The Generous Life | Rev. Adam Hamilton | Church of the Resurrection

2:08 We are called to live the generous life. This week I received a text from someone who grew up in our congregation as a little girl, and she texted me and sent me a photograph. She said, Pastor Adam, I'm scared. This is all that's left in my refrigerator. She wasn't reaching out to me to bring food to her. She was reaching out to say she was just scared. But by 6.30 the next night, she had two weeks worth of groceries from our Overland Park food pantry. That's the importance of generosity. I shared with you a couple of weeks ago about resurrection member Chris Campbell and how Chris, she has been very active in missions and serving her whole life. She's done such great work in serving, but now some physical limitations keep her from being able to do that. And she'd read an article in the New York Times about air traffic controllers not getting paid. And I mentioned to you that she had decided that she would send, she could use her phone and her computer to send pizzas to the air traffic controllers at Kansas City International Airport. But when they stopped getting paid, she decided she needed to do more.

3:06 And so last week she began sending groceries from Sam's Club and making sure that they had sort of their own food pantry right there. Here's a picture that was from the air traffic controllers offices. and she's replenished it multiple times so that if people needed something and they didn't have the money to go out and buy food right now, they were able to do that. I think what a powerful picture and there's multiple other of our members who've been doing things like that over the last week for people who are no longer receiving their paycheck. I watched you and that is a picture of generosity. I mean, that's just a generous heart. That's living generously. And then I think about you, those of you at our various locations. So two weeks ago, we had grocery sacks, 3,500 of them and every year we do this around the holidays and we asked you to take a grocery sack and it had a list of items, 10 most needed items for families that were gonna help them for the holidays and grocery items. And often we'll have two weeks of encouraging people to come and take all those sacks, but they were nearly gone.

4:01 In fact, they were gone at most of our locations on that Sunday by the end of the morning because you wanted to do something to help. And that's going to help people who typically receive SNAP benefits. You are among the most generous people that I know and it makes me proud as a pastor for the way that you serve and care for and act generously towards other people. So this last week at our Overland Park Food Pantry, which is our largest food pantry, we support 20 food pantries in Kansas City, but at the largest one, our own food pantry, we had a 35% increase in people who were coming for food help. And some of those, many of those, I think at 20% were people who'd never been there before to our food pantry. And then our mobile food truck is going out. It's our mobile food pantry. And we've added stops. it's seen a 25% increase in the number of people who are coming to receive food. And it comes back. Typically, we would have food still on the truck when it comes back. It's completely empty most of the time when it's going out.

4:54 In a couple of weeks, we're going to be, actually, I think it's a week from now, we're going to be having a drive-through food pantry, pop-up food pantry, in several different locations in Kansas City, near some of our partners in ministry. And Ball Foods and Canby's and Scavuzzo's are going to be joining us in making sure that we're providing as much food as we can to people who are in need, who may be struggling and haven't received their SNAP benefits. I mention this because in this month where we're preaching on generosity and we're thinking about generosity, I want you to understand the importance of generosity, right? It's not just some, you know, hypothetical. This is how life works. And when things are hard, this is how life works. And when you're in need, this is how life works. And that generosity is sometimes money and sometimes it's food. And sometimes it's just somebody smiling or taking time to listen and care for you. But we are called to the generous life. And the point I want you to understand is that we were made by God for generosity. So Pastor Scott last week ended his sermon talking about God's generosity.

5:52 And we were created in the image of God. And God's way of solving the world's problems and addressing the needs in our society and our world is through people. God uses us. And we were made for generosity. Without generosity, the world just simply doesn't function. And we find injustice and poverty and hunger and all kinds of things. So I think about the various words that are used in the Hebrew Bible to describe and really use pointing towards generosity. So here's just a few. Hesed is loving kindness. Tzedakah is righteousness, particularly as it relates to giving to people who are in need. Berakah is blessing and gift. Natan is to give or to bestow. Nadib is to be noble or generous. Korban is offerings to God. Didomi is a New Testament word in Greek, to give. Agape is to practice selfless love, but it particularly has to do with the actions that we do to demonstrate love towards other people. And it's used often of giving to the poor, helping those who are in need.

