Good morning, friends. Greetings today. If you are here because someone you know and love is getting baptized, then a special welcome to you.

If you’re here because Are they leaving? On baptism Sunday? Okay, you go.

This is how we manage things here. We’re just figuring it out as we go. Whole week of planning down the drain. But it’s okay. We’re gonna recover. If you’re here because someone you love is getting baptized and this isn’t your way of faith This is new to you. Then man, I just appreciate so much your generosity in coming and supporting people You love in this way You’re also going to catch us as we start a new series On a subject that some of us might say we have a bunch of tension with we’re gonna talk about money Now, we just spent some time in Revelation, which is tough if you’re familiar with scripture.

It’s like a hard place to be. And right now, I know some of you are like, Boo, let’s go back to Revelation. We don’t have this conversation. I prefer the beasts and the dragons and all of those kind of things to any conversation like this. It always reminds me of the late, great Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey when a conversation begins about money and she says, Oh, good.

Let’s talk about money. That’s going to be That’s going to be so much fun. And yet, there’s a tension around money. One is this. As a church, at South, we try to operate with money carefully. We work through the ECFA to make sure that kind of what we do is transparent. And we try to make sure that that we’re not one of the churches that you might see on TV at some point.

There’s a great Instagram channel called Preachers and Sneakers with preachers and really expensive shoes. I have a goal never to be on that channel. That’s not what we do here. If, as you were writing your get rich quick scheme list, you wrote work at South Fellowship on that list, you can cross it off right now.

It’s not gonna get you rich quick. We try to operate well and yet. You can swing the pendulum too far and avoid talking about this subject that can at times feel difficult. Why can you swing it too far? Simply because of this reason. Jesus talks about money. That’s definitely in the wrong place, guys, just so we if you can flex that, it’s not in the right order at all.

So I don’t know what we do with that. Yeah, if you guys can take a look, maybe it got ordered by a different method other than slide order which, which will do that, but somewhere at the top, that’s not it, so look at the file that was transferred, and somewhere we’ll get there. If you could start us right now off in the right place, there is a picture of, oh, there we go, look at this is, yeah, there we go, this is it, yeah, there we go.

Again, not what we planned all week, but we’re flexing and we’re gonna move on. Jesus spoke about money about 15 percent of his preaching, about 15 percent of his preaching, about 11 of his 39 stories, a parable center around that topic. When, speaking of competing attractions in the marketplace of faith, if we could use that term, Jesus placed money at the top of the list.

He said if there was one thing that was going to pull you away from him, This has a good chance of being it so so if we were to say this Leslie Newbegan, something has happened that alters the total human situation, the death and resurrection of Jesus, that must therefore call into question every human culture.

The way we operate with money is just as important in terms of following Jesus as the way we operate in terms of sexuality, the way we operate in terms of any kind of thing that we could operate in. So we’re gonna begin, not with money necessarily, but we are going to begin With the idea of generosity and of margin.

My first generosity hero, as it were. Was a packaging supply salesman not necessarily a candidate that you would have in mind for someone who would inspire you to Generosity, but if you’d asked 12 year old Alex, what’s the best thing you could be when you grow up? There’s a good chance that packaging supply salesman will be like top five on the list.

And it was all because of this man here, who happened to be my uncle as well. This is me and him when I was just a baby. He passed away in 1997. Still one of the most inspirational figures on my life, but especially in the area of generosity. He had a warehouse and an office in this in the bad part of town with a rickety old staircase that went up to his office and pool room and just the way he treated people, the way he could show generosity when and where it was needed was constantly inspiring.

When we did family gatherings for birthdays, he was the uncle that you were expecting the great present from, and he delivered. Time and time again. He had this incredible capacity to think what would a child like and then buy that gift, which is far harder than I’m making it sound. When he died, about 200 people wrote to my art saying he was personally sick.

the reason they had chosen to follow Jesus. Not because he was a preacher, but because he invested time in people’s lives. And then years later I found out, in a moment when my parents couldn’t afford their mortgage, he turned up on their doorstep with a supermarket bag full of cash and just handed it over to enable them to pay.

