Who’s Your Team?, Part 3
Maximizing Your Investment
College Football Tickets - $150
Parking - $20
Gas to and from game - $60
Tailgating - $45
Hotel room - $150
Game Day Apparel - $40
Big Foam Finger - $5
Spending Saturday with 85,000 of your closest friends – priceless
A few caveats:
Money talk is always a little uncomfortable b/c it’s personal
Too often the church has done a poor job of talking about money b/c we only talk about the 10% we want you to give to the church and we don’t talk about the 100% God has entrusted us with and biblical financial management of that money
To make it worse, we didn’t learn it in home economics either – we learned to sew a pillow and make no-bake cookies, but skipped the “home economy” part
So, most of what we’ve learned has come from the credit card companies who spend millions and millions every year talking us into spending more than we have
This message - Not talking about what we give to God, but what we do with what God gives to us.
Parable of the Talents, Matthew 25:14-30
- Jesus has just finished telling a story about the kingdom of God, which he ends by telling his disciples to “stay alert,” because no one knows when he is coming back
- Notice first off that the master entrusted his money with his servants, the money never belonged to them
- A talent was a large unit of money, one talent worth about 20 years of work from your average person
- They didn’t all start with the same amount of money – fair? No. reality? Yes.
- If this were a modern parable, there would have been a fourth guy who spent all of his talents, borrowed more from someone else and when the master came back, he was actually at -6
What we do with our money has eternal significance - do we sit on the incredible gifts God entrusts to us or do we use them for His glory?
- 70% of Americans haven’t kept what God has given them – we blow it and then we finance 30% more, as a result, we’re broke
- Average American family spends between $500-$1500/month on debt payment, excluding our house payment
- Average family can get debt free in 18-36 months
Challenge/Place to Start: Take out a blank piece of paper and open your bank account on the computer – make a list of all the things you spend money on and then rank those things in order of where you spend the most – talk about it with your family, have an honest conversation including your teenagers about how you spend money
If you are part of Ashley Ridge Church, sign-up for a small group today. In the coming months, our small groups will all have opportunities to go through a 6-week study called "I Was Broke. Now I'm Not" by Joe Sangl that will provide practical steps to becoming debt-free and investing wisely.
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