Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Welcome to the Chroma Charge podcast.
[00:00:07] Last week, we were talking a little bit about the tithe. And this week, what I want to talk about is moving from lack or not having enough into abundance. Is that all right?
[00:00:22] Good.
[00:00:23] The five of you that said, yes, get the abundance.
[00:00:29] You know, one of my first ever trips to the United States was to Southern California. It was back in the 1980s. And when I went there, everyone said, oh, you need to go and visit the Crystal Cathedral. So I did. And the Crystal Cathedral is this incredible building. And at its height, they had about 10,000 worshippers. Worshipers there. And the story is there was a man called Robert Schuler, and he was a preacher, an evangelist, and he would preach in, drive in theaters. Like, you know, you see the old American films where they drive in. You know, some of you are too young, but Greece and all of that, where they're driving, and they'd watch a film from their car. So he would go into these theaters and preach the gospel. Many of them got saved. And so he built a church. And he built this church, and it's made of glass. And every pane of glass has someone's name written on it. And it's in Orange Grove, Southern California, and it really just stands. It glistens as you drive up to it. But he didn't want to leave his roots. So not only is it completely made of glass, there's a whole section that opens up into the car park so that people can drive in. They don't even have to get out of their cars. Now. Some of us would go, oh, how lazy. That's not the reason. The reason is he didn't want to leave what God had done from preaching in the theaters. So the church was to remind them as it opened up where they'd come from, so what God had done there. And every Christmas they do, they did. I don't know if they still do. Did a nativ with live animals and camels and horses and all that. And it was televised. And when the service finishes, I don't know if you can see the blue bit in the middle of all the chairs. All these fountains go right up and all the waters going. It's not going over the people, but it all goes up. And it was built as a testimony of the goodness of God. And we might, you know. You know, I went and I looked around and thought, oh, this is just too grand.
[00:02:56] This is. You know, I'm coming from England. I'm not sure the church should be like this.
[00:03:03] But the problem was, I was coming with the wrong heart because I was living in lack. You know, I'd been raised in churches that could hardly afford to switch the heating on.
[00:03:15] And so going to. This was like a whole different world for me. And you have to remember, we were the ones that started building buildings like this, the great cathedrals that would demonstrate not only the goodness of God, but the transcendence of God.
[00:03:34] And, you know, the only person in the Bible who complains that too much is spent on Jesus is Judas.
[00:03:43] And he was a cheat and a thief.
[00:03:48] And, you know, when we started this journey, the Holy Spirit told us to get our thinking about money right. He said, go after my presence. Get your thinking about money right, and go after salvation, which we'll do in a minute. So if you've got your Bible, find Luke's Gospel, chapter six.
[00:04:09] In fact, why don't you stand? This is the word of the Lord. And we're going to Read from verse 37.
[00:04:17] These are the words of Jesus. Judge not and you shall not be judged. Condemn not, and you shall not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven. Give and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over will be put into your bosom. For with the same measure that you use, it will be measured back to you. And he spoke a parable to them. Can the blind lead the blind? Will they not both fall into the ditch?
[00:04:53] A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone who is perfectly trained will be like his teacher. And why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye but do not perceive the plank in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, brother, let me remove the speck that is in your eye, when yourself, you do not see the plank that is in your own eye. Hypocrite.
[00:05:18] First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck that is in your brother's eye. Amen. Take a seat.
[00:05:31] Okay.
[00:05:33] I said last week, there are some principles of the kingdom. And here Jesus gives us some. He says, judge not.
[00:05:42] He says, condemn not. And then he says, forgive and give.
[00:05:48] These are principles of the kingdom.
[00:05:52] And he says, when you give, make sure it is a good measure. And this represents the honest, full measure, not skimping at all. So whatever we do, we give a whole, full measure. And then he says, once you've given that full measure, press it down. Why? So you can fit more in.
[00:06:16] You know, if you're trying to get something in a box, you push it all down. You know, every now and again, I've got too much rubbish to put in my bins and I'm on top of the bin, jumping down so I can get more in the bin. This is. He's saying, push it down so you can get more in. Then he says, shake it. Why? Well, because then it will start to settle and you'll get even more in. So that what will happen is you will have a running over.
