Be on Guard Against Greed

Summit family and friends welcome. One of our many worship options that we have on the weekend, Thursday nights at three of our campuses, Briar Creek and Capitol Hills, and our Blue Ridge campus. And then on Sunday morning, there is I think eight different services at different locations. And then those of you that are in one of our home gatherings, there are 174 at least minimum home gatherings.

That's 174 because you have told us about you. Knowing the Summit Church as I do, there's probably at least twice that many that have not reached out and told us. If you do, it gives us a chance to be able to support you and be able to help make this an even better experience. But I know that there's a lot of you that are gathered in home gatherings this weekend, as well as some of you that just for either for safety reasons or just because of where life has you.

You are by yourself in a living room or you're in front of a computer screen. I want to say welcome to all of you. One of the things we believe at the Summit Church is that worship is a group experience. And so as much as we can, we want to be able to come together and nobody should have to worship alone. And so if you choose one of our in-person gatherings, obviously we're taking precautions and observing our safety protocols.

But we have other options if you're in a place where you just feel like that doesn't work for you. So wherever you are or however you are joining us, I want to say welcome to you because we're still getting a lot of people that are gathering as one body, even though it is in several hundred different locations now. The election is over, sort of, and I know that you are feeling all kinds of emotions right now. But what I want to do before we begin anything this weekend is I want to give you three words, three words that I think should shape, I believe, or should shape your posture after this election. These come from the Apostle Peter, from the letter that he wrote to the church.

He obviously wasn't talking about an election like ours. But he just talks about how believers ought to engage with one another and the world around them. Here are the three words.

Number one, I'll give you all three of them. Empathy, charity, and unity. Empathy.

Empathy means trying to see a situation through somebody else's eyes. Understanding why they think like they do. Trying to understand what motivates them. What creates such passion in them? What were they most concerned about with this election? What justice questions were close to their hearts that motivated them? What fears?

What fears animated them? I'm not saying that you need to agree with their political calculus, but you can at least try as much as possible to see it through their eyes. I think that's what we owe to one another, especially when you're talking about somebody that leans differently than you do politically. Here's the second word. Goes right along with the first one. First one is empathy. Second one is charity. Charity.

Charity means assuming the best about that person, giving them the benefit of the doubt about their motives, the political discourse in our country, trains us to assume the worst about everybody else's motives, even as we demand that they assume the best about ours. Based on what you hear, you would think there are only two options in our society. You're either Marxist or racist.

You're either communist or fascist. In the church, we ought to think differently. And as much as we can, we want to give each other the benefit of the doubt. And that leads us to the third word, and that is the word unity.

Unity. I repeat, listen. We can and should insist on alignment around biblical values. When it comes to things like the sanctity of life, that's really not up for debate.

Abortion is a horrendous scourge on our nation. We are united on the wickedness of racism, the preciousness of religious liberty, the importance of caring for the poor. These are all important biblical values that we're going to be clear on. But we can do that. We can maintain that unity even as we allow disagreement on the political calculus that is used to pursue those things.

When you say political calculus, what I mean is which candidate you think is best going to get the job done, or even which issues you ought to prioritize over the other ones in this election. Those are questions that we can have convictions on. We should have convictions on them, but we can disagree and still remain united in Christ.

Not because those considerations are not important, but because our identity in Christ and our mission to preach the gospel is that much more important. So Summit Church, listen, let's resolve to be united in a very divided time because the gospel that we preach is of the greatest importance and the great commission that we advance is of the highest urgency. Amen? Amen? Amen.

Listen, let's be outspoken. We will continue to be outspoken on things like the sanctity of life and the importance of impartial justice because those evils are real and they really harm people. We're going to do that and we're going to keep our focus on preaching the gospel that is alone able to save the soul, to heal the sick, and is able to give us eternal life because that's what this church, that's what our main thing is. We are a place where we believe the gospel is above all. Okay? Amen?

