If you find yourself today getting a little nervous with the content of this blog, there just might be a clear reason. Let me explain it this way. Let’s say your appendix is rupturing and you go to the doctor, and the doctor pokes you in the leg it’s not going to hurt.  Right?  If the doctor pokes you in the lower right side of your abdominal area what are you going to do?  You are going to scream bloody murder, because he’s poking you on the unhealthy spot.  If you find that you are a little bit sensitive about this topic, perhaps God is going to do a little healing on a spot that is, at this moment, a little bit unhealthy. 

Let’s start with this scripture from Leviticus 27:30, “A tithe of everything from the land, whether grain from the soil or fruit from the trees, belongs to the LORD; it is holy to the LORD.”

Who does the tithe belong to?  It belongs to God.  It doesn’t belong to us; it belongs to God.  What is a tithe?  It comes from the Hebrew word ma’aser.  Literally, this word means a tenth.  One tenth, scripture says, of everything that God trusts us with, it belongs to Him.  It is holy to the Lord.  It is His.  In fact, if we got really, really technical, we could say that a tithe isn’t really even giving.  It is simply returning to God.  

Now, how do American Christians do with this principle?  Here’s a couple of stats for you.  The average Christian does not give 10%, but the average Christian gives about 2% of their income to the work of God.  How many?  What percentage do tithe? Fewer than 3% of those who call themselves followers of Christ honor and obey God with the tithe. 

What we have here is a critical heart issue that, in many ways, is the key to all of our finances working properly, and that is honoring God with His principles of giving the tithe, returning the tithe, and even beyond that.  Let’s talk about two different kinds of businesses. 

The first would be what we will call the cursed business.   Malachi 3:8-9 says this.  God asks the question, “Will a man rob God?  Yet you rob me.  How in the world do we rob You, you ask, and God responds, ‘You rob me in tithes and offerings.’” Now, what does He say you are under? “You are under a curse — the whole nation of you — because you are robbing me.” Now, why are you under a curse?  Because you are robbing Me.  How do we rob God?  By not returning the tithes and giving offerings. 

The Hebrew word for rob is the word qaba. Very literally, this word means to defraud.  It means to rob.  It means to spoil.  It means to embezzle.  Here is a sobering way to think about it. If I don’t tithe, I am embezzling from God.  I am stealing from the Owner of the Universe, and I am making a tragically dangerous trade-off. 

Let me tell you about a bad trade, very, very bad trade.  I read this week about a guy who had a 1957 Chevy. My family, that I grew up in, owned two of them. One was actually in 1957 and the other in the mid 60’s. This guy, that I am talking about, own his about 15-20 years ago or so ago. It was about the time they came out with this new car back then called the Pinto.  You see where this is going, and he traded a 1957 Chevy for a Pinto!  Bad!   Bad trade. 

To withhold what belongs to God is a very, very bad trade.  We are trading the blessings that God wants to pour out in our lives for a measly ten percent.  Now, let me just say that I have talked to many people who are like, “Oh, my gosh, I don’t know what to do.  I am trying so hard financially.  It seems like I will take a couple of steps forward, and then bam.  It is like three or four steps back.  No matter how hard I try and work at this, I just can’t get ahead, and I am just hurting, and I am worried about finances, and there is just never, ever enough, and there is just always more month left than money.  What do I do?”  Could it be, could it be, that perhaps the business of personal finances is cursed in that we are not honoring God at level one, returning the tithe to Him? 

Hagaii 1:6, maybe you feel like this. The Bible says, “You’ve planted much, but you’ve harvested little. You eat but you never have enough. You drink, but you never have your fill.  You put on clothes, but you are not warm.  You earn wages, only to put them in a purse.”  Can you relate to this? It just seems to go away?  The cursed business. 

The second kind that we are going to talk about is the blessed business, and this is where it gets fun.  Malachi 3:11-12, for those who tithe, God says, “I will prevent the pest from devouring your crops, says the Lord Almighty.  Then all nations will call you blessed.”  All nations will say you are blessed of God. 

