Life the Second Time Around
From the Series: Non-series
Speaker: Dick Foth
Date: February 1, 2009
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Transcript
Pastor Mark and I had lunch yesterday and he said, “Why don’t you take just a few minutes and tell the folks why you’re here in D.C. for these days.”
Back around the turn of the century, there was a young Norwegian fellow who migrated from Norway to Montana, his name was Abram Brady and he grew up to be a circuit riding Methodist preacher all over the Northwest, and during the Depression years, he went to Seattle to work with the poor. In that process, he found out that if you want to help the culture of the poor, systemically, you have to get the ear of the people in the holds of power, because the leaders of cities and states and nations hold the keys to the coffers and they are the people who set policies and so forth. He started meeting with wealthy businessmen, just a little group of businessmen, with four ideas that are found in Acts 2:42. They met together daily in the early church for the breaking of bread, and the apostles teaching and for prayer. Abram found that in this little group of wealthy Seattle business leaders, that if they added something to that mix, it didn’t work as well as if they took one of those things away. Like if they didn’t have the food or if they didn’t say the prayer or whatever, it didn’t work as well. Over time, they invited the mayor of the city, who was getting hammered politically as I understand it. They said, ‘Why don’t you just come and we’ll be with you as a little group of friends.’ Out of that came this thought – why don’t we pray for those who are in authority like it says in Scripture. So they ended up having prayer with this mayor, and over time, they said – why don’t we do a breakfast, kind of like Jesus did at the end of the gospel of John where Peter had fouled up and had gone back to fishing and Jesus went and helped him with the catch and asked him to come have breakfast with him. That’s a paraphrase, they had fish ‘n chips on the beach. So they said – why don’t we have a breakfast and we’ll pray for the First Family because if they prosper, we’ll prosper. So out of that came the first Mayoral Prayer Breakfast in the country in 1936.
Abram started traveling with a group called Goodwill Industries, some of you may be familiar with that, he was an officer in that group and it took him across the states and eventually to Europe and in 1942, he came here. Through a series of circumstances, he connected with a few Senators who wanted him to have a little group in the Senate once a week just like they had in Seattle. So in 1945, at the end of World War II, three Senators plus Abram got together in the private Senate dining room at 8:00 a.m. on a Wednesday and did that same thing I just described. From 1945 until now, every Wednesday morning, in the Senate private dining room, any Senator that wants to can come to that little group. They leave their religious hat at the door, they leave their party affiliation at the door, they are just human beings in need of help from the Lord.
In the House, it started the next year. In 1952, Eisenhower was elected President and one of those three Senators, Frank Carlson from Kansas, Bob Dole’s predecessor, was the Co-Chair of Ike’s campaign, and out of that, when Ike was elected, Frank Carlson went over to the White House some weeks later as the story goes and said, “How are you doing Mr. President?” and Ike said, “This is the loneliest house I’ve ever lived in.” Frank said, “Mr. President, we have this group that meets in the Senate, why don’t you come and be with us?” Long story short, the House group heard that the Senate group invited the President and they decided they wanted a piece of that action and so they came over, that’s all a paraphrase, but the point is, Ike was not particularly known for being a religious man but he did say that he thought God was with him on D-day at Normandy. So, the first Presidential Prayer Breakfast came out of that. It was held in February of 1953 at the Mayflower Hotel, 200 men only. The women had a parallel group until the 1960s until the Kennedy/Johnson years. It has grown over the years, the National Prayer Breakfast for which we are here this week. It is held the first Thursday of every February up at the Hilton on Connecticut Avenue, which has the largest ballroom in town. There will be 3,600 people from 175 nations there this week. Several heads of state, heads of government, other kinds of people. There is a particularly large influx this year, it’s a transition year and when you have a new President, folks come for all the wrong reasons, but it’s a little like a breakfast at Levi’s house. Remember that story of the tax collector where Jesus said, “Come follow me,” and he got so excited and he threw a party for his friends but he didn’t have many friends? That’s sort of how the National Prayer Breakfast is! I’m sorry, this is on tape, I didn’t mean that.
But it’s a time when amazing things happen. There are hundreds of volunteers from around the world, we have a number who are here tonight from other states and other countries who pay to come and work in this sort of thing. Some of you who have been interns and worked for free, that’s how this is.
