This past Sunday in our Balanced series, we talked about what God expects us to do with our “extra”. If you missed it, I encourage you to watch it here.

In Luke 12:15, Jesus said, “A man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” We hear that and our immediate response is “I agree Jesus.”, but so often as followers of Jesus how we live is contrary to what we believe. Spiritual growth comes when we close the gap between what we say we believe and how we actually live.

Jesus tells us to “be rich toward God” which means to focus on what is eternal and to transfer all that we can over to God’s kingdom.  At the end of the message, I double-dog dared you to pull out your 2010 tax returns and look at how much money  you gave to the Lord last year. Then I challenged you to calculate the percentage of your income that you gave and allow God to speak to you about it!

This was a challenging and faith stretching message for Naomi and I. As we pulled out our tax return and as we looked at the dollar amount that we gave last year, we felt pretty good about it. It was a substantial chunk of change! But, as we calculated the percentage of our income, both of us came to the conclusion that we needed to give more! We committed to increase our giving percentage by 2%. That’s a significant increase in giving that we will only be able to accomplish by consuming less on ourselves so we can transfer more over to God’s kingdom.

I’d love to hear how God has challenged you in the area of your giving! Email me and share your faith story with me.

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