And that's all I got to say about that. We're going to focus our lives secure and eternally significant. Last week, we saw Jesus warn religious people that it is possible for them to look like they are right with God but be self-deceived. Today, we're going to see Jesus warn us about the toxic nature of greed, which is, I'm going to show you, an invisible sickness, Jesus says, that afflicts all of us.

Luke chapter 12. Like many people, I am fascinated by that show Hoarders. I don't watch it all the time but when I do catch an episode on, it's like I can't turn away.

Anybody else like that? It's just there's something tragically fascinating about that show. Just about the whole concept. You go into somebody's house and they're up to their eyeballs in broken tennis rackets and durable cages and copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica. When they stage an intervention on that show, they almost always bring in, if you've seen it, you know this, they almost always bring in two people. The first is an organizer and the organizer deals with the what, right?

Getting rid of all the junk. The second is a psychologist who deals with the why. What is it that makes this person compulsively collect all that stuff? You need both people.

You need the organizer and the psychologist because there's no use dealing with the what if you're not going to get to the why. They're just going to rinse and repeat. That show Hoarders I think demonstrates what we're going to look at today and that is that greed is not ultimately about our possessions. Greed is ultimately about the fallen conditions of our hearts. That's what Jesus is getting at in Luke 12. So let's just take a look at this passage.

Luke 12 verse 13. Somebody from the crowd called out to him, teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me. Scholars, by the way, say that this was a very common problem in Jerusalem.

Older brothers could manipulate the laws that run the books in a way that would allow them to cheat the younger brothers out of upwards, they say, of two-thirds of the family inheritance. It was a system that was just open to abuse and injustice. Jesus' response, verse 14. Friend, he said to him, who appointed me a judge or an arbitrator over you? He then told them, watch out and be on guard against all greed because one's life is not in the abundance of his possessions. And then he told them this parable.

Okay, let's stop right there for just a second. Now first, if these opening verses sound familiar to you, it's because we use this story in our flag series to illustrate how Jesus avoided getting entangled in the specifics of earthly justice questions so that he could focus on fulfilling his primary mission, which was preaching repentance, preaching the gospel, and calling people to follow him. But today, today what we want to do is we want to look at what he actually preached to this younger brother.

What was it that he warned this younger brother and the crowd that was listening and the older brother, what did he warn them about? Greed. Underline that word, greed, if you underline stuff in your Bible. Watch out, he says. Watch out, be on guard against greed.

Several things that I think you should note here. First, why is Jesus preaching this message to the younger brother? The younger brother is the one, after all, that was being wronged. You would have thought Jesus would have said, hey, go get your manipulating older brother and bring him back here. He's the one that needs to hear this greed message. But Jesus preaches it to the younger brother also. In fact, verse 15 seems to indicate that Jesus is preaching to both of them. See the word them there in verse 15?

He says, I'm not going to jump in and settle this matter. Both of you, both the one who was wronged and the one who was doing the wronging, both of you got the same problem, even though one of you is in the right, one of you is in the wrong, both of you got the same inner problem, and that problem is greed. Here's the first thing I want you to write down if you're writing stuff down. It is possible for you to live clean and still be consumed by greed. It is very possible for you to live in just an exemplary way and still be consumed by greed. In fact, look at the way that Jesus words the warning.

Watch out, be on guard against greed. It can sneak up on you and it can take you over without you even knowing it. That's the kind of language regarding any other sin. Jesus never says, for example, watch out and be on guard for adultery.

Why? Because it doesn't really sneak up on you like that. You know when you're committing adultery. It is hard to commit adultery and not know it. What do you know?

You're not my wife. That's just not how it works. But it's very easy to be greedy and have no knowledge of it at all. All that to say, Jesus' assumption is that all people, both religious and irreligious, both those who are living unjustly and those who are living justly, have a problem with greed.

And so I'll say it again. It is possible for you to live clean, to be a good person, to do everything right, and still be consumed by greed just like this younger brother. Did you know that Jesus warned against the dangers of greed far more, far more often than he warned about the dangers of sex? Greed is a silent, deadly killer.

