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Let me start by saying something that I think we all can agree with. We love generous people. We all love a person who isn't too tied to their bank account to spot a five dollar bill if you need one. We love people who are not too tethered to their calendar to make time for us, and I would argue that most of us strive to be that kind of person. And today I have the absolute privilege to talk to you about generosity. I'm talking about the spiritual habit of giving. That's right, just like how spending daily time with God, you thought you were getting out of it because Jacob wasn't preaching, spend daily time with God. Worship, prayer, meditation, gratitude, all of these are spiritual disciplines or habits and so is giving. And let me tell you something, I love to talk about money. If we have had the opportunity to meet, we've talked about money. The chances are very high we've talked about finances. If I haven't bullied you into making a budget yet, just know it's coming. With my now wife, Kat, and I, we're just starting in our relationship four years, five years ago now, wow. I found, like, it took me three weeks to figure out that she did not have a budget. It took me one week after that to fix that problem. She was a teacher, she was paying off student loans with a teacher's salary, and let me just say, I won't spend too much time here, teachers are grossly underpaid. But she was convinced that she would not be able to move out on her own even though she desperately needed to. But by the time we were done with her budget, she was already looking for apartments listed for below what she budgeted for rent. So because of that, I'm pretty unapologetic about how I talk about money. Trust me, I'm not going to spend the next few hours lecturing everybody about how they're doing a bad job with money or how we need to do better. That's not helpful. But if we take a few moments to think about this topic, money, generosity, finances, it becomes clear that money is one of the primary driving factors in the decisions we make in our lives. Money holds so much weight over our decisions, not just our decisions, our relationships. Money is so controversial and so steeped in confusion that there are times that we don't even talk to our spouses about finances, let alone kids. If we don't really understand what we're talking about with finances, how can our kids? But money holds so much weight over our decisions. Can I buy that car or should I buy this one? There's a house in this nice neighborhood. Can I afford to buy that or do I need to look elsewhere? Can I afford to accept that new job that maybe pays a little bit less but gives me way more free time or like what will I do with the additional money that I just got from my raise? Do we go out again this weekend or do we do the responsible thing and cook from home and save some money? I would argue that most like a majority of the big decisions we make in our lives comes down to money. So why wouldn't we want to look at something so pervasive in our lives, so controversial, and so covered in confusion through the lens of our faith? We should do that. So why am I the way that I am, and why should you listen to me about money? Well, I can answer the first one, and hopefully that'll inform your opinion about the second one. I grew up without much in the way of finances. We weren't destitute, we weren't, like, way below poverty by any means, but my parents divorced when I was younger, which forced my mom into odd jobs which were often low-paying. Let's just say I had my fair share of microwave hot dogs with a Kraft single in the middle. We made enough to get by, that's about it, and that made me recognize that I never wanted to put myself or my family in that situation if I could help it. So I went to college, as one does, and picked up some debt, as one does, but I was able to pay it off fairly quickly with the help of my dad and with some side gigs that I was able to pick up. But other than that I've done my best to steer clear of debt. I bought and I still buy cheap cars that I can pay off quickly or with cash. It saves a lot of money. When Kat and I got married, we aggressively paid off her student loans, the remaining student loans that she had, in about a year, and when I had to take some money out to redo my crawl space, I paid that off in about eight months. Me and debt don't get along. Now as I tell those stories, it can be easy to hear that and say, man, those people must be loaded. They have got so much money that they can just be throwing all of it at loans. But that's not true. I spent most of my 20s making less than$20,000 a year. When Kat and I got married and started aggressively paying off our debt, we made below average salaries for Midlothian. So, if it's not just a bunch of money to throw at stuff, what is it? I believe that the reason we could and can do all of that now is generosity. It's because we give money away. It's because the first line item on our collective budget is generosity. First to the church, second to our community, and third to our friends. I've been following Jesus for about 20 years now, and all 20 of those years that I've had a job, I've given 10% of my income, and that used to be a couple of dollars