Life, liberty, and the pursuit of what?
Happiness.
We've all heard a lot about it this weekend, so let's take a look at how we here in America
typically pursue happiness and how that's working out for us.
I've been rereading a fascinating book.
It is the autobiography of Dion Sanders, the famous football player and baseball player.
Dion in the book talks about how when he signed locally here with the 49ers, he became
richer than he ever thought he would ever be.
He had all the money he thought he could ever possibly want.
In fact, he even had a hit song about it called, Must Be the Money.
He was all about money.
Money was the way he was pursuing happiness.
But did he get there?
Was he happy?
Here's how he writes about that time in his life in his book.
He says, I remember sitting at the back of the practice field in Santa Clara, California
one day, tears streaming down my face thinking, this is so meaningless.
I'm so unhappy.
I'm not happy.
He says, so I went out and bought myself a $275,000 Lamborghini.
And I hadn't even driven it one mile before I realized, no, that's not it.
There's got to be something else.
Now listen to this.
He says the pain was horrible, inconceivable, because think of it, I had achieved everything
I could ever think of.
I was on the top of the world.
But I was always right back where I started, empty, empty, empty.
And so Dion climbed into a symbol of his wealth, his expensive black Mercedes, and drove it
off a cliff in a suicide attempt.
I'll tell you what happened next in a few minutes.
But first, take the message notes that look like this out of your bulletins as we continue
our sermon series, Rethink.
We call it this because it's a series going verse by verse through the sermon on the Mount
where Jesus Christ in the greatest sermon ever preached tells us to rethink just about
everything that we have ever thought.
And today let's talk about rethinking money.
Dion's experience with wealth, sadly, is not unique among celebrities.
For example, actor Nicholas Cage had actually a great quote for Independence Weekend.
He said, my generation inherited the American dream.
But what have we done with it?
The American dream is not just about cars and wealth, it's about freedom.
But are we free or are we paralyzed by our dreams of consumption?
That's a pretty good question.
Has consumption paralyzed Americans, particularly those who've achieved everything that everybody
dreams of?
Actor Eddie Murphy told People Magazine, no matter how much money you make or how many
cars and houses you have, life isn't perfect.
I don't know anybody who doesn't feel like there is something missing.
Madonna was asked in an interview, are you a happy person?
And she said, I'm a tormented person.
Johnny Depp, while being interviewed on his private Bahamian island, by the way, for Vanity
Fair Magazine, put it bluntly, money doesn't buy you happiness.
And then he joked, but it does buy you a yacht so you can sail up right next to it.
Studies backup all these quotes.
A study published just last year in the journal Science says, quote, the more money people
have, the tenser they tend to be, and the less time they spend on the simple leisure
activities that might really bring them pleasure.
Forbes Magazine had an article just a few months ago, a headline, now it's a fact money
doesn't buy happiness.
Some quotes from the article surveys have found virtually the same, watch this, the same level
of happiness between the very rich individuals on the Forbes 400 and the Maasai herdsmen
of East Africa.
Said lottery winners return to their previous level of happiness after just five years.
Increases in income just don't seem to make people happier.
Now we've all heard stats like this, and we've all heard stories like this, right?
So why do we keep getting fooled?
Why do we keep thinking, now I'm not materialistic, but if I just had a little bit more, then
I'd be happy.
And I know it.
Now some of you are thinking, well, I'm not fooled.
I don't think that money or stuff is going to make me happy.
Really I dare you to do something today.
I dare you and I dare myself to take a three pronged challenge that Jesus issues in Matthew
chapter 6 starting in verse 19 to see whether or not you are controlling your stuff or whether
your stuff is controlling you.
And a disclaimer before we get to that three pronged test, all of us here in this room
need to apply this.
This is going to be very tempting and a message about what the Bible says about materialism
to walk out those doors and see somebody from church back and out of the church parking
lot in their Mercedes and thinking, I'm glad they were here this morning because obviously
they needed to hear this.
You know, don't do that.
It's very tempting to look at somebody like that and think he or she must be very materialistic
but that may or may not be the case.
You don't know their heart.
In fact, would you agree with this observation?
Some people who have very little money can actually be more materialistic than people
who for some reason or other have lots of cash.
What I'm about to talk about from the Bible is, listen, it is not meant to be ammunition
for you to judge someone else.
I'm about to give you three tools to judge yourself, three tools to judge you and no
one else.
