Today on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Welcome back to Summit Life with Pastor J.D.
Greer. As always, I'm your host, Molly Bitovitch. You know, the Kingdom of God sometimes seems a bit upside down, doesn't it? The way to be great is to be humble. The way to lead is to actually serve. And the way to reap a bountiful harvest is not by collecting and spending, but by giving and trusting. Today, Pastor J.D. continues in Luke Chapter 6, showing us how living like Christ and not having money is what ultimately brings us joy. When we ask ourselves first how much we want God to multiply us, then we will know what kind of sacrificial giving He requires of us.
Remember, this is brand new teaching. So if you missed any part so far, you can catch up online at jdgreer.com. Now let's rejoin Pastor J.D. in Luke Chapter 6 now. Jesus says, Forgive and you will be forgiven. Give and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over will be put into your lap.
For with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. Revolutionary truth number three, learn the law of the harvest. Now, I've known verse 38 since I was a kid, and the first part always made complete sense to me. It's pretty straightforward.
Give and it'll be given to you. But totally honest with you, the last part always confused me, and I was always way too embarrassed to ask. I have no idea what this means. Jesus was using a farming analogy, which most of the people would have been familiar with. You see, in those days, harvesters got paid at the end of the week with a basket full of wheat. Now, normally, because the wheat was so heavy, you'd only load it up half or two-thirds full before bringing it back to the barn. But for that last basket, the one you got to keep, guess what they did?
There was no half and two-thirds about it. They would press it down, shake it so it settled, then do that again and again and fill it up to the brim so that it was running over. Right? You're getting the most out of that basket. It reminds me of this little Mongolian restaurant that my friends and I would eat at when I was in seminary.
Right? You paid $7 for a bowl about this size, and then you choose your ingredients from the raw bar, and you put them into the bowl and take it up front for the chef to prepare your unique culinary masterpiece. So me and my friends would carefully line the bottom with thinly sliced meats, and then we'd mash it down, and we'd put on a little layer of vegetables, little layer of vegetables, and then we'd mash that down and put on another layer of meat, and then another layer of vegetables, and we'd do it over and over until it was running over, and then we'd stack up chicken and pork chunks on the top as high as you could get, and we would carefully walk it to the up front to the wok. But do you see what we were doing? Our mentality was, I'm allowed one bowl.
That's what the law says. I'm going to get the maximum amount out of that bowl. The opposite is what the Dorito company does with this bag of chips.
Am I right? You pick this up at the gas station because it looks so full and so big, and you get it back to your car, and you open it up, and I swear, I swear, there's like four Doritos in there, right? Doritos. Doritos says, what is the least amount that we can put into that, and you still count it as a bag. So here's Jesus's question. Which of those two best describes your approach to generosity? Are you like, all right, well, Jesus requires a bowl, a tithe.
What's the least amount I can put in there and still have it qualify as a bowl? A tithe on the gross of the net. But here's the deal, y'all, with the measure you use, that's the measure that's going to be measured back to you. This is called the law of the harvest. And y'all, listen, it is taught cover to cover in your Bible. A lot of times people think that we wrongly rest this principle out of a couple of misinterpreted passages. It is cover to cover in your Bible.
Cover to cover. For example, I'll give you just a handful of examples. Look at Proverbs. The generous soul will be made rich, and he who waters will himself be watered. Proverbs 11, 25. Honor the Lord. Proverbs three, with your wealth, with the first fruits of your crops.
And what'll happen? If you do that, then your barns will be filled to overflow, and then your vats will brim over with the finest non-alcoholic grape juice, right? For you, Baptist. The apostle Paul says this in 2 Corinthians. Remember this, whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly.
Whoever sows generously will also reap generously. A few years ago, I taught something here called the laws of the harvest that I had compiled from these scriptures and with the help of some other Christian leaders. They're very biblical.
There are very few Christians who understand them, even less, who actually practice them. If you follow these, I'm just gonna list them out for you and talk about each of them real quick and then we'll be finished. If you follow these, they will change your life. They will change your life, okay?
