Stepping Into Financial Freedom (Dave Ramsey)

you did a good thing. Even if it was seventeen dollars a gallon, it will be worth it, I promise you. All right, y'all, here they come. They're joining us today from Guyana, Jamaica, South Africa, Philippines, India, Georgia, Indonesia, Virginia, No, that's her name, Virginia from California. That was confusing, Louisiana, Michigan, New Jersey. Hey, we're coming to New Jersey. You gotta come to New Jersey. Elevation Nights is five weeks away.

Listen everywhere we're coming. If you have any cousins in these cities, all right, because this begins very soon and I don't want you I don't want you to miss out. We're gonna be in Chicago, Grand Rapids, Indianapolis, Columbus, Ohio, Washington, DC, Redding, Pennsylvania, Newark, New Jersey, like I said, and Boston, Massachusetts. Elevation Nights dot Com. Some of y'all want to get a ticket and be a groupie and just come with us on the road. It gets crazy, doesn't it. It's crazy on

the road, isn't it. Lj am I lying to the people of God absolutely saying we're excited. We're excited so many good things. You saw the outreach updates, and I don't know, look at somebody and say, I don't know what you did right, But today you get to hear Dave Ramsey. Well, I mean, who could help us more at a time like this than Dave Ramsey. Dave, We're honored you're here. Man. I already told you this, but so they can know. My oldest son came to me the other day he said, I found this guy dad

on YouTube named Dave Ramsey. He thought he discovered Dave Ramsey. No, no, but he had been watching him and he was like, I'm gonna do this all this stuff on the budget. Why didn't you teach me all this? Da And I said, I taught you all this. This is what I do. And I was like, I actually know Dave and he was like really, I'm like, yeah, I'm kind of cool.

I have some cool friends. And you know, the other day, I was praying about it and who would God bring to help us at a time like this, with so much transition, And I feel responsibility to put people in front of you who cannot only inspire you for a few moments, but can really help you in a way that you'll be talking about. My barber was cutting up my hair today and he was like, tell Dave, you

change my life for me. Just tell him. Man. I know you pray to hear that a lot, but on behalf of all the people that you've helped and all of the people who have been set free through what God has given you. We honor you and thank you for being a pioneer. He and his wife Sharon are here. I said, Sharon, do you always travel with Dave? She said no, I just wanted to come to elevation. She said. The whole team is jealous back home that we're here,

so let's don't waste any time. I told him, you had all day, come on around the world, come best selling author Man of God, Dave recing goodness gracious, y'all. I feel like a weaner in a steakhouse. So y'all know Pastor Craig Rochelle, Pastor Stephen's friend of friend of mine. I'm speaking for him next weekend, and I thought I must be the oopa lumpa on the ripped pastor tour. So Pastor Stephen he he and I started swapping texts a few years ago. Sometimes when some of the fire

is flying, we'll just encourage each other. And sometimes when his adrenaline goes down Sunday after noon after preaching bout Sunday night, the texts start flying at my house. And a few weeks ago I get a text and he says, uh, you believe in free speech? I said yeah. He said, good, I want you to give one on March twentieth. That didn't happen, but it's a great job. So he's overly generous, y'all know that. But God told me on Sundays I'm

not supposed to collect. I collect Monday through Friday, and so life's pretty good for me. I'm doing all right, I got financial peace, So all right, let's pray all God. You know I can do these talks by myself and sure are better when you Holy Spirit, this is your time in Jesus' name. Amen, y'all have a seat. So my wife and I will be married this coming summer for forty years. Yeah. I told her if she leaves, I'm going with her. When we got married, I don't

know about y'all, but we were stupid. We had no sense. We didn't have anything like pre marriage counseling. We just got hitched. We just got married, and nobody told us to watch out for this or that, and they were just happy to get rid of me and whatever. And her dad is scared I was showing up and we just got married. So I was a beer drinking, hell raising hillbilly. And we've been married about two weeks. We

moved to Nashville and got our first little apartment. And my wife wakes up on Sunday morning and remembers that she's a Baptist. This is something she hadn't mentioned before. We've been dating for a while. We hadn't talked about it, this Jesus stuff. We certainly hadn't talked about her being a Baptist, and she said, is Sunday morning? We're going to church? And I said, no, we're not. You don't go to church on Sunday. You drink beer and watch football.

