayer is that whether you have a little or a lot, that you would simply be faithful. Because that's what God calls us to. Let me pray that over us. Father, thank you for what we have. Thank you for what you've entrusted to us. I pray, God, that we would be good stewards of the resources that you've allocated to us, whether that's time or talent or treasure. Father, I pray that for those of us who are not yet people who give, for whatever reason, that we would be convicted and compelled to take steps towards becoming those people. That we would quit viewing this as something that's optional for your children, but view it as something that's necessary and good. Let us step into that generosity. Father, for those of us who were convicted by this long ago and are regular givers, I pray that we would be inspired. That we would be encouraged. That we would be grateful for all the opportunities we've had to give and all the times we got to sit on the front lines of what you were doing because you invited us in there through giving. But God, more than anything, I just ask that grace would be a church filled with faithful people, faithful to your word, faithful to obedience in you, and faithful to entrust you with their finances. God, we ask these things in your son's name. Amen.

All right. Well, good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here and making grace a part of your Sunday. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service if you'd like to do that as well. This is the fourth part of our series that we're kicking the year off with called Prayers for You. So it's different aspects of life and kind of prayers over those things for 2025. And so we've looked at marriage, and we've looked at kids and legacy. We've looked at life in general. And this morning, we're going to talk about finances. We have a prayer for you with your finances in 2025. And now as I say that, that this morning, I'm going to do the sermon about money, the whole room tightens up, right? Some of you brought guests and you just thought, are you serious right now? This is their first time and this is what you're going to preach. Some of you are probably here for the first time. You wandered in, maybe you've watched a few online and now you're like, okay, I'm going to go kick the tires. And on your very first Sunday, you're like, I'd like a pass, please. Can I come back next Sunday when we're not talking about money? And so I know that the room gets tight when this topic comes up. I'll be honest with you. I don't love talking about this either. And I'm going to tell you why in a minute. But just because I know that that's in the room, I want to say the quiet part out loud to diffuse maybe some of the discomfort around this topic, particularly in a church setting. This is the first thing on your notes. If you have a bulletin on the top of your notes, there's no fill in the blanks. This is just a statement that I'm writing for you that I'm going to say out loud and we are going to acknowledge. This morning is not a thinly veiled attempt to use the Bible to guilt you into giving us your money. Okay? That is not what we are doing. I've been in those. I've sat in those sermons. And they strike me as incredibly disingenuous. And if you have been a part of Grace for any length of time now, I've been here since 2017, April of 2017. I'm finishing up, believe it or not, my eighth year here. You know that I don't preach like that about money. You know that it is really important to me that this not be self-serving. And that's why I don't love to talk about it all the time, because it's really, really hard to thread the needle of appropriate biblical teaching on the topic that doesn't come across as self-serving for me. Because, let's say this part out loud too, I have a vested personal interest in you getting good at this. Right? I do. But that's not the place that I'm coming from. I just have to acknowledge that as true. I actually, and so I know that this is going on. This is kind of the reason why I don't, I'm not, I don't just jump at the chance to preach about money all the time. I was talking to a buddy yesterday and he said, what are you preaching about tomorrow? He doesn't go to church here. He lives, he lives down in Fuqua. He said, what are you preaching about tomorrow? And I said, I'm preaching about money. And he goes, ah, the obligatory money sermon so you can get that building built, huh? And I went, sure. But we know that that's in the mix, right? We know that those thoughts exist. And I can acknowledge that too. And I've been on both sides of it. So the absolute last thing I want to do is be disingenuous in what I'm sharing with you this morning. But here's the reality. The Bible talks about giving and finances a lot. If you do a quick Google, you'll find people out there who say that money is the topic that Jesus spoke about the most in his ministry. Now that is misleading because I'm not going to get into why because I have a lot to cover and I don't have time to get into why. That's misleading. I don't think it's fair to say that the most important topic to Christ in his lifetime was money. He gave a lot of examples that involved money, but he wasn't talking specifically about giving or about finances. But the reality is that this topic comes up a lot in the Bible. And if you were to make a grid of all the topics in the Bible, all the things that show up throughout Scripture, and then look at how often in my nearly eight years I've addressed those things, one of the things that the grid would reveal is that I have fallen woefully short of my responsibility to teach us about this topic because it is one that shows up with great frequency in Scripture and does not show up with great frequency in my preaching calendar. So let's talk about money this morning because the Bible talks about it way more than we do. To illustrate this point and to give us just a good swath of the philosophy of giving from Scripture, and then to draw out a singular point that I believe jumps out of the text of all of these verses, I want to read to you six different passages on money. It sounds like a lot. It is a lot. They're going to be on the screen. You read with me. This is an overview beginning all the way back in Deuteronomy, moving all the way to the book of James, kind of a sweeping view of how God thinks about giving in his children. We're going to start in Deuteronomy chapter 15. He writes, there will always be poor people in the land. Therefore, I command you to be open-handed toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land. There's always going to be poor people, and you should always give to them. This is an instruction from very, very early on. Deuteronomy is the fifth book of the Bible, and it means the law repeated. So it's really just a summary of the first four books, more specifically Leviticus and Numbers. So this is the very beginning, the foundation of faith. He is saying from the get-go, you will always have needy people around you. Be the people who give to them. And then we jump to the end of the Bible, James chapter 2, suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, go in peace, keep warm and well fed, but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? What good are you? You're just a well-wisher. I remember years ago, and I told, sorry, Andrea, I told Andrea, who's running our slides very faithfully this morning, that I wasn't going to talk in between these verses so she could leave them up there. So now there should be a blank slide, but there's not because I'm going to tell you something real quick. I remember a few years ago when Jen and I first moved here, we lived off of Tealbrier, right there off of Spring Forest. And so we would go to the Harris Teeter and there's a St. Jacques used to be in there. And next to it, some store went out of business. And then another store called Pet Wants was going up in there. And because I frequented the Harris Teeter, I noticed that they were there. And I noticed it was kind of a mom and pop operation. It looked like family was doing it. They were working really hard in the store for several weeks to revamp it. And one night I was at the grocery store late. Probably when you live 35 seconds away from the grocery store, your nine o'clock purchase of Ben and Jerry's statistic goes through the roof. Okay. So I was heading over there probably to get a pint of Ben and Jerry's Americone Dream. Thank you very much. And I noticed that they were working in there. And I was just touched by how hard they're working on this place and the hopes that they must have for this place. And so I went and I knocked on the door and some guy looks at me like, what, we're closed, you know? And I go, and so he opened the door and I said, hey, I just want to say, I've seen you working really hard. I've seen what you guys are doing here. I think it's great. I hope it goes really well for you. I hope this is a fantastic store. And he goes, thanks so much. We're actually having a friends and family sale tomorrow if you'd like to stop by and get anything. And I went, okay, yeah, great, thank you. And the door shut, and I was like, no way. I'm not buying anything from there. I don't like my dog. I'm not going to go spend money on a thing I don't want. I don't even want to spend the money we do spend on her. I'm not going in your store ever. I just hope it goes well. And what I realized is it's one thing to be a well-wisher. It's another thing to be bought in. James says, don't be a well-wisher. Oh, you're cold and you're hungry and you need? Be warm and well-fed. I'm going to keep my wallet in my pocket. Don't be a well-wisher. Malachi 3, 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. Then Jesus in Mark chapter 12 tells us this, but a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins worth only a few cents. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. In 2 Corinthians, Paul writes about giving. Remember this, whoever then last, Jesus in Matthew chapter 6. This is a big verse about giving that is really indicative of the culture of giving a grace. And so while we're here, I just wanted to share this little bit about the way that money is handled here, because if you haven't been going here for a long time, you may actually not know this. But at Grace, this predates me. This was the culture when I got here. They've always taken very seriously, we've always taken very seriously, this direction from Christ to not let your right hand know what your left hand is doing, to give in secret and to give in private and not ostentatiously. And because of that, when you give, there are only two people on the planet who see what you give. One is our office manager, Julie, our children's assistant office manager, Julie Sauls, but that's because someone has to manually process the check. So if you write a check, someone has to fill out a deposit slip and put that in. Someone has to see it, and so that's her job. That falls to her to do it. The only other person who sees what is given, this includes elders and this includes our finance committee, is our finance manager, a guy named Tom Ledoux. Tom lives in Michigan, and you never have to look him in the eye, so it's a really great setup for you, right? You won't find yourself in Bible study with Tom feeling uncomfortable because he knows some things. Those are the only two people. No one else knows, no one else has access, no one else sees, and so this is something we take very seriously. But as I looked at all of these verses, I don't know as I read through those what kinds of themes leapt out to you. I don't know what you perceived. I don't know what kind of impression they made. And we could probably look through those six verses and do 12 sermons out of them. There's enough things in there that are worth talking about and unpacking. But the thing that I saw the most as I went through those verses, because it wasn't just those verses that I read. When I sat down to do this and to start preparing for the sermon, I just read all the verses I could find on giving in Scripture. And one of the things that was incredibly apparent as I read through those, and I think is's highlighted specifically in these verses is this. Giving has never been optional. Giving for God's children. If you call God your father and Jesus your savior. Giving has never ever been optional. If you look back through the verses. Especially that last one. Jesus' words about giving to the needy and not letting your right hand know what your left hand is doing, how does it start out? So when you give to the needy, not if, when you do it. Deuteronomy, very beginning, there will always be poor people. Be people who give to the poor people. James, when you encounter someone who is needy, and you will, be the person that gives to them. Malachi, bring the whole tithe into the storehouse. The tithe that you're giving, that you're expected to give, that's going to be given, bring it into my temple. When Jesus looks at the poor widow and she gives two cents, I think sometimes we would think that he would go to her and he would say, hey, you take that back. You need that more than the church does. You take it. That's not what he does. Instead, he honors it because of the assumption that this is something that she is going to do. In Corinthians, whoever sows sparingly will reap sparingly and vice versa. But he says, when you give, not if you decide to give, but when you give, determine what you want to do, not out of a sense of ought, but out of a sense of want to, because God loves a cheerful giver. But what I see as I read through these scriptures and I read through the rest of the Bible about these scriptures or about this topic is that giving is not optional at all. In fact, giving is essential to becoming a mature, healthy believer. It is part of the essential nature of sanctification and growing in our spiritual maturity and in the depth of our spiritual lives. As a matter of fact, I would say it like this. Thinking that you can become a healthy Christian without the discipline of giving is like thinking you can become a healthy person without the discipline of exercise. If you want to be healthy, if you want a good heart rate, if you want your blood work to come in right, and I'm about to be 44 next month, so I'm getting to an age where I have to start caring about those things, and I'll probably know what my cholesterol is here in the next few months. If you want to be a healthy person, you can eat right. You can eat like a rabbit. You can monitor what goes into your system. You can be careful about not consuming alcohol or not consuming other chemicals or whatever it is. You can be careful about what goes into your body. You can be careful about what you eat. You can be diligent about your sleep time. You can do a lot of healthy things. But until you're exercising, until you're getting your heart rate up for 30 minutes a day, you will not be a healthy person. And I believe that trying to be a healthy Christian, trying to grow in our faith and in our spiritual maturity without the discipline of giving is just as silly and as much of a pipe dream as it is to try to be a healthy person who does not exercise. Which is why it's important for us as we look through scripture to acknowledge giving, in God's view, has never been optional. And I don't think that that's how we think about it. I think for a lot of us, we do think of it as optional. Maybe not intentionally, but by default and behaviorally, we approach it as something that maybe I need to do one day sometimes. I used to joke, I used to be, when I would drive, I was a bit of a speeder. Our state patrol person is not here today. So yeah, I speed all the time. And the older I get, the less I do it. This morning I was driving in, it's 0 dark 30 on 540 to get here. And I looked down, I went, because I was driving and I literally thought, am I going too fast? And I looked down and I was doing 58 miles an hour. So I was, it was under control. So I don't speed very much anymore, but I'll still do it sometimes. And I'm always going to go a little bit over the speed limit because, come on, no one wants to be. Don't be the jerk that goes to speed limit. Nobody likes you on the road if that's what you do. Get out of the way. And so I used to joke because sometimes it would come up in different circles, especially like pastor circles where you're trying to out-compete each other in righteousness, and someone would be like, yeah, I don't speed because I believe it's a sin and it's wrong. And I would just say like, you may be right, but God hasn't gotten that far down the conviction tree on me yet. All right? There's some bigger fish to fry in my life than going eight over. All right? So I haven't gotten to that portion of conviction. I think some of us think about giving that way. Yeah, that's a thing I need to do one day. I know that's an essential part of the Christian life, but, but not yet. There's some bigger fish to fry. And I think what these, what these scriptures show us is no, no, that's a pretty important one. That's what, that's essential to the nature of being a Christian. It's an expected