a week when I was in high school, but let me tell you, it's no longer just a couple of dollars. But I can tell you that it's much easier to give now than it would've been had I not had the opportunity to start small. So even as we get paid more, we give more with joy. Now I'm not saying, and you will never hear me say, and I will not say today, that because we gave money to God, God gave us money. Money is not a tool with which we can manipulate God into doing what we want. But what I can tell you is that all throughout my life, I have seen the providence of God in every circumstance, in every situation in my life, directly tied to how we handle money. When I did an internship at a church in Charlotte for 15 weeks, I did a full semester there, while attending community college full-time online back in Virginia Beach, I made $150 per week, and I gave 15 of those dollars each week faithfully with joy, and I never once in a foreign city worried about gas, lodging, food, or anything else. There's no way that anybody could work full-time for $150 a week and not have to worry about any of that. And when I came back to Virginia Beach to do ministry full-time for, wait for it, $9 an hour, the same was true. I didn't have to worry about any of that stuff. I've been able to live a full life both in financial lack and abundance. I have learned, as Paul writes just a few verses before and as we talked about last week, the secret of being content in any and every situation. Now I'm not the most generous person you know, shocker. I'm probably not the most generous person you know, but I'm committed each and every day to do the right thing with the resources God has given me. So I've had my share of financial ups and downs, but one thing has remained consistent in my life, and that's the desire to be generous. Yet through all that, I learned a simple truth and it's my big idea for this message. God calls us to meet the needs of others, and God calls others to meet our needs. So our passage today is Philippians 4:15 through 19, which Jacob and I have already read. But I believe there are three things we can learn from Paul's letters to the Philippians in verses 15 through 19. This portion of the Joy Letter teaches us that it's better to give than receive, that our worldly sacrifice is an offering to God, and that God steps in to meet our needs. But before we talk about each of those, take a look at a day in the life of the people Paul was writing to. Philippi is located in northeast Greece. If you're curious, Philippi got its name from Alexander the Great's father, King Philip II, and the church here would have been largely non-Jewish. I mean, that makes sense. They're deep in the middle of ancient Rome and the Roman Empire, far away from Israel, so of course, the Jewish population would be a little bit lower here, but what's more interesting is that even though Philippi was part of the Roman Empire, a majority of the people were likely not Roman citizens, which meant that they did not have the same rights as the Romans who lived among them. Roman military veterans were granted land in the Philippian countryside. The more that the Romans moved in, the less economic standing the Philippians had. So by about 50 AD, the city was undeniably Roman, with a majority of the land belonging to Roman citizens. Someone had to work the land, so many of the people in Philippi sought a wage from the social elite. Because of that, this is going somewhere, I promise, it's likely that the general population of Philippi were poor. They were likely to be considered the underclass with maybe a few middle class merchants making ends meet by selling to the Roman citizens. Needless to say, this caused many economic hardships for the church in Philippi. Yet in the midst of their economic hardship, Paul writes this in Philippians

4: 8:51

15. As you Philippians know, in the early days of your acquaintance with the gospel, when I set out for Macedonia, not one church shared with me in the matter of giving and receiving except you only. Now to make this verse as clear as possible, there are two major giving initiatives throughout all of Paul's letters. They're found in Romans and 1 Corinthians. And this speaks of an offering collected for the church in Jerusalem. The church at Philippi participated in that offering. The giving that Paul's talking about here is support for his ministry specifically, and only one church came through for him, and it was the church in Philippi. There's actually a third instance of giving that Paul kinda just glosses over,

and it's in verse 4: 9:31