There was this little bitty small town that was driven by the grain industry.  Almost everybody was in the grain business, and there was this little small town church that was struggling financially, always had.  And the church asked one guy, the guy that owned the big grain silo, who was known as a man of integrity, “Would you manage the church finances?”  And the guy said, “I will on one condition.”  “What’s the condition?”  He said, “For the very next year, you don’t ask me any questions.  You don’t look at the books.  You let me manage them the way I want to, and at the end of the year, I promise you, we will be ahead of the game.”  And they, because they trusted him, said, “Sure.  Go ahead.”  One year later, the church was out of debt.  The church had had the best year of ministry ever.  All the people in the town were saying they were so blessed.  Their grain business did awesome, and they said, “How did you pull this off?”  He said, “It is very simple.  When all of you brought your stuff down to my silo, I just took ten percent of what was yours, and I gave it to God for you.  I just helped our whole church tithe.  Look at the results,” he said.  “First of all, not only did you not miss it ever, but most of you were very, very blessed.  Our church is out of debt, and look at the ministry that we have been able to accomplish.”  The blessed business. 

Here’s a thought that I hope that you don’t miss. This is the thing that most people don’t understand.  It’s the spiritual side of it.  Ninety percent with God’s blessings is far more than one hundred percent without His blessings.  This is the part that humanly doesn’t make sense.  This is the spiritual factor of God, that ninety percent with the blessings of God is far more than doing what you can do with one hundred percent of it. 

So what is your preference, the cursed business or the blessed business?

What are we going to do?  What I am about to show you will change your life forever.  Here is what’s going to happen.  You’re going to find an extra $200 a month.  Now, you may say, “Where in the world will I find an extra two hundred dollars?”  Good question.  I don’t know, but you will find it.  You will get very, very creative.  If you have to take a second part-time job, you will do that.  If you will eliminate cable TV or a cell phone, or stop drinking expensive drinks, or whatever, you will find $200 a month, and what you will do with that $200 will change future generations.

Here’s how it will play out.  Let’s start with Sears.  We owe them $450.  Your minimum payment is $50.  You will pay them $50 and add to it the $200 that we just found, totaling $250, and within a matter of only a couple of months, Sears is gone.  Bye, bye, Sears.  We’ll never have to worry about that again.  Now, we are going to let the money start to snowball away the debt.  What are we going to do?  Let’s attack Macy’s.  Macy’s, we owe $30 a month.  We are going to take the $30 and add to it $250 a month.  Now, where did that $250 come from?  You remember?  We just freed up $250 a month because we paid off Sears.  We are going to take that $250 and the $30, and together, we’ve got $280, and guess what?  In just a matter of a couple of months, Macy’s is gone as well, and the snowball is getting bigger.  Let’s take our parents.  We are paying them $200 a month.  We will add to it the $280 that we freed up, because we no longer have to pay Macy’s or Sears, and now, we’ve got $480 a month going to pay off mom and dad.  Again, a matter of a few short months, and mom and dad are paid for.  Then, we are going to take this money that grows each and every month and apply it to the next debt that we owe, starting with the smallest amount of debt, so we can knock it out, and going piece by piece down to the largest.  We are going to let the debt snowball, completely wipe out everything that we owe but the house. 

Now, how will that benefit you in the long run?  Let me show you something that’s really, really fun.  If you just continue to pay minimum payments, like so many people do, it is going to take you 120 months to pay off your debt.  That’s 10 years before you pay off all this debt.  That’s assuming you don’t take on any more.  Now, watch this.  If you do the debt snowball, your payoff time is not 120 months, but instead, 21 months.  That’s a difference of 99 months of not paying any debt.  Now, buckle your seatbelt and get ready for this.  If you take $1,110 … now, where did we get $1,110?  If you will look at the debt that you just paid off, you freed up $1,110 a month in debt payments that you no longer have.  If you take that money and you invest it at 12% for that same 99 months that you would have been paying on your debt, at the end of that time period, you will have $186,569.86.  In most parts of the country, that’s a house, paid for in cash, totally debt free.  You can do it. 

Here’s Linda’s story. As a widow she was $66,000 in debt six years ago. This week she paid her last payment on the $66,000. She is debt free.

Proverbs 22:7, “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.”  

The Hebrew word that is translated as servant is actually the word ebed. Ebed very literally means a servant.  It means a slave.  It means bondage.  If you are in debt, you are a slave.  You are in bondage.  The vast majority of Americans are in financial bondage.  We are slaves to our finances.  And there are reasons for it.

The problem is the majority of us as Americans have bought into some financial lies.  For example, how many of you hope that your children end up better off one day than you do. The challenge now-a-days is for our kids, when they become twenty-five, they try to obtain the same lifestyle that their parents took thirty years of adulthood to obtain, and they will do it with debt.  They will leverage themselves out the wazoo now to live like their parents lived after thirty years of progress. 