So this Thursday morning, if you would just pray that the Lord would do something special, not only in that event but the surrounding meals. They will serve 20 different meal events at the Hilton Hotel on Wednesday night for different regions, for different groups of people. They will serve 25,000 meals in 36 hours. I could take three Sunday mornings and tell you about the marvelous things that have happened over the years. But just suffice it to say that when people come together in the spirit of Jesus to break bread and to be friends, all bets are off, anything can happen.
That said, I want to talk to you about life tonight. What makes life work? I picked up a Washington Post yesterday and the headlines are grim. Matter of fact, that word was used in the headline of the Washington Post yesterday. Things go from grim to worse, or something like that, was the headline, and it has to do with money. Many of you have heard me before, and you hear me say that there are two things you have to deal with your whole life, relationships and money. Those are the two things. And I always say, somebody else can talk about money, I’ll talk about relationships. But tonight, I’m just going to bite the bullet, and talk to you about money. Ya know, we like money. I’ve never had anybody come to me and say they want less money, like ‘I’m overflowing, I can’t use all this, here you take some.’ You rarely get that sort of thing.
In 1966, I was a young pastor near the University of Illinois, we were building a building and we didn’t have much money and I had to help dig the drainage trenches outside the foundation. We only had about 12 people, they were mostly college students, and a young man came to help me, he was a PhD candidate in economics from Mississippi. He had a wonderful Mississippi drawl that I can’t mimic and his name was C.B. Easterwood. We are out there shoveling clay and I said, “C.B., give me a definition of economics.” And he said, “Economics is the effective use of scarce resources.” There is some way, some deep way, in which my life is represented by this dollar bill right here. This is one that’s been used. I don’t know how many people have touched this or how many cash registers it has been through, but this has been worked over a little bit.
I entitle my talk “Life The Second Time Around.” Why sometimes when we say money do people get tense? We start sucking air through our teeth. I think I get tense when people want to talk to me about money or economics because it is so close to me. Money is like intimate to me, because I go and give my life away for multiples of this every week. I get this, and then I get to give my life away a second time, this is life, the second time around. And with this dollar, you can buy a burger. It may not be the best burger! This will buy a half-gallon of gas, or it even works as a measuring stick if you’re in a furniture store and you don’t know how long the couch is. I’ve done this, the bill is about 6 inches long and you can just do this, people think you’re weird but it works. So this right there represents my life. I give away my life for this.
I’m talking to people, you’ve heard me say this before, I’m talking to people who are in the top 5% economically of all 6 billion people on the planet. Some of you say you just lost your job or you’re having trouble paying the rent and you don’t get what I just said, but by and large, we are at least in the top 10%, so this is a relative thing, but the point is – when I learn to think rightly about this, I learn to think rightly, in part, about me. And Jesus is all about me thinking rightly about Him and rightly about me. So I don’t want you to be nervous tonight, take a deep breath, you’re going to like it, it’s going to be ok, but hopefully this will help you.
I have a friend who says, “When I speak, Lord, don’t let me be boring.” I pray that too. The other prayer I pray is, “Lord, when I speak, let it be practical, let somebody walk away with something they can use this week.” So here we go.
Let’s just begin at the beginning, Genesis 1:26, reads like this, this is the creation account:
Then God said, “Let us make man in our own image in our likeness and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and the livestock and over all the earth and all the creatures that move along the ground.” God created man in his own image, in the image of God, He created them, male and female, He created them.
Point one – we are designed in God’s image. We are not designed to be God, we are designed to be like God. The question is – what is He like? And how does that relate to money, for example? Well, it is interesting because this word ‘image’ pops up again in Matthew the 22nd Chapter. By the way, does anybody here have a nickel or a dime or a quarter? I just want to use it for just a second. That’s great, thanks. Listen to how this reads, this is Jesus being challenged by religious types. Religious types didn’t like Him because they thought they had the corner on explaining God to people, and Jesus comes along and speaks with such authority, it blows them out, so they keep trying to trap Him. Matthew 22:15-22
Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words. They sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians. "Teacher," they said, "we know you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren't swayed by men, because you pay no attention to who they are. [That is, He doesn’t play favorites.] Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?"