16, and you'll never guess who participated in this offering, the church in Philippi. In Philippians 4:16, Paul writes, "When I was in Thessalonica, you sent me aid more than once when I was in need." Thessalonica was Paul's next ministry stop after Philippi, yet the Philippians never stopped giving or sending aid to Paul. They gave more than once, and it wasn't out of their abundance that they gave. They had no abundance. They were poor. Now, if you didn't know, this may be a shocker. It costs money to do ministry. At the end of the day, it costs two things to have a healthy, thriving church, time and money. So when I hear, "When can we get a new building? When can we have our own building? It's when we come together to give and to serve. When can we have a missions ministry where we go out and change the world when we come together to give and to serve? How about a men's and women's ministry? Say it with me. When we come together to? And? Yeah. So that's what it takes. Whether we like it or not, what we do here week in and week out requires financial resources. It costs money to rent a building. It costs money to feed the poor. It requires resources to reach and transform a city for Christ. There's always a vendor to pay. There's always a piece of equipment to buy. And without the generosity of the people in the church, that's you and me, none of it can happen. And that's true now, it was true then. Yet of all the churches we hear about being the most generous is one of the poorest. The most consistent giver was one of the poorest. Are you seeing a pattern yet? It appears generosity does not require wealth. It seems generosity simply requires discipline and prioritization. But we'll come back to that just a little bit later. So what did this most generous of churches understand that we can learn today. It's better to give than? There it is. Thank you. That's right, we're getting to the spirit of Christmas a few months early. It's always Christmas for me. It drives my wife crazy, but I love me some Christmas. But let's think about it. When was the last time you bought someone a gift? Who was the happier person? Chances are, it was you. Paul quotes Jesus about this very topic in Acts 20:35. It is more blessed to give than to receive. Not long ago, Kat's headphones broke, and I knew she wouldn't go out and buy her own, so I went out and I bought her a new pair of headphones, and I held onto them for a couple of months before her birthday, it was two months. And y'all took everything inside me to keep that gift a secret. Like, it was so hard for me to keep it inside, I was so ready to give her that gift. And so when the time came, I got to put it all nice and neat in a little bag, you know, with the tissue paper from last year that you're gonna use for next year. I was able to put it on, we're frugal around here. I was able to put it on the counter, so when she woke up and came downstairs, she would be so surprised. We don't normally do gifts. So I was able to put this on, and she's so surprised that there's a happy birthday bag on the counter. And you all, I was thrilled. How did she like it? I don't remember. I mean, she uses them, she was appreciative of the gift. But I loved giving her that gift. It brought me so much joy. If you don't believe me, scientists have been coming near to the same conclusion for the past couple of decades. A study done in 2008 was titled "Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness." I think we can all guess the conclusion of that study. A study reviewing that 2008 study found that people around the world derive emotional benefits from using their financial resources to help others. And what's better than giving to strangers? It's where I found joy. Giving to people we're connected to. Researchers at the University of British Columbia and Harvard found that the joy of giving may grow when we give to people we're connected to. And that's what we see here. We've been talking about Paul's letters to the Philippians for most of this year, honestly, and if you've been here for a couple of those weeks, you know that Paul and this church are friends. They know each other well. And when the church in Philippi hears their friend is in need, they rush to his aid. It's one thing to give money or food or resources to that someone out there, but it's another thing entirely to give to someone who you know is in need. It's a whole new level of joy. And I do believe that there is joy in giving to people we may never meet. We as a church sponsor a few kids through Compassion International. When a natural disaster strikes, we typically will give to Convoy of Hope which goes out and serves people we may never meet. And these are good things and we should do that. But how much better when you hear about the needs of someone you know and you know you can meet it. If that happens, please do it. If you have the funds and the resources and materials that can help people, please do it. James, the brother of Jesus, writes about this in James 2:15 through 16 when he writes, "Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, 'Go in peace, keep warm and well-fed,' but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?" Prayer is important. Everything should always be covered in prayer. But know that you can be an answer to a prayer to someone in need. I want you to share in the joy of giving and receiving, just as Paul wanted for the Philippians. And hear me, giving and receiving, they're not rivals. It's not a give and a take. They don't push and pull against one another. Giving and receiving together is a spiritual habit. And who knows that sometimes it can be just as hard to receive as it can be to give. I had a friend back in high school that would always tell me, never reject someone else's blessing for you. And since then I've done my best to receive with joy as well. But let me tell you, it's still difficult. But I'm here to tell you the truth. The kind of giving that we're called to, we as the church, costs us something. Now the fun thing about the Bible is that there are all these great ties in the text. The passage in James I read just a moment ago says "well-fed" and one might assume that this is the same word used throughout Philippians in places like when Paul says "make my joy complete" in Philippians 2:2 or "I am amply supplied"

