The Heart of the Matter

I don’t know how your team did yesterday. Maybe you need a little pep up from the football-inspired Operation Christmas Child packing campaign. I’m not sure how many more words I could fit into that one right there, but there that is. So, yeah. Tonight, tomorrow night, we have the packing parties. If you want to go ahead and just grab one of the boxes that you see throughout our facility or grab a couple of them like I saw Chad and Molly bringing a couple of them in this morning, then go ahead and grab them and we’ll just kind of collect them here for a few weeks and then we will get them to a different church and that’s how they’re going to kind of get to like the main distribution site. So really want to invite you to be able to do that. That’s a great way for a family to, you know, parents, if you’re wanting to disciple your kids and thinking about how to be just globally minded, may do that. If you don’t have kids in the home, then may you take some of that disposable income and put it in a box. All right, so there you go.

Everybody looks well rested today, so I’m glad to see that except for families with young kids. I don’t think that we gained any sleep last night because our kids, their systems don’t work according to the clock. So, there’s that. So anyways, I’ll stop all that and we’ll get to our congregational prayer time. So, if you’ve been with us over any length of time, then you know that we have a portion of every Sunday morning where we just pray for the needs of our church and we ask God to do what we need Him to do. If you’ve been with us for at least two weeks in a row, then you’ll notice that we’ve had different volunteers leading the worship for our services. It’s because we’re between worship leaders right now. So, we’re going to pray that God would provide that for us. You know, when we needed a kids director, we prayed as a church and God gave us a kids director in Kim Mulvaney. Matt, her husband, was one of the guys doing the announcements this morning. When we needed a VBS director, we prayed as a church for a VBS director and Christa stepped up and filled that role really well. We totally believe that God is already preparing somebody to fit into this that’s going to lead our church with the music. So, we’re just going to pray for that.

If you’re not comfortable yet praying out loud, then you get off the hook, especially if you’re a first-time guest with us. But I would invite everybody else, grab a neighbor and just ask that the Lord would show us who our next worship leader is. Y’all take it away and I’ll put a bow on it. Thank y’all.

Holy Spirit, we trust that You love Sauldam Baptist so much more than we do. And God, we really love this church. Lord, not just the stained glass, not just the memories that we have here in this facility. God, we love this people and You love this people like crazy. Father, You are the reason that this church that began 183 years ago is still here. You are the reason that we have any sort of future. And goodness gracious God, 180 plus years, it’s not like we’ve had the same person leading the whole time. God, consistently over the decades, You’ve been providing leaders for us. You’ve been providing pastors for us. And we trust that You got the same thing in mind. You’re going to continue to provide. Lord, when Sauldam needed a pastor, they prayed and here I am. God, when we needed a kids director, we prayed. And there was Kim. When we needed a VBS director, we prayed. There was Christa. I trust God in the absence of someone to lead our music and lead the choir on a week-to-week basis, You will provide. You are the provider. You are the sovereign Lord. Christ, You say that You establish Your church. You say that You will build Your church. You say that You will protect and You will guide this church. We trust all that to be true. So we ask that You provide that for us. Lord, in the waiting period though, I pray that we would all remain extremely open-handed, recognizing that what You provide might look different than what we want. And Lord, when You have that person anointed and marked out for that task, I pray that we as a church would all be able to recognize and see with spiritual eyes what You have done. For the time being, I need You to do something else that only You can do, God, and that is to take this word and make it come alive in the hearts of everybody in this room. God, You and I have met together. I’ve been faithful to put all my ideas and my thoughts and everything on paper, and now, Lord, I need You to do something with it. So, please, please do something. Get a hold of us. Do something in us. And it’s in it’s in Your name, I trust. Thank You, Lord. Amen.

Amen.