Here they are, okay? Law number one, the harvest is limited to the planting. That's obvious, right? God only multiplies what you sow. In order for God to multiply it, you gotta give it away.
What you keep stays the same. It's what you give away that multiplies. Maybe one of the clearest pictures of this is what occurs in John chapter six, where Jesus wanting to feed 5,000 hungry people takes one little boy's lunch, five loaves and two fish, a Hebrew happy meal, a Levitical lunchable, and he blesses it and he distributes it to the disciples. What's interesting is if you read that account in John six, the text says that as the disciples gave it away, the loaves and fish multiplied. Jesus did not take the bread and fish and multiply it first so that there's a big pile of it and then they distributed it out of that pile. No, as they took it from his hands and gave it to others, as they did that, it multiplied.
In other words, technically, the miracle happened in their hands, not his. I point that out because some of us think, well, if it multiplies, then I'll give it away. You're getting the cart before the horse. God says, start giving it away and then I'll make it multiply. Some of you are sitting there saying, I cannot afford to give money away. Jesus would say, you can't afford not to. In fact, I love how one of our church planters says it, generosity is an invitation for God to infuse blessing into your finances. Generosity is a prayer.
It's a way of inviting God in. I remember when Veronica and I were first starting out, neither of us had a full-time job. We just got married. Money was so tight, y'all, so tight.
Oh my goodness. I remember laying in bed and I would hear the heater kick on right outside of our bedroom and I would think, how much is that costing me? But Veronica and I determined that for the rest of our lives we would give God the first and the best, regardless of whether we felt like we could afford it or not. It would be the first thing that we did with what money came in every month. And sure, y'all, we've had our lean years, but I can stand up here right now and say, we have never lacked anything. God has always blessed our finances so that we have always had what we needed, more than we needed.
Point is, you cannot out-give God. The harvest is limited to the planting. Here's law number two, the harvest is proportional to the planting.
With the measure you use, it's gonna be measured back to you. So the question is, what proportions are you using? How do you load up your giving basket? Is it more like the Mongolian grill bowl approach or is it more like the Doritos bag approach? By the way, when somebody asks me, should I tithe on the gross or the net? I always feel like that's betraying the minimalist mindset.
What's the least I can get into this bag and still have it count as a bag? When somebody asks me that, I always say, well, two issues I think about, A, it's God's before it's the government, so I tithe on the gross. Second, even more importantly, I want God to bless it all. I'm tithing on the gross because I don't want him to bless part of it.
I want him to bless all of it. I remember hearing this great little story about Alexander the Great years ago. I don't know if it's true or not, but the story goes like this. Alexander the Great was riding back into Athens after one of his big victories. And as part of the celebration of his victory, he was given out baskets of rice. And there was this poor, crippled Athenian man on the side of the road. And when that Athenian poor beggar man was given his basket of rice, Alexander the Great saw him, saw the condition he was in, felt compassion on him, and said to him, give me that basket back.
Well, the poor man looked alarmed because this would feed him for a month. But not wanting to disobey Alexander's orders, he figured out, well, what's the least I could do and still feel like I didn't disobey him? So he reached in the basket and gave him back two kernels. According to the story, Alexander the Great waves his hand at his treasure and the treasurer throws the poor man two silver coins. At which point, of course, the poor man tried to give the whole basket back, but now it's too late.
Alexander had moved on. I've always thought that was a pretty good picture of us at the end of our lives. It's gonna be too late.
Don't let that be you. Give God the chance to bless and multiply more of what he's given to you now. The harvest is proportional to that. It's proportional to the planting. You see, when you recognize that, the question goes from what do I have to give to how much do I get to give?
How much can I give? Law number three, the harvest is greater than the planting. Again, these are pretty intuitive, aren't they?
