Oct 20th: Generosity – Speaking a Good Word into People’s Lives, with Rev. Dr. Rob Hagan.
A Part of the Series:
Rev. Dr. Steven Koski
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Generosity – Speaking a Good Word into People’s Lives with Rev. Dr. Rob Hagan. Series: A Braver Way A Spacious Christianity, First Presbyterian Church of Bend, Oregon. Scripture: 2 Corinthians 9, , Acts 7:59-60.
Join us this Sunday, either online or in-person, to hear an inspiring message on activating hope, living in abundance, and becoming ‘divine agents’ of compassion. Rev. Dr. Rob Hagan shares powerful stories and biblical insights you won’t want to miss.
Transcript:
Rob, Hello, I’m Rob Hagan, and I’ve been a pastor for almost 42 years, and I’ve served many churches throughout the Northwest, and I work with about 550 churches throughout the Northwest, and what I have learned about people in the places I have seen over the years is that people who are generous really speak a good word in a people’s lives. Paul talks about generosity in Second Corinthians, chapter nine, and he uses a very important word called eulogy. And whenever you put a eu in front of a Greek word, it means good. So when people are generous, they’re really speaking a good word in a people’s lives, a eulogy in a people’s lives, and also they are really embodying a leadership principle called the heliotropic principle. And the heliotropic principle is very, very simple in terms of leadership. It means that people gravitate to whatever strongest energy they have around them, whether that’s negative or positive. And in this day and age where there’s so many kind of diverse opinions in regards to what is positive what is negative, we need this heliotropic principle to activate hope, because one of the things we have to understand is activating. Hope is part of our human nature, that we need that. So how do we speak a good word in people’s lives, like the text that was just read in the book of Matthew Well, I can tell you a personal illustration for me in covid. I wanted to have a bucket list that I would complete, and that is to run a half marathon. So I signed up for the Portland half marathon, and I got there, along with about 5000 other people, and I began to run, and I practiced and I trained, and about the fifth or sixth mile, I said, Hagan, what are you doing? Why are you doing this? And, boy, I needed some hope. And people had signs around, around, the people that on the sidewalks around the people that were running like the sign that said, May the course be with you, and other signs that really tried to give you hope. But there was one little girl who stood on the street corner. She was about the age of my own granddaughter, about 11 o’clock, about 11 years old, and she had a sign. And when I saw that sign, I said, Yeah, Hagan, you can finish this race. And I did, do you know what that sign said? You remember 11 year olds really like condiments, like ketchup? Well, her sign said you’re better than ketchup. And I said, Yeah, I can finish this race. That struck kind of a hope inside of me. She activated hope and people who speak a good words, which she was doing in my life at that time, she didn’t know it, but she was they are living in abundance rather than scarcity, because they have enough energy to activate hope. And one of the things they understand is about abundance and not living in scarcity, especially how they look at their money and how they want to distribute it. Lynn twist said in her book The soul of money, she describes a purpose of money, and she says and writes, money is like water. It can be a conduit for commitment, a currency of love. Money moving in the right direction can be our highest commitments and nourish our world and ourselves. What you appreciate appreciates when you make a difference with what you have, it expands collaboration, creates prosperity. True Abundance flows from enough, never from more, and money carries our intention. If we use it with integrity, then it carries integrity forward. Know the flow. She writes, take responsibility for the way your money moves in the world. Let your soul inform your money and your money express your soul acts. Access your assets, not only money, but also your character and capabilities, your relationships and other non money resources. And when I live in scarcity, I forget this and scarcity maybe, like you produces anxiety. And people who look at family systems says, you know, families begin to be anxious because of being maybe short of money. Maybe they look at money as something that can only be in their in their pocketbooks. And one of the things that I do when I become anxious about money, I over diagnose situations. I take myself way too seriously. And no matter who we are or what we have our circumstances, we swim in this understanding of lack of Lynn twist, also. Writes this, we swim in conversations about what there isn’t enough of. I see it in myself. For me and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is, I didn’t get enough sleep. Not one. The next one is, I don’t have enough time. Whether true or not, that thought or not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the time of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining or worrying about what we don’t have enough of. We don’t have enough time, we don’t have enough rest, we don’t have enough exercise, we don’t have enough work, we don’t have enough profits, we don’t have enough power, we don’t have enough wilderness, we don’t have enough weakness or weekends or of course, we never have enough money, ever. We’re not thin enough, we’re not smart enough, we’re not pretty enough or fit enough, or educated enough, or successful enough or rich enough ever, before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor. We’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something, and by the time we go to bed at night, our minds race with a litany of what we didn’t get done or didn’t get done that day we go to the to go to sleep burden by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack, and Jesus responds in this text, and he had to go away, just like we do, to understand that his life was given for people, and he had to go away in this text that he meant that mentions he had to go to a deserted place, and that’s where he does his best work in deserted places, because people followed him. And what he did is that he turned that sort of feeling of maybe sense of what he wanted to do in life. He