Out of this World Giving

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. You see, what you do with your money infallibly reveals three things about you. It reveals what you most love, it reveals what you trust in, and it reveals what kingdom that you are living for. It's easy, easy, easy to even delude yourself that you are a committed follower of Jesus.

But until it affects this area, it's not really true. Welcome back to another solid week of biblical teaching here on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. As always, I'm your host, Molly Bidevich. Let me ask you a hard question as we get started today. What would your bank balance look like if you were truly all in living for Jesus's kingdom?

Would your giving receipts look different? Today, Pastor J.D. explains how our decisions about money reveal what we truly love and treasure in this world. After all, putting God first in our lives should make us joyful givers who recognize it's all His anyways, viewing giving as an investment in eternal purposes.

So is that true for you? Let's dive into Matthew chapter 6. Here's Pastor J.D. You got your Bible this morning and I hope that you got it. Matthew chapter 6.

Matthew 6. Here is a radical thought for you to start today with. Some of you never thought this before. Very unusual.

Ready? Generosity is not something God wants from you. That's how you thought about it all your life. You've always thought generosity was something that God wants from you to give to Him. What if instead you saw it as generosity being something He wants for you? Generosity is not something God wants from you because, I've told you and you know this, God has no needs. God is not sitting in heaven this morning or any morning wringing His hand saying, oh my goodness, there is so many things that I want to do, but I just can't afford it if only those people at Summit Church with all the money, if they would loan me some, I could get so much good done in the triangle.

Of course He's not saying that. God has no needs. Generosity is something He wants for us because He knows that money has a way of subjugating us, captivating our hearts, tearing us away from Him and subjecting us to all kinds of heartache. Jesus, He talked about money all the time. In fact, if you want to count it up, one out of every three messages, one out of every three teachings that He gave was about money. Y'all, He talked about money more than He did faith and prayer combined. And that's not because Jesus needed money, of course. I mean, nowhere in the gospels do we see a single place where Jesus takes up an offering.

In fact, quite the opposite. He could take five loaves and two fish, a Hebrew happy meal, and He could multiply it so that He turns it into a, you know, all-you-can-eat golden corral buffet right in the middle of the desert. When Jesus got a tax bill in the gospels, He sent Peter out to go catch a fish and the fish in his mouth has all the money for the tax bill.

By the way, I got my car tax bill this week and I sent Adon out my son to go catch a fish, and evidently that's a one-time deal that you don't keep doing that. But Jesus never needed any money, right? He didn't talk about money because He needed money. He talked about money because He knew that what we do with our money and how we relate to our money is the best indicator of where our heart actually belongs. You see, friend, you can talk a big game with faith. You really can't. You know lots of verses.

Put your hands up at the right time. You can make the grunting spiritual sounds and conversations that make people think that you really love and know God. But I'm telling you, Jesus knew there were one or two rock-solid indicators of where your heart actually was. And the best indicator of where your heart was, He knew, was what you are doing with your resources. That's why we say it's not something He wants from you, it's something He wants for you. He teaches on generosity not to get money out of your pockets, but to get idols out of your hearts.

He does it because He cares about you. So here's the thought, friend. Here's the thought.

What if instead of dreading or resenting His teachings on this, what if instead you welcome them because you knew that Jesus in kindness was trying to free you from one of the worst tyrants on earth? Think about how much stress, how much heartache, how much anxiety, in fact, how much relational discord money has brought into your life. If you're married, if you're married, chances are, if I asked you to name the last four fights that you and your spouse had, chances are that half of them are probably somehow money-related. You want to buy a new TV and she wants to redo the bathroom and you're like, I could buy 15 TVs for the price it's going to cost in that bathroom.

And why do we need a nice bathroom? It just doesn't make any sense. If you're dating, I've heard this has become an issue now. My generation got a lot of things wrong. One of the things we got right though, I feel like, was it was just expected if a guy and girl went out that the guy had to pick up the check. And I've heard that's just not the deal anymore. A girl at our church was telling us about a guy that asked her out.

