Dewey's Daily Cup

Dear KKIM Family,

GOD is GREAT, and HE will never be defeated! Rest in those words from Shelly who shares with us today.

It is a BLESSING to be with you here again today. Please keep all those in need in your prayers. I am so thankful for Jannetta and all she does for God’s people. Jannetta keeps the prayer list updated on the web site at www.deweysdailycup.com Please stop by there today and pray, would you please?

For MY house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations. Isaiah 56:7

Today is a bit of a long cup, but it has the words God told me to share with you today. First, please read the letter Shelly sent to us. It is a wonderful letter about what is going on today in the world. Following Shelly’s excellent comments, is the sermon delivered by Bill Hybels yesterday at Rev. Bob Schuller’s Church, The Crystal Cathedral. It is a sermon on the economy, or as I like to say God’s economy…..it should be God’s economy anyway but we have thrown God out of it for the most part.

Hey Dewey and Sharon,

Prayers definitely for those who lost jobs. May prayer is that they are able to have a spirit of innovation and find new ways to make an honest living. Also, that they can be at peace and hear the direction of the Lord. That goes for all of us – who knows when we may be in the same place?

Something else is on my mind and wanted to share it with you. I’ve prayed a lot about this. I spend a lot of time very upset about what unbelievers are doing and how they try and undermine God, how they dishonor Him etc, etc. Well, my personality type has me focusing on the bad and not on God’s glory. I become an angry, fearful Christian immersed in all the terrible stuff going on. I don’t live in His Joy nearly as much as I should. My focus is pulled away from how awesome He is to how terrible “they” are, and yes, “they” can be pretty bad sometimes.

How do we spread the Good News to the unbelieving world? What is a better testimony than being in Love with the King of Love and showing it? I like the wisdom of those that try and live so that others see their life and say, “I want what they have”.

I’m not saying that we don’t need to “battle” but I’m just bombarded with news of what the “dark side” is doing. I get several news feeds and all they seem to have is the negative news. We need to know what’s going on but the first news item should be, How Great is our God! I appreciate Daily Cup because it’s more balanced.

God is Great and He will never be defeated, ever!

In His Love,

Shelly

Thank you for your thoughts Shelly………We strive hard everyday trying to bring a balance to the news. We always first put it up to the Lord in prayer. Shelly is right on God will never be defeated.

Bill Hybels is the founding and Senior Pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois. The church began in 1975 with a handful of young people gathered in a rented movie theater and today it has grown to more than 18,000 people in attendance for the weekend services.

