Transcription
Hey, big welcome to our online family. Wherever you're watching from, if you don't mind, maybe drop it in the chat, tell us where you are right now, where you're watching from. And I wanna introduce to you a speaker today. Bobby Gruenewald is the founder and the CEO of the Youversion Bible App. He's one of my best friends and he can bench press 365 pounds. He's gonna tell you about the blessings of God, because God not only wants to bless you, but he wants you to be even more blessed. Here's Pastor Bobby.
Now what I love about our church is how generous our church is. I mean, so many of you are incredibly generous. Now I know that that's not everybody, 'cause I'm sure that there's some people that are kind of warming up to generosity. Maybe not quite there yet, but I wanna believe that you desire to be generous because don't we all want to be generous, even if we are not generous yet? But with the economy, with inflation, it can seem like maybe it's just not able to be generous yet. Perhaps if you had a higher income, you'd be able to be generous. Maybe a bigger bank balance or even a bank balance, you could be generous. Maybe a little less debt. Or maybe those of you that have resources, maybe you're just looking for a little more certainty, because right now things seem uncertain and you just like to kind of know what things are gonna look like. And once you kind of get that settled out, then perhaps you could be generous. I completely get it, because I've thought all of those same things. But today, what I'd like to do is just challenge us that maybe God could stretch our faith just a little bit and we'd be able to experience what Jesus said when he said that it's more blessed to give than it is to receive. So the title of today's message is More Blessed. Let's pray.
Father, we thank you that you're a generous God, that you so love the world that you gave, and we thank you right now for your presence, whether we're sitting in a church or whether we're watching this on our phone or at church online, we know that you're here with us and we just pray that your Holy Spirit would speak to us right now, that we'd be able to hear your perspective about generosity and that we would overflow with joy at generosity. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
Now, in the early days of our church, we really didn't have much, but God put it on our hearts to be irrationally generous. In fact, he didn't just put it on our hearts, it seemed like he put it on our walls. If you go to any of our campuses or our offices, we have that statement that says, "We'll lead the way with irrational generosity, because we truly believe it's more blessed to give than it is to receive." The problem is that we had the heart to give, but we just weren't sure if we had the resources to be able to give irrationally. So we begin studying the Bible and God started speaking to us and we read in 2nd Corinthians 8 where Paul's talking to Corinthians and he says, "And now, brothers and sisters, we want you to know about the grace that God has given the Macedonian churches. In the midst of a very severe trial, their overflowing joy and their extreme poverty welled up in rich generosity. For I testify that they gave as much as they were able and even beyond their ability. Entirely on their own, they urgently pleaded with us for the privilege of sharing in this service to the Lord's people." You see, the people in Macedonia were really poor. I mean like dirt poor. And yet, Paul is using them as an example to the church in corn of rich generosity. How could people that had so little, how could they possibly give so much? And it was because it wasn't actually about the amount, but it was about their mindset. See, so many times we have mindsets that we don't realize limit us, hold us back. The church of Macedonia, they were actually begging Paul for the opportunity to give. They wanted to participate in giving and they had overflowing joy in the giving in spite of their extreme poverty. Well, I think a lot of times we have mindsets that we don't really realize the limitations of. And one of those mindsets that I know that a lot of people suffer with is a mindset that I called the not-enough mindset. Like, I just don't have enough time. I just don't have enough money. I mean there's just a limited amount of resource and I just feel like I never have enough. What's interesting about that mindset is I know people that have $100 and feel like they don't have enough. I know people that have $1,000 and feel like they don't have enough. And I actually know people that have millions of dollars and still feel like they don't have enough. You see, not enough is not an amount. It's a mindset. It's just a mindset. You see, we serve an abundant God who not only wants to provide more than what we need, but he also wants to meet the needs of others through us. And what we need to do is adjust our mindset, if we have that mindset, from not-enough mindset to more-than-enough mindset.
