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There is internal opposition to putting God first, even among people who say they are putting God first, because when it comes to their money, God is nowhere in sight. Or they may give, but they don’t deal with the other elements that I’m going to be dealing with. So tonight, my first point is this: you have to know that you know that you know that God wants you to have more than enough.
If you don’t know that, then you will give out of a budget. You will utilize the seedtime and harvest, which we’ll get into more at a later time. You will approach God, in all these arenas of the system He set up, from a mindset of lack.
Now this is real. Latrice just made a side comment: the struggle was real. Is that what you said? The struggle was real? And with giving, the struggle was real.
I make fun of Andrew—of his stories—and pick on him quite a bit. You know, his donut story. He didn’t want any of the two bucks. Come on, guy, whatever a donut costs. But I went through a Starbucks, and somebody had given me a gift card.
So I thought, Well, I’m just going to go get me a macchiato today. And I went through there, and I really don’t ever—you know that thing when you buy for the person behind you? There’s a word for that. What is it? Well, he was behind me. It couldn’t be “pay it forward.” Pay it backward—is that what it is?
So that thought came to me. And I knew it wasn’t a normal thought, so I thought, Well, I wonder if that was God. I looked in my rearview mirror, and it was like, there was nobody behind me. So then I started to abandon the thought, but then I thought, You know, I thought I saw, out of my peripheral vision, a car coming into the drive-thru lane.
So I just kind of waited to watch it, and sure enough, this car rolled in behind me.
And so—are we being transparent tonight?—I’m looking to see how many people are in the car. And there was one guy driving the car. I thought, Cool.
So I’ve got my gift card there, you know, and I said, “I want to pay for the guy behind me.”
He said, “Okay. His is $19.59 or something like that. Just under twenty bucks.”
I’m like, Jeez, what’s the guy drinking? Man, he must have gone to Starbucks for the whole office. He’s getting everybody something.
So I paid for it.
Now here—let me tell you this. I mean, you all laughed, but I don’t know if you caught the point. It was a gift card given to me. It wasn’t even my money.
The struggle’s real.
Our mind likes to default into what makes sense to us because we don’t trust what God said: I want you to have more than enough. And so we struggle with the process of working God’s system.
So if I really know that God wants me to have more than enough, then I have to know that God has provided more than enough. So now this comes back to the faith walk.
But see, I can give tithes or offerings or something. I can budget it and make it work. But if I’m not releasing faith with it, I’m not going to activate the system.
Now let me explain something else here. Am I going slow enough? Are you all following me?
If there’s something in my body that I need healing for—by His stripes I am healed. I don’t need you. I need faith in what Jesus did. And with me and Jesus—my faith in what He did—I can get what I need.
If it’s something that seems like it’s beyond my faith, or I’m struggling, well, I can go to someone and say, I need you to believe with me on this thing. Now he can lock his faith with me and we can get it.
Okay, so in order to get healing—which I’ll talk about next month—I don’t need anything else.
But with money, I do. Because God’s not a counterfeiter, and God doesn’t have His own currency. We’re not walking around with heaven’s currency in our pockets. We’re going to use the U.S. dollar here.
Well, the U.S. dollar is not God’s dollar. It’s God’s Spirit overlaying a natural system.
So now I need the system of God and the system of the world to work together so that money flows to me.
See, what makes money valuable—especially in a fiat currency like we have right now—is not the paper itself. Your $20 bill really isn’t worth anything. The only reason it becomes a medium of exchange is because somebody else will take it for a good or a service. But it has no intrinsic value.
Whereas if you had… I saw this “man on the street” video one time. I don’t know if it was real or staged, but it was presented as being real. A guy was walking around with a $20 gold piece.
Gold at the time was probably about $1,200–$1,500 an ounce. So he’d walk up to somebody and say, “Hey, I’ve got this $20 gold piece, and I was going over to the grocery store, but they won’t take it. Can I give it to you? Can you give me a $20 bill?”
Every single person he asked said no.
Because they knew they couldn’t take it to the grocery store—even though they could have taken it to a coin shop and gotten $1,200 out of it, or whatever it was. But they couldn’t wrap their mind around it.
So we’ve got this monetary system where they’re deflating our dollars. Since about—what was it—1918 or something like that, the purchasing power of your dollar has gone down about 98%.
That’s called inflation.
So you can buy 98% less than what you could buy with the same dollar back in the early 1900s.
So now God is using this system.
Therefore, there’s a natural portion that I have to play. I work, I get a check. I start a business, I sell goods, I get a check. There’s a transfer.
This is why money is called currency, because for electricity to work in a current, it has to move. Money has to move.
So now the system is a bigger system that I’ve got to believe God for.
So when I go to God and I give, He says, “Give, and it shall be given unto you. Pressed down, shaken together… shall men give into your bosom.”
So now God has to use other people to fulfill His word in this system.