They're pretty obvious. When you plant something, what comes back to you is greater than what you sowed. Plant a wheat seed and it turns into a wheat stalk that produces hundreds of new seeds. By the way, the law of greater applies to things we don't wanna see multiplied as well, right?
Anybody who has ever tried to grow a nice lawn of fescue knows that if you get even the smallest amount of Bermuda grass in there, the Bermuda, like a little armband of gorilla soldiers, is gonna take over. Paul said in Galatians six, that the law of the harvest is true in regards to sinful habits we sow into our lives. It's true with what corrupt thoughts we fill our minds with. Those seeds multiply. It's true with how we raise our kids.
What you sow into them multiplies and comes back to you in abundance. For example, many Christian parents are surprised when their kids go off to college and they walk away from the faith. And they always say, but we raised them in church. Yeah, but maybe church and your walk with God wasn't that important to you. It was there, but it wasn't a priority. You came sporadically. You didn't volunteer. You weren't in a small group. You didn't do missions together as a family. You didn't read the Bible together and pray together. You frequently opted out of student ministry for sports events or dance or trips to the beach. God was basically a second tier priority compared to other things in your life.
Well, guess what? That multiplied in your kid's life. So when they went to college, they left the faith behind because they figured getting up and going to church in the face of such a busy and hostile culture was just not worth the hassle.
By the way, I wanna be clear, okay? I mean, sometimes a kid walks away from the faith and it has nothing to do with any unfaithfulness in their life. The son in Jesus's prodigal son's story did not walk away because of any shortcoming in the dad, right? I'm just saying that sometimes we need to at least ask if what we're seeing in our kids is the multiplication of those seeds of half-hearted commitment that we sowed.
Now God's grace is amazing, and that's awesome about our parenting because we all fall so far short. But the point is, what you sow multiplies. When scripture applies the law of the harvest to our money, the law of greater to our money, it teaches that's gonna happen in two different ways.
Pay attention to this. First, the amount that comes back to you is often greater than what you sowed. That is the literal promise in Proverbs.
Honor the Lord with your first fruits, then your barn will be filled to overflowing. God literally multiplies the amount and gives it back to you, all right? So that's one way it's greater, but scripture indicates that sometimes, listen, watch, sometimes God makes it greater by giving you back something that is better than what you gave. He uses your generosity, for example, to fill you with joy and make you more like him. For example, in 2 Corinthians 9, when Paul's talking about giving generously, he says, if you do, God will multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness.
Now, you see what he's talking, there's two different things he's talking about there. Two things God will do in response to your generosity. He will multiply your seed for sowing.
That's the wheat seed of your tithe God will give back to you as a stalk with lots of seeds. That's increasing the amount. But notice what he says, second thing, he will also increase the harvest of your righteousness through your giving. Sometimes the greatest thing God does through your generosity is to change you.
Many of you crave money because you think it will make you happier and more satisfied with life. But what if God could give you happiness and satisfaction a different way? For example, Tom Monahan, the founder of Domino's Pizza, said that what drove him to succeed in life was the desire to have more than everybody else. But after getting that and seeing how miserable it had made him, he decided to take a new approach.
He said, I'm gonna set a limit on what I live on. He adopted a relatively simple lifestyle, certainly not the kind of lifestyle you would know fit a man of that kind of wealth, and he committed to give away everything above that to the kingdom of God. He said, his words, not mine, that filled him with more joy than all the stuff he used to buy with his money. Y'all, he's the guy we always talk about who says he spent his entire life climbing the ladder of success only to find out it was leaning against the wrong building. Now listen, I love what Pastor Craig Groeschel says.
He says, I've never heard in my whole life, and I would agree with this, I've never heard an emotional keeping story. Well, we were thinking about helping somebody. Really stretching ourselves to give to the church above the tide, but y'all, thank God, we shirked that feeling away. There was a single mom who was not gonna be able to have a Christmas, and we could have helped, but hallelujah, we did not give.
