Blessings

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info visit us at thrive-fl.org. My name is actually Pastor Gary. I'm actually Grace's dad. She likes to come up and sing but she wasn't feeling too well today so she opted out not to do that. How many of you would say you're blessed? Go ahead, raise your hands. How many of you would like to even be more blessed than you are right now? Go ahead, keep your hands up. Oh, I see a few people that was a lot of hands up but there were a few people didn't have hands up. That means that y'all that didn't have your hands up, you want to be cursed. Just kind of back away from it. You on your own if you want to be cursed, you know. We're not going there. But if you want to be blessed or if you consider yourself blessed or you want to be more blessed, this is the scripture I have for you. It's gonna speak directly to you. It's from Acts chapter 20 at verse 35. It reads, "...is more blessed to give than to receive." But there's a challenge here because many of us, as we think about being blessed, that means we have more. It's kind of like, well, if I'm blessed then I'm gonna just have more. More of whatever. Maybe it's money or time or more stuff. But that's not what the text says. The text says it's more blessed to give than to receive. And so I'll start out with this. I don't know if you guys listen to the Joy FM. It's a station that's pretty much out of the Tampa area. But they're actually going nationwide. But they had this little thing that was happening several years ago where, I don't even know what they called it, but it was people would go up to their favorite restaurant, the fast food restaurant, or they would go over to to the coffee shop or the donut shop and they would pull up, take their order, get up to the window, they would pay for their order, and they would pay for the order of the person behind them. And they'd get their order and they'd leave. And the people would come up behind them and they would say, I'm here to pay, and no, you're already taken care of. See, people were taking the blessings that they had and passing them on to others because, for the simple fact that they realized that the blessings that they were given weren't all for them to consume, but they were for others. And so they were passing them along. And this would go on for hours and then would finally stop. And what people were finding is that as they were blessing others, they were finding that that they had this sense of satisfaction. I feel better than myself. I actually was a blessing to somebody. I may have even refreshed somebody else who was just having a bad day. Maybe they were feeling kind of vulnerable. You know, like, really, I'm gonna accept something from somebody that I don't even know? But that's what they were doing. And I'm gonna bless somebody that I don't even know. I don't even know what the order's gonna cost me, but I'm gonna pay for it anyway because that's the kind of blessing I'm gonna give. I'm gonna go above and beyond what I was planning to do, but I'm gonna go ahead and do it anyway. I'm gonna get that blessing out there because people need to know that there is a God, and He is a generous God. He's not a cheap God. He's a God of abundance, and He provides abundantly. If we could just internalize this one little verse that is more blessed to give than to receive, just think of the impact we could have on a community, on a nation, on a world. We're finding that we have to have an eye of generosity, a heart of generosity, which brings us into a heart of service. Serving others, that's the blessing. Proverbs 11 24 says, one gives freely yet grows all the richer. Another withholds what he should give and only suffers want. Logic would say, if I have all this and I give a part of it away, I have less. But if I keep all mine, even what I should give away and could give away, it wouldn't even bother me or hurt me, I'm not gonna do it. I'll have more. But this is not logic. This is kingdom thinking. This is kingdom logic, if you want. It's kind of like the first will be last and the last will be first. It's that kind of thinking where you're gonna say, I'm gonna give it away, and I can give it away. I have more than what I need, and I'm gonna give it away. And I'm gonna call that, what we're giving away, the tithe. But I need to unpack the tithe here. The tithe isn't just money. The tithe is of your time, your talents, your testimony about Jesus, that is, and your treasure. It can be your money as well. But that's the tithe. And the tithe is something that we're blessed with. We have time. We have talents. We have a testimony that we can give. And it's gonna be different for everybody's testimonies about Jesus. It's gonna be different. And we all have different amounts of treasure. The tithe isn't just 10%. The tithe is something that is big enough that I miss it. But it's not so big that it hurts me. ...