So it’s a little more convoluted than healing, where all I have to do is believe what He said.
Are you tracking with me?
So God has provided more than enough within a system that is not of God, but by utilizing His system together with the world’s system. And there are components of how I use it that make it increase in my life.
Now I’ll give you a heads-up about where we’re going with that part: you are the problem with your money. I am the problem with my money.
Because we do it based on culture—how we think, what we grew up knowing—instead of learning what God says.
So now God has a system of more than enough. And I have to utilize His system, which will overshadow a natural system and cause money to flow to me.
Am I making sense?
Now, it takes faith to work God’s system.
And like all things in faith, faith is hard because you have to believe something you cannot physically see.
So my point for tonight is this: at the foundation of what I’m going to be talking about, I have to know that God has set this up in my favor.
I have to know that no matter what God requires of me, asks of me, or instructs me to do, it is going to work at a higher level.
It amazes me how many people recycle the same financial problems: financial problem, financial problem, financial problem—constantly having to sell something to get enough money, to downgrade in order to get more, and so on—and they never tie it back to their giving in God’s system.
I’m talking about Christians here.
Because we make choices all day long. And if our choice is not God, you may still be a good saver. You might save enough money to get through every month without a struggle.
But that’s not where God wants you to live. That’s Motel 6 living.
Okay, if I’ve got to go out of town and stay in a hotel, I might stay at a Motel 6. God’s not wanting us to live at rock bottom. Sure, they left the light on for you. The lights might not work on the inside, but the one outside does.
But God wants us—we are His sons and daughters. He’s the King, and we are His children. So what are the children of a king? Princes and princesses.
Now I know Charles is now a king, but before he was a king, he was what? A prince. If he had to go across the country or something like that—maybe England has something equivalent—do you think he stayed at a Motel 6?
Do you think Motel 6 even crossed his mind?
Probably not. In fact, when he left, he probably called the Royal Air Force to bring a helicopter, set it down on the grounds, pick him up, and take him wherever he wanted to go.
Do you know what was at the core of that decision?
It wasn’t just that he had the money.
He understood who he was.
He had a mindset that the Royal Air Force was there at his beck and call.
You and I don’t do that. Because we believe we carry the weight of our lives, when God says, Let Me do it.
Who’s a better provider—you or God?
You might have a good saving strategy, which puts money in your bank, but many people cannot translate that into a good living strategy. God wants us to have a good living strategy because He wants us to manifest Him.
Are you with me?
Go to Second Epistle of Peter 1. You probably thought I would never get to a verse. I don’t think I’ve ever talked this long without getting to a verse.
Chapter 1, verse 4:
“Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these—insert exceeding great and precious promises—you (say, that’s me) might be partakers of the divine nature.”
So whose divine nature? God’s.
God wants you and me to take on His nature.
Now if His nature is not lack, if His nature is not being broke, if His nature is not struggling, then I’m missing out on promises.
Now He tells us how people miss out on these promises:
“…having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.”
I talk about this all the time. One of the biggest elements of failure in people’s lives is that they live according to wants instead of according to the Word.
The very first thing that caused all the mess we’re in—all the sin, all the death, all the negative elements—was a person wanting a piece of fruit.
Want drove us into this.
So when we take on the divine nature of God, we escape the corruption in the world driven by lust—by want and desire.
And especially in American culture, desire is constantly stimulated. You are the most marketed-to people in the world, with companies trying to get you to buy things you don’t need—trying to stir up your wants, your desires, your lusts—so that you pursue a life of satisfying the want arena instead of pursuing a life that satisfies the God arena.
Now does God have a problem with us having nice things? Not at all. God wants us to have nice things because He wants Himself to be seen through us.
Struggling people do not reveal an abundant God.
We’ve got to move into the God realm of no struggle.
There’s a system by which it works, but we are so driven by our wants that we often forsake God in order to get what we want.
Very few people actually have a purpose for their life.
Now everybody thinks they have a purpose, but the things they are doing are really just want-driven, based on their comfort level. This is why we have such high divorce rates: it is very hard to get two people aligned on the same purpose.
Okay, marriage class starts now.
Because most people don’t have a purpose. So if most people don’t have a purpose and they’re driven by what they want—by their comfort level and preferences—they don’t really have a strategy to get anywhere. They’re just trying to get through the next day the way they like it.
You put two people like that together—how are they going to walk together?
The Bible says, “How can two walk together unless they agree?”
And there is very little agreement about the trajectory of where they are going. That creates friction.
If you really study people, most people even have divided desires within themselves. That’s why James talks about the person who wavers:
“Today I’ll do this.”
“No, today I’ll do that.”
“Oh, that looks good—I want that.”
“Oh yes, I want to go over there and do that.”
There’s no clear direction. People are just constantly trying to satisfy their wants.
But God has a system of more than enough.
And here is the interesting thing about it: in Book of Psalms 37:4 it says,
“Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart”—your wants.
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