[00:06:45] The measure you use will run over. It'll be overflowing. And I'm not a Greek expert, but my computer is.
[00:06:57] And when you look at the Greek text, it doesn't say it's going to be poured into your lap or into your bosom. It just says it's going to be poured into that. Once we've used the full measure, we've pressed it down, we've shaken it down, and it's overflowing, it'll be poured into you.
[00:07:18] There'll be like a floodgate. And the picture here is that the floodgates of heaven will start to open up.
[00:07:27] So what Jesus is saying is, pick your measure. The measure you use will be used to measure you. Okay? So be careful what measure you use. When. You know, when Robert Schuller built the Crystal Cathedral, he used a large measure. You know, Juliet does. She cooks cakes and stuff, and she's got all these different size measures. The big ones are always the best because you get more sugar, more cream, more icing. You know, you don't need all the flour and stuff. Just put the. Just put the good stuff in.
[00:08:08] You see, I don't cook.
[00:08:10] You see, each morning, when we come to the Lord, what measure are we using? When you pray and worship, what is your measure? Let me try and explain. You see, too often we come to the Lord saying, we don't have enough. Do you know that one?
[00:08:29] Yeah, you do, you liars. All of us have done it. Lord, I haven't got enough. I can't do this. I'm preaching to me this morning, all right? And then you can just listen in.
[00:08:41] Lord, I need to do this. But I can't do this. I need to do that. I can't do that. I need to go there. I don't have enough. Remember the story, the 5000? When Jesus feeds the 5000? I think I referenced it last week. You know, the disciples. There were too many people. We don't have the resource. We don't have enough food. You need to send them away. Jesus. And Jesus just asked them, he says, what do you have?
[00:09:06] And then he tells Them go and feed them. So they bring him, and they bring him five loaves and two fish and he blesses it, breaks it, multiplies it. But what I want you to see today is the leftover.
[00:09:22] Jesus didn't just feed the 5,000, he multiplied the food so much there was 12 baskets left over. Why were there 12 baskets? Because there's enough for every tribe.
[00:09:35] There is. When Jesus comes and multiplies the food, the abundance of the kingdom, there is more than enough. We never have too little, okay? There is always basketfuls left over because that is what heaven is like. You do. You know, a few years ago, we didn't have any musicians, especially drummers.
[00:10:03] Now some of us might think that's a good thing.
[00:10:07] And the ones we had couldn't play in time. Okay, that's really a bad thing. And I remember just chatting with Joel, my son, and we were talking about the conversations about not having enough. And he would say, you don't understand.
[00:10:25] They don't teach music anymore in schools. There are no drummers, there are no guitarists, there are no people that are good enough to play. We don't have enough. To which I gave him the fatherly advice. Look, you see, there are some things that a young 20 year old needs to learn.
[00:10:48] When you don't have enough, bring what you have to Jesus.
[00:10:53] He will bless it and break it and multiply it.
[00:10:58] And he'd say, you know, we just don't have it.
[00:11:02] All we've got is Chris.
[00:11:04] He was leading worship this morning. And hear me, I'm not being rude about Chris, he's part of the family, but that's all we have. So. So Chris said, I tell you what I'll do, I'll learn to play drums. So every night he came in here, locked himself in the drum booth and played to YouTube and just played and played and played until he could play drums. You see, Chris was our few loaves and we gave him to the Lord and locked him in a box and wouldn't let him out until he could play in time. No, but there was something in his heart of abundance.
[00:11:50] I can do this. You know, wherever you find yourself this week, you're going to be given tasks that you don't have enough to do.
[00:12:02] But what if you had the abundance of heaven?
[00:12:07] What if, what if when your boss says, can you do this? You go, oh, no, we can't do this. This is all the reasons why you just say, yeah, we can do this. And then you go in your knees and go, oh God, I da Da. We're gonna do this.