Other lies that we buy into besides thinking that we deserve that, is we think that there are certain things that without them, we will never be happy.  I know people today who honestly believe, without a flat screen plasma HD television, they won’t be happy.  We’ve got to have two flat screen televisions or one in every room.  People believe that they have to have certain things to be happy.  It’s a lie. 

The funny thing is, the very thing that most people want, that they believe will make them happy, think about it, wasn’t even around five years ago.  The iPad, the latest iphone 4S, the very things that we think we need to be happy didn’t even exist five years ago. 

Other lies.  There’s millions of them.  One of them is, you are always going to have a car payment.  You just have to accept that you are always going to have a car payment. The truth is, if you believe it, that will be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it doesn’t have to be true at all.  It is one of the most foolish places ever to leverage yourself on a depreciating asset that drops twenty percent when you drive it off the lot. 

What happened is, businesses for years have been very successfully marketing debt, and they have succeeded at convincing a generation of Americans to feel good about being in bondage.  “Got another credit card in the mail.  Praise God.”  God didn’t send that credit card!  I don’t know about you, but it makes me mad.  I am honestly sick and tired of seeing great people, God’s people hurting, fighting, miserable, buying more, thinking that will bring happiness, when they are just cutting their throats even more with financial pressure.  I’m sick of it.  Makes me mad.   

The HUGE problem is that most of us are not mad .  You are not mad.  You are just thinking this is normal.  You’re not mad.  Just normal.  Just another day.  You know what normal is?  Normal is a student loan payment.  That’s normal.  Normal is credit card payments. Normal is car payments. Normal is house payments.  I’m sick and tired of normal.  I am mad that the church of Jesus Christ hurts, hurts financially.  Can’t give generously, not just at church, but everywhere.  Can’t make decisions with freedom, because it’s all financially related.  Makes me mad.  I hope you get mad.  I really do, because that the only way you will be motivated to do something about it.

(To hear the rest of the story on this subject go to this link and listen to “Minding The Business”, http://relaxedchurch.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=57.) 

Paul’s said “forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal…(Philippians 3:13) God is telling us to forget the past and  go for the goal of the future. Look to what is ahead and go for it. Go for the goal that is ahead.

Question? How will 11 be better than 12?  The key is this; you’ve got to have a goal, a plan.  You don’t just enter 2012 and say, “I hope it’s going to be better.”  You’ve got to have a goal and a plan to make it better. 

Proverbs 17:24 “An intelligent person aims at wise actions, but a fool starts off in many directions.”  For you that may describe 2011.  You were headed off in many directions.  Notice the word, “aims”.  That means you have a goal, an objective, an aim, a target.  Have you set any goals for 2012?  Or are you just going to walk into this year and hope its better?  You’ve got to have a plan. 

God desires, more than anything else for this to be a year of Growth for you. The Bible states His desire this way “… that you may become mature Christians and may fulfill God’s will for you.” Col. 4:12b This verse tells up two extremely important things. 1. God wants us to become mature Christians. 2. The only way to fulfill God’s will for our life is by becoming mature, by growing.  “We are not meant to remain as children…but to grow up in every way into Christ.”Eph.4:14-15 Notice– “every way.”

Our 6^th grandchild is coming in March, Natalie Danielle.  Once she is born we expect her to grow and mature, and if she doesn’t we conclude that there is a problem of some sort that needs to be addressed. If she misses an ounce on the growth scale there’s a call to the pediatrician to find out what the problem is, right? In the same way, God expects us to grow and mature after deciding to become a follower of His.

Here’s the big secret–it won’t happen without a plan. Growth does not happen by chance.

Alan Lakein “Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.” I would suggest and encourage you to use the growth plan of Jesus as a template. There is no better growth plan than the one Jesus modeled.

“Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men.” Luke 2:52 To follow the growth plan of Jesus is to formulate a growth plan that encompasses the development of the mind, body, personal relationships and relationship with God.

As you shape a growth plan for 2012 this is the best piece of advice I have for you. ASSUME RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR LIFE.  This is not a popular concept because in our culture we have been conditioned to believe that someone else is responsible for who you are and what you do. We are force fed this, “None of your problems are your fault.  Everything bad in your life is somebody else’s fault.  Blame the environment.  Blame the educator.  Blame your parents.  Blame anybody else, but it’s not your fault.”  It’s always somebody else’s fault.  But you’re never going to be a success in life and you’re never going to reach your goals if you have that attitude.  You must assume responsibility for your own life. Galatians 6:5 “Each person must be responsible for himself.”