What is wrong with you? Well she's real serious about this, and of course we're in Nashville, y'all. It's the buckle of the Bible belt, right, I mean there's more Baptists there than people. And so we have a big fight and she's crying and she storms out the door. Well it didn't take her long to find her tribe, and she starts attending this little Baptist church and these little Baptist people praying for her heathen husband. Well this goes on every Sunday for about six months, y'all. Be honest

with you, it wasn't going well. Every Sunday. We had big fights. She storms out, crying, and I'm going, what did I sign up for? Nobody told me about this? And I got in one of these. I was twenty two years old and I got in one of these multi level things, you know, a thing where you make all your friends mad. And one of my beer drinking buddies on me, and there's a lot of beer in this story. But we got in this thing, and we

were so dumb, y'all. We would go to happy Hour and then go make sales calls and couldn't figure out why we couldn't make a sale. This is how dumb we were. And oh God, here on his other brother, Darryl. And so we we're gonna get a yacht and we're gonna be rich, and we're gonna do all this stuff. And you know, we're living there twenty two years old. We're gonna live the dream and all this, and and uh,

we were doing pretty good. But we decided to go to one of their rallies, one of their sessions down in Birmingham, Alabama, which is about two hours south of Nashville. So we got in the car and drove to the Alabama Theater in downtown Birmingham, which in my mind held ten thousand people. I did an event there a while back. It holds eight hundred. But you know how when you grow up, things shrink. But and so you ever go

back to your grade school, how it gets smaller. Y'all know what I'm talking about, right, And so, oh my gosh, So the uh, anyway, we're up in the top row of the very back balcony, me and him, and we're taking notes all day long. These speakers are up there charging us up of how we're gonna get rich and all this stuff and get you a yacht. And there was one guy at the end of the day who was the dog. He was the one making like four hundred thousand dollars a minute or whatever, you know, and

we wanted to be like him. And so we're kind of waiting for the you know, the the apex of the day, the crescendo of the day, right, And so finally this guy gets up there, and we had written down five or six questions that thought if we could get the answer to these questions, we'd have a breakthrough. Our little business would go boom we go, you know. And so he gets up there and it says if this guy had our questions as his outline, and we

already wanted to be him. But by the time he finished reading our mail for an hour and we got all of our questions answered, if he had told us to eat a bag of dirt, we would have he owned us, you all know what I'm saying. And he was a good speaker too, and he gets to the end. He goes, and there's one more thing, and we're like, no, there isn't We got our five. He goes, if you don't know this man named Jesus, you're going to struggle

in business because business people who are takers struggle. Business people who add value in her givers always win. And he said Jesus. He said, Jesus will teach you how to do relationships. And if you're gonna be in business, you have to learn how to do relationships. And I'm looking at my buddy and we're going I have no idea what he's talking about. And I asked my buddy, I said, you think he's been talking to my wife.

And so we go back to the little holiday inn or whatever it was, and in the night stand we find a Bible and it's a Gideon's Bible, right old King James, Yeah, Shakespeare and Jesus. The chances of these two rednecks figuring this out is zero. We closed it blind leading the blind. But we went home. I told my wife, I said we're going to church, and she said, who are you? And what have you done? My husband? And so we went to some of the churches around

and these folk, they're not having fun. The place looks like it was weaned on a pickle. Y'all know what I'm talking about. It's just it's awful. And but we went in the back of this little church about three four hundred people. It ended up growing to eight thousand people later. And you know how you do when you're visiting a church. You sit on the back row in case it gets weird. You can hit a jack right, y'all know what I'm talking about. And so we were

on the back row. And this is a long time ago, y'all mean, it's almost thirty five years ago. And back then people didn't raise their hands except in weird churches, you know. And we're in there and this woman in the choir pops her hand up like she knows the answer to some question, and then another one, and then they start doing this. I told sheeron, I said, if they get snakes out, I'm out of here. And that pastor was a man's man. I thought Christians were whishes

and he was a man, and he stood up. He would say stuff like and this is what the Bible says. And if you don't agree with that, you're what's known is wrong. I like this guy. And this was old school church. As I said, there was only about three hundred folks in that church when we started there. And they'd stand at the back door and you'd go out in the line, and the pastor would shake everybody's hand. And his wife was a big, squishy woman. She'd give

you a big grandma hug, you know. And that woman's grace flowed off of her when she hugged you and looked at you and she said, I love you. Made you believe she really did love you, because she did. And his strength and grace and mercy led me the Lord, and I got baptizem met God there. It changed my whole life. I do everything backwards. I left that little multi level thing real quickly in the middle. I was just in there for about twenty minutes, it feel like.

