Embracing Generosity and Community Through Blessings

1) "I want to celebrate with you that we had 14 people up here to join the church last week. Is that not amazing? If you read my article this week, that 14 new members, since I've been here for two and a half years, that brought our new membership up to 47 new people joining the church. Isn't that great? But I want to celebrate something that to me is even better. I want to celebrate these new members. And that is that last week we had our fifth baptism in two and a half years. Friends, that is absolutely incredible. Do you know how many United Methodist churches go years and years and years without a single baptism? And we've had five in two and a half years. On top of that, we had our first confirmand since 2017. 17. Y'all let that sink in for a second. Last confirmand was in 2017. And we had one last Sunday. Does that not deserve a praise to God?" [26:06] (67 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


2) "So I want to talk for a second about what this phrase means and what it actually means to be blessed. Because we think about it, it's used in our church all the time, but what really does it mean? I think it's one of these words like faith that we throw around so much in discipleship. That we forget what the Bible means by the word blessed. So just to throw a simple definition, that word blessed means to be favored or fortunate, but it's meaning spiritually. Okay, so to have a religious or spiritual favor from God. Now it's a two-way street. So when we are in relationship with God, God is in relationship with us. We've been talking about that. Over the past weeks, haven't we? About the Wesleyan way and discipleship and how we grow closer to God and how we understand our discipleship journey. So that when we live into our life with God, God gives us grace. That's what it means to be blessed, to receive God's grace." [30:53] (67 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


3) "But see, we're missing the point that blessings are about our spiritual life. God blesses with spiritual health, with spiritual connection, with spiritual growth. Scripture talks about blessings as spirituality. Every place we see it, it's about the spiritual life, the spiritual relationship, the spiritual connection with God. That's why it starts with us first. Blessing God, because we are giving ourselves to God so that he in turn gives back growth and connection and strength to us. Let's go back to the Psalms again. Psalm 24, verse 5. They will receive the Lord's blessings and have a right relationship with God, their Savior. See, once again, the Psalmist is saying that the blessing is about our relationship with God. But there's a third part. So once we've given them to God and God gives them to us, we are supposed to also give them to others." [35:00] (75 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


4) "We don't hold on to the gift of God's love and grace and keep it secret. That's not the joy of Christianity, is it not? We don't have this incredible gift of God's love and grace and then hold it alone and not share it with the world. We are supposed to share with other people. The good news of who God is. We're supposed to share with other people the amazing love that God has given us and what it feels like to know him and what it feels like to experience him and what it feels like to grow in our walk with him. We're created in God's image, friends. And what God does is also part of our nature because we want to do in our inner self the same thing as God. So when we return the same acts of blessings, we receive the same things. We are acting to the innermost part of who we are." [36:19] (55 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


5) "The way the Bible talks about generosity can only be described as irrational generosity, and I'll say this is something that we as an American church do not like to talk about. It makes us uncomfortable. As a person who, in our family, we have always practiced irrational generosity, I say this to you because it has transformed who we are as people. In the beginning of our life, the only way we paid our bills was the support of other people. Working minimum wage at 10 hours a week, that's the only job you can get when you're a student in seminary, and if it wasn't for grants and the support of people who cared about us, we wouldn't have been able to pay for daycare and for gas and for food, and I'll never forget one day when things just seemed to have gotten unplanned in that week that I looked at my checking list and I said, I didn't have enough money to put gas in my car, and I had to call my mom and say, hey, mom, I need some money to get to payday because I can't get to class this week because there's not enough money for gas, and AJ can't get to work, and my mom, who's so loving, responded, money's on the way." [42:34] (116 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


6) "I actually had to back her away a little. She wanted to give a lot, of her car fund to it, and I just had to say, honey, I love you. You don't understand the value of money yet. Let's use a responsible amount of that money, and let's give X amount and make sure we're honoring your goals and also honoring your heart. She's 11. Dollars still have a hard time demeaning something to her, but sometimes irrational generosity catches in ways we can't imagine. And friends, this is why in this same letter to the Corinthians, just a little bit before what I just read to you, Paul says this, for I can testify that they gave not only what they could afford, but far more. They did it of their own free will. They begged us again and again for the privilege of sharing in the gift for the believers in Jerusalem." [45:34] (67 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


7) "The research tells us that the people who have the least amount are the ones who are most willing to give to church. And the more people get, the less likely they are to give. That breaks my heart, because it brings me back to the passage of Jesus teaching the rich young ruler. I don't say this to make anyone feel bad. What I say this to say is that we, as Christians, need to reflect on the fact that we're struggling. We need to reflect on the where are we in our life right now? Because I want to tell you a wonderful statistic, and that is this year alone, we had 12 new households become givers in our church. Can we celebrate that? We had 19 households this year. In addition to those 12, we had 19 households that increased their giving over last year. Can we celebrate that? And friends, we have 59 separate households currently giving within our church. That's amazing." [48:33] (73 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


8) "If we're not growing in our spiritual walk, we need to reflect on where is our money going. And this is not about how many dollars. I want you to hear me clearly when I say this. This is not about quantity. This is about relationship with God. And I teach you how to do that. I teach you how to do that. I teach you how to do that. I teach you how to do that. I teach you how to do that. I teach you how to do that. Because my goal as your pastor is to help you grow and to put God front and center in your life. And I can only speak from my own personal experience. And I can tell you for a fact that the years that I've struggled the most in my life have been the years that me and God did not have enough conversations when it came to money. I've not been a perfect person with money. Nobody has. But when we have more conversations in our house, with God about money, we have had a better relationship with God and within our house." [50:42] (69 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)