But I want you to really sincerely, maybe painfully, but it's going to be so freeing
for you and for me to apply these tests to our own lives.
Jot these down.
First, Jesus says, I need to rethink where I store.
Need where I am storing my treasure.
This is really a fascinating couple of verses.
Matthew 6 starting in verse 19, Jesus said, do not store up for yourselves treasures on
earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal.
What is Jesus saying?
Don't store up for yourselves treasures on earth.
Why not?
Because treasures on earth are evil, because treasures on earth are bad, because treasures
on earth are sinful, no, because they won't last.
Not because they might not last, because they never last.
Either you lose them or they lose their value or you die.
But either way, the treasures just don't last more than a few years.
Now if this is true, then why do we keep pursuing earthly treasure?
I want you to kind of put your thinking cap on for a minute and with me think about what
is the lure of it?
What is the lure of earthly treasure?
What are we looking for when we look for more stuff or more status or a nicer house or a
bigger salary?
Well, there's three things that I think of right off the top of my head.
There's more than this, but here's the big three I think.
First, jot this down security.
I'm thinking if I had just a little bit more, I wouldn't have any more needs.
I'd be secure.
But like Jesus said, it can be stolen, it can be destroyed.
Somebody once said, have you ever noticed that on the back of every dollar bill there
is an eagle with wings?
And that is a reminder that money used to talk, but now it just flies away, you know?
The New York Times recently carried the story of just one of the many retired couples who
sadly lost their life savings to Bernie Madoff.
You've all heard about Madoff and the scandal, the horror of all that, but I want you to
listen to this quote.
The husband says, my whole life was wrapped up around that money.
Let me repeat that.
My whole life was wrapped up around that money.
He says, I thought I was secure.
I thought I could pay my bills for the next decade, and now it's all gone.
Security, it can all get lost so quickly.
And we focus on money obviously for satisfaction, right?
We think if I just had a new car, I'd be satisfied, would never need another car.
If I just had a flat screen TV, if I just had money to buy this, but you know what?
News bulletin for you, things don't satisfy for very long.
They satisfy, trophies will satisfy you for a half an hour for a couple of days, and then
that's it.
I'll never forget the first time I became aware of this.
I was 11, it was Christmas, and I had a great haul.
I was especially proud of, I was really into GI Joes, and I was proud of a brand new GI
Joe that I got.
It was, I don't know if you remember these, the GI Joe with lifelike hair.
Do you remember that?
Odd campaign.
And GI Joes of course all had crew cuts, so it amounted to a piece of felt glued to their
plastic skulls.
That's all it was, but I was like, lifelike hair, it's awesome.
Never want, I'll never want again.
This is it, I've reached the pinnacle.
I was satisfied until I walked outside, and on that Christmas afternoon, I'll never forget
this.
I saw two kids from the neighborhood joyfully tooling up and down in something I had never
seen before on planet earth.
Big wheels.
Do you remember when these came out?
Big wheels, I'd never seen them before.
And at 11, I knew I was too big to ride them.
The big wheel ship had sailed for me.
And I was standing there next to my friend Aaron, who was the same age, and I looked
at him and I basically said, kids these days do not know how good they got it.
When I was a young child of five or six, I had to ride a tricycle made of metal, and
it was a thousand degrees on hot days, and it busted out your teeth when you wiped out.
But that's what we had, and we liked it, you know?
I was so dissatisfied, I went back into my GI Joe with the felt hair, and I just thought
it was ridiculous.
So I looked at that, and I thought, GI Joe with lifelike hair, what refugee from the
Barbie factory came up with that marketing idea, you know?
Things absolutely do not satisfy, it's like when you go look at model homes somewhere
and return to your shack, right?
They do not satisfy.
And then we also focus on significance.
Focus on maybe people will like me more, maybe I'll be a more significant person if I get
more money and more status.
But of course, that isn't always true.
I read a story about a Silicon Valley businessman who told a very long joke at a luncheon in
Seoul, Korea, where he was thinking he might do some business.
Well, the translator told it to the Korean businessman very quickly, and they all roared
with laughter.
I mean, they were on the floor.
And so after the lunch, the Silicon Valley guy says to the translator, I think it was
great the way they liked my joke, but I got to ask, how were you able to shorten it so
much?
And the translator says, well, actually, I gave up trying to translate and just said,
the man with the big checkbook just told a funny story.