And I started buying and selling real estate, and I got rich, at least by a kid from antiox standards. I started with nothing, and by the time I was twenty six, I had a a little over four million dollars worth of real estate, a little over a million dollar net worth, and I was making two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year twenty thousand dollars a month in nineteen eighty two. I don't know where you come from, but we called that rich where I grew up. And

I gotta tell y'all, it was fun. It was really fun. I mean sharing what she got. Likes those little sparkly things. So we got her some and they weren't big enough, and so we got her some more. And y'all, we went to Hawaii Rednecks in Hawaii. Oh my, it was so nice, y'all. We went back and I had that

car always wanted. You had that car you always wanted, like someday, right, So I got me a Jaguar Man because nobody in my ol neighborhood cold spell Jaguar much less had one, right, So I got me a Jaguar Man. About ninety days, I was a Jaguar, right. You know, it's like right, I mean, it's like, oh man, we were having fun, y'all. Now, I am not shallow enough or theologically deprived enough to think that money is going to make you happy. As a matter of fact, I'm

positive at won't. After teaching God's ways of handling money for thirty plus years, now, I do know that money will make you more of what you already are. If you are depressed and you get money, it's not gonna go well if you don't deal with the depression. If you got a drug problem and you get money, you got a drug problem. I mean, if you got a temper and you get money, who tyrant on parade? You got a big, gentle, compassionate heart and you get money,

you can change the world. Whatever you are, and you get money, it's going to magnify it. So beware of that. It's not going to solve your problems. There's all kinds of data points all throughout our culture that prove that. You can see people who didn't have it and they got money and it messed up their lives. Money makes

you more of what you already are. And by the way, if it makes your people around you more what they are too, Like people in your family, like the crazy ones, they get crazy, and everybody's got crazy in their family. And if you don't think you got crazy in your family, that means it's you. So we're cruising along doing really good things. Life is good. We're in our twenties. We meet Jesus on the way up. I do everything backwards and man life. You know, we've got babies and oh

my goodness, things are good. And I had done some stupid things. How many y'all ever done something stupid with money? How many of you didn't raise your hand to have a problem with lying? We all have, darling. If you've made mistakes with money, that makes you over twelve. Only I did it was zeros on the end. As I told you, I borrowed a ton of money. We had a million dollar net worth, but we had three million dollars in debt, and we were doing flip this house

before Chip and Joanna were born. Okay, so for cable TV was there to tell you how to do it right. And so we were doing flip this house. I had a lot of short term notes and the bank got sold to another bank, and a guy in another city down said, there's a kid twenty six years old. I was, that's a million dollars million two to be exact, let's limit this relationship, which is banker talk for ruin his life.

And then they called our notes. And the short version of the story is another lender heard we were in trouble, because we were in trouble after that, and they called our notes and we had two million dollars due in one hundred and twenty days, all tied up in real estate. That started a crash that took two and a half years to unfold. That no matter what I did, I couldn't stop it. I was always taught, if you have a problem, just work harder. Doesn't matter if you dug

that dig a hole. When you got that level of stupid, working harder won't fix it. It was coming down around my head. The jangle blocks were crashing. It was a mess. I had built a house of cards because I was stupid. I didn't know I was stupid. I thought I was smart, but I was stupid. Changed my life. I remember standing in the shower with it sahat. I could just barely stand there, and I would just stand there and cry. I was so scared I couldn't breathe. I have a

toddler and a brand new baby. My marriage is hanging on by a thread. Sharing's from the hills Ofpes, Tennessee. Y'all frying pan throwing there is an Olympic event. And finally we hit bottom file bankruptcy. So I met God on the way up. But Church, I'm here to tell you I got to know him on the way down. I had already been saved, i'd already been baptized, but I had an eye surrender all moment. And I'm not

talking about a Baptist alter call. I'm talking about ever been completely on your face and you say I quit, I give I surrender. You are now the Lord, you are now in charge. I apparently got nothing. I hope you never have to get beat up that hard to get to that point, because that's a heart decision, and