What he taught me at such an early age is this, a generous life, is a compelling life. It is beautiful to watch. Jesus teaches us this same thing through a very short story. In Luke 21, he says this. As Jesus looked up, he saw the rich putting their gifts into the temple treasury. Every Jewish person would bring some money to the temple to support the temple structure.

He also saw a poor widow put in two very small copper coins. Truly I tell you, he said, this poor widow has put in more than all the others. All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth, but she, out of her poverty, put in all she had to live on. Again, inspiring. Jesus says it’s not about how much you give, it’s about the heart behind the gift, it seems.

But I think it’s generosity, not just of money, but of all kinds. Generosity of grace when we see people forgive in supernatural ways and say, That’s generosity. That’s unusual. Generosity of money, yes, when people provide out of what they have for what somebody else needs. Generosity of time when people give of their energy, of their free space there.

All of those things, inspiring. This is Bluey. Any Bluey fans out there? Literally the whole room should have their hands up right now. This isn’t like an option, I would say it was a rhetorical question. Quietly, this beautiful show, Bluey, has become the single most popular show in the world. If you were sitting there thinking it’s probably like Game of Thrones or something edgy no.

General Little Sweet Bluey is by a long way the number one streamed show. Disney Plus, it is one third of their streaming whatever you call that it’s just everywhere. Why? It’s clever, it’s funny, it’s attractive to both parents and to kids but I think secretly something more. There’s something about the characters in it.

The two parents, Bandit and Chilly, seem to have a supernatural amount of time to give to their kids. They are available, they are fun, they invent games and play games in a way that, if we’re honest, those of us that are parents in the room would say we wish we could enter into. They seem to show us what it is to shepherd young kids through that era of life in a way that we want to.

And sometimes find that we can’t. And maybe that’s the struggle across the board with generosity. Maybe you would say like me, despite all of the brilliant examples we have, both of maybe uncles. of people in scripture, of Bluey. My hero is literally a cartoon dog. Maybe in spite of all of those things, you would say, like me, you are aspirationally generous.

Generous in principle, but rarely in practice. in practice. I find myself operating in that space more often than I would sometimes like to admit. And over again, I have this recurring thought that comes back to me and back to me and back to me. I thought that I wrestle with often, and it’s this.

If I had more margin, things might be different. If I had more space in my budget, in my I’m gonna say schedule over and over again and not schedule just to clear the elephant in the room And I thought about trying to say schedule, but I thought you know, I couldn’t live with myself this afternoon. And so Schedule it will be if I had more space in those things, then maybe I would operate differently.

Maybe I would be able to give more financially to the things that I think are wonderful and really needed. Maybe I would be able to give my time and energy to the things I’m passionate about and think are worthwhile in this world. And to demonstrate what I mean by that, I thought I’d start with an example that’s maybe less Where I think God might direct us Than schedule and budget.

Let’s start with wardrobe This is my collection of pants and for english people listening at home. I say pants not underwear trousers and I want you to see this for a second Some of them there’s more of them. This doesn’t include dress pants. This is just like Everyday pants. There’s some more of them.

Notice some of them still have labels on and it is not because I just bought them. I bought them a long time ago, albeit for not very much money. At last count, including dress pants, I own 52 pairs of pants. That’s a lot of pants for anybody. And this is not a competition about pants. The problem is actually not the amount that I own.

They weren’t very expensive. I bought most of them for maybe $8, $10, $15. I love to find bargains that are secondhand. I love to collect things. This is not exclusive, just two pants either. My wife sent me a picture of our a coat closet the other day with the words how many coats? does one man need?

Apparently, the answer is double digits, at least. I collect clothing, I collect shoes, I just like, and yet I wear surprisingly little of them. Of this collection of pants, I have eight in regular rotation, and on Sunday mornings, because I don’t like wearing holes in my knees, four rotate on Sunday morning.

My wife, who is long suffering, and present in the room, Unbelievably. Has said to me time and time again, condense down, like de clutter, get rid of what you need. And so I said, seen as de cluttering is clearly one of her favorite things, I would consider it, after using them as a servant illustration. Which is one of my favorite things.