I think he also might be at this church. And so if that's you, I really apologize. But a guy asked her out and she said, she said, we got to the, you went to this really nice restaurant. She said the bill came. It was pretty, you know, pretty. And she goes, I was blown away. Cause he just asked, he said, I'll pay that. He said, he took it. I was pleasantly surprised.

I thought this might be the one. She said, until later that night, I got a Venmo request for half of the amount of that, of that, of that dinner. So, you know, it's like, it's like, Hey, think about how much anxiety it causes in you. God wants you to be free of the tyranny of money. And so today I'm not only going to teach you a few things, I'm going to give you an opportunity to act, to take a tangible step in freeing yourself from that terrible master. We're going to end this message today with a time of commitment in which we renew ourselves to Jesus, to being first in our lives in the area of finances. For some of you, this is going to be a renewal of a commitment you made last year. For others of you, this is going to be the first time that you've ever done something like this. And for those of you in that category, it's going to be a scary moment. I will go ahead and acknowledge that steps of faith, dramatic steps of obedience and faith always are scary moments.

They always are. It's going to be like, I think the way I've described it before is that you're going to be like me when I went rappelling years ago. When I was 16 years old, I went some friends rappelling and none of us had ever been before. And if you've ever done rappelling, it's unlike any other kind of rock climbing because when you're rock climbing, you're, you know, you're using your arms and legs to keep yourself on the rock and the rope is there as a safety net. But when you're rappelling, you're kind of, you're not really leaning on anything except for the rope itself. And so I was first in my group of four friends and, and I'm standing up there and I'm like, I mean, I'm terrified because it's 75 foot drop.

It's on Hanging Rock State Park and I'm just 75 foot drop. And they're telling me to lean back and my friends are, you know, they're looking at me and they're making fun of me and they're sneering at me. And if my manhood had not been on the line, there's no way I would have done this, but my manhood was on the line because when you're 16 years old, it's always on the line. And so I, I, I, I prayed as Jesus to come into my heart one more time just to make sure that that had taken and I leaned back and make a short story, you know, make a long story short.

It was, it was fine. Well, my best friend was going right after me. He was even more terrified of heights than I was. I mean, he was my best friend.

He was better looking than I was, more athletic, girls liked him better. I hated this kid, but he was my best friend and he, but he was up there and I could see him from, you know, down where I was safe when the ground, I could see him shaking and, you know, I knew he was, they were telling him to lean back and he wouldn't do it. So eventually after about five minutes, he takes his, his leg and he reaches down and he finds a foothold and then he finds another one. He begins to kind of work his way down the rock.

He's not repelling. He's just, you know, climbing using the rope. Well, he gets down the rock is, um, he gets to a point in the rock face where the angle goes from this to this.

And you know, as well as I do that, you can't climb on an inverted rock face. And so I see him get down there to that kind of point. And I see his, his leg trying to find a foothold and he can't find one. And he stays there for three or four minutes. And eventually he just turns around and he climbs back. And I've told you that that's a picture of a lot of people's spiritual life is that they've really never learned to trust Jesus. And that's shown because they've never really had to obey him in a difficult area.

And then you come to a point where what brought you there can't take you any farther. And for many of you, that is going to be today because there's an area of obedience. It's not only money, but for some of you, it's this is the main one where what got you here, that the confidence you've had in Jesus, which hasn't been that much, is not going to take you any farther.

He's just been there as a safety net. But in order for you to put him first in the area of finances, you got to actually trust him. Again, for others of you, it's going to be an area of relationships. It's going to be, whatever.

But, but, but I know for most of us, this is the area where the rubber really hits the road. And it's going to be scary because you're going to have to take your confidence off yourself and you're going to just say, Jesus, I trust you enough to obey you and put you first. And that is going to be a terrifying moment, but it is going to be awesome.

It's going to be amazing. And for many of you, it will be a conversion of types. A girl wrote me a couple years ago and I did this and she said, I mean, you probably never heard this before, but I came to actual faith in Christ. When you were talking about putting God first in the area of finances, she said, because it's just been talk. It's just been talking.

I realized I didn't really love and trust him until you push me to this. So that's, what's going to happen today. That's, what's going to happen. I'm praying that today is going to be a mile marker for many of you in your walk of Christ. So, all right, Matthew chapter six, if you have not found it there by now, you should give up.