It's a kind of money sickness, and one of the worst symptoms of that sickness is a blindness to your condition. So Jesus is gonna go on to tell them a parable. He's gonna say watch out, be on guard against greed, and then he's gonna tell them a story that is designed to help you diagnose your money sickness. Before we look at that story, I wanna suggest to you that everybody listening to me right now, wherever you are, ought to start with the working hypothesis that you have a problem with greed. I don't think Jesus would have presented it that way to the younger brother who was being wrong.

I don't think he would have thought this way if that is not something he wanted us to assume. And let me just say, okay, that as Americans, I think it's just part of the air that we breathe. Let me be very clear, because I know some of us are pretty sensitive about this. I love this country. I love the Protestant work ethic that fuels our success, and I think that we are one of the most generous countries on earth. The other thing that's very prosperous is that as possessions increase, so does our appetite for more.

I want you to consider a handful of things here, okay? Americans make more than four times as much as the average person elsewhere outside of America, but we spend 98% of that on ourselves. We spend more money in this country on eating out than we do giving to charity, more money on our pets than we do helping the poor, more money on pornography and oppression and injustice.

And by the way, that's not just because we're in a tough spot right now. Americans give less to charity today, percentage-wise, than we did in the Great Depression. Or consider this, a household income of six figures puts you in the top half of 1% of people worldwide. Top half of 1%, and yet only one-third of Americans who make six figures say they feel like they have enough money to buy what they need. Only just one half of 1% in the richest part of the world feel like they don't have enough.

And that translates into an addiction to debt. 71% of all credit card balances in this country have only the minimum monthly payment made every month. They say Americans spend, on average, $1.26 for every dollar that we earn. We save less than any industrialized nation in the world. Germans save at a rate, they save about 10%.

Americans save at a rate of negative 0.5%. Alright, so it's not a great situation. And our addiction to possessions distorts everything.

It distorts how we look at life. I heard about a guy with a brand new BMW who opened up the car door after he parked it on the road and as he opens up the car door, get it on the street, a car whizzes by at 35 miles an hour and tears off the door of the car. Right? You know, he starts, a police officer runs over and this guy's wailing, oh, my BMW, my brand new BMW. And the officer said, man, what's wrong with you? You're left arm got torn off also.

The guy looks down to where his left arm was and he goes, oh, my Rolex, my Rolex, what's wrong with my Rolex? That's not really a true story. But I think it's clear, I think it's clear that like this younger brother, we've got a problem with greed. And here's where Jesus diagnoses and prescribes a solution for money sickness.

Verse 16. Let's pick up there again. A rich man's land, he said, was very productive. And he thought to himself, what should I do, since I don't have anywhere to store my crops? I'll do this, he said, I'll tear down my barns and build bigger ones in their place. And I'll store all my grain and my goods there. Then I'll say to myself, you have many goods stored up for many years, take it easy, eat, drink, and enjoy yourself. But God said to him, you fool, this very night, your life is going to be demanded of you. And then those things that you've prepared, well, whose will they be then? That's how it is, Jesus says, with the one who stores up for treasure for himself, and it's not rich toward God.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, therefore, I tell you, don't worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear, for life is more than food and the body's more than clothes. You see the pagan world, verse 30, they're the ones who run after all such things, but your father knows that you need them. You seek his kingdom, and then these things will be given to you as well. Do not be afraid, little flock, for your father has been pleased to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give to the poor, therefore, provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, and treasure in heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near and no moth can destroy.

For where your treasure is, well, that's where your heart's gonna be also. Tim Keller says that Jesus identifies, in this story, seven symptoms of money sickness. Wealth gives this man a sense of confidence and a sense of self-worth. For the money sick, how you feel about yourself is determined by how you compare financially to everybody else. I heard James Carvel, the political analyst, say one time, he said, when you finally do get to the top, your first inclination is not to rejoice, it's to look around.