in Philippians 4: 15:51

18 or "God will meet all your needs" in Philippians 4:19, but they're two different words. The Greek in those verses in Philippians paint a picture of to make full, to fill, to make complete. The Greek in James simply means literally, "to feed." But it does not imply that the speaker is doing the feeding or that they will be made whole or that their needs will be met. The fictional figure that James writes about simply says, "I see your need." In other words, there is no cost. The passage in James really drives point to home that saying something without doing something is woefully lacking. The passages in Philippians, though, paint a completely different picture of giving. The words in Philippians invoke an image of filling up, being made whole, being made complete through another's generosity. What Paul challenges us to do is not to just see a need, but to say I see your need, and I'm gonna walk alongside you to meet that need. Remember, the church in Philippi was one of the poorest churches Paul knew. So when they gave, it cost them something. When they gave, it wasn't simply just a donation that they wrote off on their taxes, it was a sacrifice for them. But it wasn't a sacrifice to Paul. It was an offering to God. And now if I'm honest, I have a problem with this word sacrifice. Maybe you can relate. The problem I find in my life with this word though, is that I can't put a line item in my budget that says, if I give X, I will get Y as a return on that investment. If I give this amount of time, the church will grow. If I give this amount of money, we can finally afford that thing that I want for the ministry. It's not usually how it works in the kingdom of God though. Here's what Paul writes to the Philippians in 4:18."The gift you sent through Epaphroditus are a fragrant offering, an acceptable sacrifice pleasing to God." A fragrant offering, this is kind of not something that we talk about anymore, but in the Old Testament, there were, it was something called a fragrant offering. We sang about it a little bit in "Worthy of It All," that last song we just did, where the incense is rising up. You light incense on fire, smoke rises, the aroma goes up, pleasing offering to God. Now I don't know if you've ever burned something before. If you have, please do it safely. But you know, if you set it on fire, it's not something you get back. It's wholly consumed, it's destroyed, it's unusable afterwards. But there was another type of burnt offering. Again, we don't talk about burnt offerings very often. But that was also practiced at this time and it was called the grain offering. Only part of this was burnt. The rest of it, the part that was burnt was called the memorial portion. The rest of it was used by the people who worked in the temple or the church. In the same way, that gift was holy to God, holy, yes, but fully to God, but still usable by people. And in this case, the people who served the church. So when you give to others, to the church, you are offering your gift to God. And it's through that gift that God's people are amply supplied. You may not see it directly. Like I don't get the X to the Y. I wish we always did see it directly. But each time you sacrifice something for God's kingdom, it becomes an offering to God. And that means our worldly sacrifice is actually an offering to God. That means generosity requires sacrifice. So generosity has to cost us something. Let's explore a bit more about what it costs us because it's more than just our finances. Paul writes earlier in Philippians 4:14 that it was good of you to share in my troubles. Paul sees this gift from the Philippians as them stepping into his trouble with him. They didn't just give him money, they did, it was helpful. They gave him much needed support in his troubles. And that's what we're called to do. How do I know? Paul also writes about this in Galatians 6:2, to encourage us to carry each other's burdens, and in this way, you will fulfill the law of Christ. There are two interesting bits here. First, fulfill shares that same Greek root of the verses I mentioned earlier in Philippians, talking about filling up, making whole, making complete. So when we carry each other's burdens, we fully satisfy the law of Christ, as in, that's what the church does. The second bit is what it means to carry each other's burdens. That part of the verse implies that in order to carry another's burden, you yourself must become burdened. The Greek word translated here for carry means to lift something up, duh, and bear its weight on yourself. We see the same word used in the Gospel of John to describe Jesus carrying his own cross. Sacrifice, carrying another's burden, is not sympathy from a distance. It's not just holding people out at arm's length and just throwing money at the problem. It's rolling up your sleeves and getting down in the mud with them and saying, "I'm gonna walk