Before I do get into the sermon, there’s something else I want to just say, another group of people I want to say thank you to. I want to say a quick thank you to everybody that was part of Fall Fest for us last Sunday night. Man, oh, what a good time that was. Seriously, I am blown away by how God continues to just bring people to our campus whenever we opened the doors and it was a really good time. If you were one of the dozens of volunteers or folks that made chili or people that just came and invited your friends and your family, I just want to say thank you so much. Two people in particular I really want to thank are Kristen Cordre and Melissa Lester. I don’t think either are actually in the room right now. They’re probably in the kids’ wing. Yeah, they’re both serving in the kids. That’s exactly fitting. So man, whenever y’all see them later, if you just give them a hug and a thank you. There were some other folks like Carter and I which really were just gophers for the whole process. But please like go tell them thank you because they really crushed it.

If you want to learn more about Fall Fest and what got to happen there, then I would encourage you open up your bulletin. You might see a glossy sheet of paper. We have started a monthly newsletter called The Current. This is meant to be a discipleship resource just as much as it is an informational resource. In the future, we’re going to make this available digitally. If you want that, you’d have to let Angela know and we’ll get that sent out digitally. This month, it’s physical. You take that, you put it up on your on your fridge. I will ask you to memorize every single word in The Current. Okay. No. So just open that up and just kind of peruse that and read some stories about what God has been up to.

But today today we are going to begin a new discipleship series. I call it a discipleship series because we need to look at an aspect of how we as disciples express our love and our relationship with the Lord. It’s only going to last four weeks because I don’t want to beat our heads over too badly, but we’re going to study the topic of generosity, money. We’re talking about money. All right. These are one of the things I’m not supposed to talk about as a pastor. We don’t talk about in American public spaces, but here I am. I’m just going to trust you’re going to give me four weeks of grace. We’re going to talk about this.

Why talk about money? Thank you for asking. As these Operation Christmas Child shoe boxes kind of help us see, it’s not that we’re about to go into the holiday season. It’s that the holiday season is already been thrust upon us. I was talking with a buddy at a local grocery store who’s already setting up his Christmas displays. This was last week before Halloween had happened. The holiday season’s on us and we are going to be inundated. We’re just going to be flooded with all the coupons and all the deals, all of the emails about all of the the good prices you can get on all of your stuff. And man, if if culture is going to talk about money, I think we ought to talk about money, too.

Now, some of us are approaching the end of the year not just wanting to spend money on our friends and our family. We’re also coming to the end of the year and we want to think strategically about where we do our year-end giving, where you might want to make those last donations for the year. As I was preparing for this series, I came across some sobering statistics. All right, so there’s this this couple, Christian Smith and Hillary Davidson. They wrote this book called The Paradox of Generosity. It’s a study of a couple thousand Americans, some Christians, some not. They studied them for five years to track their spending habits. This is what they found. Of those couple thousand people, 44.8% gave away less than $1 a year. Almost half of that group didn’t give away a single dollar in an entire year. 41.3% gave away less than 2% of their income. So, so far we are at 85% giving away less than 2% of their income. 9% of that group gave away between two and five percent of their income. 3.1% gave away 5 to 10% of their income, and a whopping 2.7% gave away 10% or more of their income.

A study like that of a couple thousand people drawn from a variety of demographics over five years indicates that it’s a window into America. Most people in America, that’s what they do. And you are seeing where you are on that list. Now, not only is the culture telling you to spend your money on gifts and toys, and we see some of our American giving habits, but I’ve got to be honest, we’re also in a new budget year. We have some ambitious goals. We believe the Lord is calling us to an amount of ministry and activity that’s higher than we’ve ever brought in before. And for us to meet this budget, we’ve got to bring in more money. So again, this feels a little self-serving, but I’m looking at our church and I’m saying, “Hey, we believe that God is calling us to make greater moves of faith.” And to do that, we have to also be—we have to meet that with more financial generosity.

But none of that is the greatest reason. The greatest reason I’ve got to bring up money as a pastor is because of what Jesus taught us—that we can’t serve God and money. Jesus said this a number of times, and Luke chapter 16 was one of them. You can’t serve God and money. You’ll be devoted to one and hate the other, or you will despise the one and you’ll love the other. You can’t serve God and money. And I feel like honestly for Americans, everybody in this room, there’s a variety of economic situations that we all have. And I love the diversity that God is bringing to Sauldam and what He’s doing. Everybody in the room though is in the top 3% of wealth in the world. We’re in the top 3%. Other people look at Americans and they think that we are all just crazy rich. And honestly, compared to most people around the world, we are. And we have a choice. Who are we going to live for? Who are we going to serve? Are we going to serve God or are we going to serve money? If you want to serve God, then you’ve got to seriously pray about how you use your money. And if we want to make disciples here at Sauldam, then I’ve got to talk about this.