This is the very thing that we were going through in the early days of our church as we were really, really struggling financially. Now here's kind of the good news. We were growing as a church. We had a lot of people that were coming, but that required more buildings and more space to put the people people, and it had costs associated with it, and the expenses were something we were struggling to keep up with. And to give you perspective, we were borrowing as much money as the bank would loan us. We'd actually mortgaged all the properties that we could to be able to get enough money to build the next building, to have the resources. And I even remember a conversation that we were having as a leadership team where we're asking if any of us had any extra savings that we might be able to loan the church to make payroll that week. Some of you could relate to that. It was tight. It was really tight. But in the midst of that, we just really felt like God wanted us to be irrationally generous. So we said, "What are some other things that we have?" We started to look around and we had people that had been creating content and graphics and videos and curriculum for children and all these talented people had come on our team. But those resources were used on a weekend and then oftentimes would sit on a hard drive or a shelf or sometimes even get thrown away. They were just used for that weekend. We thought, what if we could make those available to other churches and other ministries? Maybe they could benefit from it. Well, we began to look into this and realize that at that time what was the most common way to distribute those resources was to package them up and to sell them to like make DVDs and to print curriculum and to sell those for other ministries to be able to use. It was super common. Many churches did it. And we were all from former business background, so we thought, well, this makes total sense because we could actually use another revenue stream at the church. That just seemed to make sense given the financial situation we're in. But every time there was a proposal, every time we had an opportunity to do it, it just felt like God said, "No, I want you to be irrationally generous." What is irrational generosity? It's generosity that doesn't make sense, right? It's not rational. And so as we began to pray about that and think about how can we do it, we just kept thinking, I just don't think we have enough resources to be able to give those away. Meaning, it was gonna take money to actually give it away. It wasn't like we could just say, "Here, come and get it." We're gonna have to build a website, we're gonna have to have staff resources go into it to do it. And so even the act of giving it was going to cost financial resources, which were really, really sparse and we just felt like we didn't have enough.
But January of 2006, I remember the meeting, our leadership team was there and we'd been talking about this, praying about it for some time. And it became clear in that meeting that God was asking us to step out in faith and say, "Look, if you really trust me, then you'll trust me in this." And so we in faith, we stepped out and said we're going to do it. In that March of that year, we actually launched a website that today is called open.life.church. And that website is a website that we used to give all these resources away for free. And we started to hear from pastors that were downloading the resources, we had no idea what God was gonna do, but we started getting reports back and a bivocational pastor would report back that they actually were just about to quit ministry, and then they saw these resources and they thought, "I can go on because I can now focus on shepherding my church instead of creating videos and content." (congregation applauds) And it went from tens of pastors, hundreds of pastors and church leaders to thousands of pastors and church leaders. And just recently, we passed a milestone where now 610,000 pastors and church leaders have downloaded, wait, 20 million different resources. (congregation cheers) Yeah. It's incredible. And just think about that. That's not 610,000 people. That's 610,000 leaders leading congregations of people, which means there were millions of people that have benefited from that one step of faith. But it doesn't actually stop there, because that step of faith became the foundation that things like the YOUversion Bible were built on top of, things like Church Online and a Church Online platform where we share our resources with other churches. So there are literally hundreds of millions of people that have benefited from that step of faith. But God went even further with it, because that same step of faith inspired other ministries to do the same thing that we did. So we have 39 different churches and ministries that distribute their resources through our website, and we have a movement of churches that do it, where today it's probably more unusual to buy resources from churches than it is to download them for free. That's something... So God literally changed the face of the church as a result of that step of faith. But but catch this: we were wondering how we would have enough financially to be able to make it happen. And not only did God provide the financial resources for us to build the website and for us to staff it and to do that, but the next campus that we went to build, guess what? We didn't have to borrow. And then the campus after that, we didn't have to borrow. (congregation applauds) And dozens and dozens and dozens of campuses later, we didn't have to borrow to build any of those campuses. In fact, that insurmountable debt that we had in January of 2006 was completely eliminated. And there's not a single campus that has a mortgage on it today, which is this really incredible, you think about it. (congregation applauds) You see, God provided and gave us more than enough, even though we weren't sure if we had enough, more than enough to meet our needs and more than enough to meet the needs of others. You see in God's economy, it's actually pretty interesting, because when you give to God, you don't lose anything. You actually gain something, You gain the opportunity to participate in what he's doing. It's like a crazy type of economy where the math doesn't really seem to work and that's what makes irrational generosity something special to do.