6:46 Combined, these words show up more than 4,000 times in the Bible. What you can understand, when it comes to generosity towards God and towards other people, this is a huge theme in the scripture. You just can't get away from it. If you understand these words, you understand God is calling us to be a generous people, to live generous lives. Now, the book of Proverbs offers wise sayings that reflect how the world works. They're not necessarily commandments. What they are is they're saying, the writers of Proverbs look at how life works. They say, this is what we've seen in how life works. And this is one of the things they say, Proverbs 11, 25, generous persons will prosper. Generous persons will prosper. Those who refresh others will themselves be refreshed. It's just the opposite of what you'd think. You'd think if somebody's generous, then they're giving away and they're not gonna have enough. But instead, it's in generosity that we find that we are replenished and refreshed. I think of Acts 22, or excuse me, Proverbs 22, 9. It says, happy are generous people because they give some of their food to the poor.

7:43 And of course, it was Jesus who famously said, it is more blessed to give than to receive. Now, what we find is truth in scripture is also what we find the researchers, secular researchers are saying is true in life today. So I think about the John Templeton Foundation and there's an article that they had, really written the title captured the very question or the very statement Jesus made, it is more blessed to give than to receive. Their article was, is it really better to give than to receive? And they described a survey of over 600 Americans. And here's what they found. Those who spent money on others reported notably higher levels of happiness compared to those who spent money on themselves. Now in their book, The Paradox of Generosity, this is by Christian Smith and Hilary Davidson. They described their survey results. They surveyed 2000 Americans and then conducted 62 in-person interviews. And here's what they found. they asked people up front, you know, how happy are you? And they could rate how happy they were from very happy to very unhappy. And then they asked a whole series of questions. They were trying to find correlations between happiness and the activities of people in their daily lives.

8:47 And so one of the questions they asked or one of the statements they made, and they asked people to respond to is this statement. It is very important to me to be a generous person. And they could respond in several different ways. They could say they strongly agree, they mostly agree, they slightly agree, they neither, or they disagree. So it is very important for me to be a generous person. Then they'd look to see if there was any correlation between happiness and the conviction that they needed to be generous. Let me just show you. This is one of many charts in the book. I find it just fascinating. So the people who strongly agreed that they wanted to be very generous people, 44% said that they were very happy and only 10% said they were very unhappy. Now come down here to the people who disagree that they didn't feel like they needed to be very generous people. 21% were very happy and 18% were very or somewhat unhappy. Here's what I want you to notice, that the people who wanted to be very generous were also twice as likely to report that they were very happy.

9:45 And the people who didn't want to be generous and didn't think that was important were 80% more likely to report that they were unhappy or very unhappy in their lives. There is a correlation here between the desire to be generous and happiness in our lives and the neglect of generosity and unhappiness in our lives. All right, so I wanna ask you this question. Do you believe it's important for you to be very generous in your life?

10:13 And if you don't, the whole point of the sermon, that's okay, but the whole point of the sermon series is to convince you that this is really important. It's really important to God and it's also really important to you and for you because it is more blessed to give than to receive. All right, so the question is once we decide, you know, okay, I think maybe I do want to be more generous than I am. The question is, how much generosity do we need to, you know, to generate? How much should we be giving away? Now, I want to recognize next week, we'll talk a little more about this, but this is time, it's talent, it's care for other people, it's emotional energy, it's all of these things. But today I want to specifically talk about our financial generosity. So, you know, we might ask the question, you could Google search this, how much does the average American give to charity or to charitable organizations, how much they give away. And what you're going to find is the answers are all over the map. Of course, it hinges on the age of somebody. It hinges on where they live.