Who else is up here where I'm at now? Greed is inherently competitive. So even if you don't have a lot of money, you can still have this symptom. You ever catch yourself looking at others, comparing yourself to them, lamenting that you or your children don't have the opportunities that they have? Does a lack of money make you feel lesser? Does it make you feel deprived? If so, then you've got money sickness. What about the future?

You see this in verse 22. What are we gonna eat? What are we gonna drink?

What are we gonna wear? What's gonna happen to my retirement? What's gonna be the future of this economy? What if I never made the kind of money that will afford me really nice things? You worry this way because you think the good life consists of material things, and you're worried about never having those, or not getting money to have that kind of life, or losing the money once you've gotten it. And you think there's really no way that I can have the good life unless I have that money, that's why I'm worried about it, or worried about losing it once I have it. Symptom number two, symptom number three, money comfort.

Money comfort. See what this man does? Verse 17? He thought to himself. He's talking to himself. He's comforting himself by telling himself that all of his money is gonna guarantee his safety. Self, you've got many goods laid up for many years.

Life is gonna be awesome. When you've got money sickness, you take comfort in money. You take comfort in money.

How about you? You're the kind of person who feels safe when your financial prospects are abundant. Do you feel intolerably vulnerable when they aren't? That's the heart that gives birth to greed. You need possessions in order to feel secure. The irony is, at that point, you no longer own your possessions.

They own you because you need them in order to have that feeling of security. But that's symptom number three. Symptom number four, we see stinginess. And this man's multiplying prosperity. He never thinks about what his money can do for others or why. He never asked why God gave him so much. As a religious Jew, because that's the context of who Jesus was talking to, this man surely paid his tithe to the temple. But generosity was not the joy of his heart. It's not where his mind naturally went.

He was most excited about living a life of luxury and ease and building bigger barns. That's why he talked to himself about those things. Greedy people often will give out of a sense of duty, but they have no joy in being generous. It hurts them. They might tithe, but it hurts, so they only give what they feel obligated to give, and then they go back to their life of bigger barn building. Symptom number five, overspending.

I need to get something new. I need a bigger barn. That's why debt becomes such a problem. Your savior is your credit card. It's your bottle of pills.

You medicate life strains with stuff. An excessive amount of things is a sure sign of money sickness. I know some of you men right now are thinking about your wife's closet, but don't do that, okay? Think about whatever it is you collect. You collect more and more.

It just never seems to be enough. I'm sure when the guy in this story was a young man, I'm sure he thought, man, if I could just have enough money to buy some nice clothes, man, that would be the life. Maybe get a nice chariot to be able to cruise around Jerusalem.

That would be awesome. And then he got that and he thought, man, what would it be like one day to own my own farm, have my own workers? And then he gets that and he makes, well, I could just build a barn and have some excess crops I could sell. Then he gets that.

Now here he is needing a bigger barn. A symptom of money sickness is never being satisfied. Enough is always right around the corner. It's just never quite where you are.

It's just a little bit ahead of you. When I was thinking about this this week, when I was in high school, I wanted a pair of Air Jordans so bad, but they were absurdly expensive. And my parents were like, you want us to pay $70 for a pair of tennis shoes?

Are you out of your mind? But I thought, man, if I could just have a pair of Air Jordans and a G-Shock watch, that's what I wanted. And I thought, man, if I could have that light, I would like, what else is there to want in life? And guess what? I eventually got those things. In fact, I'm wearing both of them right now.

But when I got those, that ended up giving way to something else. It was almost like a cruel joke. Real satisfaction and real security of soul is always just beyond me. Money sickness is like that.

It's always out there just beyond you. It never lets up. It reminds me of that CEO that was interviewed in Forbes magazine that I often quote, who said, I spent my entire life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and find out it was leaning against the wrong building.

Symptom number six is can't turn it off. Symptom number seven, stockpiling. Money sickness drives you to save excessive amounts like this man. We're not talking about a wise investment plan.