thing of believers. But I think that even in light of that, maybe we don't put it off and go, gosh, one day I'm just not there yet. Later on in my spiritual maturity, I will get there. Maybe we think of it like this. Maybe it's just hard for us to do it. Maybe we don't have a lot of extra right now. I mean, inflation's up. Things are tough. That's a bit, I mean, everybody, a lot of people that I know have had to tighten the purse strings a little bit in the last two years. And so maybe for us, the idea of giving is something that we want to do, but we just don't feel like we can afford it. Or we just don't feel like it's wise. And so we put it off. But whenever I think about that, first of all, if you look at the way that Jesus applauds the old lady who gives out of little, that's a good indicator that that may not be a good way to think about giving. I can't afford it, so I'm not going to do it. Another thing that informs my thinking on this is a conversation I had with Jen years ago. Early on in our marriage, I was a poor student pastor and she was a poor private school teacher. And we bought our house. We got married in 2006. We bought our first house in 2007. Excuse me. We bought our first house in 2007, which is wonderful because we bought it, I think, for like $180,000, our very first house. It took 10 years for that house to be worth $180,000 again. It was just right at the brink of the recession. By the next year, that thing was worth $125,000. Great. So we're not living in plenty. We are living in very close to want. We don't have a lot. And Jen's dad has always been a remarkably generous man. And I remember making the comment to her, I hope one day we make more money and live more comfortably so that we can be generous like your dad is. I want to have that experience and be that kind of, now the word I would use is be that conduit of grace to other people. And Jen said, yes, I hope so too, but my daddy always taught me that the way you give when you don't have a lot is the way that you will give when you do have a lot. So the generosity trait starts early. And his larger point was, if we are people who think one day when I have more margin, I'll be more generous. There's no magical generosity button that gets hit when you have plenty. However generous you are with little is how generous you will be with a lot. So if you want to be generous one day, then you need to start being generous today. It's never been optional. And because of that, the encouragement today, what I want to press upon you is just the idea of being faithful in your giving. My prayer for you, these are prayers for you. My prayer for you for your finances this year is very, very simple. My prayer is that you would be faithful in your giving, whether you're giving out of little or you're giving out of much. Each one has different kinds of pains associated with it. But my prayer is that you would be faithful to what God expects of his children, understanding that giving is what's best for you. Being a generous person is what's best for you. Understanding that you will not mature as a Christian into full maturity if this is not a part of your regular discipline. So my prayer for you is that whether you give out of little or you give out of a lot, that you would simply be faithful in that giving. And like everything else, when God tells us we have to do something, when God says do this or don't do that, it is always because he has our best interest in mind. So giving and being a generous person is actually what's best for us, which is why I'm preaching the sermon today. Because if you study scripture, it's very clear that this is what God wants for us. And if I don't tell you that, then I'm derelict in my duty. So we can be adults and have an honest conversation about it. Giving is something that God wants you to do. It has never, ever been optional. Now, the question then becomes, okay, if it's what's best for me, why is it what's best for me to give away the money that I feel like I've earned? Here's why. Three reasons. There's more than this, but three reasons. Giving reminds us, invites us, and fuels us. The act of giving reminds us, invites us, and fuels us. Here's what I mean. The act of giving reminds us, first and foremost, that what we're giving is not ours to give. We are simply giving back to God what he has entrusted us with. It is the idea of stewardship. The act of giving, whether it's to the church or to a nonprofit that you believe in or to anything else that's going on in God's kingdom, the act of giving to God's kingdom is a reminder every time I am giving out of my allotment that God has assigned to me, I am not giving out of my possessions. Do you see the difference? God has allocated his resources out amongst us, and he's trusted us to be good stewards of those resources and to direct those in ways that build his kingdom, not our own. This is the idea of kingdom builders. This is also the idea of being a conduit of grace. A conduit connects to one source and funnels those resources to another source. So when I say at grace, we are conduits of grace. Yes, we offer grace to one another, but we're also, we also understand and see our lives as a conduit from God to the people and to building his kingdom. And so when we give, we are reminded of that conduit status. We are reminded of who we are and what we have. And we're even reminded if we're willing to take it a step further. Okay, I have these resources and I'm reminded that they're God's, they're not mine. I would take it a step further and I would say, yes, and the talents and abilities that you applied to garner those resources were also given to you by God to be a steward of and to use. So the fact that he allowed us to have resources is his gift and grace anyway, so we continue to be a funnel and let those resources flow out of us in generosity. It reminds us of how we should think about our finances and our resources. It puts us in the proper perspective. A wonderful thing about giving, maybe the best part, is that it invites us. You could say it invests us here too, but giving invites us into ministries that we might not be capable of doing ourselves. It's one thing to go to a charity dinner, to a charity gala where they're going to give you a cold chicken or a cold barbecue or something and a salad that's really terrible. Like we've all been. It's like $150 a plate and I'd rather go to McDonald's. But you go and you sit and you hear about the ministry and you hear about the thing and maybe you write a check for $200 or whatever it is you do. It's one thing to go to a charity gala or a charity dinner. It's another thing to be a giver to that ministry and go participate in the blessing of what God is doing and where he is doing it, to be invested in this ministry so that when you hear the stories of the families that are reached, when you hear the stories of the children that are no longer orphaned, when you hear the stories of the women in third world countries who have been equipped with skills and have been running a successful small business on their own that is sustaining their family in ways that they were never capable of, you get to feel like a participant in that. You realize that your participation in that nonprofit, in that entity, in that institution is something that can be celebrated by you because I'm a part of this. It invites you into areas of God's kingdom that you might not otherwise go, and it invests you in what those people are doing. And I say this with all candor. God may not have put you in a situation in your life where you have the time, the skill set, the life circumstances that allow you to go to an African country and start a ministry that prohibits children from becoming orphans and trains up their moms so that they can sustain their family. You might not have the bandwidth to go to another country and start that ministry. But somebody else has had that bandwidth. And somebody else has done that. And you've got the bandwidth to go make money. God's given you those gifts to do that and you're good at it. Maybe you're good at it so that you can funnel those gifts into other areas of God's kingdom where his work is being done and where God is showing up. And now I might not have the skill set to go down the street and start the nonprofit and do English as a second language for Spanish-speaking parents who are just trying to navigate their kids through middle school. But I have the resources to help and to fund those who do have those gifts and talents. And so the opportunity to give invites us into ministries and into