So, we’re going to spend four weeks talking about how to look at money. Now, I don’t assume that I’ve got the best wisdom or the know-how. I don’t assume that I’m the smartest person in the room on this topic. I know that I am not. But I do trust that God’s Word speaks to every situation you could go through in life. So, we’re going to look at four weeks just looking at what the Bible might have to say about how you view what God has stewarded to you.

So, what is generosity? This is how I define it. This is how we’re going to look at it over the next few weeks. Generosity is lovingly stewarding God’s abundance for God’s purposes. Lovingly stewarding God’s abundance for God’s purposes. And I’m going to start our series in Matthew chapter 22. If you have your Bibles, go ahead and open them up to Matthew chapter 22. Ironically, this passage does not mention money. You will not find the words dollar or cents or pennies in this passage. However, the passage speaks to the heart of the matter about how you view, use, hoard, or steward the dollars that will come your way.

As you’re turning, let me give you a little bit of context, though. Jesus is teaching. He’s doing His thing. He’s healing people. He’s ministering all the—yeah, the full nine yards. And this group of people come up to Him and they ask Him a question. It’s a group of people known as the Sadducees. This is one of the Jewish teaching groups. They would study the Old Testament like crazy. They had their own views on how to interpret it all. And one of the Sadducees comes up to Jesus and asks Him this kind of off-the-wall question about marriage. Hey, if a guy has multiple wives in his life, then when he gets to heaven, which one is he going to be married to? And Jesus is like, man, that doesn’t matter. In heaven, there’s not going to be any marriage. You don’t have to worry about that. And the Sadducees are stumped. They’re like, they’ve got no response. That was like their best attack. And they couldn’t they couldn’t trick Jesus.

So the Pharisees, who in church you hear about a little more often, the Pharisees see their rivals, the Sadducees, get stumped by Jesus. And I imagine they high-five each other a little bit and then they say, “But hold on. Now it’s our turn. Now let’s try to stump Jesus.” So, one of the Pharisees walks up to Jesus and asks Him an incredibly, impossibly vague question. He says, “Which command is the greatest?” Y’all, when the Pharisees read the Old Testament, they count 613 commands. 613 times they view God directly commanding people how to live and how to act. That’s a huge buffet to choose from. And the crazy thing is each rabbi, which would have been a known teacher amongst the Pharisees, every rabbi had his own interpretation about what the most important command was. So these Pharisees are asking Jesus an impossibly vague question that He could not possibly get right.

It’s kind of like if I just threw it out to you guys, hey, what’s the best type of pizza? I’d get at least 20 different responses. There’s be at at least 20 different best possible combinations of pizza, unless you say Hawaiian. And then in that case, we can all say, “Boo, you’re wrong.” So, they ask Jesus this impossible question. What’s the most important command? Because they’re just trying to trick Him. They’re just trying to force Jesus into saying something so they could be like, “Nah, man. You’re wrong.” And they can walk away feeling a little bit better about themselves.

Picture the scene. Jesus is just ministering. He’s teaching people. You got all the Sadducees over here who are frustrated because Jesus just stumped them. Then you got the Pharisees over here who are asking Jesus this question, trying to trick Him. You’ve got this big crowd over here who Jesus was talking to and is genuinely wanting a response from. And then you got all the disciples behind Him who were also very curious because they at their hearts do want to be good followers of God. Everybody really is curious. What is the most important command? If you could boil it all down, what is the most important thing for me to do?

So Jesus seeing this moment responds like this. Love. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and most important command. The second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and the prophets depend on these two commands.