 There are three kinds of people in life. 

  There are accusers.  They always blame everybody else for their problems.  Their favorite phrase is, “It’s all your fault.”  It’s never my fault.  It’s all your fault.

  There are excusers.  Excusers always have a rationale for where they are.  There’s always a reason.  I’ve discovered that whenever I want to procrastinate on something, any excuse will do.  The Bible says, “A lazy man is full of excuses.”

        Accusers and excusers – people who blame others and people who excuse themselves – are LOSERS.  So you need to be a chooser.

  Choosers say, “I choose to assume responsibility for my own growth, development and maturity.  I’m not dependent upon somebody else.  I choose the direction of my life. I am responsible to accomplish what God wants me to achieve in this new year.”  I’m choosing to accept responsibility for my life. 

“I press toward the goal,” but first you have to have goals. It begins with personal goals.

Paul instructs us to forget the past and press on toward the goal. But there is one other thing he said that we don’t need to miss, “Straining toward what is ahead.” This is an athletic term. It depicts a runner going hard for the finish line giving everything he has and then some to reach the goal. Holding nothing back.

And the message is clear, especially at the beginning of a new year. Forget what is behind, the good, the bad and the ugly. Identify the goal in front and give everything you have to reach the goal. There is nothing more important in life.

Two keys to victory:

 Heb 12:1-3 “Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. 2 Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. 3 Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.”  Does anything else need to be said about that?

Eph 6:10 “Your strength must come from the Lord’s mighty power within you.”   Resolutions or targets or plans or goals won’t last two weeks if you don’t have this verse under your belt – “the Lord’s mighty power within you” gives you the power to set goals and make plans and then to keep them. That is the key to making the most of 2012 and the rest of your life.  “The Lord’s mighty power within you.”

We have 2500 postcards ordered and should arrive any day. We will be distributing the postcards door to door to the community closest to our Sunday meeting place on Saturday morning, January 7 at 10 AM. We need lots and lots of volunteers, including older kids and teens. We have a lot of territory to cover. We are counting on you.

Then we need a few volunteers each week to “man” the collection places each Saturday and Sunday in January. The collection times are 10 am-12 noon on Saturdays at the Ministry Center and 9:30 am-11:30 am on Sundays at the church building. We need people to cover all or part of the collection time each week. It is just a matter of being there when people arrive and accepting their donation when they bring it. We will have banners posted to inform the public of the effort and “drop zone” location for their peanut butter. Who would like to be the first to sign up as “drop zone” volunteer?

Attached is a layout of the postcard and banners that will be arriving any day now. Please put the 7^th at 10 am on your calendar and join us for the mass distribution. We are only asking for one hour of your time on that day. And then please give me a call, 874-3269, or email me if you would like to serve as a “drop zone” volunteer.

Begin now to pray for a tremendous response from our community. And please continue to bring your peanut butter each week. Let’s have a HUGE part in meeting the nutritional needs of some of the under resources people of the greater Richmond area and be a community leader in doing so.

If you could have just one Christmas wish, what would it be?

Here are the responses from some people I asked yesterday.

  “I wish that everyone is as fortunate as we are, with all the wonderful blessings God has provided us with.”

                “My Christmas wish is that my husband would find Jesus and accept Him as his Savior.”

                “My wish 4 Christmas: Mormons would know our true Christ.”

                “Get rid of the commercialization of Christmas.”

                “For my mom to move to VA!”

                “For all my family and friends to know the joy of knowing Christ.”

                “My family and friends to come to know Christmas.”

                “Another job!”

                “My Christmas wish is that my wife will be healed and well soon.”

                “One wish for Christmas: Heat win first basketball game of 12/25/11”

                “Everyone that we bought a gift for is blessed by it.’

                “Peace in the house.”

                “What I want for Christmas is peace and happiness in the house.”

  ” I wish for my neighbors to come to Christ.”

Two questions:

1. What would your one Christmas wish be?
2. For all who have a Christmas wish, what might God be expecting you to do to help make that wish come true.

Remember, he works through you.

“I wish that everyone is as fortunate as we are, with all the wonderful blessings God has provided us with.”

“My Christmas wish is that my husband would find Jesus and accept Him as his Savior.”

“My wish 4 Christmas: Mormons would know our true Christ.”