Now, if He says yes, He is not a holy man. If He says no, then it is treason. So it’s what the philosophers call the horn of a dilemma.
But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, "You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? Show me the coin used for paying the tax." They brought him a denarius, and he asked them, "Whose portrait is this? [The word that is used for portrait here is image, it’s the word from which we get icon.] And whose inscription?" "Caesar's," they replied. Then he said to them, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's." When they heard this, they were amazed. So they left him and went away.
Some of you have heard me talk about this. I’m amazed to. I have no idea what that means! I’m not trying to be disrespectful to the text, I’m just saying, what does that mean? But maybe He said something or did something like this, whose image is on this coin, and they say Caesar’s, and He says, fine, give to Caesar’s what is Caesar’s. Give him his pennies, it’s the only thing he can stamp his picture on, give him his pennies, but give to God what is God’s. You bear his image. If He has you, He’s got your pennies. It’s a heart deal, it is not about legalism, it is not about this much or that much or a certain percentage, it is about my heart.
The second thing He does in the Genesis passage is He gives them a mission. The mission is this, In Genesis 2, He gives them the Garden and He tells them to take care of it. Verse 15
The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it and the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the Garden but you must not eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, for when you eat of it, you will surely die.
So what He does is He creates man and puts him in the Garden and says – here it is, it is yours. He is not just a creative God who makes us in His image, He is a generous God, He is the most generous person in the universe. When I think about being designed in His image, when I think about being designed like Him, I have to think about what it means to be generous. Have you ever been around a really generous person? It’s cool! It isn’t because you get stuff all the time, it’s just this atmosphere of holding things loosely, not this kind of wound tight, it’s an open-handed thing as opposed to tight-fisted. The God who created us designed us to be like Him, and he says – the whole Garden is yours, go for it! How generous is that! When did you last sign a contract where they said just go for it. He says there is only one exception, and because He is sovereign, He can make any exceptions He wants. He could have said I’ve got 80% and you’ve got 20% over on the north edge. But He gave them the whole Garden except for the one tree. And it isn’t because He needs the one tree, it’s because He is sovereign. And He says this establishes my sovereignty in your world. Exodus says it this way: Bring your first fruits, the best of your first fruits to God. When we respond to Him, when we respond in generosity like He is generous, He says acknowledge Me first, acknowledge me at the front end. I don’t think that’s just about dollars, I think it is with our lives. But the fact is that when I come to this understanding, it changes how I see things. What this says is that I am not the owner. People say, “I own my house.” Like I own my house in Fort Collins, kind of, with the bank, you know how that goes. But the fact is that I am not the owner. It is not because I’m smart that I’m sitting here tonight. It is not that I’m beautiful, although many of you are lovely, it is not that I’ve got 130 IQ or all that. You didn’t get up this morning and say, ok autonomic nervous system, hit it, let’s go. I slept all last night with my heart doing this, thump thump, thump thump, didn’t think about it once, because He is the one who is the owner. He knows how many thump thumps I’m going to have. I don’t know, my job is to take in trust what He has given me and use it effectively. Economics is the effect use of scarce resources. So I am entrusted.
In 1962, at Christmas time, I was in Santa Cruz, California and I called to Modesto, California, which is the Central Valley. I called my girlfriend’s house, her name was Ruth Blakely, I was going to talk to her father and ask to meet him so I could ask for her hand in marriage. She answered the phone and I had to disguise my voice. He got on the phone and I said, “Pastor Blakely, don’t let Ruth know it is me, it’s Dick. Can you meet me out at such and such a place?” He said, “I can’t. Is it an emergency?” I said, “Yes it is.” He said, “I’ll be praying.” He was very cool. He was a farmer at heart, he drove up in an old pickup truck. He was a pastor but he was a farmer at heart, drove an old pickup truck. I climb up in the cab and I said, “Pastor Blakely, I really love your daughter Ruth.” He said, “Well, we kinda like her too.” He was playing me like a fish. I said, “I’d like to marry her.” He said, “Well, I think that could be arranged.” I said, “But my parents’ own marriage is coming apart after 29 years and I’m scared because I don’t know if it is a hereditary thing, or DNA, I don’t know.” Some of you understand what I’m talking about. Sometimes, there is a moment in life when somebody says something to you that changes how you see your whole world. He put his hand on my shoulder and he said, “Dick, why don’t you just love Ruthie and follow Jesus and Ruth’s mom and I will love you both and follow Jesus and walk with you. It’s ok, I trust you.” That was 46 and a half years ago. So far, so good.