Okay. And look on with the person next to you. And we are looking at a core teaching of Jesus on money. It says this, no man can serve to master. Serve is by the way, a religious term. It would have meant something like worship. No man can give himself fully to two masters since either he will hate the one and love the other, or he'll be devoted to one and despise the other.

You simply cannot serve both God and money because at some point, they're going to take you to different directions. I say it as a core teaching of Jesus because it appears verbatim in two different places as a part of two different sermons that Jesus taught on money. Which means yes, by the way, that Jesus had sermon points and illustrations he went back to repeatedly. So when I do that, don't hate on me. I'm just being like Jesus.

Okay. Hashtag, what would Jesus do? He repeated stuff in sermons. And so I'm just trying to do what he did. That's a core part of his teaching. He preaches it in Luke as a part of one sermon. In Matthew, he makes it part of a different sermon. So what I want to do is I want to show you what he does in Matthew now, after looking at Luke last week and show you how he builds this and fleshes it out. So let's go back to the beginning of the sermon on money in Matthew six. It starts around verse 19.

So let's take a look here. Here's what Jesus says. Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, where thieves break in and steal. Instead, you should store up for yourselves treasures in heaven.

Look, it's there. Moth nor rust can destroy them and thieves cannot break in and steal what you stash there. This is the same point that he made in his sermon in Luke. If you know, friend, that eternity is coming and you know that compared to eternity, your life on earth is like the blink of an eye. If you know that it's like the vapor that your breath makes in the morning, that appears literally on a cold morning, literally for only a half a second, and then it is gone. If you know that's what life is like compared to eternity, then why would you invest all your resources on that little vapor?

Why would you waste all your resources on that mist when you could keep them for eternity? It's like they always say, you have never seen a hearse pull in a U-Haul. And that is because you simply cannot take any of those things with you. You came into this world with nothing and you go out with nothing.

But, and here is the huge conjunction but, okay, the huge conjunction. But, but you, while you cannot take it with you, Jesus says you can send it on ahead. That's what he means with that phrase, store up for yourself treasures in heaven. How do you store treasures in heaven? By investing in the kingdom of God, you actually are hanging on to the resources that God has given you for eternity.

So here's the question, if you believe that, if you believe what Jesus says about eternity, wouldn't living that way just be common sense? In the gospels, Jesus boiled all of the commandments down to just two things, love God and love people. One day at a time is a 60-day devotional that'll help you get better at doing both of those things. Each daily devotional includes questions for reflection and a challenge to help you love the people God has placed around you. We'll send you a copy with your gift of $35 or more to this ministry. To donate, give us a call at 866-335-5220 or visit us online at jdgrier.com. Step up your loving game with those around you and see what God will do in you. Now let's return to our teaching.

Once again, here's Pastor JD. Why would you use your resources for something you can't hang on to and doesn't really matter anyway when you could in fact keep it for eternity? Here's how I thought about it. Anybody here that is around my age, and by that I mean like late 20s, if you're my age, you might remember that there was a thing that Toys R Us, before it went out of business, used to do. Toys R Us, it was a Christmas shopping spree they would give away to, I think it was like one lucky contestant in the United States. And you would have to, they'd have like a call-in time, and if you were the 10th caller, then you would get a five-minute shopping spree.

Anybody remember this but me? A five-minute shopping spree, all the stuff you could get into your cart in five minutes and get it to the front of the store. Every year I tried to win this thing.

And I would even do the thing where you would dial all the numbers up until the very last one, because a rotary phone, that's what I'm doing for those of you who have no idea, or you dial all the numbers and then you wait for them to release the last, and then you dial that last number and it would go down. And every, I never even got close because all the rich kids had the touchstone bones and they just kept getting richer. And so I never won. But you would always watch it. It was always amazing because these kids run to the store and they're grabbing stuff and they're putting their shopping cart and they're taking it back up, okay.

Well, imagine you won that. Imagine you got your five minutes to go through Toys R Us and get anything that you want. And something catches your eye and it fascinates you in the store. And it's like a toy. And so you sit down in the aisle and you start playing with that toy. What would your parents tell you? What would an older version of you tell you?