alongside you until your need is met." And now, notice, throughout this entire message, I have not been saying the word friend or community or neighbor, because our call is not just to the ones that we like or we relate to. It's to serve the whole world. It's to serve everyone. So when we're called to carry each other's burdens, Paul is telling us to lift up someone else's weight and bear it ourselves. It doesn't matter who they are. Our call is to lift up the oppression, the bonds of oppression on the people around us and put it on our shoulders. It's to see our brothers and sisters in poverty and be filled with righteous anger, for the injustice done to them and put it on our shoulders. It's to see the widow, the orphan, the hungry, the thirsty, the imprisoned, the people we disagree with politically and see their problems through the eyes of Jesus and see the weight they carry and put it on our shoulders. And as we do this, just as Jesus looked at us and saw our needs, the weight of our sins, our circumstances, our illnesses, our problems, and hoisted it up onto his shoulders in the form of the cross. Now this is what we're called to, friends. An old pastor named Jonathan Edwards asks it this way in a sermon from way back in the 1730s. If we are never obliged to relieve others' burdens, but only when we can do it without burdening ourselves, then how do we bear our neighbors' burdens when we bear no burden at all? We don't like thinking about sacrifice. It gets uncomfortable to think about sacrifice. We might get a little squeamish if we think about putting others' needs and burdening ourselves for the needs of others. But discomfort drives us to action. And my friends, action is what we need. You see, generosity costs something, but it is a joy. So how do we live in this level of joy? Put simply, generosity is a restructuring of your priorities. When we don't set our priorities, the world will set them for us. When Kat and I sit down to do our budget, the first line item every time is our gift to the church. Comes first every time. And when I sit down to help anyone else with their budget, every time I tell them that giving should be first. You'd be amazed at how many times people are shocked that they have as much money to give away when they put it first. But when you put generosity last, it gets shaved off the most. What's left is scraps, but friends, let me tell you that our community, our friends, our neighbor, the people in need deserve"more than the scraps of our budget." Just as not only does Jesus deserve our first and our best, our community deserves our best as well. Think about it this way. Whatever gets the first part of your budget is what you truly care about. If the first thing on your budget is your food budget, you prioritize food. It's not a bad thing we all have to eat. Some of us like to eat good, but it's just what you care about the most. If the first thing on your mortgage or your budget is your mortgage, you prioritize your mortgage. I mean, it makes sense. For most people, it's the largest expense you'll ever have, and it's a big consideration. So yeah, you should know what that is. Again, it's not bad to care about that thing, but if it's first on your budget, it's your priority. But if the first thing on your budget is generosity, then you prioritize generosity, and the rest of your budget will bow to your generosity. So I encourage you to just try putting generosity as the first line item in your budget. And then see how the rest falls into place. If you don't have a budget yet, this is a good time to start. And like I said at the top of my message, if you don't have a budget, I would love to bully, I mean, talk to you about making a budget. As we continue as a church to grow and to help our community learn how to become Jesus followers, the more impact we can have in our city. Not just in people's spiritual needs, it's important, we should be praying for people, we should be inviting people to church, but also in their physical, material, and emotional needs. You see, we're not just called to compartmentalize our lives. We don't have our emotional life, or our personal life, or our mental life, or our spiritual life. It's all one life. That's all we have, y'all, is just this one life together. And so when we as Christians, as the church, go out and help other people, we need to think about them holistically. It's not compartments, it's one holistic person. And that's the kind of church we wanna be, of somebody who goes out and meets all those needs. And I want us to be a church that sees our money and time as a resource to be used by God for God's glory, according to God's purpose for each and every one of us. So now you might be asking, where should I give? If you couldn't tell, I'm a firm believer in the tithe, giving 10% of your income to the church. The tithe was established before Old Testament law, reaffirmed by Jesus as the minimum, and has been practiced for millennia since. I'm a fan. The church is a great way for us to pool resources and serve our community in a way that we as individuals often are unable to do on our own. However, Jacob, don't boo me off the stage here, I don't believe that all of your generosity needs to go to the church. Of course, it can if you don't know