For some of us, these words honestly are boring. Can I say that? It’s it’s almost like a formula that you learn in school to find X in the equation. Yeah. I love God with all my heart, my soul, my mind, and my strength. I’m getting some arm pumps from a math teacher. For others of us, these words are so honestly religious sounding, they feel a bit irrelevant for my real life. Like, okay, but I’ve got bills to pay. I’ve got people I’m frustrated with. I’ve got a bad back. Like, how does this actually apply to my life?

for all of us. If we would sit in what Jesus just said, I think that we will grow to become wildly generous people. Look at it again. Verse 37. I’m going just read it again from the top. Jesus said to Him, “Love, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind.” This is the greatest and most important command. The second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and the prophets depend on these two commands.

Jesus says that if you want to follow God, then God deserves your total love. God deserves your total love. Notice Jesus says with all your with all your with all your. He doesn’t just one time say with some of or consider doing this or maybe perhaps He says with everything with everything. With everything with all of your heart the Greek word there cardia it means the well of all of your unknown emotions. That feeling you feel that you can’t quite put a finger on. That’s your heart. It’s where your volition comes from, your conscience, the center of your spiritual activity, with every bit of your innermost self that you struggle to express even with your closest friend. Love God with every bit of that. But love God also with your soul, your psyche, where we get psychology from, your inner life, the emotions you can name, your desires, your disgusts, your hopes, your dreams, your fear. Love God with all of that. And love God with your mind, your thoughts, your reasons, your decisions, your actions. Love God totally, totally, totally. Love Him from the inside out. From your most hidden self to your most observable actions. Love. God wants you to love Him with every part of your life. And that includes how you spend your money. Following God means loving God totally.

Jesus also says if you want to follow God then people deserve your sacrificial love. God deserves your total love and people deserve your sacrificial love. Jesus says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Man, most of us really love ourselves. When I’m hungry, I feed myself. When I’m cold, I clothe myself. When I am tired, I go to bed. When I have a need, I work hard to meet it. When I have a want, I meet that, too. I am fiercely devoted to me. I really love me. You really love you, too. We are fiercely devoted to ourselves. Jesus says your fierce devotion to love yourself is supposed to flow through you toward other people. As much as you want to meet your needs, meet the needs of others. As hungry as you are, meet that hunger in someone else. As cold as you are in the winter and as hot as you are in the summer, meet those needs in others’ lives. How much you love you, how deeply you love you, how you love you is the standard for how you should love others.

Take all this together. The heart of following Jesus is love. If you want to follow Jesus, and I’m looking at a bunch of people that do, if you want to follow Jesus, if you want to please God, if you want to live a godly life, if you want to keep yourself from evil and from sin, if you want your life to matter and to make a difference, man, I can’t tell you everything to do, but I know the heart of it is love. It’s love. God has made you to love Him totally and to love other people sacrificially. That’s the heart of it. The heart of following God, the heart of being a Christian is love.

Now, why would I go so hard about love in a series about money? I fully believe this. It’s because we struggle to live generously, to give money to the church, to use money to meet the needs of other people. Not mostly because of our ignorance with markets, our inexperience with savings accounts or our inability to schedule. I think it’s a love problem. I’ll put it a little sharper the way the guys of Experiencing God do. We don’t have a budget problem. We have a love problem. When I don’t love God totally, I am always calculating how little can I give, how much can I keep. Anybody else been there? When I don’t love people sacrificially, man, I’m not going to extend myself. I’m not going to go without things that I want. I’m not going to put my money to their good. Instead, I’ll say something like this. Someone else will help. Or, man, it gets worse. They got themselves into that mess. Man, they can get themselves out. Anybody else resonate with that? But praise God, He doesn’t treat us that way.

In fact, the Bible declares this: that God loves us totally and sacrificially. For God loved the world in this way, brothers, that He gave His one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send Jesus into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him. And boy, did we need saving because Romans 3:23 says that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And to sin is not some temporary mistake that you might make at work where you just make a misstep with the process. No, sin is so much worse than that. The wages of sin is death. Literally, every time you lie, every time you gossip, every time you look at the thing you’re not supposed to Look at, every time you want your neighbor’s stuff, every time you are greedy with your money, you are earning death. Death. Death. Death. And that is a debt of death we can never pay off. But it’s okay in God’s eyes. Not because God will just wipe away the debt, but because God will clear that account for us. Because God gives us a gift, the free gift of eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. And He gives us that gift not because we are such well-meaning people. No, He gives us that gift because we are hopeless and we cannot get ourselves out of it.