Like, no! Just get it up to the front of the store because once you get it to the front of the store, you can enjoy it for the rest of your childhood. But if you enjoy it now, you can't enjoy it then. So in order to enjoy it for a long time, you've actually got to forgo enjoying it now. Does that make sense? That's what Jesus is saying about your resources in eternity. In order for you to really store them up, it means you forgo some of your enjoyment of them now, but you realize it's a much better idea. Or here's a different analogy.

Randy Alcorn wrote a book called The Treasure Principle. He says, he says it's like this. Imagine you're a northerner who is living in the south, doing business toward the end of the Civil War. And so in the course of your business, you've accumulated a lot of Confederate money. But now you see that the south is going to lose the war, and that means that all your Confederate money is about to become worthless. So if you know that is about to happen, what should you do with all that money that you've accumulated? Well, you should immediately go cash out your Confederate money for U.S. currency. You should keep only enough Confederate money for short-term needs, because soon everything that you've compiled is about to be worthless. Here's what Randy Alcorn says, for us then to accumulate vast earthly treasures in the face of the inevitable future is equivalent to stockpiling Confederate money. It's not just wrong.

It's stupid, right? You just think about it. Do you believe what Jesus says about eternity? You can't take any of these earthly resources with you, but you can send them on ahead. Financial advisors will often tell us, don't just think 30 days ahead with your finances. Think 30 years. Jesus would add, don't just think 30 years.

You should think 30 million years into the future and arrange your life accordingly. Jesus continues, verse 21, you see where your treasure is. That's also where your heart's going to be. In other words, where you put most of your treasure is inevitably where your heart is going to belong. And that means that the majority of your treasure is here, then your heart is going to be here. I don't care how many verses you know or how spiritual you think you are. Jesus said, it's true, if you got most of your treasure here, most of your heart is also going to be here.

C.S. Lewis said, wealth has a strange way of knitting a man's heart to this world. You show somebody that has leveraged most of their resources on earth, and I'll show you somebody whose heart and whose children's heart is going to be tied to this earth and not that heaven. By contrast, he says, if you put most of your treasure there, you'll find your heart naturally follow. You see, what you do with your money infallibly reveals three things about you.

It reveals what you most love, it reveals what you trust in, and it reveals what kingdom that you are living for. Like I said, it's easy to talk a big old game of faith out here. It's easy, easy, easy to even delude yourself that you are a committed follower of Jesus.

But until it affects this area, it's not really true. Jesus expected his followers to be eye-poppingly generous. How we gave was supposed to amaze the world. It's not just that we Christians were supposed to be a little bit more generous and a little bit kinder and a little bit nicer.

It's that our giving was supposed to reveal that we have an entirely different kingdom. If you've been around here, you've probably heard me tell the story of William Borden, who in the 1920s, 1920 years old, was the heir to the Borden Milk Company, one of the five biggest companies in America at the time. So we're talking a young man who had literally the whole world as his oyster. He had everything in front of him, but he felt like God. He got saved in college and felt like God was calling him to go overseas to share the gospel, specifically in the country of Egypt, where very few believers at the time lived. And so he had to sever all his ties. His family said, if you leave, then we're cutting you out.

And he said, I've got to obey God. So he severed his ties. He gave away his inheritance. And he boarded a ship to go to Egypt where he was planning to live the rest of his life. On the way there, he contracted meningitis and died within three months of arriving in Egypt. Because he only made it three months, somebody right before he died, just a few hours before he died, asked him, they said, do you feel like this is a mistake? You feel like this whole coming to Egypt thing was a waste. He was so weak that he couldn't even talk, but he got a little piece of paper and he wrote two words that have become rather infamous.

He just wrote the words, no regret, no regret. A couple of hours later, he died. He's buried in Cairo today in a little nondescript place out of the way.

I've never been there. And one of our teams there actually sent me a picture of his grave though. A little out of the way place, a little tombstone you'd never notice if you weren't looking for it. All it has on it, one of the potentially richest men in the United States, all it has on it is his name, the years of his very short life, and underneath it, one little phrase inscribed in the tombstone, apart from faith in Christ, there is no explanation for such a life. In other words, his life screams, if eternity is not real, this is a waste. Here is my question for you. And I think it's Jesus' question as well.