Do what you think is appropriate.
Money doesn't really make you significant.
In fact, look at these three lists.
You can only find lasting security, lasting satisfaction, lasting significance in a relationship
with God.
If you're looking for these three things in money, it'll throw you off kilter.
I just read that chiropractors now say that if you sit on a wallet, it actually puts your
spine out of kilter.
And get this, they say, the fatter the wallet, the more pressure it puts on you.
And that's a metaphor right there.
Now is Jesus saying that money is wrong?
That success is wrong?
Of course not.
Abraham was rich, Solomon was successful.
Money is fine for certain things.
It's just not good at these things.
And that's the trap.
The trap that, for example, Dion Sanders found himself in.
Now if you stop reading here, you'd think that Jesus was against you storing up treasure
for yourself.
You'd think that he was against you seeking treasure, against you being motivated by treasure.
But in fact, he's all for it.
In fact, he commands you to seek treasure.
In fact, he recommends that you make seeking treasure your soul ambition.
In fact, he wants you to save up treasure.
He's just telling you to stop storing it in the wrong place and start storing it in the
right place.
He says, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where moth and rust do not destroy
and where thieves do not break in and steal.
For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
In his book, The Treasure Principle, Randy Alcorn says, imagine that you're living in
the South at the end of the Civil War.
But you are a northerner.
You're a northern spot.
Now while you've been there in the South, my northerner.
There we go.
How about that?
The sheer electricity of my speaking ability caused the microphone to short out.
That's a common problem for me.
But it's a cross I have to bear.
So, picture this.
Let's say you're in the South.
It's the Civil War.
You're a northern spy.
Somehow you have accumulated millions of dollars of Confederate money.
However, you know that at the end of the war, the North is going to win.
There's no way the South is going to win this war.
And now you've got millions of dollars of Confederate money.
If you're smart, what are you going to do with all that Confederate money?
You're going to go exchange it into United States dollars.
Because that's the only money that in the long term is going to be worth anything.
You're going to keep Confederate money that you need just to pay the bills.
And the rest you're going to store for the future.
Well as a Christian, your situation is exactly the same.
You're living as a stranger in a strange land.
You know who's going to win this spiritual war.
You know what's going to last.
So use what you need down here and make sure you store up treasures in heaven by exchanging
your U.S. dollars for eternal currency, for heavenly dollars.
You say, great, that's a good idea.
How do I do that?
You know, where's the exchange booth?
Well Jesus said that if we feed the least of these, He said, if you just give a cup
of cold water to somebody who's thirsty, you will not be without your reward in heaven.
But all through the year, we try to give you a chance to do this, to store up heavenly
treasures through local service opportunities, through things like share fest, through the
second harvest food drive, and through international and national trips.
In fact, we've got a team that Valri's on going to Taiwan starting tonight to help out
some missionaries over there in Taiwan for a couple of weeks.
And we've got another team going to India that my wife is leading, a team of about 30
going to an orphanage that we, as a church, support in India.
They're going to be doing some medical and dental care for those children and for the
villagers around there.
Why?
Listen to this.
Jesus says it's not charity.
It's an investment.
It's an investment in heavenly dollars.
And that's something very, very important because Jesus says if you want to really understand
what lasts forever, convert your money to the economy of heaven.
Jesus said for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
And this is so true.
Where's your treasure?
It's like if you had some shares in Disney, you would be riveted right now by the box
office performance of up because that is going to probably affect your share's value.
And so any news that you hear about Disney, you're right there because you've invested
in Disney, right?
If you've got shares in Apple, you're going to be really interested in Steve Jobs' health.
If you've got shares in GM, you're going to be throwing up, frankly.
But listen, whatever you got interest in financially, that's where your focus is.
And it's the same exact thing with this.
Where your treasure is, that's where your heart is.
Many of you gave graciously to the Second Harvest Food Drive where our church raised
over 400,000 pounds of food for Second Harvest.
And you know, I'll bet that in the weeks and months right after that, every time there
was an article about the hungry or about Second Harvest in the newspaper or a TV report out,
you were riveted, right?
You were there because you were invested there.
Where your treasure is, that's where your heart is.
My wife has given so much of her life the last few years to this orphanage in India and
every day she's Googling news about India.
She's interested in how the Christians are doing in India.
She's praying for the persecuted Christians in India.