Well, you might be saying to me when I tell you that story that, Bobby, it's actually easy for you to do that or easier if you do that because that wasn't your money. Right? Is that true? I mean, it's easier to give if it's not your money. Well, that's actually a good point. In fact, I'm gonna make that the second point of my talk. (congregation laughs) It's easier to give when it's not your money. And what we have to recognize and understand is that we serve a God who is generous and provides for us, and everything that we have actually comes from him. It's not ours. If you read in 1st Chronicles 29:14, this is David speaking, he says, "But who am I and who are my people that we should be able to give as generously as this? Everything comes from you, and we have given you only what comes from your hand." You see, when you start to really gain that perspective and realize that these are not our resources, but these are God's resources, then that makes it easier to give. We're simply stewarding his resources. So we need to move our mindset from my resources to God's resources. And when we do that, it unlocks something different. You start looking for ways you can bless people. You start thinking about God's given me these resources, what can I do with them? And you also realize that we serve this God that's abundant, he wants to provide for my needs and also wants to bless other people through me. You see, we're just managers of those resources.
Now, I don't know about you, but in most families there's at least one person who manages the finances, pays the bills, writes the checks, does the online bill pay all that. So if you're that person in your family, raise your hand and say, "I'm the one that manages the finances." All right, now say "I'm the one that spends the money." How about that? Anybody willing to... Oh yeah. More hands on the spending. And there's a little bit of concern there. Well, in my family, my wife, Melissa, she's a CPA. And so from the beginning of our marriage, she always managed the money. She always handled the checkbook, she always handle our finances. I'm the spender, (congregation laughs) but I'm also the investor. So I have a degree in finance. And so any money we invest, that's kind of one of my responsibilities is to invest it. And they say that managing money and conversations about money in your relationships and especially in your marriages is a really tricky situation. Sometimes, it's the type of thing that people fight over a lot. In fact, they say unfortunately many divorces oftentimes are triggered by financial type arguments and things that are concerns that people have with their finances. Well, I'm really blessed, because in the 26 years that I've been married to my wife, we've had plenty of arguments. In fact, some this week, but never, not a single time have we ever had an argument about money. And it's not 'cause we've always had money, but I think it's because of one simple rule that we had from the day that we got married. And that rule is that any purchases that we make over a certain dollar amount, we both had to be in agreement on. It's pretty simple. I mean, it can seem a little bit tedious, but just I check with her or she checks with me and we're on the same page. It doesn't mean that we always make the best financial decisions, but just means we make 'em together, right? We don't have any arguments about money. And when we first got started, the threshold of what that number was, of what was a significant amount of money was $10. It really was, I know it seems funny, but that was a lot of money to us when we got married, in fact, $10 was our weekly budget for food when we got married. So it was ramen noodles, spaghetti without meat, you know, that was kind of what our diet consisted of back then. But God began to bless our family through the careers that we had. I was an entrepreneur, had a company and sold it, started another company and sold it. My wife had a really successful career in a corporate accounting, and God began to provide resources for us. And I began to invest those resources and do that, I did spend a little bit of 'em, but I would invest those resources, and Melissa continued to manage the money. And I noticed one day in our checking account that we had what I consider to be a pretty high balance in the checking account. So I talked to her, I said, "Melissa, why's the balance so high in the checking account? What if we just move some of that over to investments? That seems like that would be something smarter to do with the money." And she said, "No, I wanna leave the balance where it is." I was like, "Okay, well I mean she's in charge of the checkbook and that's her thing. So no big deal. Well, a couple months later we were driving home from church and she said, "Bobby, I need to talk to you about something." She said, "You know our rule about over a certain dollar amount, we have to be in agreement on things?" And said, "Yeah." She said, "Well, I did something and I didn't ask you before I did it." I said, "Okay, well how much was it? What was it for?" You know? And she said, "Well, in church tonight, Pastor Craig was speaking, and the Holy Spirit really began to speak to me. And he said, 'Why aren't you trusting me with everything?'" And she said, "I knew exactly what he was talking about, because the reason that I keep that high balance in the checking account is because I just felt like that was mine. And I know that God provides everything for us, but it just made me feel safe, made me feel secure. And while there's nothing wrong with saving money for bad things that might happen," she said, "I realized that I had kind of wrapped up... I wasn't really trusting God with that money. And so I wrote a check." I said, "Okay, well, how much was the check for? Who was it to?" And she said, "I wrote a check to the church for the entire balance of our checking account." (congregation laughs) And I was like, "Well, okay, that's a little more than a hundred dollars," which is what our limit was at that time. But I realized, and I thought it was awesome by the way, I responded positively, I know you're looking for my response. So it was actually really positive. But I love the fact that my wife heard from God and I love even more that she stepped out in obedience. And I knew at that time, 'cause I didn't even know that she was struggling with that, but hearing or talk about it, I knew that that was a breakthrough for her and for us. Because when you recognize that God owns everything and we're just managing his resources, it allows us to trust him completely and fully in what we do.