11:04 It hinges on their socioeconomic status, how much money they make. All of these are things that tie in. So you really need to drill down a little bit in this. And you're also going to find that there are a wide array of results. So it depends on who's being surveyed. So last year, actually it was released this year. The survey was done last year. But in April of this year, there was a survey results were released from the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, NORC. And they surveyed 1,229 adults nationwide, and they wanted to find out, you know, how many people were giving. Now, in this particular study, 73% of those folks said that they had been giving, they'd given something in the last year to charity, some charitable organization. So 73% of Americans in that survey. But the previous studies that have been done were saying that the number of Americans who were giving to charities actually been going down from a high of about 67% in 2002, and two, down to about 49% in the year 2000. And so actually 45% in the year 2000.

11:59 And so the numbers of, you know, the amount of money that's been given has actually been going up. Last year was a record year, but it was sort of masked by the fact that a fair amount of that came from very high net worth individuals. So maybe it's 73% who are giving and 27% don't give anything to charity, or maybe it's 54% who give nothing to charity and 45% or 46% who do every year. So here's the thing, though. Even with the National Opinion Research Center, they found that half of the people who gave reported giving less than $100 in the previous year. So 27% gave nothing. And then of the half that did give, half gave less than $100 to charity in the previous year. So that's one set of data. So that would mean that the people who did give gave quite a lot more than that because the average, according to GivingUSA from 2020, indicated the average American family, excluding the high net worth people, gave $2,514 to charity.

12:54 Now, I know you're not going to remember all that information. I mainly just want to say that if you research this and study it, you're going to find the numbers are all over the map. But at least one study, GivingUSA, said that the average American gives $2,514 to charity, excluding the people who are high net worth. All right, one last little bit of data, and this might be the most accurate of a sort. And that was one organization went through and they studied, and I think they used the government data to study how much people deducted for charitable contributions on their income tax returns. Now, in order to deduct, you've got to not just take the standard deduction. So these are people who knew they had enough to be able to deduct their charitable giving. So here's what they found. Americans who made 50 to 100,000 a year gave $3,305 to charity. So I'm just, you know, this is data from the tax returns. So again, 50 to $100,000 a year, they gave $3,305 away to charity. Those who made 100,000 to 500,000 a year gave $5,124 to charity.

13:52 That's what they deducted. And those who made $500,000 to $2 million gave $25,150. And overall, when they did all the data, they found that the average American was giving 4.3% of their adjusted gross income away. 4.3%. All right, at least of those who itemized their deductions. All right, religious people tend to give more. In almost every study, there's one outlier out of Sweden from last year or a couple of years ago, but generally speaking, religious people give more money than non-religious people to charity. They just are more highly motivated to do that. And some, you know, it's like five or six times the amount that on average non-religious people tend to give to charity. And when it comes to the age of donations, people who are older, silent generation, that you begin to, you reach a peak and then you begin to go down. But if you look at baby boomers, you're going to find the baby boomers are giving the most.

14:49 And then you're going to find from that generationally, it just steps down with each generation. But there's one exception to that, and that is Gen Z. And Gen Z is giving more on average than the millennial generation is. So millennials, you got a little work to do if you got Gen Z out giving you when it comes to charity. All right, so as Christians, we ask the question, you know, what does God expect us to do? and here what we find in scripture is the idea of the tithe now the word tithe means tenth so it's literally the first 10 of what you have is given to god now this starts with abraham when abraham is uh you know 1800 bc and he's gone off to war and he you know god gives him victory in war and he takes 10 of all the plunder or all the spoils of war and he gives it to the priest melchizedek so uh the priest of salem and then uh two generations later so his grandson jacob when And he's pleading with God for God to protect him and watch over him.

15:43 He says, if you'll protect me and watch over me, a tenth of all I have, I give to you. And so Jacob voluntarily, like Abraham, gave the first tenth. Why a tenth? That was the king's portion. And so God was his king. And so he gave the first tenth to God in the ancient world. That's how it worked. By the time you get to Moses in 1300 BC, in the 1200s BC, and God is giving the law to Moses, it becomes codified that the first tenth belongs to God. And so we read this in Leviticus. All tithes from the land, all tenths from the land, whether it's seed from the ground, so your harvest of wheat or other crops, or the fruit from the tree, they belong to the Lord. They are holy to the Lord. All tithes of herd and flock, every tenth one that passes under the shepherd's staff shall be holy to the Lord. It shall belong to the Lord. And so there's this idea that God is claiming. He says, you know, I'm giving you everything you have. I've given you the capacity to generate wealth. I give you the sunshine.