turned that sense of darkness around to ministry. You know, Jesus feeds body and soul, not only to us, but to the crowds that were there. And so maybe, if you are feeling deserted in a place that is remote, and maybe you feel that darkness is coming around you. Jesus does his best work because hope is not optimism. Hope is in the midst of darkness. Hope comes to us in deserted places, and that’s where Jesus does his best work. And so he comes and he sees people and has compassion on them. That’s a very important word, because compassion means that all of a sudden he concentrates on people that are hurting. In fact, one of the texts that says in the King James version is that he hurt inside of themselves. He even hurt in his bowels because of his love for people and how they needed a touch of abundance from his life and from his hands. And so he began his ministry right there in the feeding of the 5000 and you know, abundance is so important in our life, and also activating hope. I remember a story of junior high kids who were in a camp, and the last night, the staff wanted to wash their feet. And well, the junior high kids really never had anybody wash their feet. And so as they were doing, they were giggling, and they were wondering, Hey, what’s going on here? And then five minutes later, they were quiet, and they began to cry, all of them. There were about 50 of them. And after the staff washed their feet, they said, Can we wash your feet? And they did. The staff changed places with them. And as those junior high kids were through, they said to the staff, is there anybody else that we can wash their feet with and to. And so they ran to everybody else in camp, and they demonstrated compassion and love to everybody else in camp. And so what Jesus wanted to do to His disciples is have them show compassion. I call it having people eyes. In the martial arts, Aikido, one of the things that they tried to do is to have people who feel a threat in their own lives, is to have soft eyes, because usually we have narrow eyes, because we look at the threat and everything becomes kind of myopic, one place that we just see that threat Jesus is wanting them to see their eyes softer and to see things around them, like hurting people. And when Jesus said to them, what do you have after they said, We can’t feed these people. Well, are you kidding me? Jesus says, What do you have? And so they brought what they had. Maybe those fish and loaves were things that they made or they caught that morning, but they brought them, and Jesus took them and blessed them and broke them and gave them back to the church, if you will, and really to us. And that’s the order of grace that we see in this text. He takes, he blesses, he gives back. And one of the things in the church does, and you as you follow that grace is you become divine agents, divine agents of God’s compassion, giving abundance rather than scarcity, activating hope in dark places. And we need that in this day and age, don’t we hope in the midst of dark places. So here we have Jesus has the promise, Jesus has the compassion. Jesus has the power to feed, and Jesus has the love that he has, not only for his disciples, so that they become the divine agents, but for the people who are hurting, and if you’re hurting today, Jesus has that compassion for you. So how do you activate home, your hope in your own life? And that is to hear those words of grace in your own lives so that you can go from wherever you are to touch people, to touch people who are hurting, and speak a good word into people’s lives. There’s a story, as I conclude, about a high school camp, another story about camp, because I believe that people are changed in places like that. And so these high school kids drove up in a van as these high school other high school kids were being registered for that camp, and all of them jumped out of this camp, and they had a handicap lift on that back of that camp, of that of of that van. And so what he did, what they all did, is they raced back. They took down the the the gate, and here came out a young woman in a wheelchair. Well, they didn’t go to the registration to register everybody and her. What they did is they got her from that wheelchair, and they took her down, carried her down to the dock, and there was a parasailing ministry there. And what they did is that they hooked her up to the parasail and they were running down the dock, and they threw her into the air, and that parasailing boat and that sail took her off into the into the air, and she was giggling all the way. And that’s what happened every day of that camp, what that girl experienced, everybody experienced from that church. Those guys took Debbie, that was her name around everywhere. The last day, the director of the camp said to these young high school kids, hey, you have done such a marvelous job. What we’re going to do is we’re going to take Debbie on a hike, because we’re going to go on a really long hike and high elevation, about 3200 feet elevation gain. And we know Debbie can’t do that, so we’re going to take her to the trail where it it goes from asphalt to gravel, and then we’re going to take her off to the town. And our staff can, some of our staff can show Debbie the shops and go shopping. And one of the high school kids looked at the camp director and said, That’s not the deal, because a year ago, Debbie lost the use of her legs and legs in a traffic accident, and said, I love camp, and I know I can’t go to camp because of this. And the kids in that camp and the kids in that church said, Whatever you do, Debbie, we’re you’re going to do. Whatever we do you’re going to do. And so what they did is they went to the dining hall. They took a chair, they hitched it up like a backpack. And so what they did is they put Debbie on their back. And what they did is they took her one by one all the way up to the summit. Somebody took her 100 yards, 200 yards, 500 yards, and all of a sudden they were at the top, and there was not a dry eye in that trekking group. And the question is, how do. Activate hope. Who are you carrying today? You need to maybe reach out to somebody in your family and maybe around you in your neighborhood, neighborhood, because people need to have hope and have that hope be activated in your lives. As Stephen prayed that great prayer that everything around us seems to be deteriorating. We need to hope. Have hope in the midst of darkness. We.
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