opportunities and into blessings that we might not otherwise have based on our gifting and our life circumstances and where we are. It invests us in what's happening there. And it's a tremendous privilege to do that. I think one of the great benefits of investing our lives in things that build God's kingdom is that he gives us front row seats into places where we would not otherwise get to go. One of my great joys of being a pastor is the sacred spaces that I get invited into because of my position. Sitting in the hospital room in the middle of fear and praying with people. I realize that's not a normal place for people to get invited. Being entrusted with people who come and sit down in my office and ask for help in certain areas of their life or ask for prayer about this or advice about this, I realize that that's not a typical life experience for everyone. Having the opportunity when there's something on my heart that I really feel like I need to say, I have a platform where I can do that. There's different things about my position that give me access to front row seats to what God is doing in different places that I might not otherwise get. And by being a person who is a generous giver, we now have front row seats into different places where God is doing work and we're showing up to build his kingdom and we get a unique perspective there. It's an invitation into the blessing of what God is doing. And then finally, candidly, giving fuels us. It fuels our desire to give more, to be more, to be involved more, but it also fuels the ministries of God. This is an undeniable fact. The very first time God instructs his people to give is in the book of Numbers. And do you know why he does it? He says, bring your tithe to the temple because the Levites are not allowed to have jobs. They do this all the time and we need to be able to sustain them as a society. So the other 11 tribes, you give 10% of what you have to the Levites so that they can serve us as our priests. It's God said to begin to give, to fuel the ministries that he is doing. And so giving, quite literally, fuels the ministries going on around us. To this end, grace is fueled by our partners. And this is where I just want to speak to you directly because you're grownups. This church is fueled by the generous giving of our partners. If you guys don't give generously, this all goes away. We have four full-time staff people. We have three part-time staff people. We pay them. If we don't give, Miss Erin is the first one on the chopping block. Out of here. Right away. No kids ministry. We have to pay rent. We pay $13,000 a month for this dump. All right? We do. We can't even get the pole removed. And every year they charge us more for common area maintenance so that our grass can look cruddy out there and we don't have any. We have to keep the lights on. We fund different ministries through the church. The reality of this place is that it is fueled by the partners. And if that's not happening, then this place doesn't happen. So one of the things that I've started doing in our Discover Grace class, if you want to be a partner of grace and you come to the class, I think we're going to have one in February or later this month, I guess. At some point we go, okay, what is required to be a partner here? And it's not in the writing yet, but I've started to say, if you want to be a partner with us, nothing's compelling you to do that. If you're here this morning and you're not a partner of grace, which we have partners, we don't have members because members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. That's how we do it here. If you're here and you're just like, man, I'm kicking the tires, then what I would tell you is this part's not for you. It's for you one day, wherever you go, what I'm about to say is for you. But if you don't call yourself a partner at grace, then this part's not for you. But for the folks who come to Discover Grace, we say there's nothing compelling you to be a partner. You can come, and you can volunteer, and you can be in small group, and you can be an active participant in our church to whatever degree you want to be besides sitting on a committee or becoming an elder. But if you want to partner with us, then partner with us and support us financially. So here's what I would say about that. Scripture, and this is important, does not explicitly say anywhere that you should give to your local church. It does not come out and say that anywhere. But I think that's because the concept of a local church hadn't yet been, it was just the church, the church in Ephesus, the church in Rome, the church in Thessalonica. It was just the church. And in those churches, the expectation is you are giving because that's always been the expectation because the entire scope of scripture assumes that we know that. So what I would say is, even though it doesn't explicitly say it in the Bible, that I believe that you should give to your local church. I really do think that, and it took me some years to be able to say that, but the more I think about it, the more I study, the more I talk about it, the more I'm convinced that if you are a Christian, you should A, be a part of a local church, and B, you should give to that church. So I know the implications of that. We can all connect the dots. If you're a part of grace, you should give to grace. That's what Nate's saying. Sure. But here's what else I'll say. If you are a part of grace, and I don't think a lot of pastors would say this, and maybe the finance committee will get mad at me for saying this, but if you are a part of grace, but you don't give to grace, you need to find a church that compels you to give and go there. You need to go to a church that does inspire you to give. Because what I believe is, if you're here and you're thriving and your spiritual life is becoming healthy and your kids are thriving and they're being taught about Christ and you're experiencing community community. And you would call grace a blessing in your life. And you feel like you or your family or you and your spouse have benefited from grace. Then you ought to support grace so that other people can benefit in the same way. Because we are fueled by that giving. And if the ministry that you are experiencing from us is not compelling enough to make you want to partner with us in giving, then because I believe you should give to a local church, I have to believe that you should find one that compels you. But that's the encouragement this morning. Plain and simple. Adult to adult. This is what scripture teaches. We should be givers. We should be compelled to give to God's kingdom, particularly the parts of it where we are personally benefiting from that. So if we are a part of grace, we should give. Which brings me back to my prayer for you this year, that you would simply be faithful in your giving. I always say this, and I know a little bit contradictory to what I just said, but I can also be honest with you enough to say this. If you are someone, or if you are a couple, who is not in the habit of giving, and this is going to be a new exercise for you, and it feels remotely manipulative or self-serving that I'm trying to get you to give to grace, I would encourage you, as your brother in Christ, begin to give to things that aren't grace but that God is still doing. Begin to give to God's kingdom. Become a giver. And then in time, as it feels right, because God loves a cheerful giver, direct some of that towards your local church. But if you think that what I'm saying is self-serving, then don't give to grace. Don't do it under compulsion. But I would encourage you to begin that discipline and watch what God does as you become generous with your resources. So that's my prayer for you this year. And every year as we move forward. That as God's children, as believers, you would take seriously the teaching about giving in Scripture. And that you would be a person who is a giver. My prayer is that whether you have a little or a lot, that you would simply be faithful. Because that's what God calls us to. Let me pray that over us. Father, thank you for what we have. Thank you for what you've entrusted to us. I pray, God, that we would be good stewards of the resources that you've allocated to us, whether that's time or talent or treasure. Father, I pray that for those of us who are not yet people who give, for whatever reason, that we would be convicted and compelled to take steps towards becoming those people. That we would quit viewing this as something that's optional for your children, but view it as something that's necessary and good. Let us step into that generosity. Father, for those of us who were convicted by this long ago and are regular givers, I pray that we would be inspired. That we would be encouraged. That we would be grateful for all the opportunities we've had to give and all the times we got to sit on the front lines of what you were doing because you invited us in there through giving. But God, more than anything, I just ask that grace would be a church filled with faithful people, faithful to your word, faithful to obedience in you, and faithful to entrust you with their finances. God, we ask these things in your son's name. Amen.