where else to give it, But if you still feel compelled to give beyond your 10% to the church, I'm gonna say that again, beyond your 10% to the church, then my encouragement is to look at what burdens your heart. For example, Kat and I love dogs. I've got a picture of my dogs here, in just a second, Momo and Appa. Everybody say aw. So we have these two shih tzus, many of you already know them. They've been here, they're kinda famous. But we love dogs, we love our dogs, we love all dogs. Like if we see a dog, we wanna talk to it. So we have neighbors that we have met multiple times. We know their dog's name, we don't know their name. We're working on it, we're growing too. So we love dogs, but we can't adopt them all. So part of our generosity budget goes to the Richmond Animal League to help animals in our area. We also have a heart for refugees and the unhoused in our area, so we have money set aside to give to organizations who meet those needs in our community as well. There are all these great organizations that allow you to sponsor children internationally, like Compassion International, who I mentioned earlier, and we as a church also give to organizations like Mercy Mall and Moments of Hope. There is no shortage of organizations that could make incredible impacts on the world and our community with just a little financial support. So here's what I want. I want you to be the most generous person ever, even if that means you don't give only to the church. We've talked a lot about giving, but Paul writes about the joys of giving and receiving. We can be sure that just as we work to meet the needs of others, we ourselves will also need. And that's where verse 19 steps in. Paul writes, "And my God will meet all your needs "according to the riches of His glory in Christ Jesus." All the years that I've given to the church and to other organizations, I have never missed a dime that I've given away. But it's not because each time I gave, I got a raise. It would be nice. It's not that all those years that I made just enough to clear the poverty line, they weren't punctuated with a 3% cost of living raise each time my giving check cleared. No, my situation never changed, but man, did my heart change. And that's true for you too. Your situation, our situations may not change, but our hearts will. As we continue to give, our capacity for joy and capacity to receive increases as well. As the Lord continues to bless us, we can continue to bless others, And it's here that we come to my last point. God steps in to meet our needs. Giving is important. It's a spiritual habit. I hope you will all give a try after my message here today. But there will always come a time where we have a need that only God can step in and fulfill. But here's the funny thing about how God meets needs. It's through the generosity of his people that our needs are met. Are you seeing how this circular journey is starting to come together? God meets our needs, then we can meet the needs of others as the Lord prompts, who can then meet the needs of others including us as the Lord prompts, and so on and so on. And God is so funny, man. He chose us to do this important work of carrying burdens for each other. He entrusted me to watch your back and to trust you to catch me when I fall too. It's like he knew what he was doing when he formed his church community. It's like he knew that people needed people. I'll tell just one more story to illustrate my point. When Kat and I got married, we decided to buy a town home together and move her brothers into the house that I bought before we were married. Time came, we wanted to buy a new house. So we all just were like, we'll sell the first house for a very good profit and then move everybody up a house. It was a good time. But it turned out that our good friends, Evan and Tori, who were expecting their baby Ellis needed a place to rent that wouldn't cost an arm and a leg, needed to be in a good area. So that paused our plans on selling the house for a little while, but no big deal. We were happy to help and let them rent from us. And after the initial part of our friendship, you know, the one where you pretend like you're normal people they would start to joke with us and say, bet you wouldn't sell your house for what you paid for it. And mind you, I bought this house right before the initial surge of COVID closures. And the real estate market was just taken off. By the time they made that joke the first time, it would have been financially irresponsible for me to sell that house. We'd miss out on a lot of great equity the house gained over the years, but the same events that raised the value of that home so much made it difficult for even greater numbers of people to realistically buy a house. Fast forward a year and I'm going on a run, training for the Richmond Half Marathon, much like I'm doing this year. And normally when I'm out on my long runs, I don't have headphones in. I like to listen to nature, like to listen to the Holy Spirit nudging, but let me tell you, this time, I wish I had been wearing headphones. I felt the Lord nudging me. He said, "I want you to sell Evan and Tori the house." And I said, "Yes, Lord." And I'm just running. I go a couple more steps, and I hear so clearly for what you paid for it. And