“Get rid of the commercialization of Christmas.”

“For my mom to move to VA!”

“For all my family and friends to know the joy of knowing Christ.”

“My family and friends to come to know Christmas.”

“Another job!”

“My Christmas wish is that my wife will be healed and well soon.”

“One wish for Christmas: Heat win first basketball game of 12/25/11”

“Everyone that we bought a gift for is blessed by it.’

“Peace in the house.”

“What I want for Christmas is peace and happiness in the house.”

Two questions:

1. What would your one Christmas wish be?
2. For all who have a Christmas wish, what might God be expecting you to do to help make that wish come true.

Remember, he works through you.

I was born and raised in Richmond, VA. I thought I had a normal upbringing.

My grandfather was very strict. My grandmother talked like a human warning sign. Every word she said was in a harsh, violent and loud tone of voice as if fear would demand obedience. And you know what? For me, it did.

I didn’t get the privilege of doing family activities like eating dinner at a dining table. I wanted to go out and be with friends, but usually the answer was no. My grandparents were so strict that I often times felt like I needed to tiptoe around the house so they couldn’t hear me. I didn’t hate them, but I was afraid. You’ll probably ask, at this point, where my parents were all this time. They worked 6 days a week, 13 hours a day. I couldn’t blame them for anything. They worked all the time and put food on our table. At the end of the week, we’d go to church.

All my mother ever wanted was a good Christian family. She wanted a family. My father, on the other hand, decided he would coast through raising us up. He didn’t teach me much of anything. So, I never really knew what it was like to have a loving father. It wasn’t that my father wasn’t physically there or putting food on the table. It’s that he wasn’t emotionally or spiritually there. My grandfather had my brother and me doing high school level math and other subjects when I was in kindergarten. If I got a question or problem wrong, he would beat us. Who was I to question them? They’re my grandparents, right? When I look back at it now, I ask “Why would my parents allow this?” And then I asked my mother, and she wept because she never even knew. She worked too long and or family never gave her a break so that she could love her kids.

My brother is a very quick-tempered, bitter man today because of what Hebrews 12:15 says: “See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no “root of bitterness” springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled.” He fell victim to the root of bitterness just like I did.

So, this for me was a normal childhood. I had a soft spot for mothers, was confused about fathers, and grandparents at first glance seemed very mean looking. Just kidding about the grandparents. I only meant my own.

I grew up in Presbyterian church. I couldn’t understand what the Pastors were trying to tell me. I never tried to either. Church, for me, was having fun with my friends and trying to be good, but receiving the Word meant, simply, making sure I didn’t fall asleep during the sermon. I mastered the art of coming 90% close to falling asleep during every sermon without going all the way. I think, nowadays, that the reason I loved youth group so much because I just got to be around my friends.

I honestly can’t remember any sermons, yet I went to church every Sunday until high school. That’s a problem especially when you’re like me and claim to be a Christian growing up. But going to church didn’t make me any more Christian than sleeping in a garage will make me a car. I knew Jesus, but I didn’t KNOW Jesus. In my confusion, I figured I’m a Christian because no one told me I wasn’t, and I figured I’ll just be a good person and everything will be okay.

By the time I was in high school, I had enough of church. I was determined for such a long time to try to be nice with people and try to be active in my youth group, but things weren’t going my way. I was so selfish and I wish someone had called me out on it. But no one did, so I turned to the world to go get my way.

I was a pretty good student. I attended my classes and had a lot of respect for my teachers. I wanted to do well academically and eventually find a college to go to. I studied and worked very hard in my junior and senior year and eventually landed a scholarship to an art school in Arlington, Virginia.

Until college, I’d never been to a party, tasted alcohol, smoked a cigarette or done drugs. I figured that made me a pretty good kid. However, I was also socially awkward. Having moved to a new city, I didn’t know anyone and so I decided I’d force myself out of my comfort zone and get to know people and learn how to be social. This took a couple years, but I made some friends. I still kept to myself most of the time, however, and I also prided myself for never having tasted alcohol or done drugs. I did, however, have my first drink of whiskey at age 22.

Everything seemed great on the outside, but on the inside I was really giving in to some of the worst temptations our Bible talks about. Our Bible calls giving into temptations ‘sinning’. It’s a disease that lives in all of us and causes us to fall short of the glory of God. Sometimes, we look at this ‘sin’ in our lives and we put them on a chart and say “these are little ones I have that aren’t that big of a deal” and “these are definitely a lot bigger, but as long as I hide them nobody will know…”

So, let me paint that picture of my sins. And I’m doing this because you really need to know how much God really loves us, so much to save the terrible, despicable person that I was.