you could just make that decision. But I started deciding, Okay, if it's in here, it's real, and the rest of the stuff I'm not listening to because I listened to my finance professor in college who taught me to borrow money, and he was broke. What's wrong with that picture? I mean, that's like a shop teacher with missing fingers, right, broke finance professor. So I'm gonna learn how to live because I didn't know how to be a husband. I didn't know how to be a daddy. I didn't know how

to be a man. And so I'm you know, marriage, so submit yourselves one to another. Oh crud. That means I gotta dry dishes. That means I'm gonna serve my wife who can find a virtuous wife, for her worth is far above rubies. The heart of her husband safely trusts her, and he will have no lack of game. My kids are like, Dad, what's this rod stuff? And I'm like, come, everybody, I'll show you only five hundred scriptures dealing with money and possessions. Proverbs alone will give

you a master's degree in finance. It'll show you everything you need to know. And it's not just a Bible thumper. You can study that with your intellect as well as with your spirit, and you'll see it. It's there. So we hit bottom and we have the opportunity to start again God's ways and we decided, Okay, we're gonna start handling money, marriage, leadership, business kids. If I can find it in here, this is the way we're doing it. I can't always find it. Insurance isn't in here. I

can't find it, but I still buy insurance. So it's not everything's in there, But I'm gonna do it if I can. And you know what, that's thirty five years ago, y'all, And thirty years ago we went broke and it's worked out. Oh my goodness. As it worked out, Oh my goodness. It turns out that God's ways of doing things work. Hello, they work. So I got a bunch of I got

we got yesterday. I looked at our thing. We've got eleven hundred and sixty two I'm sorry, one thousand and sixty two people working on our team right now as a Friday, or as of Monday morning. We got thirteen more starting Monday morning. And Ramsey Solutions have turned into this thing. And it's a process over these years teaching people how to handle money. Now, fifty thousand churches have

taught almost ten million people financial Peace University alone. I mean, it blows my mind what God has chosen to do, he says. I says in the Bible will speak to a donkey apparently, so we're in. I'm in. This is good. So, so I got a bunch of youngsters on the team. And I love our youngsters. They're brilliant. The average agent our team's about twenty seven. People hate this millennial generation. I gotta tell you, millennials are amazing. I love the

millennial generation because there's only two kinds. Awesome and sucks. I mean, it's just they either will missional driven bright, will charge the gates of Hell with a water pistol, or they're living in their mother's basement. They ain't leaving. You know. It's one of the two. So we we got them on our team that are missional driven, smarter than me, say words and meetings, I have to stop them and go, I'm sorry, but I'm pretty comfortable with my own skin on the place, would you just say?

And so, I mean, they're smart, but sometimes Papa Dave, I have to I have to lead. And I was coming by one of them and he was doing the stuff he was supposed to be doing wrong, and I was like, hey, that's not don't do it. Do it this way. That's that's not how we do it here at Ramsey. This is this is the thing. It's an excellence thing. You gotta do it right. And he's like okay. And I come back about a week later and he's doing it wrong again. I'm like, hey, hey, nah, we

do it here, we do it this way. We have talked about this. Yeah, I know, I know, I know. I come back a week later, he's doing it wrong again, and I'm like, hey, we're gonna set you free in Jesus name. Okay, I mean there's one I'm telling you how to do this. And he looks at me and he says, I'm not like you. And I said, okay, change. You don't have to be like me, but you gotta do it like I do it. This is the right way, do it, this way. Change. And you know God does

that with us. There's the thing in Christianity. If we're going the wrong way on something, God says stop. This is called sin going this way or stupid going this way. And sometimes they're the same thing. And we're going this way, and then God says stop, and we turn change and we go the other way. It's called repentance in Christianity, isn't it I was going the wrong way, I repent, I stop, I change direction. This isn't working. Continuing to do the same thing over and over again and expecting

a different result is the definition of insanity. Stop and change. And you know what, He gives us the dignity and the power of choice that we can just decide change. You ever met someone that just quit smoking. I have. They didn't have anything, they didn't do any kind of program and It's okay if you did a program and whatever, that's fine. But they just they just said, I'm not in anyone. I just quit. I've met people like that now. A lot of people do other stuff that's okay, But