What a great day that was. I'd never heard that in all my years, not one time, but I've heard lots of incredibly emotional giving stories. That's why we say generosity is not something God wants from us, it's something he wants for us. Newsflash, y'all, God does not need anything from you. God is not in a financial jam, and he's like, man, if I could just get people to summit, just share some money with me, I could get this Great Commission thing done. No, God owns the cattle on a thousand hills, and he can sell off a portion of him anytime he wants.
God is always liquid, right, he's always solvent. He calls you to be generous so that you can experience what it's like to be sons and daughters of the most high, not because he needs you. To be sons and daughters of the most high, not because he needs your money. God wants us to have joy, but contrary to what we're conditioned to believe by our culture, joy does not come through collecting and spending, joy comes through giving and trusting. Thanks for listening to Summit Life with J.D.
Greer. There's more teaching in just a moment, but before we return, let me tell you about our newest resource created exclusively for our Summit Life family. It's time for our annual day planner.
Yes, it's back again. This is one of our most popular resources each year and for good reason. You see, there's nothing magical about January 1st, but it does present a natural opportunity for reflection and direction. It's a great time to take stock of your life and set some goals for ways that you want to grow in the coming months. Maybe you want to start reading your Bible every day, or maybe you want to get better at making time for ministry.
Maybe a relationship needs some time and energy. Whatever it may be, we hope this planner will be a great tool to help you prioritize your time and meet those goals. In this time of year, your gift is critical to the future of this ministry. We rely on the generosity of God's people to make this program available on your radio station each day.
So would you consider joining with us right now? Reserve your copy of the day planner with a generous end of your gift by calling 866-335-5220 or visit us online at JDGrier.com. Now let's finish up today's teaching. Once again, here's Pastor JD. Law number four, the harvest comes later than the planting.
This is the hard one, y'all. That's why I think so many of us don't actually do it. The benefit of the harvest, benefits of the harvest take time, don't they? And we're an instant gratification generation.
I'm like that, to be honest. When I diet, I want to see results immediately. I want to eat one salad one time and be able to look in the mirror the next morning and see the difference.
I want to do 30 push-ups one time and look in the mirror and see the muscular curvature of a Greek god. That's what I want. But results take time. That's even more true with agriculture. You plant in one season and you don't harvest until the next. You know what that means? Listen, listen to this.
What you're harvesting today is the result of decisions that you made yesterday. Pastor John Muller, who's one of our campus pastors, told me that one of the best practical jokes that he played as a kid growing up in Gilbert, South Carolina. What do you do for fun in Gilbert, South Carolina?
This is what you do. He said, after his neighbors had aerated and fertilized their yards, he and his buddies would sneak out at night and go strew random seeds in their yards, corn and watermelons and sunflowers. He said it was a great joke, but the hard part was that you got no immediate gratification for the joke. Next morning, it looked the same. But sure enough, he said, six months later, his neighbors had watermelons and sunflowers growing in their yards. Harvest is limited to planting. It's proportional to planting. It's greater than the planting. It's later than the planting.
Here's the last one, law number five. You can't do anything about this year's harvest, but you can change next year's. You reaped today what you sowed yesterday. That's true in regards to your money. It's true right now with your marriage. It's true with your parenting. It's true with your physical fitness. It's true with your career.
It's true with your life savings. You are reaping the harvest of past things that you have sown. You cannot change that. Y'all, even if you pray about it, you can't change it. You can always get forgiveness for past mistakes, but you can't unsin.
The consequences and damage of those sins stay with you long after you've been forgiven. But the good news is that you can change your future. You can change your future by sowing seeds of obedience today. Some of you right now, right now, today, you're experiencing the bad harvest that came from an ungenerous life.
For example, no matter how much you make, you always feel dissatisfied. You're just experiencing the truth of Proverbs 11. The righteous eats to the satisfied. Proverbs 11, the righteous eats to the satisfying of the soul, but the stomach of the selfish will always be hungry.
That's you right now. Some of you are experiencing financial strain in your marriage. Some of you are unhappy in your singleness, that fast and free, do whatever I want lifestyle.