That's biblical. We're talking about saving excessively or failing to be radically generous along the way. You feel like you can't do that because money is the entire basis of your security for the future. People who have money sickness can't be truly generous because money is their security and so they can't give it away. You see verse 33 where Jesus tells them to give away their possessions? Keep in mind that back then all they had were possessions.

They didn't do savings accounts or stock portfolios. All they had was possessions. Possessions were your retirement. Possessions were what you left to your children. So when Jesus says give away your possessions, Jesus is not telling you to get rid of some things. He is telling this group to reduce their savings and cut into their net worth.

And a lot of them are like, I can't do that. My identity is tied up in that and my security is tied up in that and Jesus says that's because your money is sick. Seven symptoms of money sickness. Boasting, worry, money comfort, stinginess, overspending, can't turn it off and stockpiling. You got any of these? You have any of these? Point to your spouse if you think they have some of these. No, don't do that.

I'm just kidding, okay? Thankfully, Jesus in this passage points us to the cure. I count four things in this passage that he gives us a cure. Number one, he tells you to wake up to the brevity of life.

This is a strangely effective cure. Verse 20, wake up to the brevity of life. This man's security gets brought down by one sentence from God. One sentence that God will say to every single one of us at some point in our lives. Verse 20, tonight your soul is required of you.

And then all these things that you work for and you store it up, whose will they be? This man went to sleep that night totally confident about tomorrow. He was getting up early to play golf.

And that night about two o'clock in the morning, unexpectedly, his heart stopped. Psalm 90 verse 12 says, thinking often on the brevity of life is the beginning of wisdom. Lord, Moses said in the Psalm 90, teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to learn wisdom. It's only by firmly embracing the brevity of your life that you're going to begin to order your life in the right way. Y'all, I remember learning this lesson as a kid by playing my favorite board game with my mom. We used to play almost every afternoon, Monopoly. I love the game Monopoly. My mom and I played all the time and I love getting Boardwalk and Park Place and Pacific and Pennsylvania Avenue.

I got that whole side of the board, that last little section of the board. And I loved watching her, or anybody else play with her. I loved watching her face wince when she would round the corner with her little car and know that she was going to have to land on one of my squares coming along that side because I had a Monopoly there.

There's just no way that she could get through without landing up on one of my squares that was loaded up with hotels and basically bankrupt her in one move. And I remember my mom, you know, smiling with approval, telling me I was getting the point of the game. And after I'd taken all her money and trounced her, she probably taught me the biggest lesson of all of Monopoly and that is when she took the board and she scooped all of it up at the end, put it back in the box and said, Son, you won. You made all this money, but it makes no difference because it all goes back in the box.

Now go clean your room. All that money you had didn't make any difference. You understand that at death, it all goes back in the box.

It is literally as worthless as all my accrued power in part place and boardwalk in a game that lasted for an hour and a half. And then after it all goes back in the box, then whose will all those things be? Only one life to live will soon be past.

Only what's done for Christ will last. If what the Bible says about eternity is true, it is insanity for you to think that the point of your possessions is to complexify and adorn your life here. Imagine you saw me walking around in Target and I've got shopping carts full of stuff and I'm carrying in my arms. You're like, wow, you're buying all this stuff? You're buying all this nice stuff. And I'm like, no, I don't have any money. I just liked it and thought I'd carry it around with me in the store.

You're like, that would be insane. Friends, you can't take any of your possessions with you after death. You're not going to leave the store with them. It all goes back in the box. Stop living as if this life lasts forever and eternity is not real.

It is. You understand it's all going back in the box. So start to live that way. Number two, he says after you embrace the brevity of life too, you should be rich toward God. Choose to be rich toward God. Verse 21. Verse 21, Jesus says if you're going to seek to be rich somewhere and seek to be rich toward God. In verse 33, he continues, sell those possessions and give to the poor.