[00:12:20] Suddenly we start to operate out of the abundance and not the lack. It's not what we can't do now. It's what we can do because of we have the resource of heaven. Now, let me just say, what do we mean when we say to God, we don't have enough? Well, aren't we really just grumbling?
[00:12:44] I mean, isn't I don't have enough grumbling? Isn't that what the children of Israel had a PhD in?
[00:12:52] You know, and again, hear me, I'm preaching to me.
[00:12:56] You know, I don't want a PhD in grumbling.
[00:13:01] I want to graduate in abundance. I want to learn how to step through this idea that I don't have what I need and see what God can do when I bring what I have and perform and see a miracle. And that's what we've seen at every stage of this church. And we're going to need to see some more. You see, the antidote to grumbling is thanksgiving.
[00:13:26] That's why the psalmist says, we enter his gates of thanksgiving, his courts, with praise. That's why we always start with praise.
[00:13:34] We always come into. There is no other way to get into his presence than to lift our thanks and our gratitude to him for all he's done in our life. You know, enter his gates, thanksgiving. He's caught with praise. Be thankful to him and bless his name. For the Lord is good.
[00:13:54] And the moment we are thinking is God is good. He wants us to do well.
[00:14:02] He may take us on a journey, but his plan is always of goodness.
[00:14:09] So when you're coming out of exile, you need to change your thinking from lack to abundance. When you give your life to Jesus, he starts to change your thinking from having the lack of only your own resources to now having all of the resource of heaven at your disposal. Haggai, the prophet says this, and the scene here is the Israelites have been in exile. They're starting to return.
[00:14:39] The temple is going to be rebuilt. Nehemiah is going to build the walls. He does that in about 50 days. The temple is a little bit more problematic.
[00:14:51] Okay, the temple takes a little longer. But this is what Haggai says to the people. He says, you have so much and bring in little. You eat, but you do not have enough. You drink, but you are not filled with drink. You clothe yourselves, but no one is warm. And he who earns wages, earns wages to put them into a bag with holes in. You ever feel like that?
[00:15:12] Come on some of you do. I do. Sometimes, you know, I've been there. And you're working your socks off and it feels like it's going. You ever pray that prayer to the Lord? It's not fair.
[00:15:28] I got a PhD in that one as well.
[00:15:31] Okay. But then next thing the Lord says is, consider your ways.
[00:15:36] He says, my house is in ruins. So what happens is the people start to rebuild the temple, just like is happening here.
[00:15:46] You see, I think the Holy Spirit has given us here a blueprint for a revival church. I think he's given us a map. How do you rebuild? What is the church going to look like in the 21st century? And he's taking us on a journey. Have we got everything right? No. Are we there? No. We're on a journey that he's leading us. But as they're building the temple and the foundations are getting.
[00:16:18] Something happens. And what happens to the people? Instead of looking forward to what is going to be built, they start to look back.
[00:16:27] And the prophet Haggai prophesies to the people again. He says, I know what's in your eyes. You're looking at this and you're going, this is nothing compared with the former temple. The former temple was Solomon's temple.
[00:16:42] And you're looking at it and you're already disappointed in the foundations. And the Lord makes them a promise. He says, the glory of this latter temple shall be greater than the former temple.
[00:16:56] That's the promise. He says, and I want to say to you that God is always revealing himself through the scriptures. And every point, it gets better.
[00:17:07] At every point we see more of what God wants to do. And you know, when Ezra is teaching the people, and this is when literally the foundation of the temple has been laid, there's one group of people, this is in Ezra 3, but many of the priests and Levites and the heads of the Father's houses, old men who had seen the first temple wept with a loud voice when the foundation of this temple was laid before their eyes. Why? Well, they're looking back, you see, they're looking back at what was.
[00:17:45] But to enter the abundance of what God wants us entering, we need to look forward, but then at the same time. So this is all happening simultaneously. Yet many shouted aloud for joy so that the people could not discern the noise of the shout for joy from the noise of the weeping of the people. For the people shouted with a loud shout and the sound was heard away off. So then there's another group of people that all they could see was what God was doing now, they didn't really care what he'd done then.