you can just with some things. It's certainly behaviors that we're doing. I can just I'm not saying that's my wife ever again. I'm just gonna change. It didn't work well when I said it last night. I'm not doing that again. So thank god the poor woman is not married to the same guy she married forty years ago. Because I get the opportunity to change, and I haven't arrived, but I'm considerably bad because I've had the opportunity to change. And it's a decision. You get to decide. No one

decides that for you. Pastor doesn't decide it. Dave Ramsey doesn't decide it. You know, no one in Washington, d c. For sure decides it for you. You get to decide when you're gonna change. God won't even make you do it. He'll make you wish you did, but he will not make you do it. So there's five things that are baseline in all the data that we have, and the millions and millions of families we've interacted with that have changed and moved from high stress, broke horrible situation with

money to becoming wealthy over time. And this is not this is not some kind of magical thing. This is pretty much like if you want corn, you should plant some corn. If you're a farmer, you don't go out and pray over the mud. You put corn in the ground, you weed fertilized, and then you reap what you have sung. So you know, sometimes I meet my brothers sisters in Christ who have been oversaved and they're just standing over the mud praying. Saint Ambrose said, work like it all

depends on you. Pray like it all depends on God. Where our faith meets our faithfulness is where all things are unleashed. You gotta be faithful in the little things, and then you'll be giving more to manager. You ever read that scripture? And so you know the first thing we gotta do all these five things. You start doing these five things, they will not fix your life. By Friday. It won't happen. We I'll tell you what will happen. You'll walk a little straighter. It's like all of a sudden,

you'll think a little clearer about the future. Instead of thank God, it's Friday, Oh God, it's Monday. And instead of saying, thank god it's Friday, Oh guy's Monday, you start thinking about ten years out. Because where there is no vision, the people perish. You want corn, you gotta have a vision. Put corn the ground and it'll be spring before you see it, dron that far and befall before you get corn. So if you want microwave, you probably shouldn't talk to God because he's more in the

crock pot business. Occasionally he just microwaves it, but that's seldom, and we call those miracles because they're seldom. Most of the time he's dealing with us to get us right, and then the corn comes in and we got the muscles to carry it. Most of the time, that's what's going on. There's a process, in other words, that's vitally important. The first thing you gotta do if you want to win with money is you have to get on a budget,

a written game plan. Jesus said, don't build a tower without first counting the cost, lest you get halfway up, And all who see you began to mock you and say this man began to build and was unable to finish. My friend's exiglar used to say, if you aim at nothing, you'll hit it every time. My friend John Maxwell says, a budget is people telling their money what to do

instead of wondering where it went. If you manage money for a company called You Incorporated, and you manage money for you Incorporated the way you manage money for you, now would you fire You don't answer that if you're not a faithful steward. We have a clear example in the parable the Talents that God is going to take the money from you and give it to the one who did manage it well, the one who planted corn and tended to the field instead of stood back and

watched it rain on the mud. Please don't be disorganized, living chaotically and impulsively with the maturity of a four year old on the cereal isle, having a fit on purchases, and then expect God to bless it. When you say, Lord, send me money, he will not send you money. It's in scripture. Faithful with the little things, then I will give you more. My son's a grown man now. He's an executive on our team and is an absolutely fabulous, world class leader. When he was a kid, he was

fourteen years old. He comes in one day he says, Daddy, I want a new Corvette when I turned sixteen, and I said no, because I'm a loving father. I've seen you drive. You're incompetent. If I put you in a four hundred horse power fiberglass body zero to sixty and two point seven seconds, you'll kill yourself and someone else. No, I answered his prayer as a loving father. No, I said, you will be getting an old chavette with a tired

gerbil under the hood. And my son, when you are faithful with the little things, like you polish that thing, you change its oil. It doesn't come home full of McDonald's boxes because you keep it clean. You pull it up to the curb properly. You don't leave our house on two wheels. When you take care of the little things, we'll talk about moving you up. That's what God says all the time. When you're faithful in the little things,

you'll be given more to manage it all. In scripture, Prayable the Talents indicates that the mind of man plans his ways, but the Lord directs his steps. All of this is in there. A loving father is not going to give you something you can't handle, because it'll crush you. Be on a budget. The second thing we have to do is we need to get out of debt. Now you knew Dave Ramsey was gonna say that the rituals over the poor and the borrower is slave to the lender.