16:35 I give you the oxygen. I give you the rain that waters the earth. All of these are my gift to you. Life is my gift to you. And a tenth of what you have, I'm claiming is mine. This is what God has said. I didn't make this up. This is what scripture says. And we find throughout scripture that sometimes people struggled with doing this. And so you get to the book of Malachi, the last book in the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible, and you find God saying to the people through Malachi, he says, bring the full tithe, the full tenth, into the storehouse, that is into the temple or in the tabernacle. Bring the full tithe into the storehouse so that there may be food in my house. and thus put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts. I love this. He says, put me to the test. Usually we are not to test God, but in this case, God says, test me on this and see if it's true. See if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you an overflowing blessing.

17:22 One of the reasons why I actually like preaching on tithing, a lot of my friends who are pastors are like, man, I never want to preach on that. I hate to do it. I don't want anybody to think, you know, that all we care about is their money. I hope you know that's not true for us at Resurrection. But I love preaching on this because I found it to be true in my life. I found these words to actually function this way in my life, that the blessings of God have come. And I'll tell you more about that in a moment. A national organization called Mortarstone surveyed over 500 churches and found that among those churches, 8.9% of members gave the first 10% of what they earned or more to God through the church. Now we have children and high school students here at Resurrection whose parents have taught them or they've learned in Sunday school about giving their first 10th of their allowance or whatever they're making as a young person. We have teenagers and children who are tithers here. We have young adults in their 20s and 30s who are tithers, who give more than some of the people in their 50s or 60s, even though those people who are older make a lot more money than they do.

18:15 They've made it just a habit and a pattern in their lives to give the first 10th to God. And this is true of people in their 30s and 40s, 50s and 60s and retirees who continue to do that into their retirement. Now, LaVon and I learned this when we were in high school and youth group. And I remember we were newlyweds. We were 17 and 18 years old, and we were giving the first 10th of what we had to God through the church. Here's a picture of us when we were just kids and 17 and 18, just got married. And the first 10th of what we made, we lived below the poverty level that year. So I know it can be done at any level because we did it when we had nothing. But the first 10th we had of our paychecks. So the first 10th, so people say net or gross. And ultimately you might get to gross, but we started with net. And then if we got a tax refund at the end of the year, we gave 10% of that too. And that's how it worked for us when we began. So I asked a couple of weeks ago in my e-note if any of you wanted to share your experiences with me of tithing.

19:09 And I wanted you to hear from actual people. I mean, it's one thing for your pastor to say, I did this and do this and continue to do this. It's another thing to hear from others in the congregation. So one of you wrote, for us, tithing is a way of reinforcing our allegiance to God. We're putting our devotion to God ahead of our devotion to anyone or anything else. Tithing is an act of trust, trusting God to provide for us. Tithing is also an act of obedience, they wrote, choosing to obey the Bible. and tithing is an act of gratitude, a way of tangibly expressing to God that we realize everything we have is a gift from him. I love that. That captures how I feel about this as well. Another person wrote this. She had been surprised. She was struggling and she'd been surprised. She ended up with this perfect job that she had been hoping for something like this. And she recognized once she heard the news, she was driving home. She said, I knew this was a gift from God. And I decided at that moment, she said, I had always struggled with the idea of tithing. She said, I just found it a hard sell.