All right. Well, good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here and making grace a part of your Sunday. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service if you'd like to do that as well. This is the fourth part of our series that we're kicking the year off with called Prayers for You. So it's different aspects of life and kind of prayers over those things for 2025. And so we've looked at marriage, and we've looked at kids and legacy. We've looked at life in general. And this morning, we're going to talk about finances. We have a prayer for you with your finances in 2025. And now as I say that, that this morning, I'm going to do the sermon about money, the whole room tightens up, right? Some of you brought guests and you just thought, are you serious right now? This is their first time and this is what you're going to preach. Some of you are probably here for the first time. You wandered in, maybe you've watched a few online and now you're like, okay, I'm going to go kick the tires. And on your very first Sunday, you're like, I'd like a pass, please. Can I come back next Sunday when we're not talking about money? And so I know that the room gets tight when this topic comes up. I'll be honest with you. I don't love talking about this either. And I'm going to tell you why in a minute. But just because I know that that's in the room, I want to say the quiet part out loud to diffuse maybe some of the discomfort around this topic, particularly in a church setting. This is the first thing on your notes. If you have a bulletin on the top of your notes, there's no fill in the blanks. This is just a statement that I'm writing for you that I'm going to say out loud and we are going to acknowledge. This morning is not a thinly veiled attempt to use the Bible to guilt you into giving us your money. Okay? That is not what we are doing. I've been in those. I've sat in those sermons. And they strike me as incredibly disingenuous. And if you have been a part of Grace for any length of time now, I've been here since 2017, April of 2017. I'm finishing up, believe it or not, my eighth year here. You know that I don't preach like that about money. You know that it is really important to me that this not be self-serving. And that's why I don't love to talk about it all the time, because it's really, really hard to thread the needle of appropriate biblical teaching on the topic that doesn't come across as self-serving for me. Because, let's say this part out loud too, I have a vested personal interest in you getting good at this. Right? I do. But that's not the place that I'm coming from. I just have to acknowledge that as true. I actually, and so I know that this is going on. This is kind of the reason why I don't, I'm not, I don't just jump at the chance to preach about money all the time. I was talking to a buddy yesterday and he said, what are you preaching about tomorrow? He doesn't go to church here. He lives, he lives down in Fuqua. He said, what are you preaching about tomorrow? And I said, I'm preaching about money. And he goes, ah, the obligatory money sermon so you can get that building built, huh? And I went, sure. But we know that that's in the mix, right? We know that those thoughts exist. And I can acknowledge that too. And I've been on both sides of it. So the absolute last thing I want to do is be disingenuous in what I'm sharing with you this morning. But here's the reality. The Bible talks about giving and finances a lot. If you do a quick Google, you'll find people out there who say that money is the topic that Jesus spoke about the most in his ministry. Now that is misleading because I'm not going to get into why because I have a lot to cover and I don't have time to get into why. That's misleading. I don't think it's fair to say that the most important topic to Christ in his lifetime was money. He gave a lot of examples that involved money, but he wasn't talking specifically about giving or about finances. But the reality is that this topic comes up a lot in the Bible. And if you were to make a grid of all the topics in the Bible, all the things that show up throughout Scripture, and then look at how often in my nearly eight years I've addressed those things, one of the things that the grid would reveal is that I have fallen woefully short of my responsibility to teach us about this topic because it is one that shows up with great frequency in Scripture and does not show up with great frequency in my preaching calendar. So let's talk about money this morning because the Bible talks about it way more than we do. To illustrate this point and to give us just a good swath of the philosophy of giving from Scripture, and then to draw out a singular point that I believe jumps out of the text of all of these verses, I want to read to you six different passages on money. It sounds like a lot. It is a lot. They're going to be on the screen. You read with me. This is an overview beginning all the way back in Deuteronomy, moving all the way to the book of James, kind of a sweeping view of how God thinks about giving in his children. We're going to start in Deuteronomy chapter 15. He writes, there will always be poor people in the land. Therefore, I command you to be open-handed toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land. There's always going to be poor people, and you should always give to them. This is an instruction from very, very early on. Deuteronomy is the fifth book of the Bible, and it means the law repeated. So it's really just a summary of the first four books, more specifically Leviticus and Numbers. So this is the very beginning, the foundation of faith. He is saying from the get-go, you will always have needy people around you. Be the people who give to them. And then we jump to the end of the Bible, James chapter 2, suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, go in peace, keep warm and well fed, but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? What good are you? You're just a well-wisher. I remember years ago, and I told, sorry, Andrea, I told Andrea, who's running our slides very faithfully this morning, that I wasn't going to talk in between these verses so she could leave them up there. So now there should be a blank slide, but there's not because I'm going to tell you something real quick. I remember a few years ago when Jen and I first moved here, we lived off of Tealbrier, right there off of Spring Forest. And so we would go to the Harris Teeter and there's a St. Jacques used to be in there. And next to it, some store went out of business. And then another store called Pet Wants was going up in there. And because I frequented the Harris Teeter, I noticed that they were there. And I noticed it was kind of a mom and pop operation. It looked like family was doing it. They were working really hard in the store for several weeks to revamp it. And one night I was at the grocery store late. Probably when you live 35 seconds away from the grocery store, your nine o'clock purchase of Ben and Jerry's statistic goes through the roof. Okay. So I was heading over there probably to get a pint of Ben and Jerry's Americone Dream. Thank you very much. And I noticed that they were working in there. And I was just touched by how hard they're working on this place and the hopes that they must have for this place. And so I went and I knocked on the door and some guy looks at me like, what, we're closed, you know? And I go, and so he opened the door and I said, hey, I just want to say, I've seen you working really hard. I've seen what you guys are doing here. I think it's great. I hope it goes really well for you. I hope this is a fantastic store. And he goes, thanks so much. We're actually having a friends and family sale tomorrow if you'd like to stop by and get anything. And I went, okay, yeah, great, thank you. And the door shut, and I was like, no way. I'm not buying anything from there. I don't like my dog. I'm not going to go spend money on a thing I don't want. I don't even want to spend the money we do spend on her. I'm not going in your store ever. I just hope it goes well. And what I realized is it's one thing to be a well-wisher. It's another thing to be bought in. James says, don't be a well-wisher. Oh, you're cold and you're hungry and you need? Be warm and well-fed. I'm going to keep my wallet in my pocket. Don't be a well-wisher. Malachi 3, 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. Then Jesus in Mark chapter 12 tells us this, but a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins worth only a few cents. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. In 2 Corinthians, Paul writes about giving. Remember this, whoever then last, Jesus in Matthew chapter 6. This is a big verse about giving that is really indicative of the culture of giving a grace. And so while we're here, I just wanted to share this little bit about the way that money is handled here, because if you haven't been going here for a long time, you may actually not know this. But at Grace, this predates me. This was the culture when I got here. They've always taken very seriously, we've always taken very seriously, this direction from Christ to not let your right hand know what your left hand is doing, to give in secret and to give in private and not ostentatiously. And because of that, when you give, there are only two people on the planet who see what you give. One is our office manager, Julie, our children's assistant office manager, Julie Sauls, but that's because someone has to manually process the check. So if you write a check, someone has to fill out a deposit slip and put that in. Someone has to see it, and so that's her job. That falls to her to do it. The only other person who sees what is given, this includes elders and this includes our finance committee, is our finance manager, a guy named Tom Ledoux. Tom lives in Michigan, and you never have to look him in the eye, so it's a really great setup for you, right? You won't find yourself in Bible study with Tom feeling uncomfortable because he knows some things. Those are the only two people. No one else knows, no one else has access, no one else sees, and so this is something we take very seriously. But as I looked at all of these verses, I don't know as I read through those what kinds of themes leapt out to you. I don't know what you perceived. I don't know what kind of impression they made. And we could probably look through those six verses and do 12 sermons out of them. There's enough things in there that are worth talking about and unpacking. But the thing that I saw the most as I went through those verses, because it wasn't just those verses that I read. When I sat down to do this and to start preparing for the sermon, I just read all the verses I could find on giving in Scripture. And one of the things that was incredibly apparent as I read through those, and I think is's highlighted specifically in these verses is this. Giving has never been optional. Giving for God's children. If you call God your father and Jesus your savior. Giving has never ever been optional. If you look back through the verses. Especially that last one. Jesus' words about giving to the needy and not letting your right hand know what your left hand is doing, how does it start out? So when you give to the needy, not if, when you do it. Deuteronomy, very beginning, there will always be poor people. Be people who give to the poor people. James, when you encounter someone who is needy, and you will, be the person that gives to them. Malachi, bring the whole tithe into the storehouse. The tithe that you're giving, that you're expected to give, that's going to be given, bring it into my temple. When Jesus looks at the poor widow and she gives two cents, I think sometimes we would think that he would go to her and he would say, hey, you take that back. You need that more than the church does. You take it. That's not what he does. Instead, he honors it because of the assumption that this is something that she is going to do. In Corinthians, whoever sows sparingly will reap sparingly and vice versa. But he says, when you give, not if you decide to give, but when you give, determine what you want to do, not out of a sense of ought, but out of a sense of want to, because God loves a cheerful giver. But what I see as I read through these scriptures and I read through the rest of the Bible about these scriptures or about this topic is that giving is not optional at all. In fact, giving is essential to becoming a mature, healthy believer. It is part of the essential nature of sanctification and growing in our spiritual maturity and in the depth of our spiritual lives. As a matter of fact, I would say it like this. Thinking that you can become a healthy Christian without the discipline of giving is like thinking you can become a healthy person without the discipline of exercise. If you want to be healthy, if you want a good heart rate, if you want your blood work to come in right, and I'm about to be 44 next month, so I'm getting to an age where I have to start caring about those things, and I'll probably know what my cholesterol is here in the next few months. If you want to be a healthy person, you can eat right. You can eat like a rabbit. You can monitor what goes into your system. You can be careful about not consuming alcohol or not consuming other chemicals or whatever it is. You can be careful about what goes into your body. You can be careful about what you eat. You can be diligent about your sleep time. You can do a lot of healthy things. But until you're exercising, until you're getting your heart rate up for 30 minutes a day, you will not be a healthy person. And I believe that trying to be a healthy Christian, trying to grow in our faith and in our spiritual maturity without the discipline of giving is just as silly and as much of a pipe dream as it is to try to be a healthy person who does not exercise. Which is why it's important for us as we look through scripture to acknowledge giving, in God's view, has never been optional. And I don't think that that's how we think about it. I think for a lot of us, we do think of it as optional. Maybe not intentionally, but by default and behaviorally, we approach it as something that maybe I need to do one day sometimes. I used to joke, I used to be, when I would drive, I was a bit of a speeder. Our state patrol person is not here today. So yeah, I speed all the time. And the older I get, the less I do it. This morning I was driving in, it's 0 dark 30 on 540 to get here. And I looked down, I went, because I was driving and I literally thought, am I going too fast? And I looked down and I was doing 58 miles an hour. So I was, it was under control. So I don't speed very much anymore, but I'll still do it sometimes. And I'm always going to go a little bit over the speed limit because, come on, no one wants to be. Don't be the jerk that goes to speed limit. Nobody likes you on the road if that's what you do. Get out of the way. And so I used to joke because sometimes it would come up in different circles, especially like pastor circles where you're trying to out-compete each other in righteousness, and someone would be like, yeah, I don't speed because I believe it's a sin and it's wrong. And I would just say like, you may be right, but God hasn't gotten that far down the conviction tree on me yet. All right? There's some bigger fish to fry in my life than going eight over. All right? So I haven't gotten to that portion of conviction. I think some of us think about giving that way. Yeah, that's a thing I need to do one day. I know that's an essential part of the Christian life, but, but not yet. There's some bigger fish to fry. And I think what these, what these scriptures show us is no, no, that's a pretty important one. That's what, that's essential to the nature of being a Christian. It's an expected thing of believers. But I think that even in light of that, maybe we don't put it off and go, gosh, one day I'm just not there yet. Later on in my spiritual maturity, I will get there. Maybe we think of it like this. Maybe it's just hard for us to do it. Maybe we don't have a lot of extra right now. I mean, inflation's up. Things are tough. That's a bit, I mean, everybody, a lot of people that I know have had to tighten the purse strings a little bit in the last two years. And so maybe for us, the idea of giving is something that we want to do, but we just don't feel like we can afford it. Or we just don't feel like it's wise. And so