y'all, I thought it was a joke. I thought I like maybe ate something weird, or I ran through some smoke, if you know what I mean. But when I kept running and realized that it may actually be the Holy Spirit nudging me, I finally said, Lord, that's a big financial decision. I need to count the costs. I need to see what it's gonna cost me and I'll never forget what I heard in response. He said, that's fine. Count the cost and then do it anyway. I finished my run, I could not shake the thought so I told Kat, while I was still trying to catch my breath, what I heard and that she should pray about it too. She did and we both felt it was what we needed to do so we bought Evan and Tori dinner and told them what the Lord told us. And let me tell you, it was scary. It was uncertain, but we sold them the house anyway. And here's the crazy part. God didn't necessarily just speak to me out of nowhere. I'm not saying I heard the audible voice of God or anything, but they were praying and God was speaking. They were praying about their next steps, what God wanted them to do, where God wanted them to be, and while they were praying, God was speaking. But he wasn't speaking to them, he was speaking to me. It would have been completely and totally rational for me to finish that run and let the thought die on my cooldown. Nobody would have ever blamed us, me and Kat, for saying no and just taking rental income and eventually selling the house for a profit. But my friends, I don't believe we are called to rational giving. We're not called to a generosity bound by our earthly limitations. No, we're called to irrational giving, giving that costs us something, giving that truly helps us carry the burden of another. And as I was trying to shake that thought off, all I kept thinking about was my bank account, my potential profit, my perfect interest rate on that house, my credit score, my rental income, my comfort, and the Lord gently nudged me again and said,"What about my people?" And LVC, I came here to tell you today that there are people in here and out there that are praying to God right now, and God is speaking to you. God is asking you to step in and meet the needs of your fellow brothers and sisters, or your neighbors, or your communities. And he's asking you, are you going to step up? Are you going to do what I'm calling you to do? Because all throughout this room, from me up here, all the way out to the parking lot and beyond, There's a load of people who are in need and in order to meet their needs God is asking His people to step in and begin to understand what joy it is to take part in giving and receiving. But we can't do that until we're ready to accept that doing it requires getting your hands dirty. It requires picking up the burdens of our friends and our neighbors and the other people all around us. There are people praying for a miracle and God is speaking to you to meet their need. And I hear you this is hard. Giving is not easy especially if you don't feel like you have much. It does get easier the more you do it but it is never easy. Putting others before yourself is one of the most uncomfortable things I believe we're called to do. But when we're discouraged we need to look no further than our Lord Jesus Christ. He who knew no sin became sin, taking our burdens with him to the cross, and the most generous act known to humanity. Jesus didn't just give up his money, or his possession, or his time, he gave up himself. He gave up his status as the son of God when he died a criminal's death in my place, so that whoever believed in him would have eternal life. So when I struggle to give and live generously, I think back to what Jesus did for me on the cross. And I remember that this is what love requires of me, to lay down my life and my privilege for my neighbor, for those around me. And because he did all of that, I know I can do this too. And so friends, when you think about how impossible all this feels, I want you to turn your minds, turn your eyes to Jesus. He is the one that makes the impossible possible. He is the one who works miracles still today, and He is the one that can help us to see that it's better to give than receive, that our gifts are actually offerings to Him and that He steps in to meet our needs. Let's pray together. So Father, we take this message about money, about generosity, about our finances, and we submit it to you. Work in our hearts what you would have us do. Yes, Lord, when the heaviness comes about this topic, I pray that you would put that weight on your shoulders and walk with me through it. Help me to see what you're doing in my life through the generosity that you've called me to. Yes, Lord, when I am in need, help me to trust in you, to think on you, to pray to you. And now maybe you don't know who this Jesus is, talked about him a little bit throughout the message. You don't know why you might want to give to the church. I ask that you would just open your heart, open your hands and say,"Lord, speak to me. I don't know who you are. I don't know what to do, speak to me. And I believe that he will speak to you. So Father, we lift this message up to you, we worship you, we love you, and we need more of you. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. Amen, let's give God some praise.