Make money bags for yourselves that won't grow old. An inexhaustible treasure in heaven where it's not going to go back in the box where no thief comes near and no malt destroys. A wasted life is a life that focuses all of its effort on the 70 or 80 years here, lives richly here, and takes little to nothing into eternity. Last week I told you about a new book that I have that just came out called What Are You Going To Do With Your Life? And what I do in that book is try to explore the difference between a wasted life and a wisely lived one. I opened the book with a story about hearing a sermon by John Piper years ago that is one of those ones I would say really changed my life.

I feel like we threw that phrase around a lot, it changed my life, but this one actually did. And I can see that now from the vantage point of about 20 years. Passion Conference, the year was 2000. It was not a great setting for a sermon, by the way. It was outdoors, it was rainy, and it was muddy.

It was January. The wind was really boisterous and it blew half of Dr. Piper's notes off of the lectern out into the crowd. There was about 40,000 college students there, and remember John Piper told this story. He recounted, he said, three weeks ago, we got word at our church that Ruby Eliason and Laura Edwards had both been killed in Cameroon on a mission trip. Ruby was over 80, single all of her life. She poured it out for one great thing, to make Jesus Christ known among the unreached, the poor, and the sick.

Laura was a widow, a medical doctor, pushing 80 years old and serving at Ruby's side in Cameroon. The brakes failed, the car went over the cliff, and they were both killed instantly. John Piper said, I looked out at my people at Bethlehem Baptist Church and I asked them, their lives, was that a tragedy?

Smattering to students throughout there, kind of yelled back, no. No, that's right, Piper responded, that's not a tragedy. I'll tell you what is a tragedy. He then pulled out a page from Reader's Digest and he read from this little page in Reader's Digest, Bob and Penny took an early retirement from their jobs in the Northeast five years ago, when he was 59 and she was 51. Now they live in Punta Gorda, Florida, where they cruise on their 30-foot trawler, play softball, and collect shells. Piper continued, the American dream, come to the end of your life, your one and only life, and let the last great work before you give an account to your creator be, I collected shells.

Lord, here, see my shells. That I submit to you, he said, is a tragedy. People today are spending billions of dollars to persuade you to embrace that tragic dream.

Today, I am here to plead with you. Don't buy it. Don't waste your life. As a young man in my early 20s, I will tell you, I never got over those words, don't waste your life.

Don't die rich in the world and poor toward God. Some of you need to think about this. Tonight, it could all be over. Would God look at you and say, you fool! You'd live clean, nobody's got anything to say against you, and you were at church every week, but, but tonight your soul is required of you, and then all those things that you worked so hard for.

Whose are they gonna be now? Only one life to live will soon be past, only what's done for Christ will last. Number three, number three, Jesus says you need to rethink contentment. Rethink contentment, verse 22. Verse 22, Jesus goes right to the heart of money sickness. Then Jesus said to his disciples, I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear, for life is more than food and the body is more than clothes. He says your problem is you think money is the essence of the good life.

Jesus then uses two analogies that correspond to money sickness, really in two different personality types. First, verse 24, he says, consider the ravens, they neither have storehouse or barn, yet God feeds them. How much more value are you than the birds?

There's some of you that, when you get extra money, you like to save it, because you worry about a rainy day. And Jesus said, well think about the birds, birds don't take care of saving, God takes care of them. Surely you're more valuable to God than birds are, you're made in God's image and birds aren't. Verse 27, he says, consider the lilies, how they grow, they neither toil nor spin.

Yet I tell you, even Solomon in all of his glory was not arrayed like one of these. If God so clothes the grass, which is alive in the field today and tomorrow stoned into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, you of little faith. I mean, you last forever. Grass changes every season.

Right? You're more valuable to God than grass is, he died to save you. He didn't die for grass, you're way better than grass. His point with these analogies is not that we should never save or spend money on clothes. His point is simply that God is a more reliable source for both security, for the future, and for beauty, significance, and fulfillment in the present than money is. When you think about the future, what gives you a feeling of security? Is it the amount of money that you have, or is it that you're right with God? If it's money, you'll be very tight-fisted with it. If it's God, you'll be free with that money, you'll be open-handed, you'll be ready to be generous whenever God directs, and that's because you're not worried about it, because God is your security, not money. Stop thinking that contentment and happiness are found just around the corner at the next income level.