When we’re done, maybe we’ll de clutter. But her argument is sound. What she says to me in principle is this, the clothes you have, Get in the way of the clothes you want. In actual fact, nobody buys you clothes because you have all of these ones you don’t wear, and they fill up every bit of space. And there’s loads that you don’t wear.

Get rid of them. Sell them. Condense them down and buy something that you actually enjoy wearing. We could extrapolate this theory about something as innocuous as clothing into this larger point. Sometimes the life we have Gets in the way of the life we want we long to be generous because we see that Jesus is generous that the generous God of This world has captivated many of us and yet because of what our schedule looks like Because of what our budget looks like we find that rarely do we enter into that generosity.

This is the writer, Richard Swenson, he says this. Marginless is being 30 minutes late to the doctor’s office, because you were 20 minutes late getting out of the bank, because you were 10 minutes late dropping the kids off at school, because the car ran out of gas two blocks from the gas station and you forgot your wallet.

If the generous life is beautiful to look at, the marginless life is awful to look at. Horrible to look at. It makes us gasp and makes us wince. He goes on to say this, Margin on the other hand, is having breath left at the top of the staircase, money left at the end of the month, and sanity left at the end of adolescence.

If you’re not convinced we have a margin problem, here’s a couple of brief statistics. This is an APA survey. Seven out of ten adults feel completely overwhelmed just with the busyness and the cost of life. A good proportion of the population struggles with money, carries too much debt, has a fear of not being able to pay the bills if they give more away.

47 percent of US adults said money has a negative impact on their health. on their mental health, including stress. We are a whole country of people that struggles with this concept. James Bryan Smith says this, When we lack margin in our lives, we become tired, and lonely and joyless, which seems to invite temptation.

Margin restores balance and restores our soul, thus increasing our capacity for joy. I tried to think where we would turn to now to see what does God say about this? How can we take the lessons that scripture teaches us? teaches us and apply them to this kind of subject. And there were lots of different options.

One was the scripture we heard read at the beginning of the sermon, which we’ll have read over every week of this short three week study. But in the end, I landed somewhere else. This old little book called Ecclesiastes in chapter four, if you’d like to turn to it. And we’re gonna start in a moment from verse four.

Now if you’re brand new to Scripture, Scripture has all sorts of genre in it, and by Scripture the Bible, it has narrative sections, it has prophetic sections, which are really about speaking against the ills of society, it has what are called Gospels or narratives of Jesus life, it really reaches across a whole spectrum, but one of them that often gets forgotten is the Bible.

It’s the idea that scripture wants to teach you something about the best way to live. It isn’t the newest wisdom, because in this culture, new is not valuable. In our culture today, we love new, everything changes so fast, information gets out of date so quick, we don’t need it anymore, but in this culture, where little changed, wisdom lasted generations, and sometimes the older it was, wisdom more.

valuable it was considered. Read with me Ecclesiastes chapter four. We’re going to go through it section by section. And I saw, says this writer whose name is the Qoeleth, if you are interested, note that down. It might be important. I saw that all toil and all achievement spring from one person’s envy and love.

of another. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. Throughout the book Ecclesiastes, there is a word that comes up over and over again. It’s the word in Hebrew, habel or havel. In a lot of your versions in front of you, it will be translated something like meaningless, but it is a bad translation.

Meaningless is not the heartbeat of this passage of scripture. A few years ago, I showed those of you that were here then an idea That explains perfectly Hebel. And it’s this. Mist. Vapor. The thing that cannot be grasped. You cannot own vapor. The moment that you think you own vapor, you no longer have it.

According to this writer, who wrote 3, 000 years ago ish, everything we do that is centered around personal achievement, the gathering of wealth and possessions. Everything is vapor. You cannot keep it. It will not get you what you want. Vapor, according to this ancient writer, is what so many of us find ourselves chasing all the time.

And I saw that all toil and achievement spring from one person’s envy of another. Why do we do it, according to this writer? We do it because we see what other people have, and we want the same. There’s just a possibility When you buy a new car, you bought a new car because someone you knew bought a new car.