We're carring around so much student loan debt that we think Sally May is a family member. We have Master Card who named that the borrower's slave and he's my master. Look at that, and it's tough to serve two masters because you'll love one and hate the other. I worship at the altar of the Gray Fico score, but my tithe is not up to date. Sharon and I saw

this and we said no more, We're done. And we got the scissors out and we said, okay, we're gonna light a little candle here and we're going to have a plassectomy. We're going to have plastic surgery because what's in your wallet money Airline miles. Oh good. We did the largest study of millionaires ever done in North America two years ago, over ten thousand millionaires that we studied eighty nine percent of them became millionaires without and without

using an inheritance to become a millionaire. Nine out of ten of them became millionaires on their own. You know how many of them made their money off of airline miles zero precisely discover Freedom. You're weird, Ramsey, I know, but normals broke. I don't want to be normal. You mean you don't have any credit cards? Not having any

credit cards? Start where they went bankrupty wouldn't give me any, and then later on they start handing them out like candy again, and we didn't take any because we were through. We figured out the borrower slave to the lender. We don't. We figured out if we don't have any payments, you know what, we got money. That's weird. You don't have

any credit cards? Now, that's my wallet, green presidents faces, four pieces of plastic, my debit card on my business, my debit card on my personal, my driver's slices, and my handgun carry permit. And that's it. Rednecks in North Carolina too, Okay, yeah, I said I said that over in California, but I got arrested. But good to be back in America. But uh, oh, I love you California people, we love you. We love you. It's all good and uh, your state's crazy, but we love you. And so, oh

my gosh. So a guy called me on the radio the other day and he's like, if I got a problem and people call me on I this talk radio show thing. And I said, what's the problem. He goes, You're gonna kill me. I'm not gonna kill you. You're in Texas, I'm in Tennessee. I can't get to you. What'd you do? He goes, Well, I got my truck payment. I'm like, how much is your truck payment? Seven undred and sixty nine dollars seven hundred and sixty on a truck? I said, ma'am. He goes, I know, I know, I know.

I said, yeah, how much is your house payment? Well, we we live in a double whit it's five hundred bucks. I said, dude, if your truck payment's bigger than your house payment, you might be a redneck. There was car payment in America right now. It's five hundred and forty

six dollars over eighty four months. If you didn't have that because you drove a paid for vehicle that you weren't trying to impress someone you don't know at a stoplight, and you didn't have a five hundred and forty six dollars payment, and you put that in good growth stock mutual funds. From make's thirty to age sixty five, you'd have five point six million dollars in that one account. Hope you like the car. When I quit borrowing money, I suddenly had money. You don't have to make a

lot to have money when you have any payments. Because most Americans, we work, we bring it home, we change its names, and we send it off, and we send it to Ford Motor Credit, and we send it to Chevrolet, and they go down. Other than the last four or five months, when cars are going backwards, like everything's going backwards right now, used cars are actually going up in value for the first time in the history of man and U and it'll catch up and it won't be

that way long. But I mean other than that time, I mean, Chevy is like, you know, they're all this way. It's like, you know, these things go down in value like a rock. That's where Chevy got that, like a rock. Right, So, and we're financing this thing. I don't mind you having a nice car. I justn't want your nice car to have you. I want you to have choices and margin and room to be generous, and room to think about your future instead of the present, because if we live

for Friday, you don't that much of a life. The third one's weird. You have to foster quality relationships. Bible says, be not deceived. Evil company corrupts good habits. Did you know you become who you hang around with. I mean, if you want to be generous, you need to hang out with generous people. If you want to hang out with people that are world changers, you need to hang out world changers. If you want to hang out with

people that know. If you want to know the Bible, we probably ought to hang out with some people that know the Bible. If you want to hang out with people, if you want to have a great marriage, you probably ought to hang out with people other than your four friends who just got six divorces. I'm minister to them, I love them, I'm not snubbing them, but I don't need to learn marriage from them. And I catch myself