What We Can Learn in a Downturn
Written by: Bill Hybels
2027 12/07/08
Unless you’ve been living under a rock in recent days, you would all know that most places around the world are experiencing the most dramatic economic downturn that people of my generation have ever seen. Now, Bob Schuller survived the huge recession right after the civil war that was back in the 1870s, but I have no recollection of that and none of you do either. However, for people of my generation, this current downturn is about as bad as anything we’ve ever seen. It’s the subject of conversation at water coolers and dinner tables, so I thought it would be profitable for us to have a conversation about it in church this morning – especially in light of the recent election and the coming holidays.
I want to ask the question, “What do we learn from a downturn?” Maybe the way to jump into this is to tell you some of the things I’m learning and see if you can relate. The first lesson I learn or relearn in any downturn is that downturns are inevitable. They are inevitable in our collective economic reality.
I have two children. I have a twenty-nine-year-old son right now who’s sailing a forty-two foot sailboat around the world. He left from Michigan, through the Panama Canal, through the south Atlantic, over to Australia, and he’s just within a day or two, now, of pulling into Cape Town, South Africa. When he was preparing for his circumnavigation, he purchased a lot of heavy weather sails and gear. I kidded him one day about all of this heavy weather preparation and he said, “Dad, no one sails twenty-five thousand miles without encountering a storm. I’m not going to be the exception.” Just this last week in the Indian Ocean he took a couple of huge poundings for which I know he and I are both glad he was fully prepared. All that is to say that nobody in this church, no one watching this program, is going to go twenty-five or fifty or seventy-five years on this earth without encountering an economic storm.
We live in a broken world. We live in a world with fragile economic systems and with mistake-prone people running them. And every so often, grey clouds are going to form on the horizon, the wind will pick up, and before you know it, we’ll be in a full-blown storm. We’re in one now and the question will be, “Did you prepare for the storm you knew was going to come?”
This leads to my second lesson that I learned from downturns. Downturns ruthlessly expose any and all weaknesses in our current financial strategies.
Question: does your air conditioner ever break down when it’s cool outside, when it’s 55 degrees with a gentle breeze blowing? Of course not. It only breaks down when it’s 90 or 95, the humidity is high, and company is coming over. Any problem you ever have with your air conditioner is going to be exposed when it is put under a heavy load. The same is true in economic downturns. The load, when it comes, exposes any weakness.
So, a married couple says our zero-down adjustable rate mortgage sounded great when the seas were calm and the sun was shining. Now it feels like a noose around our neck. Or the twenty-eight-year-old with ten thousand dollars of credit card debt, school loans, a car payment and no emergency funds – well, that all feels great when the economic indicators are all green, but when they turn red, the whole house of cards starts to fall. The fifty-five-year-old sole provider loads up his 401k with risky stocks believing he’s going to beat the odds and retire comfortably when he’s sixty and then a downturn hits, and we all know what happens.
In downturns, any weakness, any shortcut, any financial high wire act is likely to be exposed and usually the consequences are very painful. I’m sure everyone I’m talking to can relate. Is the downturn, this one that we’re going through, is it shining a light on any part of your recent financial strategy? Are you thinking, are you re-thinking, are you putting together a what-am-I-learning list? I don’t think it does anybody much good to beat oneself up over what’s happened in the past months, but I do think there’s some learning to do, some underscoring to do. We’ll get into that in just a moment.
The third lesson I learned in a downturn is how reliable the Bible is in its wisdom about how to handle God’s money that he has entrusted to us. At the risk of mixing metaphors, in Chicago where I’m from we all know what a chump is. We use that expression and it’s probably used more in Chicago than in any other place in the world. But do you know what it is to be called a chump? I was feeling like a chump a while back when a friend of mine asked me, as a favor, to drive his grandmother’s car from Chicago over to his place in Michigan. It was not a cool car. It was the kind with vinyl seat covers, fuzz around the steering wheel, prayer beads hanging from the mirror, full hubcaps – you get that it was not a cool car. So, I’m doing my friend a favor, driving on the highway between Chicago and Michigan, when a young guy in a BMW convertible pulls up next to me, checks me out in grandma’s car, and disses me. I’m sure he did – he dissed me. He gave me that look of disrespect then he floored it and took off. It was like getting sand kicked in your face at the beach when you were in jr. high. But there I was, doing a favor for a friend.
I kept going the speed limit feeling like a chump when, about fifteen minutes later, I see this young guy in the BMW convertible pulled off to the side of the road. Two cop cars surround him, lights flashing, badges glistening in the sun. I didn’t feel so much like a chump anymore. Of course, I had to honk and wave when I went by and pulled on the prayer beads a little bit.
But hang onto that thought for just a second because the point I’m trying to make is that God’s money management plan revealed in the Bible is pretty straightforward and clear. Let me review the basics for you. God’s word encourages us to earn money enthusiastically and honestly. To live well within our means. To have margin in our lives. To avoid debt like the plague. That debt is not our friend and will never be our friend. To save and invest all we can. To give generously to people in need. To honor God with the first ten percent of our earnings. To give it to the church that helps you grow. And to support great ministries like this and other ministries that take the message of Christ and spread it around the world. The Bible also says that, apart from those basics, we must make sure that we’re trusting God as the supplier of our provision and not just getting God confused with our income stream. We must trust God not just our portfolios. Trust God not just our 401k plans. Follow his financial plan, trust him completely, and anticipate his full blessing. That’s God’s plan. It works famously when it’s followed. It works in fair weather and foul. It works if you’re young or if you’re old. It works if you make a lot of money or if you make just a little. It has worked for centuries. Here’s the point. When you are on God’s plan, following it carefully, following it consistently, spiritually, continuously, you start to feel like a chump. Admit it you do. You’re driving the speed limit in grandma’s car and all your friends who are on a different financial plan are flying past you, dissing you along the way. They’re all buying the bigger houses that they really can’t afford. They’re driving the better cars that they have huge payment plans. They’re wearing more fashionable clothing, taking more exotic vacations, and sending their kids to cooler places. Everyone’s whizzing by and there you are chumping along, doing it God’s way. Doing it the biblical way.