I remember myself at my worst, mostly in recent years.

When I was 19, I’d slept with a woman for the first time causing her to cheat on her boyfriend and after I told her that I didn’t love her she painfully acted as if it was her fault. And I stood there and did nothing. This has happened at least 2 more times, once to a single mother.

In my early 20′s, I felt so much anxiety, depression, and bitterness growing all on top of this crazy sense of entitlement as if the world owed me something. I was so full of myself, I didn’t even stop to think of my mother’s needs when she was in the first stages of her separation from my father. She worked in her own store in Blackwell for over 20 years and has been robbed at gunpoint 6 times. Instead of seeing that she’d be okay by helping her at her store, I allowed her to work there by herself and went on acting like everything would be just fine because I wanted to chase money more than I wanted to look after my dysfunctional family.

At 24, I found a new church to start going to. Everything about it was cool. I thought it changed my life, but really I know now it was just my ‘drug’ to make everything I was doing seem okay. As long as I was going to church and participating in outreach, it could balance out all the evil thoughts and deeds I committed. I just wanted to be in the limelight and allow everyone to look at me as if I was someone important and special. I remember even getting on that stage and sharing a testimony about forgiveness and having people come to me and tell me how much of a blessing I was. But I was just one big lie. And I was being a big lie in front of God and his people.

I even ended up working at that same church by age 25. I wanted to be with the coolest looking good guys. That is until it started not working out for me. I didn’t want to help other people. I just wanted selfish gain. I wanted to be in charge. I even got baptized there because other people were doing it and I figured it would be ‘cool’ for me to do it, too, and say I got baptized. Anytime I prayed, it was only because I needed a miracle and not because I wanted Jesus.

I left that church after working there only 5 months. I couldn’t take how much good I had to do and just wanted to do bad. I started drinking more heavily and made plenty of drinking buddies, too. Soon, I had my own posse of friends I could drink several nights a week with and go to strip clubs and throw away money and tell the whole world I was finally living the good life.

That is until one day I made a friend in someone I became so infatuated with. I wanted everything this person had. Everything about this person just seemed so good. This person was so in love with Jesus, it was sickening. I wanted to fill my void so much with the love this person had for Jesus, but the sin in me just kept rejecting it and rejecting it.

As I’d sit on my couch alone at night opening my 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th can of beer I’d be angry and sick and then laughing to myself like I was going crazy or something. The only advice I’d get about life were from other friends who were on their 13th, 14th, 15th, and 16th can of beer. I looked at my life and realized I had become the king of my own drunken, lawless land. Filthy, full of wickedness, and going down a long road straight to hell.

Finally, I thought to myself that I would start calling the good Christian friends I used to have and get some good Christian advice. I knew this was what I needed, but unfortunately none of them were available. Everyone had moved. I know now that God had closed all the doors and put me in a woodshed with just me and Him, but at the time all I could think was “I’m all alone.”

Getting deeper and deeper into my disgusting little world, I thought about my whole life and asked myself “In five years, do I want to be a sicker, older version of myself today? Or do I want to be someone I never dreamed I could be?”

Could I be a loving father? Even find a good wife and be a loving husband to her? Could I do what it takes to restore relationships with my family? To finally be able to give my mother the Bible Studies she told me she prayed we’d have together. To finally be able to start a real relationship with my brother. To forgive my father for leaving my mother and even have a relationship with him?

I looked at all these things and I decided one lonely night on September 4th, 2011, and I got down on my knees at my bedside and cried out loudly to God and prayed as loud as I could “God! I can’t do this alone anymore! Why?! Why do I have to feel this way?! I don’t want this anymore! I need you!! I need you!!”

And that night came and went. But, that night, God said “James, I love you. I love you so much. You turned your back on me for all those years. You cursed my name. Through your actions and your sin, you told me you didn’t want anything to do with me. You hurt my children, too. So many times, I called out to you but you wouldn’t answer. What did I do to deserve this from you, James? But, now you’ve called out to me and I’m here for you, James, like the loving father you never had. I love you so much and I want you to be my child. Welcome home.”

With the many awful things I’ve done in my life, I knew I absolutely deserved the hell God tells us we deserve for our evil ways. But God, being a loving and gracious God, thought little me should be saved. How gracious is our God? That when I cried out to him, he was there.