I talk like the people I hang around with. The verbal cues, the cadence of your sentence I was in New York City the other day. Y'all know all those people have an accent up there. They all talk just at it's crazy, and then they come down South, and you know what, we teach them how to talk Eventually, you know, because you become who you hang around with. Did you know the studies have shown that your income will be the average will be within ten percent of

the average of your ten closest friends income. Some of your going I needed some new friends. Maybe now I'm never saying be snobbish to somebody I'm minister to. I'll spend time with, I will love anyone. I love people. I'm talking about your crew. Who's in your center, who's walking with you, who's lifting your arms, who's smacking them down, who's calling you out? Who You're gonna talk like them, You're gonna read like them, You're gonna binge watch the

same thing on Netflix, stagger King. You're gonna become who you hang around with. Be very careful, you know this. That's why you don't let your kids run around a juvenil delinquents, because you know little Johnny down the streets smoking weed. You hang it, kid hangs out with litt Johnny. Yourki's gonna be a weed head too. You know this. No, you ain't hanging out with Johnny. Johnny is not smart. We will pray for little Johnny. He can come over at our house and play, but we're not. No, no,

You're not gonna be like him. Moms and dads, do that. Be not deceived, evil company, corrupts good habits. Be very careful. The third, fourth one is save and invests. Save money, save money. The Bible says, in the house of the Wiser stores of choice, food and oil. But a foolish man devours all he has. You spend everything you make. You're a fool. I didn't say it, God said it. Get mad at him. There's a time or two in my life. God's had a red arrow point in a fool. Fool, fool,

and you don't want to be a biblical fool. This is not a greeting like hey foo, No, this is like a fool in the house of the wise or stores of choice, food and oil. In Biblical times, when Solomon, the smartest man ever lived, wrote that one of the wealthiest men they ever lived. By the Way too, wrote that in the House of the Wise there were two classes of people in Israel in those days, there were

not a middle class. There was no middle class. There was peasants, poverty, which was most everyone, and there was the aristocracy. The aristocracy the wealthy are the only ones that had what you and I eat every day called choice food. The best food the world has to offer, clean, safe, good for you. That's what they aristocracy ate. Maybe not good for you, but they ate the good stuff. Okay, I mean we're talking Israel. So what the poverty is. It's hummus, you know, pet of bread, right, this is

what you got. This is the whole puppy. In the house of the Wise are stores of choice food. Choice food was an indication of wealth. Oil was used all throughout the Old Testament to anoint to show God's spirit. The Prophet anointed the shepherd boy David, and later it says that the anointing drops from the beard onto the body. The spirit of God drops from leadership into the body of that leadership. God's spirit is always represented by oil. Consequently,

oil was highly valued. You could take a caraffe of oil and trade it in the marketplace for anything. Because it was also used to keep the whole the lamps lit in the Holy of Holies. It was highly prized, highly esteemed. I leave valued. Now let's do it again. In the House of the Wise are stores of choice, food and oil. Well, the Bible says the rich people are going to hell. No it doesn't, No, it doesn't.

If you believe that rich people are going to hell from scriptures, then you don't believe Jesus's blood on the cross was real, which would by definition make you a heretic. There's a lot of warnings about wealth. It's powerful, be careful with it. I had warned you about that earlier. But rich people aren't. And the Bible does not save money is the root of all evil. It says the

love of money is the root of all evil. So the first thing we save money for is we save money for in a emergency because Grandma said, save for a rainy day. Visual aid. It's going to rain. It's going to rain, Dave, you should be positive. I'm positive

it's going to rain. When pandemics hit and you have no debt and a pile of money in your emergency fund, it's a whole different level of stress that your body takes in peace that passes all understanding because you're the third pig, not the one with sticks and straw, but the one that built the brick house. I planted the corn, the corn came. It's awful out there, and I felt bad for a lot of people, and a lot of businesses were really, really struggling. But we're sitting on a

campus that's one hundred percent debt free. We're sitting on a pile of retained earnings. None of our people lost their job, not wine. None of them missed a paycheck, not wine. Is that because Dave Ramsey is noble? No, it's because God says if you plant corn, corn will grow if you follow his guidelines, his principles, they work

every time. And so if you're on a plan and you get out of debt and you're saving money, you can save more money when you don't have payments and you're hanging out with people that are generous and future thinking instead of short term thinkers, impulsive thinkers, children. One definition of maturity is the ability to delay pleasure. If you're hanging out with people like that, it will naturally believe bring the Christian to the fifth one, be outrageously generous.