[00:18:18] That was past. But right now he was doing something. And they'd focus their joy and their attention. Even this morning. Do you feel the joy start to arrive at the end of the worship? Why? Because God is here. He's moving. Keep your eyes on what he's doing now, not necessarily what he's done in the past.
[00:18:38] You see, we live in lack when we hang onto the old and we can't see the new. When we live in the old. We put God in a box and he says, this is how God does it. And we don't let God out of his box. As if we could do that.
[00:18:53] But when we start to think abundance, we're looking to the future where everything is possible. Because the kingdom of God is breaking in.
[00:19:07] You see, the temple is being rebuilt. It's not as good as the old one.
[00:19:13] People are getting saved in this place. Yes, but are they really getting discipled?
[00:19:18] Give me a break.
[00:19:21] Discipleship is a journey.
[00:19:24] The wonder is of salvation.
[00:19:28] The journey is the rest of their lives.
[00:19:32] The church is full again. Hallelujah. Oh, yeah, I know, but the pubs are still open in the Welsh Revival. All the pubs closed. When all the pubs have closed, it'll be a revival. Do you understand? Mariah Chapel can only hold 900 people where the Welsh revival happened.
[00:19:55] We had 700 last week.
[00:19:58] Not last week, sorry, two weeks ago. We squeezed in and you go, ah, yeah, yeah, but you know the Welsh Revival, all the books have been written about that. Look, and this might be disappointing to some of you, I don't want the Welsh Revival. I want the Leicester Revival.
[00:20:19] That's what I want God to do.
[00:20:23] You see, God keeps getting better. He's revealing more of himself. The glory is increasing. The gatherings have to get bigger. A young man came up to me end of this service last week and he said, he said, you know, I really feel that God has told me that I'm to build a stadium for people to worship in.
[00:20:46] How cool is that?
[00:20:48] You know. You know, for years we've talked about church planting and building churches.
[00:20:56] Why don't we start building some stadiums?
[00:20:59] Why don't we?
[00:21:01] Look, what is our measure?
[00:21:10] You see, Jesus demonstrates abundance by what they have left over the overflow.
[00:21:16] Do you understand? Jesus is coming back for a bride.
[00:21:22] He's not coming back for Cinderella in her ashes.
[00:21:27] He's coming back for a bride in her beauty.
[00:21:33] Isaiah says the ashes are replaced with beautiful.
[00:21:42] Have you read the plans of God? I just. I Want to refocus this a bit? Do you understand that New Jerusalem is going to descend from heaven? I googled it. There's an idea of what it might look like.
[00:21:59] And this city has walls made of Jasper, and it is built of pure gold. That is transparent. Revelation says. I don't. I mean, people can correct me. I don't know we found that stuff yet.
[00:22:16] This is heavenly, transparent gold that is so pure you can see through it. Its gates are pearls.
[00:22:28] And it is going to descend out of heaven for everyone to see. Because heaven is coming to earth. That the whole plan of redemption was that God would be proved right and his kingdom would be established on earth and his will would be done on earth just as it is in heaven.
[00:22:51] And that is where he's taking us to.
[00:22:55] There is a journey. And back in Genesis, we could just see a garden in Exodus, a wilderness.
[00:23:07] And then we have a Time of the Kings.
[00:23:15] Do you know the reign of Solomon is thought of as the high watermark of the Old Testament? Why? Because the shalom of the kingdom came that after the wars of David, the temple is built and Solomon feeds the nation.
[00:23:36] Everybody in the nation has a house, has a job, has a tree indicating that they have some kind of garden. There is the sense of the prosperity and the abundance of God.
[00:23:51] David, when he worships in front of the ark, the very next thing he does is he feeds the entire nation. Some of you have got Dance like David did sweatshirts. Anyone got Dance like David? Yeah, own up. Even I've got one.
[00:24:07] Do you understand? That's a prophetic declaration. You're going to feed the nation because the reason David danced was the joy. The presence of God was here. And the result of that presence is that the nation is fed.
[00:24:23] You are making a prophetic declaration and then the coming of the kingdom through Jesus.