That night, my life changed. I repented from my old ways and literally my life turned completely around. The things I used to want: money, sex, alcohol, selfish gain. These were all literally replaced by my new love for God, love for his word, and wanting to live for God’s will for my life. I truly don’t feel the same. A veil was lifted from my eyes, as if I was blinded before, but now I can finally see. The Bible, His Living Word, has become truly real and alive to me. It’s hard to explain. Imagine passing out and a doctor puts the paddles to your chest and zaps you back to life. That’s the feeling. When I seek something with all my heart from God, he has ALWAYS answered my prayer through his Word, the Bible. God’s also given me a real purpose in serving his will for my life. My prayer life is amazing not because I pray everyday but because I’m literally praying all the time by just talking to God.

God has taught me how to live in relationship with my family, friends, and others all around me. Jesus in me has taught me to be slow to anger, to stop being anxious, and always do my best to treat those around me how a loving family member would.

God has shown me that all the doubts, worries, anxiety, and uncertainties that I had were never from him but from Satan. This is a huge problem in our society. A lot of us are becoming lost in our thoughts thinking we will never make it, we will always fail, we will never be loved, we should just kill ourselves. The last of those led my friend to suicide this past week. She loved Jesus so much and with all the problems in her life, Satan finally convinced her to kill herself. And he’s laughing. Do you see why I hate sin so much?

When Satan claims one of our own, I look at it now as a personal attack to my family. Here’s the truth: God has shown me that he wants me to have joy in the Lord and peace. He LOVES ME like a loving Father loves his child. JESUS LOVES ME and wants a relationship with ME and YOU. That love isn’t just something we feel or say, but that it’s something we do through sacrificing our own lives, like Jesus did for us on the cross, for the sake of the ones we love. But Satan is really real and we need to build each other up together to shield ourselves from his attacks.

New Venture is my new family and because God has shown me grace and how he loves me, I feel a sense of duty to love my new family and be there for them and try to be as good of a servant as I can be. I’ve joined two Bible studies and never want to miss a gathering or event. I want to keep building my character because in 2 Peter it tells us that if we build our character, it makes us more effective and productive in our knowledge of Jesus Christ.

I, like all of us, was dead in my sins. I deserved to die for my sin. And because of my sin, there was nothing I could do to connect myself to God because he cannot be where sin is. He’s too holy and good. But how awesome is it that he loves us so much that he sent his son Jesus (his son!) to die for me and you. He loves you so much, he wants you and me to spend eternity with him in heaven. Before I get there, I want to do what God calls us to do and bring a little bit of heaven down to earth. God has put a big desire in my heart to serve through New Venture. And through New Venture, I personally believe we can change the hearts of our community and really bring Steve’s vision full circle by changing Midlothian. How? By doing it together for Jesus.

Now, I can’t wait to be baptized because my Bible tells me to be baptized and wash away my sins. All the wickedness I ever did and will ever do will all be washed away

While I was always aware of God, and knew the teachings of the Bible, I never really had the relationship with him that I knew I should be cultivating.  In retrospect, I think that perhaps life never showed me just how much I need Him.  As I came into adulthood, not having a personal relationship with Christ made it easy for me to begin to question His purpose in my life and to feel like life was my journey that I was equipped to deal with independently.  In my twenties, I became busy with life; certainly too busy for Him, as I worked, earned my degree, dated, cultivated friendships, and distracted myself with frivolous pursuits.  I thought I was building the life that I wanted.

As I became more interested in myself, and more driven by my own ego and pleasure, I began to completely disregard God’s will for my life and ignored everything that would bring me closer to him, including the wisdom of my parents and my wife.  It’s hard for me to say this now, but I began to question that the Lord had a place in my life at all.  I was certainly not willing to bend to it if it did exist.  In shunning Him, I began a slide that took me to depths that strained all of my relationships and made me question everything about myself.

In the last 8 years, I’ve filled my life with all of the trappings of modern existence.  I was constantly in pursuit of one false idol after another.  They all lead to emptiness and despair.  Being constantly unfulfilled, and with all of the stresses of life, despite what appeared to be a successful business, wonderful family life, and a world of opportunity and promise, I suffered from bouts of depression and anxiety.  I was always too proud to deal with them, and as they subsided, I never took time to examine my life and why I was never happy.  As I time went on, I became unable to cope with daily things, and began to feel like I had no anchor and no direction.  I was completely lost.