20:03 But at that moment, I found I wanted to give the first 10th of whatever I made to God. And they've continued to do this. And she said, for me, I'm reading from her note. For me, it had become a gratitude thing. If God was going to be so kind and specifically caring to our family, I wanted to give back to him with joy. We have never looked back. Our financial picture hasn't always been easy, but our tithe always comes off the top. And God has always provided in one way or another. that's interesting to me the word for offering in the hebrew bible is korban and korban means to draw near or close so it's as though when the offering was made what that was a way of doing was saying i want to draw near to you oh god and god also drawing near to us so there's something profound that happens in our spiritual lives as we are making our offerings to god and i just remind you the earliest acts of worship in the bible were not songs being sung and a preacher giving a sermon, what people did is they built an altar and they offered some of what they had, their flocks or their crops as an offering to God. Begins right there in Genesis, or in Genesis, I think it's chapter four, is the first time we find worship as expressed as an offering of something that's of value to me, that I'm going to give up. I could have used it for myself, but I'm going to give it up to you, oh God, as an offering to you. And that draws us close to God.

21:19 And of course, what that was used for in the ancient world was to support the work of the ministry of the tabernacle or the temple. And today, the church and the ministries of the church. We'll talk more about that in a moment. So I've not met a single person who decided to tithe who regretted it later. I've not met a single person. I'm sure there may be some out there, but every single person I've talked to who made that decision to give their first tenth talked about the joy it brought to their lives, the meaning, the sense of purpose, and the closeness they felt to God, the connection they felt to God. It reordered their values in their lives, which is again, why I love teaching about this. Now, not, you know, as we learned, Mortarstone says 8.9% of Christians tithing in those 500 churches they surveyed. So part of my hope is that some of you will say, you know, I'd like to get to that point too. I'd like to make that a goal in my life. Now, I believe that most of us want to be more generous, not just towards God and the church, but more generous, generally speaking, to causes that we care about, to other people.

22:13 We want to be more generous with our time, our talent, and our resources. But we struggle. So why do we struggle? And part of the struggle is the world that we live in and how things seem to work. We simply don't have margin to be able to give generously of our time or our talent and our resources. We are overscheduled in our daily lives. At least that's true for many of us. If you're retired, maybe a little different. Although I keep talking to retirees who tell me they're busier now than they were when they weren't retired. That's depressing to me. But for many of us, when it comes to our finances, we are overcommitted. And that may be true of our time as well. So I think about, in part, you know, this problem of being overcommitted or, you know, just simply having no margin. And I think about Morgan Housel's bestselling book, The Psychology of Money. So he notes that modern capitalism is great at generating envy. Much of our emotional energy is spent thinking about acquiring more and about what we want next.

23:09 So we're approaching Christmas. And what's the question that every kid gets asked 100 times as they're approaching Christmas? You know, maybe you're even asked this question as an adult. What do you want for Christmas? LaVon asked me that the other day. I asked her that. What do you want for Christmas? Do I need anything? No. Does she need anything? No. Does my granddaughter need anything? No. Do my kids need anything? No. Of course, there's something nice about giving gifts. I don't want to take away from that. I love giving gifts. It brings me joy. And so we're going to give things to each other. But the thing is that really our society is built around creating, as Hussle says, envy, generating envy, thinking about what we want next. We've acquired a lot of stuff, but what are we gonna have next? Now, Housel tells a story in his book about a time when novelist Kurt Vonnegut and his friend, fellow novelist Joseph Heller, were at a party at the home of a billionaire hedge fund manager. And Vonnegut says to Heller, and by the way, Heller's wrote a best-selling book called Catch-22.

24:05 And so Vonnegut says to Heller, hey, this guy makes more money in a single day than you made in the entire lifetime of your book Catch-22. And Heller replied with this, Yes. But I have something he will never have. What's that? Enough. Enough. The world is constantly telling me I need more. And I got to be able to speak back to the world first to my soul and say, no, you don't. I really don't need anything more. And to be able to be satisfied with what we have to find contentment. Now, I want to share an illustration with you that has to do, I learned this when I was a teenager. And I've shared it with youth groups when I was a youth director. And I've shared it with you before as a congregation. But I think about this jar as my life. So this is my life. Maybe it's my family, but I'm gonna just say it's my life. So every little rock that's in here, I've used these rocks to demonstrate and illustrate forgiveness.