Stop thinking security is at the next benchmark in your portfolio. Both significance and security, Jesus said, think about the ravens and the lilies, both of those are best found in the present by being obedient to God. You see, verse 31, you should seek his kingdom, and if you do, all these things will be added to you.

What are all these things? In context, security and fulfillment and happiness. If you put God first, he'll give you security, he'll give you fulfillment and happiness. Stop thinking they're out there somewhere, they have nothing to do with what you're going to obtain in the future. Those things are things that you should be able to experience wherever you are. So let me just ask, are you happy right now? Do you feel secure right now? If not, that's not a money problem, that's a relationship with God problem.

Contentment is a present posture issue, not a future acquisition one. Number four, last one, have a radical experience of grace, verse 32. Verse 32 has become one of my favorite verses. Don't be afraid, little flock, because your father delights to give you the kingdom.

I was always taught by my English professor that you should not mix metaphors. But here, Jesus wonderfully mixes three. I call them the trifecta of assurance. God is A, the watchful shepherd, intimately aware of where we are and what we're doing. He is B, the almighty king, controlling everything according to his good purposes for our lives.

And C, he's a tender father who delights to see us thrive. Can't you trust that if you obey him, he'll take care for you? I mean, didn't he die for you? It is your father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. How much did it cost him to give you the kingdom?

It wasn't free. Jesus had to purchase it with his blood. And if he provided that for you when you were his enemy, don't you think he'll supply you abundantly now that you were his child?

And that'll take your hands off of clinging so tightly furthermore. Shouldn't an experience with the generosity of Jesus produce generosity in you? What did Jesus do with his stuff? He gave it away to save you. Where would you be had he not?

You'd be lost. Shouldn't you also do that for others? To see the cure for money sickness is to wake up to the brevity of life. It's to be rich toward God, to choose to be rich toward God. It's to rethink contentment and have a radical experience of grace. That's the cure for a heart of greed.

Before I close this, let me say a really practical way that you can apply this. This is something we call FIRST here. FIRST was an initiative that we began at our church in 2018. It was a two-year journey in which we approached God with one question. Is Jesus FIRST in our hearts?

Is he FIRST in our time, our talent, and our treasure? We challenge you to give, to make a two-year commitment of radical generosity that put Christ FIRST. Let's say he was a pastor.

It was a very moving time to see members that made some of the boldest and most radical commitments we had ever seen. I know of newlyweds, for example, that built generosity into their initial budget with money they didn't really even have. One did it before getting a job. He said, I saw the Lord provide the exact salary increase so that I could meet this faith commitment that I made. I know of a family who had young kids who determined they were going to make giving to the kingdom of God their largest expense every month. More than their mortgage, more than their retirement savings, more than they spent on Christmas. They watched God provide for them, and even more importantly, watched God train their kids in why life was about serving Jesus, not about collecting stuff.

I think of a couple of retirees in Briar Creek, our Briar Creek campus, Ken and Joanne, who shared that through FIRST, they've given more in two years than in the past decade. The guy said the greatest thing was not that God multiplied our money and gave it back to us. He said God gave us something we never had in our lives, and that was contentment. Contentment and a level of joy that we never experienced. Ken shared that he feels like he's just as rich as Jeff Bezos because there's nothing in the world that he desires that he cannot afford because the level of contentment God has given him with what he has.

It was that and so many others. Over two years, Summit Family, you committed $75 million to this. That generosity has enabled us to do some amazing things. In the last two years, we launched a campus in Garner and the Capitol Hills campus. We bought land for the Alamance County campus.

We've moved ahead with plans for building the North Durham campus facility. We sent out four U.S. church planters with teams to get churches started in different cities around the United States. We got five more in residency this year.