In an effort to change my circumstances, and become happy, I made a terrible decision and separated from my wife.  She was the woman I loved, the mother of my children, and the person who had been the most positive influence on my life since I had come to know her 10 years prior.  I know now that this was God’s plan for me.  I had to clear the slate to find him.

Almost immediately after my wife  and I separated, I realized that nothing was better for me.  In fact, thing became far worse.  I began to suffer physically, losing 20 lbs. and became a shell of my former self in all other aspects.  I lost the ability to function at work and withdrew from everyone as I became more hopeless.

On February 25^th of this year, as I sat alone in my apartment and estranged from my family, I began to cry.  I remembered all of the people who had loved me and still did.  Most importantly, I remembered God.  I spent that night alone with Him, unloading myself and asking for forgiveness for all of my pride and mistakes….everything I had misjudged and done improperly or with the wrong intentions.  I asked him for guidance and strength to find my way back to my life and my family.  I had finally realized after all of these years, that I could no longer do life without him.  I prayed for hours and began the relationship that I am ready to affirm in public (today in baptism).

Without God’s daily presence in my life now, I don’t know where I would be.  What I do know, and what many who know me can attest, is that I am different in Him.  With his power I have transformed in my thinking, and doing.  I have defeated my issues regarding happiness and contentment.  I have learned to be the father I have always wanted to be but struggled with.  I have become a better husband and began to repair the damage to the relationship I have with my wife.  Walking with God has helped me to love and give with the right motivations, and to build and rekindle relationships with strong Christian men and women who I learn from and hopefully give back to.

Because I opened my heart to God and let him back in, I will always look at 2011 as the year in which I gained my life.  I realize now that I am never alone, and with Him, I am always taken care of and given my needs regardless of my circumstance or the mountain I have to climb.  He has a plan for me and I am happy to know that all I have to do is be patient and look to him.

There is one verse that I have looked to many times on this journey and would like to share:  ‘But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength.  They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.’-Isaiah 40:31.

(Ryan’s story was shared before his baptism on November 27, 2011 at new Venture Christian Church)

“When spring finally came, Indians taught the settlers how to plant corn, fish for cod and skin beavers for coats. Life improved for the Pilgrims, but they did not yet prosper! This is important to understand because this is where modern American history lessons often end. Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives, rather than as a devout expression of gratitude grounded in the tradition of both the Old and New Testaments. Here is the part that has been omitted: The original contract the Pilgrims had entered into with their merchant-sponsors in London called for everything they produced to go into a common store, and each member of the community was entitled to one common share. All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belong to the community as well.” They were collectivists! Now, “Bradford, who had become the new governor of the colony, recognized that this form of collectivism was as costly and destructive to the Pilgrims as that first harsh winter, which had taken so many lives.

“He decided to take bold action. Bradford assigned a plot of land to each family to work and manage, thus turning loose the power of the marketplace. … Long before Karl Marx was even born, the Pilgrims had discovered and experimented with what could only be described as socialism. And what happened? It didn’t work! Surprise, surprise, huh? What Bradford and his community found was that the most creative and industrious people had no incentive to work any harder than anyone else, unless they could utilize the power of personal motivation!  But while most of the rest of the world has been experimenting with socialism for well over a hundred years — trying to refine it, perfect it, and re-invent it — the Pilgrims decided early on to scrap it permanently. What Bradford wrote about this social experiment should be in every schoolchild’s history lesson,” every kid gets. “If it were, we might prevent much needless suffering in the future.” Here’s what he wrote: “‘The experience that we had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years…that by taking away property, and bringing community into a common wealth, would make them happy and flourishing — as if they were wiser than God,’ Bradford wrote.

“‘For this community [so far as it was] was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense…that was thought injustice.’” That was thought injustice. “Do you hear what he was saying, ladies and gentlemen? The Pilgrims found that people could not be expected to do their best work without incentive. So what did Bradford’s community try next? They unharnessed the power of good old free enterprise by invoking the undergirding capitalistic principle of private property. Every family was assigned its own plot of land to work and permitted to market its own crops and products. And what was the result?” ‘This had very good success,’ wrote Bradford, “for it made all hands industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been. In no time, the Pilgrims found they had more food than they could eat themselves. … So they set up trading posts and exchanged goods with the Indians.

“The profits allowed them to pay off their debts to the merchants in London. And the success and prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans and began what came to be known as the ‘Great Puritan Migration.’”