There’s just a possibility if you reach for a mountain home, you’re buying it because someone you knew had amounted the home. There’s just a possibility that when you fill your kids act to schedules with activity after activity, you’re leaning into a family of origin that told you that’s how you live your life.

There’s ways that we copy what we see around us. And we go after it, and we fill our budgets, and we fill our schedules. Because why? Of envy of everything that we see around us. According to this writer. And even when it isn’t envy, he would still say, it’s Hebel, it’s meaningless, it’s vapor, it cannot be grasped.

We might say this, comparison to others is the enemy of contentment. And, by extension, but it’s the companion of contentment. Of over commitment. Comparison is the enemy of contentment, but it’s the companion of over commitment. We see what others are doing and we say we’re going to reach. We’re going to overcommit.

We’re going to pack out that schedule, pack out that budget. Now, here’s the challenge with this thing. When I was first pastoring in this community, I reached out to a pastor who was well known in the area, who’d been success for a long time. And I said, give me some advice on how I can operate. What do you wish you knew when I was your, when I, when you were my age?

And he said this, find a way to run at 90%. In church, there’s always a crisis. If you run at 100%, if you try and run at 110%, when the crisis comes, the crisis might kill you. But run at 90%, and when the extra thing is needed, you’ve still got that 10 percent of margin to go that little bit extra. One of the most important lessons I ever learned in my life just pure wisdom.

The problem isn’t having an active schedule. The problem isn’t spending the resources that God has given you to spend. The difference is, it seems, when we try and get to 110%. instead of 90%. 90 percent success, 110 percent eventually disaster. The message writes, translates this version like this. Then I observed all the filling of schedules and budgets motivated by envy was a waste smoke and spitting into the wind.

I adapted it just a little bit. The actual version says this. No, not there still. Somewhere here. I’m going to blame it on the mess of the slides because it’s somewhere but roughly same idea that it’s smoke, not vapor here, but smoke, and spitting it into the wind. It cannot be done. It cannot be achieved.

You can’t get where you hope that you’re getting. This speaker, this coelef goes on to say this. There’s two ways, it seems, of dealing with this problem. The first is just to say nothing matters then. We just won’t do anything. Empty the schedule, or just not spend any money, not earn any money, not bring anything in, we’ll just do nothing.

That’s his posture in verse 5. Fools fold their hands and ruin themselves. And this doesn’t seem to be what he thinks is a wise thing to do. If you were to ask him whether John Lennon’s idea of imagine no possessions, he’d say no, you can’t get there. You have to participate in life around you. You still have to go to work.

You still have to earn. You still have to bring in enough to live on. You still have to just interact with the world around you. Don’t do that. But still don’t make it the center of everything in your life. Derek Kinder says of this first person, that he’s a picture of complacency and unwitting self destruction.

For this commitment on him points out a, for this comment on him points out a deeper damage than the wasting of his capital. He’s eyed on us, eats away not only what he has, but what he is. Eroding his self control, his grasp of reality, his capacity for care, and in the end his self respect. He says don’t do nothing.

Don’t just pull back that far, but there’s a middle ground that he’s going to introduce us to that is the heartbeat of this passage. Catch this, verse 6. Better one hand with tranquility than two handfuls with toil and chasing after the wind. This writer of this ancient wisdom would say there is a middle ground.

ground of enough. There is a sweet spot of holding out a hand that is postured like that is different than the grasping of two hands. The struggle is this, we seem to come out of the womb grasping the ground. for everything that we can get. It doesn’t take long for a toddler to learn that he has no interest in sharing.

He wants to bring everything into his own governance. And we, it seems, are all still the same. We like to get everything that we can. And this posture that he suggests is not that. It’s contentment. It’s enough better. One hand with tranquility than two handfuls with toil and chasing after the wind. When managing your vapor, the stuff that you are constantly trying to get an open hand is what he recommends.

Not two handfuls with that constant toil. That constant chasing after the wind, which I think in the modern version is sometimes translated spitting into the wind. It only comes back to hit you somewhere. First Timothy chapter six says, but godliness with contentment. We brought nothing into the world. We can take nothing out of it.