Romans 5:6-8 says this, “While we were still helpless, at the right time, God died for the ungodly.” That’s you and me. For rarely will somebody die for a just person, though for a good person, someone might perhaps dare to die. But God proves His own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. God loved us and loves us totally and sacrificially with all of God’s innermost being and with all of His decisions. God has loved you. God has fully taken on your situation and bore that on Himself so that He can give you Himself.

Romans 5:21 says that God made Jesus to be sin who knew no sin so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. The divine exchange that happened between God and man on the cross where Jesus Christ took your sins fully upon Himself and God punished Him for the junk that you and I do. Jesus bore that. This eternal debt of our bad actions, our bad living, Jesus took care of that. God loved you totally. He loved you sacrificially. And because of that, we respond in kind.

You see, love is at the heart of generosity because love drove God to do the most generous thing anyone could ever do. Praise God when He saw us. God did not say, “They got themselves into that mess. Let them get themselves out.” Praise God when He sees us. He never once thought, “How little do I have to give and how much can I keep?” No. When God sees us in our mess, He says, “I love them. I’m wild about them. I have the resources to heal them, to forgive them, to pay off their sin, and I will take on the full cost.” But as He does that, He in no way damages His holiness.

Here’s the essence of it. It’s not just that God loves you, but it’s that God, who is the greatest being, loves Him. He’s perfect. He’s perfect in everything He does. He is holy in everything He does. He is the greatest in everywhere. And as God loves Himself, He cannot help but love us because we have been made in His image. From before time began, God decided that He would glorify Himself through ransoming us, through saving us, through finding a way to bring us back to Himself.

Though our sin creates a chasm between us and God, something we can never throw enough dollars at, something we can never throw enough good works at, something we can never throw enough good, well-intentioned actions at. God crosses that chasm and frees us from our sin, pays off our debt, and maintains His holiness through the perfect sacrifice of Jesus. Love fueled God’s generosity to you. And that’s the thing I want you to take it away is that love fuels generosity.

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to talk about money. But my heart in this is not just that you would learn some habits to help channel the dollars you’re already receiving and giving. My heart in this is that you would develop a deeper love for the Lord that can’t help but show itself through generosity. You see, only love can free your heart to trust the God we can’t see in the midst of circumstances we can. Only love can empower you to sacrifice your comfort and your financial goals to help others. And only love can help you be truly generous. It’s all about love.

At the heart of how you spend money is what do you love? What gets you excited? What breaks you? What frustrates and angers you? What keeps you up at night? Man, I promise you, you won’t get it all right all the time, but if you are just growing in your love for God and your love for people, you’ll get a lot of this right just kind of naturally. And that applies to how you will use your money.

So, what do we do? I want to offer you a few Ways to respond, man. The first one is just to embrace God’s love right now. I fully believe in a room this size, there is somebody in the room who is yet to accept the gospel of Jesus Christ. And you have never yet known the generous, total, and sacrificial love of God for you expressed through Jesus Christ coming to live a perfect life in your place and die sacrificial death in your place and be risen in victorious resurrection in your place. Romans 10:9 and 10 says that all who call on the name of the Lord will be saved. For with the mouth one professes and is saved, and with a heart one believes and is saved. And my offer to you right now is that you would admit that you need to be saved. Admit that you are a sinner. Admit that you have gone away from God. You believe that God sent Jesus to free you from your sin and to offer you a new way. And you confess your faith in Him. Please do that right now.

You may have grown up in church all your life. You’ve heard stories like this and sermons like this for years, but none of it’s actually pierced your heart. Man, if you believe that might be you, please you tune me out and just right where you are, you would just close your eyes and bow your head and you say, “God, I don’t know that I know Your love this way.” And You would embrace it. You would receive it.