So what do we know? We know that we need to change our mindset from not-enough to more-than-enough. And we need to change our mindset from my resources to God's resources. And lastly, we need to change our mindset from, I'll give when, to, I'll give now. Now if you read in 2nd Corinthians and go on in chapter eight to verse 11, it reads, and this Paul again talking to the church in Corinth, "Now you should finish what you started. Let the eagerness you showed in the beginning be matched now by your giving. Give in proportion to what you have." You see, what's happening here is Paul's is just talking to church in Corinth a year earlier, the Corinthians actually committed to give, they were eager to give, they gave a little bit, but they were really eager, and they're the first ones that want to give to help support the church in Jerusalem. But they didn't follow through. And what Paul is saying is that you need to match your eagerness to give with giving. If you wanna experience the overflowing joy of generosity, like the Macedonian Church did, you can't just have the intention of giving, the plans to give, the thoughts that one day I'll give or maybe I'll give in the future. But you actually need to give. You need to step into it and be obedient and do it now, not later.
And there's a story that inspires me in this regard and it's about a man named Orville Rogers. So Orville Rogers was born in 1917 and when he was six years old, his father actually abandoned their family, and he didn't grow up with much, but he developed two passions while he was a teenager. One passion was for Jesus because he became a follower of Jesus and he was passionate about his faith, and the other was for aviation, for airplanes. He saw Charles Lindbergh across the Atlantic and he was passionate about aviation. Those things I can relate to 'cause I'm a pilot. Jesus and airplanes. When he got to college, he went to the college at the University of Oklahoma and he got a degree in engineering and he actually learned how to fly airplanes while he was in college. Well, he graduated college and he signed up for seminary because he thought, "I want to give a lifetime of service to the Lord," because of his passion for Jesus. But before he could make it to seminary, he got called to serve our country in World War II. So he actually had the unique responsibility of training and teaching people how to fly bombers. So during World War II, he was teaching the pilots that were flying the bombers in World War II. And after World War II ended, he actually himself flew the B-36 bomber, which was a nuclear capable bomber. And they were always on call just in case their a nuclear war broke out after World War II. When he left the military, he then went to work for Braniff Airlines as a commercial airline pilot. And he had a long career of 32 years as a commercial airline pilot, flying some of those really cool planes that they had back then. Well, when he turned 50, he read a book about health and it inspired him to be a runner at 50 years old. So he started picking up running, and through the rest of his life, he ran a total of 42,000 miles, which is... I mean, I couldn't run 42. So 42,000 is pretty impressive. But get this, at the age of 90, he started to compete in races, and at the age of 99 he actually became the world champion in the 60-meter dash, (congregation cheers) beating out the 92 year old (congregation applauds) that he is running with, come on, by 0.05 seconds. The guy that lost said I should have leaned in, you know. People attribute it to his inexperience since he was younger, only 92. (congregation laughs)
A few months later, I actually met Orville for the first time, and I met him at a Bible translation fundraiser. And I got to hear about his passion that he has for Bible translation. And I said, "Where did this come from? And he'd learned early in his life that even though he had the Bible in English in his language, his heart language, that there were thousands of languages around the world that are yet to receive the Bible in their own heart language. And so he said, he felt like he could contribute to help make that happen. And no, he's not a bible translator, he's a pilot. And so he began to fly airplanes from the US and move them over into position and mission fields so that people could fly missionaries into remote areas so that they could get where the tribes were and the people that spoke these languages to learn the languages and learn how to translate these languages. And so he did this for decades and he did some crazy stuff, like fly single engine airplanes over the Pacific to be able to get 'em all the way over to the Southeast Asia. And he just gave and gave and gave of his time, but he didn't just give of his time, he actually gave of his treasure. He began