She's interested in the orphan situation in India.
Why?
Where her treasure is, that's where her heart is.
If you thought to yourself, how can I jumpstart my spiritual life?
How can I get more interested in the things of God, invest in them, and I guarantee you
you will be?
And that leads right to point two.
I need to rethink what I seek.
What am I seeking?
What am I really focusing on?
Jesus says, look, and this almost sounds like a parenthetical statement here in the middle
of a section about money, but it's not.
Watch this.
The eye is the lamp of the body.
If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light.
But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.
If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness?
What's that all about?
Jesus is saying, it's very simple.
What are you looking at?
What are you looking at?
Because whatever gets your attention gets you.
That's where the treasure trap starts.
I read this week that the average American television is now on seven hours and seven
minutes a day.
That means tens of thousands of commercials a year, all saying, you need more money so
you can buy this stuff.
All I'm saying is it's very easy for your eyes, the lamp of your body, to go bad in
this culture.
In fact, here's the recipe for dissatisfaction.
Here it is.
Dissatisfaction results when my attention shifts from what I have to what I don't have.
And our culture is constantly pushing us this way.
What are you seeking?
That's why the apostle Paul said, people who want to get rich fall into temptation and
a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction.
Circle ruin and destruction.
People can hurt themselves with their own greed, wanting to get rich.
It's kind of like this Calvin and Hobbes comic.
His dad says, Calvin, I want to show you a magic trick.
Me, I pulled a dime from your ear.
And Calvin gets that look, final panel, anything yet?
Just a bloody nose.
You know, we bloody ourselves trying to get rich.
I just read that there have been more illegal, multi-level, get rich quick marketing schemes
in the past three years than in the past three decades combined.
Think of all the heartache.
And Jesus is saying, I love you.
You matter to me so much.
I want to keep you from all that pain.
I read Americans now owe a record $1.1 trillion in debt, not including mortgage debt.
They're serving their debt, literally their servants to it.
And that leads right into the final question raised in this passage.
I need to rethink who I serve.
Where am I storing?
What am I seeking?
And who am I serving?
Really?
What are the most haunting verses in the Bible?
Jesus says, you know, no one can serve two masters.
Because when you serve two masters, you get what psychologists today call cognitive dissonance,
where you're like, well, I need to serve that person.
I need to serve that person too.
And here's the way you resolve it eventually.
Jesus said, either you'll hate the one and love the other, or you'll be devoted to one
and despise the other.
You cannot serve both God and money.
So be honest.
Who are you serving?
Now, to most of us, for example, it's obvious that if somebody's taking risks to get high,
just to get a buzz, then they're a slave to that addiction.
But if you're working slave hours, slave hours, not to pay the bills, but just so you can
have better stuff, you're a slave to possessions.
Who's your master?
Who are you taking your orders from?
Who is the boss in your life?
I really think this ought to be a verse we ask ourselves at the beginning and the end
of every day.
First, who am I going to serve today?
And then who did I serve today?
One of America's founding fathers, Samuel Adams, said, if you love wealth more than
liberty, crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you.
May your chains rest lightly upon you.
What a great quote.
Wealth can be a slave driver.
You and I will always serve something.
Your work, your money, your addictions, your resentments, your pleasure, your God, there
will always be a central motivator to your life.
What is it for you?
Like Bob Dylan said, right, you've got to serve somebody and you've got to ask yourself
that question.
Who am I serving?
When you look back at this whole passage, what Jesus is getting at here really reminds
me of something that somebody gave me a few years ago.
You know, I am somewhat known perhaps for, well, as being kind of a chamber of commerce
type spokesman for the city of Fresno.
It's a city that is in the Central Valley of California, if you're not familiar with
it.
Against Fresno, it's been kind of a running gag here at the church, and what's funny is
people from Fresno who visit the church keep sending me Fresno stuff.
I've got like a whole shrine almost in my office, a corner of it dedicated to Fresno
things.
I've got Fresno maps, Fresno Chamber of Commerce bulletins, and so on.
I've got a couple of Starbucks mugs from the Fresno, Starbucks that feature the gorgeous
skyline of downtown Fresno.
That's a prize possession.
Just this last week, somebody anonymously sent me a bottle of Fresno State wine, and
so that's an interesting possession right there, but this is my all-time favorite Fresno
gift.
This is a game called Fresno Scene.