24:58 But here I'm using them to illustrate every meal that I've eaten out, every dollar that I spent on something. It captures every bit of clothing that I bought, every pair of shoes, whatever it is, it captures it all. At some point, of course, LaVon and I decided that we would buy a house and we bought a little house, you know, our first house. And then eventually we decided we would get a little bit bigger house and a little bit bigger house. And I think we're on our fourth house, but we've been in this house now for 25 years. Okay, so then you get a house and of course you've got all the expenses that go along with that, television sets and stereos and dishes and appliances of all different kinds. And so you've got all the things in every dollar, every little thing that we bought. And of course, then there are cars that go into there too. So, you know, I think about the cars that I have, and I've got two cars right now and a truck. I've got an old Mustang that I've had for 13 years and a newer truck that's my daily driver. And LeVon's got a Mustang, or not a Mustang, a Honda Accord.

25:53 And so over the years, I bought I don't know how many cars, maybe 15 cars since I was 14 years old and bought my first one. And, you know, almost all those are now in a trash. You know, they've been crushed for steel or sitting in a field or somewhere at a, you know, wrecking yard. And of course, I had to buy more stuff to go with that. And I had, you know, lots of trips and clothing and all kinds of other things. And so, you know, you just keep spinning. And then there's all the things you really wish you could have that you don't have yet. And pretty soon you find that your cup runneth over, right? Your cup runneth over. There it is. And it's gonna still spill over because I got a lot more living left to do and more rocks I'm gonna add to my jar, right? And then I get the idea after hearing, you know, a pastor preach one Sunday, gosh, you know, I should be more generous to God. Maybe I should actually try to take on that tithing thing. Maybe I should try to give more to God and other people. And so then I got a cross here, right?

26:47 Which represents Jesus and my faith in Jesus. And the problem is that there's just no room. Yeah. There's just no room to be able to do that because I'm already overcommitted. My credit card bills, my mortgage, you know, how I'm spending my money, I've kind of gotten used to this sort of way of living. And there's no way I can possibly become more generous unless I reorder my life. Unless I decide, you know what, maybe I don't need all this stuff. Maybe I wanna start over just a little bit. Maybe I'm gonna simplify my life some. and you know, we begin to do that. We need to empty a little more out of here.

27:33 We still have our house, but you know, maybe, I mean, I've known people who decided I don't need that big house. I could go with a smaller house and I don't need that fancy car. I can go with a simpler car. And then we find we're gonna put Christ first. Maybe you keep the same house. I'm not saying you have to move. I'm just saying somewhere along the way, what has to happen is we gotta make room in our lives for the things that matter most. And of course, then we're gonna still have other things we're gonna do, right? We're gonna help other people. Now we have margin to help other people. We're gonna still be able to enjoy our lives. God gives us everything for our enjoyment, Paul says in 1 Timothy, but you see, there's margin now to be able to do the things that we wanna do. I remember several years ago, we had two different families. I preached a sermon like this and two different families decided they were gonna, maybe more, but I knew of two, who decided they were gonna move out of a very nice neighborhood they lived in, one of the nicest neighborhoods in Kansas City, and they were gonna simplify.

28:30 And they sold their house, and they bought a smaller house. It was still a beautiful, really nice house. And they decided they would get rid of their car payments. They bought cars they could pay for. And they started changing their lifestyle. And I remember them coming to me. Both families came to me and said, I can't tell you the difference we feel in our lives. We feel free, liberated, and we feel like we can do the things that really matter to us. Because you invited us to reset, to simplify and to recognize in our lives that we had enough. All right, Paul says it this way, as for those who in the present age are rich, which really by the world standards, almost all of us are rich. As for those who in this present age are rich, command them not to be haughty or to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but rather on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. I love that. God wants us to enjoy life. They are, listen to this, they are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous and ready to share, thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.