we put it off. But whenever I think about that, first of all, if you look at the way that Jesus applauds the old lady who gives out of little, that's a good indicator that that may not be a good way to think about giving. I can't afford it, so I'm not going to do it. Another thing that informs my thinking on this is a conversation I had with Jen years ago. Early on in our marriage, I was a poor student pastor and she was a poor private school teacher. And we bought our house. We got married in 2006. We bought our first house in 2007. Excuse me. We bought our first house in 2007, which is wonderful because we bought it, I think, for like $180,000, our very first house. It took 10 years for that house to be worth $180,000 again. It was just right at the brink of the recession. By the next year, that thing was worth $125,000. Great. So we're not living in plenty. We are living in very close to want. We don't have a lot. And Jen's dad has always been a remarkably generous man. And I remember making the comment to her, I hope one day we make more money and live more comfortably so that we can be generous like your dad is. I want to have that experience and be that kind of, now the word I would use is be that conduit of grace to other people. And Jen said, yes, I hope so too, but my daddy always taught me that the way you give when you don't have a lot is the way that you will give when you do have a lot. So the generosity trait starts early. And his larger point was, if we are people who think one day when I have more margin, I'll be more generous. There's no magical generosity button that gets hit when you have plenty. However generous you are with little is how generous you will be with a lot. So if you want to be generous one day, then you need to start being generous today. It's never been optional. And because of that, the encouragement today, what I want to press upon you is just the idea of being faithful in your giving. My prayer for you, these are prayers for you. My prayer for you for your finances this year is very, very simple. My prayer is that you would be faithful in your giving, whether you're giving out of little or you're giving out of much. Each one has different kinds of pains associated with it. But my prayer is that you would be faithful to what God expects of his children, understanding that giving is what's best for you. Being a generous person is what's best for you. Understanding that you will not mature as a Christian into full maturity if this is not a part of your regular discipline. So my prayer for you is that whether you give out of little or you give out of a lot, that you would simply be faithful in that giving. And like everything else, when God tells us we have to do something, when God says do this or don't do that, it is always because he has our best interest in mind. So giving and being a generous person is actually what's best for us, which is why I'm preaching the sermon today. Because if you study scripture, it's very clear that this is what God wants for us. And if I don't tell you that, then I'm derelict in my duty. So we can be adults and have an honest conversation about it. Giving is something that God wants you to do. It has never, ever been optional. Now, the question then becomes, okay, if it's what's best for me, why is it what's best for me to give away the money that I feel like I've earned? Here's why. Three reasons. There's more than this, but three reasons. Giving reminds us, invites us, and fuels us. The act of giving reminds us, invites us, and fuels us. Here's what I mean. The act of giving reminds us, first and foremost, that what we're giving is not ours to give. We are simply giving back to God what he has entrusted us with. It is the idea of stewardship. The act of giving, whether it's to the church or to a nonprofit that you believe in or to anything else that's going on in God's kingdom, the act of giving to God's kingdom is a reminder every time I am giving out of my allotment that God has assigned to me, I am not giving out of my possessions. Do you see the difference? God has allocated his resources out amongst us, and he's trusted us to be good stewards of those resources and to direct those in ways that build his kingdom, not our own. This is the idea of kingdom builders. This is also the idea of being a conduit of grace. A conduit connects to one source and funnels those resources to another source. So when I say at grace, we are conduits of grace. Yes, we offer grace to one another, but we're also, we also understand and see our lives as a conduit from God to the people and to building his kingdom. And so when we give, we are reminded of that conduit status. We are reminded of who we are and what we have. And we're even reminded if we're willing to take it a step further. Okay, I have these resources and I'm reminded that they're God's, they're not mine. I would take it a step further and I would say, yes, and the talents and abilities that you applied to garner those resources were also given to you by God to be a steward of and to use. So the fact that he allowed us to have resources is his gift and grace anyway, so we continue to be a funnel and let those resources flow out of us in generosity. It reminds us of how we should think about our finances and our resources. It puts us in the proper perspective. A wonderful thing about giving, maybe the best part, is that it invites us. You could say it invests us here too, but giving invites us into ministries that we might not be capable of doing ourselves. It's one thing to go to a charity dinner, to a charity gala where they're going to give you a cold chicken or a cold barbecue or something and a salad that's really terrible. Like we've all been. It's like $150 a plate and I'd rather go to McDonald's. But you go and you sit and you hear about the ministry and you hear about the thing and maybe you write a check for $200 or whatever it is you do. It's one thing to go to a charity gala or a charity dinner. It's another thing to be a giver to that ministry and go participate in the blessing of what God is doing and where he is doing it, to be invested in this ministry so that when you hear the stories of the families that are reached, when you hear the stories of the children that are no longer orphaned, when you hear the stories of the women in third world countries who have been equipped with skills and have been running a successful small business on their own that is sustaining their family in ways that they were never capable of, you get to feel like a participant in that. You realize that your participation in that nonprofit, in that entity, in that institution is something that can be celebrated by you because I'm a part of this. It invites you into areas of God's kingdom that you might not otherwise go, and it invests you in what those people are doing. And I say this with all candor. God may not have put you in a situation in your life where you have the time, the skill set, the life circumstances that allow you to go to an African country and start a ministry that prohibits children from becoming orphans and trains up their moms so that they can sustain their family. You might not have the bandwidth to go to another country and start that ministry. But somebody else has had that bandwidth. And somebody else has done that. And you've got the bandwidth to go make money. God's given you those gifts to do that and you're good at it. Maybe you're good at it so that you can funnel those gifts into other areas of God's kingdom where his work is being done and where God is showing up. And now I might not have the skill set to go down the street and start the nonprofit and do English as a second language for Spanish-speaking parents who are just trying to navigate their kids through middle school. But I have the resources to help and to fund those who do have those gifts and talents. And so the opportunity to give invites us into ministries and into opportunities and into blessings that we might not otherwise have based on our gifting and our life circumstances and where we are. It invests us in what's happening there. And it's a tremendous privilege to do that. I think one of the great benefits of investing our lives in things that build God's kingdom is that he gives us front row seats into places where we would not otherwise get to go. One of my great joys of being a pastor is the sacred spaces that I get invited into because of my position. Sitting in the hospital room in the middle of fear and praying with people. I realize that's not a normal place for people to get invited. Being