to fund some of these airplanes that they were purchasing and he contributed generously to Bible translation and to his church and to various other Christian causes that he was passionate about. And there's so many remarkable things about Orville Rogers that inspire me. But the number one thing that inspires me about Orville Rogers is this. In the 40 years that he worked both in the military and as a commercial airline pilot, the total of all of his wages and all of his salary over those 40 years was $1.5 million. Now, that sounds like a lot of money, but if you do the math and divide 1.5 million by 40, you'll realize that that was a pretty modest salary. Airline pilots back then didn't get paid as much. But get this: over the course of Orville's lifetime, by the time he was 101 years old, he gave over $35 million away. (congregation applauds) Yeah, it's incredible. I wanna be like Orville Rogers when I grow up. Except the thing is Orville Rogers didn't wait until he grew up to be Orville Rogers, did he? He actually lived this life of abundance and generosity his entire life. You see, he said that when he got married early on his life, he and his wife began to tithe to their local church, because they just returned 10% of what was already God's back to him. But they felt like, we could do better than a tithe. And so they begin to increase the percentage that they were giving above and beyond the 10%. And they begin to see God's blessings in their life. And they said, you know what? We actually can live on even a little bit less and save. And if we invest, then perhaps God could take the gains in our investments, we could also give that as well. So he would give and he would save and invest. And it just turns out that Orville's actually a pretty good investor. He invested in a few companies you would know, like Walmart and a few things, and that grew over time. And every time it would grow, he would give it away, and he would do it again, and he would give it away, and he would do it again. And he got to experience the overflowing joy of an abundant life. You see, a couple things I learned from Orville, one is it's not too early to begin. And I also learned it's never too late to start. He modeled that through his life and he captured all of those mindsets and principles that we talked about, I heard that even come out of his vocabulary because he believed we served to God that was get more than enough, not a not-enough mindset, but a more-than-enough mindset. And he believed and he knew that they were all of God's resources and none of them were his. And he actually modeled stewardship in such an amazing way, just how he stewarded God's resources and the choices that he made with it. And he also, of course, knew not to give later, give when. He didn't wait until he was 101 years old to give 35 million, he gave now. And he got to see the blessings of that. And he said, "God doesn't just want you to have eternal life, which he does, but God also wants you to have an abundant life." And Orville represented that abundant life to me in a way that I've never seen anyone else do before. And that's actually what I want for you, is I want you to be able to have a life that's so abundant and full that you can live in the overflowing joy of generosity. For those of you that are already experiencing that, I just want you to experience it even more in an even greater way that God would bless you with more resources to be a blessing yet again to others. But for those of you that are standing on the sidelines, just desiring to be generous but not quite sure if you can, I just wanna challenge you to push through those mindsets that limit us and to realize we serve a God that has more than enough to meet our needs. And you might be starting today just with the tithe, just like Orville did with his wife and saying, you know, that's our beginning place. We're just gonna return back to God 10% of what's his. And like I said before, in God's economy, when you give to him, you don't lose anything. You actually gain the ability to participate in what he's doing. And there's so many amazing things that he's doing through this church and through our church. And for others of you, you just need to recognize that you don't own any of it, that it's all his. It's way easier to give when it's not your money and when it's his, you can step into it in confidence and say, "God, I'm just a conduit for your generosity in my life to others around me." God even says, when you give to brothers and sisters that are in need, it's as if you're doing it for him and he remembers it. And when you give give to the church, it's you're supporting the body of Christ. It's like supporting Jesus himself. And so just wanna encourage you, whatever that is that's holding you back, perhaps you've been intending to do it, you've been looking to do it, been planning even to do it some time off the future, when. And my challenge is let's do it now. Let's do it right now. Whatever it is that God calls you to, he will always equip you to do it. And that includes if he's calling you to be generous. And so my prayer for you is just like that for the Macedonian church that you would be in overflowing and joy in your rich generosity. Thank you. (congregation cheers) Pastor Bobby. Thank you. (congregation applauds)
