The Blessed Life

We wrapped up a 4 week series on The Blessed Life this past Sunday at NewLife.

Here's my final take before we start a new series this week.
· God wants His children to be blessed financially (II Corinthians 9:6-15) so that we can be a blessing to others!
· Until God is first, our finances are cursed. (Malachi 3:6-11) (Not my words...read it for yourself.)
· Years ago Terica and I made the decision to put God first in our finances because we didn’t want to be the people who believed the verses in the Bible about salvation but not the ones about giving.
· Money is the #1 thing that holds most people back from walking with Jesus, He said it is the #1 competitor for our hearts (Matthew 6:24) and that until our treasure goes to Him then He doesn’t have our hearts (Matthew 6:19-21).
· We cannot follow Jesus and handle money irresponsibly!
· I CANNOT OUT GIVE GOD (Proverbs 3:9-10!)
· It is God who saved us, has blessed us and is always faithful to us…with this in mind how in the world can we stand in the shadow of a blood stained cross and bellyache about giving 10% of what HE ALLOWED US to earn in the first place (Deuteronomy 8:18)

My challenges to our church through this series are…
· Begin To Tithe (and…as I said before, if you think this is about NewLife getting your money then I invite you to pick a random church in the yellow pages and tithe to them. I don’t want something FROM you, I want something FOR YOU. God said to test Him…so go for it!
· We are offering a money back guarantee! Check it out HERE.
· Choose Generosity Over Greed – Keep this in mind, GREED WILL KILL the work that God wants to do in and through you (see Joshua 7 and Acts 5!) Generous people change the world!!! AND…Jesus modeled generosity, not greed (see II Corinthians 9:15)

Let me also say this...I want to give a HUGE “thank you” to all of our faithful givers at NewLife. Over and over again we’ve seen people step up and “put God to the test” (Malachi 3:10) in this area…and because of the amazing generosity from the people here we've been able to see lives impacted and hearts changed.