I've shared it with some of you before.
Fresno Scene is a game that was put out by Fresno, and it is very similar to the game
of Monopoly.
In fact, let me just kind of show you the game board here of Fresno Scene, very similar
to Monopoly, which is set in Atlantic City.
You kind of go around the board and you get different properties in Fresno.
In fact, according to the Fresno Scene instructions right here, it says the object of this game
is to accumulate wealth.
A player buys ownership cards representing various properties and businesses in Fresno.
However, you can be kind of snookered in your attempt to do all this by the chance cards
just like in Monopoly.
The chance cards for the Fresno Scene game, they're all kind of adjusted to what happens
at Fresno.
For example, here's one.
This is a good chance card.
You win a car at the annual Armenian picnic, and so that's a good thing.
Your tractor engine needs expert machine work, advanced to rudder army machine work, so
that's good, but sometimes you get bad chance cards.
This is the worst card you can get in the Fresno Scene game.
It says, you're transferred to Firebaugh.
Go back seven spaces.
What I love about this is this tells me that even in Fresno, there's a city they all make
fun of.
If you're at church this morning, the pastor there would be making fun of Firebaugh.
I guarantee you.
That's awesome to me.
But here's the thing.
Let's say you accumulate all the wealth.
Let's say you get every single property in the Fresno Scene game.
What's the flaw you see here?
What's the problem of Fresno Scene?
Let's say you get all the wealth, all the play money.
What's the problem here?
You're still in Fresno!
That's the issue!
And I'm not just putting down Fresno in Monopoly.
What's the problem?
Has it ever occurred to you to get all the problem you'd go, but I'm still in Atlantic
City, New Jersey!
And you know what?
In the game we play called Earth Scene, you can get all the play money down here and all
the little plastic houses, but at the end of it, you're still just on Earth.
And that's a dot compared to the eternity of your existence in heaven.
What you want to do is take that play money and exchange it into something that's bigger
than the game.
When the whole world, through TV commercials and through motivational speeches at work
and through cultural pressures, is trying to get you interested in playing the game,
you need to remind yourself that at the end of the game, A, it all goes back in the box,
and B, it's all just earthly.
You need to focus on something that's bigger than the game.
And you know, I want to, before we wrap up this morning, just introduce you to some people
who I think get it.
Some people from our church who have done something just recently that I think is bigger
than the game.
And they observed some things that speak to exactly the point that we've been discussing
this morning.
I want us to welcome back the TLC Hurricane Relief Team.
All you guys stand up, the whole team right now, those of you here, stand up and let's
thank these people first of all for what they did in Port Arthur, Texas.
And Jen and Suzanne and Austin, why don't you guys come up here to the stage right now.
I want to welcome a couple of members from the team up here.
And before I wrap this up, I just want to ask you guys a couple of questions about Hurricane
Relief and what you guys saw and what you guys did there.
Suzanne, what did you guys do there on this trip?
First, how many years have you been going down?
I think this was our sixth trip.
Your sixth trip?
Five years.
You started, you're a nurse.
You started as a Red Cross volunteer in what you saw in Port Arthur, Texas, which was devastated
by Hurricane Rita, which was just as devastating as Katrina happened around the same time,
but somehow did not get the press that New Orleans got with Katrina, which was also horrible.
But a lot of the relief is focused on that and ignores Port Arthur.
Also, sadly, the eye settled over at the lowest section of that city economically.
It's still devastated years later.
So what did you guys do on this trip?
You went with a team of almost 30 people.
Yeah, we started out with eight the very first time and now we're up to 27.
That's fantastic.
People are getting the vision of what it is to serve and to store cherries in heaven.
But what we did was there were a lot of winds and tornadoes that just touched down and blew
off roofs.
And when the roofs were blew off, the water went in and destroyed everything for people
who had nothing to begin with, so it's rebuilding and whatever needs to be done.
You really saw what this verse talks about.
Masters and earth can be destroyed by moth, rust, or in your case, hurricanes and floods.
And Jim, you went there.
I want to ask you, what did you observe there?
How did it affect the lives of the people that you observed spiritually and how did
it affect your life as a team member and your lives as a team?
Well, two things.
First is the power of the group.
This is the second time that I went.
First time I went, we had 10 people.
Second time we only had 30, so the dynamics were very different.
But I had thought that going on a trip like this was really all about the work that we
were going to do.