Did you know you can give money away if you have some. Did you know that people who feed poor, people who feed starving kids are people who had money. That's where it came from. It came from people who did the stuff I was talking about. They're not evil, they're not horrible, they're not corrupt, they didn't steal that in cheat. They serve the community in scale and consequently have the ability to serve the community in scale. Generosity

comes from having planted corn. So now I got some to share with my brothers and sisters, and it's the most fun you'll ever have with money. Outrage is crazy. Generosity you gotta do it. You gotta do it, y'all. It's unbelievable. What will happen. It'll turn everything loose in your life. Your creativity will go up, your passion will go up, your health will change. When you start letting money flow through you instead of to you, it changes

everything in your life. But it is a mathematical requirement that for money to flow through you, you you have to get it to you. You got to pay the like bill first, feed your kids, because if you don't take care of your own household first, you're worse than an unbeliever. Are we following scripture here, you're not selfish. You just broke. We got to work on not being broke. I've been there, and it's scary as crud. I don't want to live

like that. So we tithe. As Evangelical Christians, we always tie that means give a tenth of our income to our local church. That's your baseline. But I want you to do some other stuff beyond that that just is mind blowing, just for fun. I want you to just carry some money around. Here's one for you. Let's do this. And they told me to be done in about forty five minutes because that's when the Holy Spirit leaves. So and I don't want to be up here by myself.

So Thanksgiving Easter's quicker when you're getting the family together and you're picking up the kids and maybe you're going down the road or two states over to go see grandma. I don't know if you're going to cross town or whatever. We're going to grandma's house and Grandma's gonna make a feast. LL know what I'm talking about. Maybe not, but maybe you could see the type of picture this is. This is what happens to us, and so what I want you to do is. I want you to load the

kids up. I want you to leave twenty minutes early, and I want you on the way to get off in an exit and find yourself like a waffle house. Y'all know what waffle house is, and pull up right in front of the glass and leave the car running until the kids put down your screens. Watch God, behave, and I want you to go in have a cup of coffee at the front counter, at the lunch counter. Y'all know what I'm talking about. You have been a

lunch count. And this is Thanksgiving weekend, this is Easter weekend. You know who's working at the counter at a waffle house. Somebody needs a job. You know who's working at the counter in a waffle house on Easter weekend. Somebody needs a job. Bag So I want you to have a cup of coffee. Order a cup of coffee. You probably not even gonna drink it, And before you leave, I want you to to get chat about three or four of these Uncle Benjamin's hundreds, slip them under the coffee cup,

and slip out to the car. Hey, kids, watch God, watch him. Here's what she'll do. She'll walk along and pick it up in her eyes will get back. She's looking around like it's a trick. It's been so long since anything good it's happened to her, and God just showed up. You just changed him net worth one hundred percent of time. And even if she's not been in church in her life, or even if she was there last week one hundred percent of the time, who knows to say thank you? Can she can smell the aroma

of the Holy Spirit that you left dripping there. You didn't leave a track you lost. You left three four hundred bucks. I want you to go out and spend three four hundred bucks on a date night on yourself. I want you to do that too. I want you to have fun with money, but I dare you to have more fun than that. So here's the thing you can decide. I'm gonna budget, I'm gonna get out of that. I'm gonna change. I'm gonna start handling my life the

way God instructs in his love letter to me. And he's crazy about me, and he's got a plan for me. And it's not to bring me hard, but to bring me hope. I'm gonna get better. I'm gonna be a diligent farmer, because the diligent prosper and the lazy man doesn't. I'm gonna change now. Am I perfect? No? Good, Gracious, I'm not perfect. I mess up about every day. I don't mess this stuff up. I took care of him all that in my twenties. I mess up lots of things.

We all do. We're all working on this, we're all, you know. But I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me. I can decide I'm gonna change. God's crazy about you. And if you wandered in here because you saw a Facebook post said Dave Ramsey is gonna be here and you don't know him, let me just tell you this, Jesus Man, you change your life. God, we thank you for these folks. We turn this service

over to Pastor Stephen. But Father, as I'm doing that, I just want to pray a blessing and ask that you show up for folks here, that if they felt condemned, that they're not but instead convicted. And Father, God, give them the power of the strength, the love, the ability to run the distance and finish the race well, the ability to walk with what You've got for them. In what you've got for them, bring them protection, bring them provision, and help them to be a shining light on a

hill that is unbelievably generous in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, if you enjoyed today's podcast, there are a couple of things I'd love for you to do. Make sure to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast. You can also help us reach others by investing today at Elevationchurch dot org. Slash GiB and thanks again for joining us on the Elevation Podcast.