There’s a lot in the room that you do know God’s love. You are born again. You are saved. My offer for you is become more loving. Some of us, man, we we do love God, but we need to grow in that love for God. And here’s what Jesus also says that where your treasure is, there your heart will be. Also, here’s the deal. Your emotions follow your actions. Your emotions will follow your dollars. Where you start pouring your money, you will grow a heart for. If you want to grow in your love for God, you start putting your money toward the things that God loves. If you want to grow in your love for people, then use your resources to meet the needs of people.

But some of us need a little coaching to get there. I want to offer you Financial Peace University. That’s the other insert in the bulletin that you got on your way in. Man, Financial Peace University. It’s not the Bible, but it’s teaching based off of what the Bible says about money. Some of us in the room are just living paycheck to paycheck, and the idea of giving money to the church is extremely terrifying. Others of us in the room are paying off huge amounts of debt and we feel like we don’t actually have a whole lot of disposable income. Some of us in the room, man, you’ve got the paycheck to paycheck thing all right. You got the debt thing all right. You just don’t necessarily know the biblical principles of what you sow is what you reap and where to put your money. Man, my offer to you, we have somebody that can start a class in two weeks. Do you want to be in financial peace in two weeks or do you need some time? You need to get through the end of the year and January is more of your time. There’s a little slip of paper in your bulletin. It’s a Financial Peace University. Just a little graphic. If you want to be part of this, you just write your name and your email and put it in one of the offering plates on your way out and we’ll get you connected with the right people.

The final possible response, man, you love God. You are growing in your love for Him, and you’re just looking for a need. There’s two huge needs that you can meet with your money and your resources. One of which we’ve already talked about a lot is Operation Christmas Child Shoe Boxes. Man, those things don’t actually take a whole lot of money to pack. But these things mean the world to kids around the world who are not just going to receive toys and a picture of you, but when when villages and communities receive those boxes, the more important thing is that Christians are taking them and Christians use that shoe box that you’re going to pack to share the gift of Jesus Christ. And God is going to use the toys that you pack to bring lost people into His family. People that you may get to meet in This lifetime, but you’ll definitely get to meet in heaven. Man, some of us, we just need to grab five boxes on the way out of here and pack them and bring them back in a week. Or you need to come tonight and do that with us.

Here’s another way that you can show love, man. It’s by filling the blessing box on the street. Some of y’all don’t know this, but we have a little box that’s over by it’s just under the oak tree over there. I now that the weather is nice, I sit outside on the portico to do a lot of my work and I’ll watch a dozen cars stop and grab things out of that box every day. There are so many people in our community that need what can be provided through that box. There’s people in our church that need what’s provided in that box.

You may or may not have heard that the government is shut down right now. Now, not all of us are government employees, but one in eight Americans relies on the SNAP program to get their groceries. So, as of Saturday, SNAP stopped. SNAP snapped yesterday, which means at least one in eight people, one in eight homes in our community is going to start coming there a lot more often. And what a better way for us to show the love of God than making sure when every time they come that thing’s full.

That might just look like when tomorrow when you go to Publix or you go to Aldi or Walmart, whatever it’s going to be, you just grab a few extra cans, a few extra packages, and you you put it in there on your way home.

I trust that God is going to speak in the next few moments, though. Here’s what I want to invite you to do. If you are curious about growing in your love for God or how your love for God and how God’s love for you can fuel generosity, I invite you just to do something. We do this occasionally. I just call it open hands prayer. If you’re curious, I invite you just take your hands and place them palm up on your lap as if you are both giving your life to God and you are receiving an assignment back from Him.

And you just ask God, God, how should I respond? How should I show love? Even in this moment, if you feel like God is calling you to give your life to Him for the very first time, will you just do that right where you are and say, “God, I admit that I am a sinner and I need to be forgiven. I believe You sent Jesus to do that for me and I confess my faith in Him.” You just do that right where you’re at.

And if you have if you have given your life to Him, you just ask Him, God, how can I grow in love for You? How can I show my love for You? Is it joining financial peace? Is it packing a shoe box? God, what do You want me to do?

Holy Spirit, I trust that You’ve spoken. I trust that You’ve provided some really clear next steps for us. Please give us the faith to follow You and to be obedient now. We love You Lord.