And I found out very differently that a lot of it is really about the group and being
with the group and just how God gets inside of you when you're with the group.
It's like family.
That's the best that I can say.
It's just like being like a family.
And you're in a place that you're unfamiliar with, you're a foreign country, in our case
it was Texas.
That's right, y'all.
But the power of the group is just amazing, the bonding of it.
And you realize that God just comes inside of you and works inside of you along with
this group.
And the second thing is it's just great and mighty things does he do.
Yeah, that's right.
Exactly.
And the second thing is how it changed me looking at how little these people have and
yet they're genuinely happy.
And this really ties into what you've been talking about today with money, Renee.
We were working in homes that people have not lived in for four years and who knows
where they're living.
A lot of times you go into an empty house and you have no idea where these people are.
And one of the things that we do, the last thing we do on this trip is we go to a church
service for a church that feeds us when we're down there.
And these people, here we are from California, we must look like kings and queens to these
people.
This is a devastated community, a very poor community.
And yet these people are walking up to us and they're just so grateful for what we have
done.
And it changed me in realizing that it's not about money, it's not about what I have.
These people have very little and yet they're happy, maybe happier than I am.
It's interesting.
Austin, let me ask you a question too.
You went there, is this your first time with the team?
Yeah, it's my first time.
What was the biggest impact that made on your life?
Big impact on my life was just seeing the devastation and how it affected the people
around them, like around what happened.
And like this, we worked at this one lady's house, Sabrina, and she was like pretty much
happy as can be just seeing us there and being there for her during that time and painting
her house and stuff, which was pretty big.
So even though they're devastated physically, spiritually, just like Jesus said, it's funny
how often that happens.
They are happy because they're finding their focus in Christ and you guys learned lessons
from that.
Suzanne, I want to ask you one final question.
As your team does its team reunions, you're not hearing words like, I'm exhausted.
I'll never go back.
What are the kinds of things, what are the kinds of effects that these trips have on
your teams?
Well, what's been shared is it transforms us.
We think we're these great rescuers that are going to do great work and in reality it's
the work that God does within us.
And just with Austin, he didn't share real quick if I could, this mother, the house we
worked on was one block over from gang infested and they were doing things to her property
and threatening her and her son.
And he had no friends.
He was in high school.
She really wanted to keep him focused.
So he had no friends.
He was isolated to go to school and come home.
And Austin played pool with some guys and said, who are your buddies?
You know, have your buddies come over here and play and he says, I don't have anybody's.
And then he stopped and he looked at Austin and said, and to the guys that were playing
pool, you are my buddies.
And this is a kid that walked in the door our first day and ran upstairs.
When we left, he stood at the fence.
He couldn't stand to see his ghost.
So it's about relationships.
If you think your world's too small, mine is here in Santa Cruz.
God does great and mighty things when you step out of our comfort zone.
That's right.
We're going to see what God can do in and through and with us.
It's powerful.
You guys are awesome.
Let's thank these guys again.
We're doing a wonderful job.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
What did they just say?
How do I escape the treasure trap?
Final lines in your notes.
First, gratitude, right?
These people were thankful for what they had down there in Port Arthur, even though they
had so little.
Be happy with what you got.
Enjoy it.
Dig it.
God wants you to.
He wants you to want.
Happiness is enjoying whatever you have.
Paul says God richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.
Every moment is a moment that will never be repeated for the rest of your life.
So love it.
Be grateful for it.
And then secondly, giving.
2G is gratitude and giving.
This is how we escape the treasure trap.
By the way, this is now verified by research.
