Where Your Treasure Is: Choosing Generosity Over Scarcity

``This is a God who overflows with creativity. This is a God who gives, and gives, and gives again. This is a God who does not lack, but he loves you with an everlasting love. This is a God who lavishes upon you mercy and hope and goodness and righteousness. This is a generous God who leads you, who calls you to live an abundant life. Because when we have a generous God, when we have an abundant God, we can have an abundance mindset. We can have confidence that there is enough. And when we believe that, our hands and our wallets can follow suit. [01:03:36] (37 seconds)  #GodOfAbundance

who has carried you this far. And we raise up this rock, and we say, this far, God has helped me. This far, God has carried me. And because of that, I will have faith stepping into the next year. I do not need to grab and hoard and be stingy, because I worship a God who is a generous God, an abundant God who has got more than enough. This far, God has helped us, and that will give me the confidence to live out of a place of blessing. [01:06:00] (31 seconds)  #ThisFarGodHelped

My friends, I pray that over the four weeks, we would move from being less Scrooge to more Ebenezer, that we would remind ourselves that we worship a good and abundant and blessing God. A God who has more than enough. A God who has bought us this far and helped us this far. And I pray that it would change us, that we would alter the direction we are on, so at the end of this year, we would be a more generous people than we are right now. [01:14:57] (28 seconds)  #GenerosityJourney

Jesus says, you be careful. Before you start looking at how you spend your money, look at how you view the world. Because how you see it will determine on how you act. Have you got a clean eye? Have you got an eye of light? Or have you got an eye of darkness? Have you got an abundance mindset? Or have you got a scarcity mindset? [00:58:29] (21 seconds)  #EyeOfAbundance

I'd encourage you to do that in a group. We learn best in circles. So join a small group. Start a small group. Start a WhatsApp group. Get some people to be accountable to each other. So you can ask yourself the question, right, we tried this. Is it working for you? And then and then next week, we'll just do it again. We'll do it again because, like I shared in my Christmas message, I'm a big fan of this long obedience in the same direction. Yeah? We keep on moving. We keep on moving and become more and more like Jesus. [00:46:56] (28 seconds)  #LearnInCircles

So maybe we can try and discover the joy of giving this week. Buy someone a coffee. Start small. It's countercultural, isn't it? Because we have got thousands of advertisements hitting us every day, telling us the stuff we should get. And Jesus is like, think about the stuff you can give. Who in your life can you be? Buy someone a book. Send someone a voucher. Get the coffee in for the person behind you. Start small, but start enough to make it a little bit uncomfortable just to test it out. See if you are more blessed as you give than you are when you receive. [00:51:12] (34 seconds)  #JoyOfGiving

What I'm saying is, sometimes our money follows our heart. You you're passionate about someone or something, and you spend money on that thing or that someone. Yeah? But Jesus is saying, as well as that also, where you spend your money, your heart will also go there. Let me put that in very practical terms. You do not care about losing a pen, do you? Until you bought an expensive pen, and then you care. [00:54:01] (27 seconds)  #MoneyFollowsHeart

You can't serve God and Mam. It's a warning to us that there's a spiritual element to money. Like we talked about at the start, where you put your money, there's something about your heart and your attitude that follows it. And Jesus is warning. He's like, you've got to hold this thing carefully because this is a power that will seek to own you. Think about all the evil that is done in the world because people are behest to mammon. Think about all the terrible things that are done because people are so so locked up by that power that money can hold over them. [01:08:11] (38 seconds)  #NoServeMammon