How good is it to be a vessel that God uses to impact the lives of people all over the world? I wanna say to our church family, thank you for your irrational heart of generosity to to lead people to become fully devoted followers of Christ and in the spirit of the generosity of the one who gave to us first, let's all pray together, wherever you're watching from today. God thank you so much for a powerful message to stir our faith, God, that generosity is not just an amount, but it's a mindset, God, that it's not ours, but it's yours, because of your goodness and because of the need in the world and because of the blessings in our life, we won't give when, God, help us to give even now. At all of our churches today, I know many of you are incredibly generous and I hope that all of you want to grow in your generosity, if you'd say absolutely and completely, God, would you build my faith, trust me with even more, God, help me to grow in generosity, would you lift up your hands right now? Just lift them up in a moment of prayer before God, online you can just type it in a comment section. "Help me grow in my generosity." And Father, thank you for an amazing group of Jesus followers. God, stretch us to believe by faith that we can make a difference all over the world. God, help us to give with joy to your church and through your church. But, God, help us to see needs in the lives of people around us. Use, God, what we have to meet needs in the name of Jesus and to bring glory to you, God, stretch us, stir us to be irrationally generous.
As you keep praying today, some of you may say, "You know, I'd like to be generous, but I really don't have a lot of faith for that." If we had a spiritual conversation and I ask you, you know, "Where are you with God?" Some of you say, "I'm not really sure." You might feel guilty for some things that you've done. You might feel like God is far away. And I wanna tell you about one of the most amazing attributes of God. When you think about God, what do you think about? When we think about His love, but what does love do? Love gives. Love always gives. And scripture says that God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son Jesus. Who is Jesus? He is the son of God who is perfect in every way. Jesus was without sin and became the perfect sacrifice for the forgiveness of our sins. He died on a cross and God raised him from the dead so that anyone, and this includes you, it doesn't matter what you've done in your life, it doesn't matter how far you feel from God, anyone who calls out on that name, the name of Jesus and cries out to him, that your sins would be forgiven and you would be completely brand new today. Wherever you're watching from, those of you that may say, "I do, I feel far from God," or, "I feel like I've done too many things wrong," what do we do? We just step away from our old life. We turn from our sins. We repent of them and step towards Jesus. And because of the gift that God gave us, our only reasonable response is to give him back our life. That's what we're doing today. We're submitting to Jesus. Jesus, just take my whole life. God loves you so much no matter what you've done. When you call on Jesus, he hears your prayers, he forgives your sins and he makes you brand new today. Wherever you're watching from, those who say, "I need that, I need need his grace, I want his forgiveness, because of what he's done for me, my response is to give my life to him." Those of you who say "Yes, today I surrender my life. Jesus, I give you my life," that's your prayer, lift your hands high right now all over the places. Lift them up and say, "Yes, that's my prayer today." Praise God for you and others today who say "Yes, Jesus, I surrender to you." (congregation applauds) Those of you online, just type it in the comment section, "I'm surrendering my life to Jesus." Just type that in there. And today, wherever you're watching from, let's just pray aloud together. Pray, Heavenly Father, forgive me of my sins. Jesus, save me. Be my Lord. Fill me with your spirit so I could know you and serve you in all that I do. My life is not my own. I give it to you. Thank you for new life. Now you have mine. In Jesus day, I pray. 'Cause somebody worship God, celebrate day to day. Welcome those born into God's family.