I found an article in the Boston Globe last year, headline, Money Makes You Happy If You
spend it on others. Quote, they say, money can't buy you happiness, but new research
suggests it can if you spend it on someone else. You know, if you want proof of this,
man, if you've ever been on one of these outreach trips, I've been on trips to Guatemala, trips
to India, trips to Mexico. Often the people there will make us meals, make us what for
them is a feast that probably cost them a month's worth of wages. And they come up to
give it to us because we're a visiting ministry team and what's written all over their face
is pure joy, right? Pure joy. Even though they're giving so much and it's not fake, it's not
put on, they're really happy to be giving you to lavish gifts upon you. Why? Because no
matter what socioeconomic level you're at, no matter what country you live in, it's just
true. Giving is the way that we are fulfilled. Let's land this plane. When we last left
Dion Sanders, he was plunging down a cliff in his Mercedes as a suicide attempt. But
Dion survived. The police found him, brought him to the hospital, and later that week another
former 49er, Mark Logan, took Dion to breakfast at the IHOP of all places, and they sat and
talked for four hours about Jesus. And finally, Logan looks Dion in the eye and says, Dion,
are you saved? Dion says, no, I'm not. And he asks Jesus to come into his life and everything
starts to change. He says, quote, success and money almost ruined my life, but thank
God I came to him just in the nick of time. And that has made all the difference. Now
I am consciously and expectantly growing in the grace and knowledge of Jesus. As he puts
it, I tried everything money could buy. There was no peace. The Bible describes it in the
first chapter of Ecclesiastes as a chasing after the wind, and that's exactly what it
was, because nothing could possibly satisfy the emptiness deep down inside of me except
Jesus. And that says it all. The biggest danger of money is not that it makes you unhappy
or leaves you unfulfilled. It's that it can make you forget God if you're not careful.
I think it's appropriate on the fourth of July weekend to close with a quote from our
greatest president about the effect that he saw of wealth on America. Abraham Lincoln in
a famous speech said, we have grown in numbers, wealth, and powers no other nation has ever
grown intoxicated with unbroken success. We have become too self sufficient to feel the
necessity of redeeming and preserving grace too. Proud to pray to the God that made us.
It behooves us then to humble ourselves before the offended power to confess our national
sins and to pray for clemency and forgiveness. That can be true of a nation and it can be
true of a person. So as he suggested, let's pray, which about your heads with me. Heavenly
Father, I pray that you would change our hearts from the things that do not satisfy to you.
And God, I pray that all of us would leave today encouraged by Jesus to focus on what
really lasts. And maybe there's some people here like Dion Sanders. I'm sure there are
who need to pray for the first time. Jesus, save me. I am empty, empty, empty. Come into
my life and fill me. God bless those people with great spiritual growth, even starting
this week. Thank you for your word. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.
Hey, we're going to do something right now that's a little bit dangerous after a message
on money. We're going to take the offering. Now, I don't want you to feel any pressure
here, all right? This is not like, I hope I made him feel guilty so we have a record
setting type today. Please don't put anything different than you normally were going to.
I want this to be a lifelong pattern of change in all of our lives, especially if you're
a visitor. Please let that go right by you. This service is our free gift to you. And
as the offering is taken this morning, let's put our hands together and welcome back to
lead us in worship. Dave Lemieux in the house of soul.
You are beautiful, my sweet, sweet soul. You are beautiful, my sweet, sweet soul.
You are so good to me. You are my broken heart. You are my father in heaven.
You are beautiful, my sweet, sweet soul. You are beautiful, my sweet, sweet soul.
You are beautiful, my sweet, sweet soul. You are beautiful, my sweet, sweet soul.
You are beautiful, my sweet, sweet soul. You are my strong melody. You are my dance
and rhythm. You are my perfect line and I will sing. I will sing. I will sing.
I will sing. I will sing.
I will sing. I will sing.
You are my father in heaven. You are my father in heaven.
You are beautiful, my sweet, sweet soul. You are beautiful, my sweet, sweet soul.
You are beautiful.
You are beautiful, my sweet, sweet soul.
You are beautiful, my sweet, sweet soul.
You are beautiful, my sweet, sweet soul.
You are beautiful, my sweet, sweet soul.
You are beautiful, my sweet, sweet soul.
You are beautiful, my sweet, sweet soul.
You are beautiful, my sweet, sweet soul.
You are beautiful, my sweet soul.
You are beautiful, my sweet, sweet soul.
You are beautiful, my sweet, sweet soul.
That's where my treasury is. I'll take you there. It's not for your treasury. I'll take you there.
Let me take you by the hand.
You are beautiful, my sweet, sweet soul.
You are beautiful.
O.J. Blackwell.
You are beautiful, my sweet, sweet soul.
You are beautiful, my sweet soul.
I'll take you there.
Thank you guys. Thank you for sticking around.
Hallelujah.
I'll tell you what, it's just like being among family and if we could stay for longer and longer and longer, you know that we would.
But we can't. We've got places to go and things.
But I just love being here. We'll come back next year as many years in a row as you'll have us.
But thank you for your support. We couldn't do it without you. Appreciate it.
Thank you.
