Transforming Lives Through Kindness and Generosity

I know the shame of poverty. I lived it. But I also know the power of kindness, because people at our church, they wrap their arms around my family and they would come to our door week after week with bags of groceries. And people ask me all the time, "Well, what difference can a bag of groceries make or a plate of food?" Trust me, for a hungry kid, it makes all the difference in the world. [00:09:18]

I believe God had to do a work in my heart before he could do a work through my hands. And I came back from one of those trips and I just, I had to do something. And so we took $300 and we bought groceries and we loaded up a pickup truck. And we went into the migrant farm workers part of Northern California and we began passing out groceries to the migrant farm workers, telling 'em Jesus loved them, we love them, and there was a church right down the street that loved them too. [00:15:07]

We really began to seek, "What is it you wanna do God?" rather than what we wanna do. And we changed the question. The question was, for years, "Oh, how do we grow Convoy of Hope?" The question changed to now, "God, how much can we give away? Who can we bless?" Be rich. Who can we bless? And so instead of building another charity, it's how do we empower the church and become a channel of blessing to the church? [00:18:30]

I wish the church was known more for their sweat and tears on behalf of their communities rather than perhaps even their political positions. You know, I'm not one that believes that we need to divorce ourselves from the political arena, but neither do I believe we should be sacrificing eternal impact for short-term political gains. I don't. I believe that God wants to work through the church to influence our communities, but also to influence the bastions of power in our nation. [00:25:40]

I've traveled all over the world and I have to tell you, I've never seen love fail. Not once. I've never seen it happen. And I think when you look at the life of Jesus, a lot of people today, I think they are, they are pointing to Jesus and they say, "Well, he turned over the tables of the money changers." And he demonstrated some other compassionate activities, but he demonstrated, you know, just at times, holy anger. [00:27:00]

Jesus, it was compassion followed by holy anger, justified, followed by compassion and holy anger. There was a rhythm to it. And so today I hope that the church has known more for it's compassion than it's rage. [00:27:42]

Devotion to God is best demonstrated and authenticated through love for other people, not sermons and songs. Love for God or a devotion to God is best demonstrated and authenticated by the way we treat other people, especially the people that can't do anything for us in return. That extravagant generosity, if you think about it, if you're a Christian, extravagant generosity is actually the appropriate, it's kind of the natural response to God's extravagant generosity to you and to me. [00:38:00]

And Be Rich is our opportunity to remind our communities, as we're constantly reminded here at church, remind our communities that everybody, right? Everybody matters to God. Everybody matters to God whether God matters to them or not. [00:31:49]

We wanna be good at being rich because most of us, compared to a lot of people, are, in fact, rich. Now, the reason you don't feel rich is because you know people who are richer. And you live in the world of er. There's bigg-er and pretti-er and skinni-er and high-er and fast-er and shini-er, er, er, er, er, er. So none of us feel rich. And that's okay not to feel rich. You are, because you and I, we have extra. [00:39:57]

And this is our opportunity to bring some of our extra together to do something extraordinary in our community. So when it comes to Be Rich, we do not set a financial goal. We don't try to raise in a certain amount of money. We have a participation goal. And our participation goal is simple. It's 100% participation. We want everybody to participate. We're asking 100% of you to give, and then we are going to give 100% of it away. [00:40:24]

Jesus was clear about this and we talk about it at our churches all the time, right? "Devotion to God..." "Devotion to God is best demonstrated and authenticated through love for other people, not sermons and songs." Love for God or a devotion to God is best demonstrated and authenticated by the way we treat other people, especially the people that can't do anything for us in return. [00:37:49]

And then Jesus came along and introduced a whole different way of thinking about people. That everybody had dignity, that everybody deserved to be loved, that everybody was loved. And the church came along and took that teaching and organized around it and began doing for others what the government and what the empire had never considered doing for others. And it took hold and it changed an empire and it changed the world, and it continues to change the world. [00:38:56]