entrusted with people who come and sit down in my office and ask for help in certain areas of their life or ask for prayer about this or advice about this, I realize that that's not a typical life experience for everyone. Having the opportunity when there's something on my heart that I really feel like I need to say, I have a platform where I can do that. There's different things about my position that give me access to front row seats to what God is doing in different places that I might not otherwise get. And by being a person who is a generous giver, we now have front row seats into different places where God is doing work and we're showing up to build his kingdom and we get a unique perspective there. It's an invitation into the blessing of what God is doing. And then finally, candidly, giving fuels us. It fuels our desire to give more, to be more, to be involved more, but it also fuels the ministries of God. This is an undeniable fact. The very first time God instructs his people to give is in the book of Numbers. And do you know why he does it? He says, bring your tithe to the temple because the Levites are not allowed to have jobs. They do this all the time and we need to be able to sustain them as a society. So the other 11 tribes, you give 10% of what you have to the Levites so that they can serve us as our priests. It's God said to begin to give, to fuel the ministries that he is doing. And so giving, quite literally, fuels the ministries going on around us. To this end, grace is fueled by our partners. And this is where I just want to speak to you directly because you're grownups. This church is fueled by the generous giving of our partners. If you guys don't give generously, this all goes away. We have four full-time staff people. We have three part-time staff people. We pay them. If we don't give, Miss Erin is the first one on the chopping block. Out of here. Right away. No kids ministry. We have to pay rent. We pay $13,000 a month for this dump. All right? We do. We can't even get the pole removed. And every year they charge us more for common area maintenance so that our grass can look cruddy out there and we don't have any. We have to keep the lights on. We fund different ministries through the church. The reality of this place is that it is fueled by the partners. And if that's not happening, then this place doesn't happen. So one of the things that I've started doing in our Discover Grace class, if you want to be a partner of grace and you come to the class, I think we're going to have one in February or later this month, I guess. At some point we go, okay, what is required to be a partner here? And it's not in the writing yet, but I've started to say, if you want to be a partner with us, nothing's compelling you to do that. If you're here this morning and you're not a partner of grace, which we have partners, we don't have members because members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. That's how we do it here. If you're here and you're just like, man, I'm kicking the tires, then what I would tell you is this part's not for you. It's for you one day, wherever you go, what I'm about to say is for you. But if you don't call yourself a partner at grace, then this part's not for you. But for the folks who come to Discover Grace, we say there's nothing compelling you to be a partner. You can come, and you can volunteer, and you can be in small group, and you can be an active participant in our church to whatever degree you want to be besides sitting on a committee or becoming an elder. But if you want to partner with us, then partner with us and support us financially. So here's what I would say about that. Scripture, and this is important, does not explicitly say anywhere that you should give to your local church. It does not come out and say that anywhere. But I think that's because the concept of a local church hadn't yet been, it was just the church, the church in Ephesus, the church in Rome, the church in Thessalonica. It was just the church. And in those churches, the expectation is you are giving because that's always been the expectation because the entire scope of scripture assumes that we know that. So what I would say is, even though it doesn't explicitly say it in the Bible, that I believe that you should give to your local church. I really do think that, and it took me some years to be able to say that, but the more I think about it, the more I study, the more I talk about it, the more I'm convinced that if you are a Christian, you should A, be a part of a local church, and B, you should give to that church. So I know the implications of that. We can all connect the dots. If you're a part of grace, you should give to grace. That's what Nate's saying. Sure. But here's what else I'll say. If you are a part of grace, and I don't think a lot of pastors would say this, and maybe the finance committee will get mad at me for saying this, but if you are a part of grace, but you don't give to grace, you need to find a church that compels you to give and go there. You need to go to a church that does inspire you to give. Because what I believe is, if you're here and you're thriving and your spiritual life is becoming healthy and your kids are thriving and they're being taught about Christ and you're experiencing community community. And you would call grace a blessing in your life. And you feel like you or your family or you and your spouse have benefited from grace. Then you ought to support grace so that other people can benefit in the same way. Because we are fueled by that giving. And if the ministry that you are experiencing from us is not compelling enough to make you want to partner with us in giving, then because I believe you should give to a local church, I have to believe that you should find one that compels you. But that's the encouragement this morning. Plain and simple. Adult to adult. This is what scripture teaches. We should be givers. We should be compelled to give to God's kingdom, particularly the parts of it where we are personally benefiting from that. So if we are a part of grace, we should give. Which brings me back to my prayer for you this year, that you would simply be faithful in your giving. I always say this, and I know a little bit contradictory to what I just said, but I can also be honest with you enough to say this. If you are someone, or if you are a couple, who is not in the habit of giving, and this is going to be a new exercise for you, and it feels remotely manipulative or self-serving that I'm trying to get you to give to grace, I would encourage you, as your brother in Christ, begin to give to things that aren't grace but that God is still doing. Begin to give to God's kingdom. Become a giver. And then in time, as it feels right, because God loves a cheerful giver, direct some of that towards your local church. But if you think that what I'm saying is self-serving, then don't give to grace. Don't do it under compulsion. But I would encourage you to begin that discipline and watch what God does as you become generous with your resources. So that's my prayer for you this year. And every year as we move forward. That as God's children, as believers, you would take seriously the teaching about giving in Scripture. And that you would be a person who is a giver. My prayer is that whether you have a little or a lot, that you would simply be faithful. Because that's what God calls us to. Let me pray that over us. Father, thank you for what we have. Thank you for what you've entrusted to us. I pray, God, that we would be good stewards of the resources that you've allocated to us, whether that's time or talent or treasure. Father, I pray that for those of us who are not yet people who give, for whatever reason, that we would be convicted and compelled to take steps towards becoming those people. That we would quit viewing this as something that's optional for your children, but view it as something that's necessary and good. Let us step into that generosity. Father, for those of us who were convicted by this long ago and are regular givers, I pray that we would be inspired. That we would be encouraged. That we would be grateful for all the opportunities we've had to give and all the times we got to sit on the front lines of what you were doing because you invited us in there through giving. But God, more than anything, I just ask that grace would be a church filled with faithful people, faithful to your word, faithful to obedience in you, and faithful to entrust you with their finances. God, we ask these things in your son's name. Amen.