[00:24:33] But Jesus says, I'm coming back and the sky is going to split open and you're going to see the Son of Man descending.
[00:24:44] You see, the story of God is unfolding and it gets better and better and better. And depending on your eschatology, is when Jerusalem is going to descend and what that's going to look like. I'm not going to debate that today.
[00:25:01] But this abundance of God, you see, what I'm trying to say this morning is what's your measure? What's your measure? What can God do? What can't he do? And as I said, I'm preaching to me. We've got to stop saying I don't have enough and make room for the more we got to stop skimping.
[00:25:23] He says, get everything in, you can shake it so there's even more room. And then it's going to run over and over and over and only then are you living in the overflow. Someone asked me last week, they said, what if my tithe is too big for the church?
[00:25:44] You know, I might give it and it would ruin the church. Let me say this again, the tithe is not yours, it's his.
[00:25:52] You bring in the full tithe. It's up to him what he does with it, you know, and I, we, we do a pre service prayer at 4:30 before the evening service. So if you're around, come. But I was just starting, I was just a little bit distracted and I was just thinking to the Lord, well, Lord, if you gave me, you know, a million or 10 million, what would I do with it? You know, somebody tithed that, what would I do with it?
[00:26:26] And I thought, you know, the first thing I would do is give all of our staff a bonus.
[00:26:39] And some of you go, I knew it, you'd line your own pockets.
[00:26:45] Wrong measure.
[00:26:50] Who is the building? Who is the house of God? People.
[00:26:56] People we invest in, people we sow into people.
[00:27:04] The next thing I would do, and it was funny, someone was just saying to me afterwards is I'd make an appointment with someone at the council or the police and I would say, what is your biggest problem at the moment? Where are you struggling?
[00:27:25] And then we could write them a cheque for a million pounds and say, would that help the abundance of heaven?
[00:27:36] The world needs to understand, you see, we've got to. The church has to stop being led by the world and now the church needs to lead the world because of the resources of heaven are enormous.
[00:27:56] And you say to me, yeah, but Steve, I've seen the abuse. You might go and buy a jet.
[00:28:02] Oh, please, where am I going to land that?
[00:28:07] There are only two ways of arriving as an event in the Bible. Jonah or Philip. Jonah chooses public transport. A whale, and he's spewed up on the beach.
[00:28:19] Philip chooses the glory of God when he's in the Ethiopian Eunuch straight up in the sky and it lands in the next city, next city. The really interesting thing is both cities are saved.
[00:28:35] You can use public transport, the whale gets spewed out on the beach, or you can use the glory of God to be delivered at the event. Either way, the Lord is going to save the city because he has a plan, because he is abundant.
[00:28:58] What I'm trying to say is we need to get our thinking about resource right. It needs to change now.
[00:29:06] Jesus came that we would have abundant life.
[00:29:11] It starts with generosity. I think it starts with the tithe. I think the tithe opens up the floodgates of heaven. That's what Malachi says. But that's just the start of what God can do. We enter his gates with thanksgiving. Why? Because we have more than enough. We always have more than enough.
[00:29:30] And you know what? It's time that the UK had millionaires that love Jesus and are reverent to his church.
[00:29:38] Two things love Jesus, reverent to his church.
[00:29:43] The church is not the fool that doesn't know what to do with the money.
[00:29:49] The church displays God's manifold presence in amongst the people.
[00:29:57] And there's going to be a change.
[00:30:00] Because without his presence, you don't have the ability to make wealth.
[00:30:08] And you might say to me, yeah, but Steve, you know, I've worked hard for this. No you haven't. It was the favor of God to you. He gave the ability to make wealth. Deuteronomy 8:18. It all came from him. And he gives to 1:5, he gives to another two. And he gives to another one. And he says, what's your measure? What are you going to do with it? Thanks for listening to the Cromach Charge podcast. If you enjoyed this message, you can like and subscribe. You can also join us in person or online every Sunday at Croma Church. For more information about us, including our ministries, events, worship and how to donate, visit our website, Roma Chat.