We've given out 7,000 copies of Groundwork's disciple-making study out of Summit members and people here in the Triangle and all kinds of people going through that. Over 100 baptisms here since August during COVID. Okay, 100 people that have been baptized. We've heard of 66 who prayed to receive Christ in October alone from dozens of countries around the globe.

Several hundred home gatherings meeting every week. Yeah, we've had to adapt like never before here in 2020 and going into 2021, we're going to continue to ask how to put Christ first and how to make the gospel above all in everything we do. In this new, wacky, crazy normal that we're in, everything has got to be on the table, especially our yes. So as we prepare to wrap up this two-year journey of first, I'm going to ask all of you, whether you're brand new here or you've been here for a while, I'm going to ask you to take a next step. First, if you made a first faith commitment a couple years ago or last year when we renewed it, I'm going to ask you like I'm challenging myself and my family to finish strong. In December, we want you to complete that commitment. For those of you who were not here and you didn't make a commitment or maybe you're just new to our church family, we'd ask you to jump in. And we're not going to ask you to fill out a card, but over the next couple weeks, I want you to prayerfully consider what it would look like for Jesus to have the first place in your finances and get engaged. Now you're like, well, I'm just a visitor here and I'm not even sure I'm a Christian.

I'm not talking to you, okay? I'm talking about those of you that are like, I think this church is supposed to be the church that I'm a part of. Listen, we would love to have you here under any circumstances, but we know that if God leads you here to make this your place of ministry, then it's a mission that you believe in and we want to see the gospel transform the triangle and we want to see churches planted around the world and we would love to have you as a part of that because that's all we are is a group of people that are not funding the vision of a pastor. It's a group of people that are following what Jesus laid out in the Great Commission.

This is not about us meeting a budget. It's about you being a full disciple of Jesus and us taking advantage of this moment that we have right now for mission. That's what it's about. I saw this recently. Let me end on it. I want to read you a list. Listen to this. I want you to imagine how much you think all this would cost.

Okay? Sponsor a million new indigenous full-time missionaries in poor nations around the world. Completely fund the fight against global malaria. Quadruple the global missions budget of all missions agencies engaged in reaching an evangelized nation.

Quadruple it. Provide food, clothing, and shelter to all 6.5 million refugees across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Triple the global Bible translation budget. Fund 150,000 seminary scholarships for promising students in emerging economies. Double the operating budget of compassion that's caring for orphans. Establish eight new Christian universities around the world. Hire 25,000 additional American missionaries to work on our college campuses. That sounds like quite a list, doesn't it?

What do you think the price tag on that would be? Listen to this. I'm not making this up. You can do the math. It would all be accomplished if the Christian community in America gave just 0.4% more of its income. One more dollar out of every 250 to work in the kingdom of God. By God's grace, we're the richest faith community in history.

American Christians have a combined annual income of $5 trillion. What could we do right here in the triangle? If you've got a group of people, 12,000 strong, that call this church their home, that just say, God is going to be first and his kingdom is going to be first. Can you imagine the impact that we can make on the triangle?

It would never be the same. All I want you to do in this season is to put your yes on the table and say, God, I want you to be first. I don't want money to be my God. I want you to be my God. And I want you to obey the voice of the Holy Spirit. God, why don't you bow your heads if you would and let's pray together.

Father is the, I guess you'd call it, leader of this church. God, I'm first and foremost a follower. And God, I want to lead right now in simply saying, I don't want to trust in money. I don't want to trust in my bank account.

I don't want to trust in my earning potential. I just want to obey you. All that I have, whether it's income or things that I own, I just want to put it again on the altar in front of you. I just want to say, what do you want? Show me in these days to come what it looks like to refine.

What it looks like for you to be first. And what you want me to do in the days to come. As I think about giving and next year and how I'm going to make you first. And all that I do. I pray, God, I ask for that. I ask for clarity for our church in this too. Thanks to God in Jesus' name. Amen.