But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap, and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. Constantly through this, there is this tension to be managed. In this room, there are people in all sorts of places.

Some of us would say we literally are close to subsistence. We live on that margin of being. Do we ever have enough? Some of us would say we at one point got enough. And then because of how we operate, we expanded into spending more or scheduling more. We increased what we could do. We constantly find that we pushed out to the maximum we could possibly achieve.

Margin is the space between what we do or spend compared to what we could if we maxed out our budget, our schedule, or, in this case, our closet space. He goes on to describe the worst case scenario in this situation. He says, again, I saw something meaningless, something that is vapor. Under the sun. There was a man all alone.

He had neither son nor brother. There was no end to his toil. Yet his eyes were not content with his wealth. For whom am I toiling? He asked. And why am I depriving myself of enjoyment? And this too is meaningless, a miserable business. So if you’re at all convinced that margin might bring joy to your life, the question might be, what do we do?

What do we do? Maybe the invite first is simply to take something like inventory of how you spend your time and how you spend your wealth. Knowing that the answer might be, no, we’ve done everything we can to make that work. We are literally living at a point where we’re just juggling the finest little details.

But many of us would say, oh no there’s gaps. There’s ways that we’ve had subscriptions that have been running for three or four years for things that we’ve never really used. They just take over and over. There’s ways that we’ve maybe expanded out unnecessarily and unhealthily to fill our schedules with every single activity, so there’s no, margin left.

What do we do? How do we, in some language, find margin? Supposing you balance that feeling. Supposing when I say budget, it makes you wince, because you know the space is very little because of habits of spending. Or when I say schedule, you wince, not because of how I pronounce it, but because you know it’s just far too busy.

Making a decision that you want to change something is actually one of the key steps. Unfortunately, thousands of years of New Year’s resolutions tell us it is not the only step that is necessary. Psychologically, change, it seems, is managed by a couple of things. One, like the gift of prayer and entering into this in relationship with Jesus, but internally, by two secret desires inside you in everything that you do and everything that you decide.

There’s the emotional part of you. The heart piece. And then there’s the pragmatic part of you, the head piece. There’s part of you that says, I’d love to come out next month with margin in budget and margin in schedule. And then there’s a heart piece of you that drives past Chick fil A every day and says, I want more and I want more and I want more.

There’s the head space in you that says, I want to control the budget. There’s a heart space in you that has to walk through Costco’s television section or sees new couches or new cars or any of those things. There’s the head space on you that says, as a family we need balance. There’s the heart space in you that says, I want my kids to be able to do everything and see what they can achieve and flourish in.

The two things operate with each other. Here’s the problem with this. The head space is the rider, the human. In Freudian terms, he’d be the id. But the heart space is the elephant. In Freudian terms, again, the superego, the emotional, visceral brain. In a conflict, who wins that battle? The rider could get up and push, but if the elephant doesn’t want to go where he wants to go He’s not going to go. He could try pulling the trunk, but that doesn’t seem to work well either. The writer can’t move the elephant unless the heart changes and transforms somewhere and says, I am actually participating in this thing. This is the same struggle that the writer Paul expresses in Romans chapter 7.

For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do. This, I keep on doing. There’s a heart piece that is harder to control. There’s a head that has to make a decision. There’s a heart somewhere that has to make a decision. And then there’s the pathway. The question of what am I willing to practically put in place.

that will help me figure this kind of thing out so I can step into the way of Jesus who seemed to suggest not necessary that every time there’s an opportunity to give, we should operate like the woman in our first story, but that constant generosity should be a pathway journey for each of us to some degree or another.

What is the pathway for you? What will you do To end there, in the next month, next six months, the next year, with space in your budget and space in your schedule to live something like a life that feels joyful, a life that is described in the way Margin was described, not something that is painful to watch, if we’re honest.

Dave Ramsey. Poking at each other as he does at our different emotions says this, the way to get there is actually really easy. That is, it’s easy if you’re intentional about budgeting your money and making sacrifices in the short term to reach long term goals. Don’t agree with everything Dave Ramsey says by any means, but sometimes he just, he’s so honest and outspoken that he points at something that actually maybe has this kernel of truth to it.