When somebody entrusts you with something, there is a kind of obligation that goes way beyond legal. It has to do with the spirit deal. That’s not very good theological language I guess, but it has to do with something that is deep. So when we talk about the energy that it takes to make one of these, and then re-invest it, if you will, there is something about that that is powerful. Here is the God who trusts us. We talk a lot of times in church about trusting God. I came here from Fort Collins to say to you that God trusts you. He trusts you. He has entrusted you with your days and with your dollars and with your intellect and with your capacities and with your talents. When you look at it that way. It changes how you see your life.
Let me just focus for the next few moments and give you some illustrations. How do we multiply what we have? This is not an investment strategy from whatever brokerage firm, this is just how do I see my life. There is an interesting passage that I won’t read now because of time, in Matthew 25 where a person gives his servants three different amounts of talents, or money. Two of them invest, one of them hides it, and the giver throws the last guy out. He said at least you could’ve put it in the bank. But he didn’t do that because he made some assumptions about the owner, that’s why he hid his money. But it is fun to try stuff. When I was the president of a small college, one Jan-term, it’s a three week semester in January, I was going to speak in chapel like this, and I had this thought. Ruth and I had $50, we were going to give it to the married students for their work. I had this thought, why don’t I select five students and give each $10 and see how they do stuff over the next three weeks. So I said, “Does any student want ten bucks?” Five of them came up, four guys and one girl. I gave them each $10 and told them they had three weeks to multiply this anyway you can that’s legal, just go ahead and multiply it. And I told them they could keep 25% of whatever they make. They came back in three weeks, I think the young woman had raffled off a date with her for like $38 bucks or something. Somebody else had done cookies, this one guy walks up, he is a basketball player, he’s got a bucket of money, like over $100 and I said, “Scott, where did you get that?” He said, “Well, I just doubled that $10 and then I had Mom Gunderson, [who was the Dean of Women at this little college, she made these incredible cinnamon rolls] make some cinnamon rolls and I sold them down at the mall in Santa Cruz and I got all this money!” I said, “That’s tremendous, but tell me how you doubled that first $10?” He said, “Well, President Foth, let’s put it this way, just say that I’m grateful that the 49ers won the play-offs.” I said, “Give me that money! We’ll talk about your theology later!”
You have this thing that happens when you take what He gives you and you do with it something that is generous. Biblical economics, I believe, is simple. It’s keep that money moving around. When you read II Corinthians 8:2, Paul is commending the people in this Greek city for giving out of their poverty. He said you had tremendous joy and extreme poverty and it showed up in rich generosity. That’s an interesting equation. Take joy plus poverty, it equals generosity. That doesn’t make any sense at all in my general way of thinking. But in the Biblical way of thinking, the people that are used as examples often times don’t have anything. I said the widow with the two mites hardly has anything to rub together, she puts that in, percentage-wise, it’s way more than the rich guys are putting in. And he doesn’t fault the rich people, he just says - look at that. He uses people who don’t have much to illustrate generosity.