29:34 Don't you wanna take hold of the life that really is life? All right, instead of all this stuff that we've thought maybe might make us happy and then never really does and leads us to the next thing we gotta acquire. But here's what he says. We have to do good to be rich in good works, generous and ready to share. And in that way, we take hold of the life that really is life. All right, I wanna mention, so if you're tuning in for the very first time, once a year, I preach a sermon where we're asking you to fill out a pledge card if this is your church family. If this is not your church family, this doesn't have anything to do with you. You can just listen in and kind of hear how we do this. But once a year, we ask our members to pray and to think about what part of what I have, am I gonna return to God in the coming year? And that's how all the ministry that this church does is funded is by your generosity. And that generosity is not first to the church's budget. It's first to God. It's a way of saying, God, everything that I have, I'm gonna return this portion to you.

30:28 And we want you to spend time praying and thinking and figuring out, are there some things that I can reshuffle? Do I need to take some things out so that I can put things that are more important into my life? And so for those of you who are in our in-person locations, you received a commitment card today. Please do not fill it out. We want you to take it home. If you're online or on TV, you can go to our website and you can find this commitment card. If you go to cord.org slash next and you're able to make a commitment, please don't do it today. So we don't want you to do this today. This is what we're gonna do next Sunday. And next Sunday, when you fill out a commitment card, we give you a small gift. This is our 35th anniversary coffee mug. Love boldly, serve joyfully, lead courageously. 35 years, celebrating 35 years. Just a small token to say, thanks for turning in your commitment card. There it is right there. But don't turn it in today. What I want you to do is take it home. And I want you each day to pray. And if you're married or you have a significant other, to be able to discuss together what portion of what we have.

31:23 You may not be able to get to tithing right now, but maybe you take a step in that direction. Now, I also, there's another card I want you to see because I'd kind of like you to know what happens with the funds that you give to God through Church of the Resurrection. So this card at all of our locations you have, I'd like for you to look at it. And you can find this at core.org slash next if you're online or on TV. And it says, the impact giving made possible over 35 years. and some of these facts you saw during our 35th anniversary month last month. But 10,373 baptisms, that is a return on your investment. 24,000 people who committed their lives to Christ here at Church of the Resurrection, that's a return on your investment. 63, 2,000 plus people in recovery groups and support groups at Resurrection. 25,000 churches using our resources. 60,000 pastors and church leaders that have been trained by Resurrection. The weddings, the funerals, all of this. 100,000 men, women, and children who have clean drinking water in parts of Africa because the boreholes are the wells that you drilled in those communities.

32:20 23,000 men, women, and children who have light in their homes because of solar light kits that you dedicated or you gave to them. 25,000 plus children around the world who have been impacted by our ministry. And you can see all the other, a million pounds of food, 30,000 low-income children served, 487,000 backpacks, all this. This number was staggering to me. And this is the amount that you've committed to missions outside the walls of our church over the last 35 years. And we had a different number on here before, and I learned it didn't include our Christmas Eve offering. So this includes that. $123,944,000 in the last 35 years that you've given to missions and ministries outside the walls of our church.

32:58 That's the return on your investment. That's what you made possible. People who were generously giving, that's what they made possible. And so I want you to see there's a connection between your offerings and what happens in our community, in our society, and in our world through Church of the Resurrection. I want to show you, this is a pie chart of our resurrection annual expenditures. So 4% goes to debt service. And we look forward to the day when we're completely out of debt and we're not spending any of that. 4% to outreach and evangelism, which is also a mission and ministry. 12% to facilities. Now we have to have facilities. We have nine of them across the metro area. And those monies are important. We have to be able to plow the parking lots in the wintertime. We've got to be able to keep the light bills on and all that, or else we wouldn't be connecting with you right now. So 28% of what we have, of what was given last year, was given for missions and ministries beyond the walls of our church, the things we just talked about. And 52% to ministries and programs, which includes worship, care, children, youth, our special needs ministry, discipleship, senior adults, recovery ministries, counseling, shared church helping other congregations in all of our locations.