That's let you down. Maybe you're experiencing materialism, growing in your kids. Maybe it's the feeling that you're just wasting your life, even though you've been successful, your life is not amounting to anything.
Maybe you're going through genuine financial hardship right now, and you recognize these are all the harvest of a disobedient, ungenerous, untrusting life. You can't do anything about this year's harvest, but you can change next year's. The old Proverb says it this way, the best time to plant a tree, 20 years ago.
The second best time is today. Start sowing different seeds today, so you can reap a different harvest tomorrow. At the beginning, I talked about a revolutionary way of looking at money. And that revolutionary way of thinking is basically that money does not equal the blessed life. Holding money is not what brings happiness, living in a Christ-like way is. And the way to reap a bountiful harvest is not to collect and spend, it's to give and trust.
Here's the question. Are you ready to start living by those new rules? Let me close all this by addressing two different groups this morning, two different groups. Root number one, some of you've never really given to God, at least nowhere near a tithe.
I'm not talking about throwing your lunch money in the plate every once in a while. You ready to start that process? Maybe you can't get all the way to 10% this year, but you can start making a big step in that direction. Malachi 3 10 is such an absolutely unique verse, not unique in the concept, unique in the phrasing of it, bring the full tithes into the storehouse, God says. Thereby put me to the test, and why don't you wait and see if I will not open up the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need? To people in group number one, I'd say, why don't you just take God up on his word and test him and see, give it back to him and watch what he does in you and your finances in your heart.
That's group number one, here's the second group. Maybe you do tithe or you get close to it, you're giving, it's regular, but you might be ready to take your giving to the next level instead of just saying, okay, how much is the tithe and giving the minimum? Maybe you're ready to start packing that generosity bowl full and see if the biblical law of the harvest is actually true. God measures our giving and our faith, not by how much we put in, but what kind of sacrifice, what kind of sacrifice, what proportions it is, what it represents for us. So friend, the question is, how much do you want God to bless and multiply you? Remember the lesson from Alexander the Great, how much do you want God to bless?
You should ask that and then give accordingly because you've got a heavenly father who is rich and generous and he loves to see his children walk in his image. As we look ahead to a new year, a lot of people are setting goals for themselves, whether that's a financial goal, a health goal, whatever it may be. Pastor JD, do you have any thoughts for our listeners as they're kind of looking ahead and making these plans? Yeah, Molly, time is one of the few resources that we just can't manufacture any more of. No matter what you do, no matter how much money you have or how little you have, you cannot magically add extra seconds to your day. So the question becomes, how do you make the most out of the 86,400 seconds God gives you every day? Well, it starts with a little bit of planning and intentionality.
You can have all the good intentions in the world, but until it affects your daily rhythm, your daily calendar, then all it is is good intentions. That's why we provide at the beginning of the year, this tool, it's a daily and yearly planner that will help assist you in setting your own goals and holding yourself accountable for what you believe God wants to do in your life. So yeah, we've all got health goals and educational advancement goals and managing our finances better, but the most crucial investment we can make, the one that anchors all the rest is in the realm of the spiritual. So this new year, don't neglect that one because that's foundational to the others. This tool will help you lay out some spiritual goals.
We've included a Bible reading plan in this resource that'll just guide you. Here's the deal. Don't let this opportunity slip through your fingers.
It's only available at the beginning of the year. So head on over to jdgrier.com slash donate. Let's resolve to thrive in 2025.
And let's do that by anchoring it in intentionality and goals that we are setting for ourselves and holding ourselves accountable to. This planner, this Bible reading plan will help you. So go to jdgrier.com and get yours today. Ask for a copy of the 2025 Summit Life Day Planner when you donate today at the suggested amount of $45 or more. Call 866-335-5220.
That's 866-335-5220 or give online at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch and I hope you'll join us tomorrow as we continue our brand new series called Whatever It Takes. We'll see you right here, same time, same place, Friday on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.