I’ll never forget the first time I asked a person for a million dollars as a college President. That’s not what I had ever done, I was nervous. I asked a man who was a farmer in Silicon Valley. He had gone to the college where we were for six months in 1924 and it changed his life, and he loved the school. And I went to him, and he had owned 50 acres of pears in what is now downtown Sunnyvale, California. Anyone who knows that area, if you’re going to have some pears, you want to have 50 acres in downtown Sunnyvale. So I went to ask him, and he just had this little green-acres house, all these big high-rise houses around him, and here he was on his front porch and he’s got overalls on and the stuffing was coming out of the chairs, he is 84 years old, and I said to him, “John, we are doing this capital campaign, would you be willing to give us one million dollars?” I had prayed like crazy that he would say yes. And he looked at me and grinned and said, “How soon do you need it?” And I about passed out! I know I had prayed but… I died six months later without having done that. I went back to his widow a year later, she had been in our meeting, and I asked her if she remember it. She said, “About the million dollars?” I said, “Yes.” She said, “Our family wants to do that.” That million dollars helped to build a small administration building and one of the granddaughters came for the dedication and she spoke to the students in chapel and she said, “You need to know something about my grandpa. My grandpa was not a spender, my grandpa was an investor. He hated paying taxes to Uncle Sam, he didn’t like doing that, but he found that if he invested in you students, that you would take Jesus’ name around the world and that the interest on his investment was compounded every month that you were out there doing whatever He calls you to do. And he didn’t have to pay one red cent to Uncle Sam. He loved that! And when we cut that ribbon today and walk into that building, we are not walking into a building of stucco and redwood and steel and glass, we are walking into my grandpa’s life, so be real careful with it.”
Am I a spender or an investor? When I give it to people, I’m investing in their lives.
I was a graduate student at Wheaton College in 1964. I was doing a thesis on a missions topic. Intervarsity Christian Fellowship holds a conference every three years called the Urbana Conference at the University of Illinois and my instructor, Dr. Lois Lebar who was in her mid-sixties, a single lady, a sparrow of a lady. She said, “Dick are you going to the Urbana Conference to get interviews?” I said, “I can’t, it’s expensive, it costs $50 for the whole week, this was 1964, and Ruth only makes $50 a week and I wouldn’t go without her anyway.” And she got up and walked into a back room and then came and took my hand and laid five brand new 20-dollar bills in my hand and she said, “You take Ruth and go to Urbana.” That $100 changed the entire trajectory of our lives. That simple $100 investment absolutely changed our lives.
Here is the God who says – look, I designed you to be like me, I am generous. There is nothing as freeing as giving your life away twice. Nothing. Secondly, I am not only generous but I establish my rights in your life, so recognize that I am not just the guy who created it and gave it to you, but I am in fact with you, so acknowledge me with your life both times around, with how you live it and how you invest it when you get one of these. The third thing is, understand that I want you to multiply it, this is not just Western capitalism, this is a God who says when you invest it in people and in things that count, you never know where it takes you, you never know what’s going to happen.
Here is the God who says biblical economics is keep your life moving around, keep your money moving around, keep your investment of time moving around, do that. He is a generous God and He designed us to be like Him.
I have a brother-in-law, some of you have heard this before. I have a brother-in-law I can’t trust. His name is John, he lives in California, and he is always giving. He will come and borrow your car and when he brings it back, it is full of gas, sometimes he will borrow your car and bring it back with new tires on it. He came to our house one time, back when we didn’t have a dishwasher and he goes out to Sears and buys, you might be too young to remember this, they had these dishwashers on rollers and you plug them into the faucet, and he bought us one of those. I said, “John, you don’t have any money, what are you doing?” He said, “Ah, you just needed one of those.” When I was President of the school, one day I went out and got in the car and Ruth was there and I got in the car and I looked down and there were new floor mats, and I said, “Ruth, did you get new formats?” She said, “No, I thought you got them.” I said, “John got them!” I went in the house and called John and said, “Did you get me new floor mats?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “When did you do that?” He said, “Three months ago.” I’m not very observant but I am appreciative. I asked him, “John, why do you do that?” He said, “Dick, I can’t think of anything more fun than giving.”
Here is the God who calls you to joy. Here is the God who calls you to spend your hours and your minutes and your days and your dollars with great abandon. Just do it and see what happens. You bless the world, you honor Him and you do what you are designed for.
Father, thank You for your grace. Thank You for the privilege of knowing that we have been created, not just to do our thing, but to acknowledge You, to walk with You, and in a time of economic tension, help us to understand that it is not about how much we have, but how we see what we have, what we do with what we have. For the one or the several here tonight who are struggling because of lost positions or because of inability or incapacity to pay the rent, we pay your blessing upon them, that doors will open or that others will help. As we walk together in You, we keep it moving around. Thank You for your grace, Amen.
Ministry Transcription
Margaret Salyers
606-706-5006
margaretsalyers@gmail.com