Would that phrase describe your life? Apart from faith in Christ, there is no explanation for the way they lived. If eternity is not real, what a waste. Or what did they say about you when you die? Would they say, well, he or she, they were a little bit nicer, they were a little bit more generous than everybody? Are you living in a way that it just doesn't make sense if eternity is not real? Are these the words we will write on your tombstone apart from faith in Christ, there's just no explanation for such a life?

Let me see where the rubber hits the road here. Most American Christians in churches like this one give, on average, about two and a half percent of their income away to charity or the kingdom of God. The average secular person gives away 1.8 percent.

Hey, right? I mean, they're at 1.8. We're at 2.5. But does that really scream we live for a different kingdom?

I bring it closer to home here. Only 19 percent of the people at this church, only 19 percent of those here that come every weekend, in the survey we did a few weeks ago, only 19 percent say that they tithe. What does that say about what kingdom 81 percent of the people who were in this church are living for? Listen, I'm not trying to guilt you into giving us your money. I want you to understand that. I'm just trying to let that 81 percent, I'm trying to let you know that you're missing out on something.

I'm trying to plead with you. My giving and your giving ought to scream, I believe in eternity and I'm living for Jesus's kingdom, not mine. Jesus's kingdom, not mine. That's what Jesus expected.

Look at what he says next. The eye of the lamp is the body. If your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. So if the light within you is darkness, whoa, how deep is that darkness? Now, at first that may seem like an odd analogy and you're like, I don't have any idea, not the foggiest idea how that's got to do with money. Here's what it means.

The analogy is this. Say you get up at night, it's dark, flip on a light. If your eye is good, then the benefits of the light benefit your whole body. Because now that you can see, now your hand knows what it's looking for to get the milk out of the refrigerator to get something to drink. The light benefits your feet because your feet isn't running into the parts of the furniture and making you scream profanities in the middle of the night. Your whole body is benefiting from the light.

On the other hand, if your eye is dark, meaning it's bad, then your whole body doesn't get the benefit of the light and your hands don't know where to reach and your feet run into furniture. In the same way, Jesus is saying, right, if your eye sees money the wrong way, then your whole life is going to be filled with a kind of darkness. If the way you see money is distorted, it's going to mess up every part of your life.

If you serve money, if you depend on money for security, you look to money for happiness, then it's going to make you make a lot of bad decisions. Are you living in a way that only faith can truly explain? You're listening to Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. Today's message is titled, Out of This World Giving, and it's part of our teaching series on generosity called First. So, J.D., a resource we mention often here on the program but seldom discuss with you directly is your daily email devotional.

This is a valuable resource and it's free. Can you share some of your heart behind it? Yeah, Molly, thank you for asking that. That's something that we here we put together. It's based on other teachings that we do, you know, whether they're from the messages on the weekend or sometimes even our podcast where we just say, hey, this might be really helpful to have in a written form. Sometimes you can just get your mind around it that way. It's a way, it's kind of a small way of being, if I could say it this way, in your lives almost every single day just to share a thought. Imagine if you just had a pastoral friend that, you know, rode with you to work in the morning and just said, hey, here are three things to think about. That's what this is an attempt to do. It's enjoyable to put them together. I enjoy actually going back through the messages and saying, I think this kind of this insight here might really help.

And what you'll find is that it's the promise of scripture or the reminder of the gospel that you need. And so I think it would benefit you. I would love for you to sign up for it. If you just go to jdgrier.com slash resources, you can click that button and you can sign up and we'll see you tomorrow morning.

Thanks JD. We would be honored to receive your gift of $35 or more to this ministry. And to say thank you, we'll send you a copy of Pastor Eitelman's 60 day devotional called One Day at a Time. To give, simply call us at 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220. Or you can always give online at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vinovich inviting you to join us again Tuesday when Pastor JD helps us understand how being a spender, saver or steward defines what kingdom we serve. Listen Tuesday to Summit Life with JD Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.