There is some question of, am I just committed to living constantly? In the short term, am I maybe willing to make decisions for what the future looks like? As I contemplated with this, as I wrestled with this, here’s some questions that kind of occurred to me that might be helpful to you. First question was, what am I willing to do?

I’m actually willing to put something difficult in place for myself to actually get me there when I take this pile of genes home. Am I willing to say some of them don’t make it through the front door? Am I willing to get to the point where I actually will let release some of the things that I’m somewhat passionate about go?

In my budget, am I willing to make discerning decisions over how I add extra things? And maybe willing to pull back some things that have just become normal and habitual for me? In my schedule, am I willing to do the difficult thing to say no when I want to say yes to every single thing going out there?

As in Enneagram 7, my wiring is to jump into every joyful thing as quickly as possible. What am I willing to do? And then what can I not change? What’s that baseline? What am I committed to? One of the things that I do mentally in the budget is I look at what we get to give. And that’s the first thing on the list.

Cause that to me cannot change is as high as I want it to be one day. No but right now it’s there and it’s locked in. What can I not change? What do I have to keep as part of who I am? What’s in the schedule and needs to stay because it’s valuable and important? And then finally this third question that I think is crucial.

Who am I journeying with in this? Who are my companions on the journey? Have you noticed that if you make a decision to work out, it works to a degree until You don’t want to go till your elephant sits and says no, I’m not moving. What’s the best way to get an elephant moving then? It’s to have a friend who calls you and says, Hey, we agreed to meet at six o’clock in the morning tomorrow.

You’re going to be there, right? That person has this incredible capacity to pull you along in the journey. If you have a small group, bring them into the conversation, invite them into the same conversation with you. It pulls you all along. in the same direction, make commitments to different people. We have coming up a class that I’ll show you a slide of in a minute, but we have a slide that’s going to invite you into the possibility of financial health.

Maybe commit to doing that and seeing how you can manage some of these structures in your own life. But most of all, remember this, ultimately a generous life of any kind, of money, of time, of energy. is not an activity that we do, it’s a response that we make. A generous life is our response to the God who is generous with life.

He is the one that is given first. We are here, many of us, because of Jesus beautiful gift to each of us. His life changing action of death and resurrection is the action of a God who is infinitely generous and gracious with us. Whenever I fail to be gracious with me, I remind myself that God is infinitely more than I am.

gracious. When I struggle with generosity, I try and remind myself that God with me is infinitely generous. The principle that grounds all this is that God is the one who is generous first. A generous life is our response to the God who is generous with life. In a moment, we’re going to baptize some wonderful people, which is why some of you are here.

Thank you for sitting through that. And you get to now see the reason that you came. We get to enter into this moment of joyfully welcoming people into a decision of faith. If you are a They just left, they just knew, they heard me say baptism they went. In a moment, they’re going to get changed, and they’re going to come around through the back of the stage, and someone will bring them on and interview them, and just walk through that process with you.

But as you watch it, as you feel it, here’s an encouragement to you. Think back to the time when you took this step for the first time. Maybe you have a baptism story that’s five years old, 10 years old, 15 years old, 20 years old, 40 years old, 60 years old, 80 years old. Whenever it was, whatever it looked like, you, like them, made a decision that you were going to respond to a God who is infinitely generous, that loves you and cares for you, that gave his life for you in Jesus death.

and incredibly was risen to life again. If you’ve never come to know Jesus yourself, this is maybe a moment where you might like to say, Jesus, if you’re there, I want to know you as you are. Maybe just a quiet prayer in your own heart is something that just is your way of applying some of this that you’re about to see.

If you’d like to have a conversation about that after the service, there’ll be some of the prayer team and I’ll be hanging around here just there to pray with you if you need it, to have a conversation with you. If you’re wrestling with questions of generosity, wrestling with, is Alex actually right about this?

Is this something I’m supposed to think about entering into? We have a podcast on Thursday, we’ll have space here to ask questions afterwards. Now let’s turn our hearts and minds towards baptism. Aaron’s going to lead us in worship.