34:01 And really everything except the debt service, I would say, is mission and ministry. It is what we do in order to serve God by serving other people and doing God's work in the community and the world. And you make that possible. You make that possible. All right, on the backside of this postcard, and you'll find this online as well if you're on TV or online, you'll notice we say, we each have a part to play in making this happen. So our being on TV or online is only possible because of your generosity. All the things we do together, only possible. So you'll see, we just laid out for you, this is for people who give. So we have some people who don't give anything. But for people who give, this shows you the weekly gifts of $5, $22 a month, $206 a year. 12% of our people, that's how much they give. Some of those are children or teenagers. And then you'll see 8% are giving $10 a week and 21% are giving $25 a week and 37% are giving $50 or more a week and 16% are giving $100 a week and 4% at 250 and 1.2% at $500 or more a week and 0.2%, which represents, I think that's about, I don't remember, I think it's about 50 or 60 families, maybe not that many, are giving, I think it's 20 families, I'm sorry, are giving at this rate of $1,000 a week or more.

35:13 Right, that's just how it breaks down in our congregation. What I'd love to ask you to do is one of two things. Either take a step up if you can on that chart or increase your giving by $10 a week. So $10 a week, so if you're giving nothing, would you consider giving up a fancy drink at the coffee shop and giving $10 a week to God's work through the church? or if you're giving $10 a week, would you consider giving 20? And if you're giving 50, consider 60. You see how this works. And if you're on the higher end of the income scales, consider doing more than that because there's some people who can't even do that. But this year, we need your help. We need your support. Every month, there's somebody I'm saying no to in terms of a ministry or a program that we'd like to be able to do. We just don't have the resources to do it. And I'd love to invite you to take the $10 challenge or to take the step-up challenge and to live more generously. I wanna encourage you to do that. All right, I wanna end with this. So here at Church of the Resurrection, And behind the sanctuary where I'm standing is our memorial garden. And our memorial garden, we have niches out there.

36:08 And people who wish to be cremated and have their remains, their cremains placed there. So this is what it looks like. And the stained glass window kind of looks down upon the memorial garden. And right in the center, back in the back, is where my family has our niches. LaVon and I have our niches. And we're right in the middle row. And the top, instead of the bottom of that middle row, is where LaVon and I will be someday. And it struck me. I was remembering John Ortberg once wrote a book called, It All Goes Back in the Box. And he talks about when we die, it goes into the casket. I don't have a casket. This is the box, right? This is where my ashes will go and be placed in that spot I showed you. And of course, this isn't me. My soul goes on to be with God. But here's the thing, all the stuff that I spent money on, all the things that I had across the course of my life, all the things I thought were so important to purchase, None of it's going in this box. And nobody at my funeral is going to celebrate all those things I paid money for.

37:04 And you know the things that are remembered and the things that go with me when I leave this earth are the things that I did in generosity towards God and towards other people. I want to invite you to grow in the grace of giving. I want to invite you to remember and to find out the truth that it is more blessed to give than to receive. I'd like to invite you to be somebody who takes hold of the life that really is life. in every part of your life by growing in generosity. Let's pray. God, we thank you for your generosity towards us. Apart from your generosity, we wouldn't be here. This world wouldn't exist. You formed us in our mother's wombs. You've shaped us across the course of our lives. You have loved us relentlessly. You have forgiven us again and again. You came to us in Christ to show us the way, the truth, and the life. The sun that shines on this planet, the air that we breathe, the water that brings about nourishment and food for us to eat.

37:58 All of it ultimately comes from you. And we thank you. Please help us, oh God, with our time, our talent, and our resources to grow in generosity and to live the generous life. I pray that you would guide our congregation this week as they're planning for, as they're preparing, as they're praying and discerning what their gift will be to you for the coming year. I pray that you would guide them and lead them, Holy Spirit, and help us when we need to to simplify our lives, that we might become your servants, faithfully giving to you as an expression of our love for you and our gratitude. So guide us, we pray, and we offer ourselves to you in Jesus' name. Amen.