You earn money, you report all of it. You put your seventy-five dollars a week in a little savings plan. You pay cash for used cars. You resist the abuse of credit cards. You vacation in the basement with your in-laws in Peoria. You write out your tithe check to your church each week. And all the time you feel a little bit like a chump. But then, right about the time when you think you can’t do chumphood one more month, here comes a downturn. And while none of us would ever get any delight in watching someone else struggle, there’s a quiet voice in our head whispering, “Aren’t you glad you’re a chump now?” You have a six-month emergency fund and it’s all set aside. You have no credit card debt and no car payments, your mortgage is manageable, your investments are conservative, and your giving to God and his work in the world has been consistent and generous. You know the hand of God is on your life you know he’s your ultimate provider. You’ve been honoring him. You sleep like a baby at night because your economic future is in his hands. What’s not to like? And maybe I’m talking to somebody today. Maybe chumphood isn’t that bad after all.
I love what I Timothy 6, verse 17 to 19, says: “Command those who are rich in this present world (that doesn’t mean really, really rich; it just means people who have income and houses, cars, and such) not to be arrogant or to put their hope in wealth.” I love the next sentence: don’t “put your hope in wealth,” which is so uncertain. Haven’t we seen that? “But put your hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. Command (the affluent) to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share. In this way they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age, so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life.”
Life that is truly life – something more vital than just trading dollars and buying stuff. I love that passage I’ve underlined it so many times in my Bible that I’ve almost wrecked that page in the scripture. And I find that in a downturn, sometimes God whispers to us that this is the time for a do-over. This is a time to get a clean sheet of paper out. This is the time to go back to God’s financial plan and to put our faith in his wisdom and be a chump for God and secure his blessing for our current time and for our future. The fourth lesson I learn in a downturn is that God often uses financial pain to bring clarity into my mind on what really matters in this life and what doesn’t.
I’ve been the pastor of Willow Creek church for over thirty-three years now. I hear a lot of God stories. People stop me after services to tell me the activity of God in their life. Some one will say, “Everything was going along great in my life, I was having a ball at work, the charts were going up, everything looked fine, and then we lost our biggest account (or our industry changed, or our division was sold, or our company was downsized), and my position got eliminated.” You fill in the blank, but an economic storm came their way. Then the stories usually go on like this: “For the first time in my life, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know where to turn, who to turn to. I was scared, embarrassed, and all alone.” And then, here’s the turn in many of these stories: “So, for the very first time, I bought a Bible.” Or they say, “I went to a church,” or maybe they say, “I turned on a Christian television program,” or “I went to a Bible study with a friend who had been inviting me for year,” or “I talked to a Christian friend.”
The learning comes when they take a step and then they share what they learned through the church, through the Bible study, through the TV program. “I learned that I had money (or career advancement or material things) my God.” And then the story continues, “And I decided I wanted to make God my God. I wanted everything else in my life to find the right level.” So many of the stories continue with: “I wound up asking Jesus Christ to forgive my sin and to be the leader of my life and I yielded control of my life to him. I put my hand in his hand and I took hold of it never to let go of it again.”
Now, parenthetically, many of theses stories do not include in them: “God made all my financial worries go away.” In fact, most of these stories continue that there were still economic hardship but that the greater gain was coming into a relationship with God and putting him in the rightful place. I’ve heard that kind of story hundreds and hundreds of times and I have no doubt that in our current downturn a lot of people are going to come to the same realizations as in the stories I’ve heard in the past. And I think there are going to be many people some months or years from now who are going to be in a vital relationship with God because of this downturn. Maybe they’ve lost a ton of money. They’re going to look back and say, “The terrible downturn of ’08 and ’09 was what it took to bring me to faith in God and to get my faith central to my daily life. And if it took that, then so be it, but I’m glad it happened.”
Now, some of you are in the middle of excruciating financial pain right now. It’s the thing that’s in front of your face when you get up in the morning. it’s like a cloud over your head all day every day. It’s your last thought when you go to bed at night. I’m not trying to diminish the seriousness or the pain you’re feeling in any way. I’m just saying that sometimes God redeems financial pain and sometimes he uses it to bring clarity to your mind and your heart. And sometimes it’s exactly that kind of pain that helps you see the love of God in ways you’ve never seen it before. You grab his hand as you never have before and there is a greater good in all of this.
The fifth lesson that many people learn in a downturn is that less is sometimes more. In Philippians 4:11b-13, the apostle Paul he says, “…I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I’ve learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through (Christ) who gives me strength.” Don’t you love that text?
In every downturn I’ve been in, in my life, I’ve talked with people who have had to make some very tough decisions. There are people in my church right now in the last thirty days who have had to put a “for sale” sign on their dream home. Not the first home that they bought in the subdivision that they knew they were going to get out of someday, but on their final home, the dream home. There are people who have had to sell the car that they thought they were going to keep. There are people who have had to cut up their credit cards, turn off their cable service, and stop dining out. There are people who are going to the library now instead of Borders to buy books. They’re wearing fashion that is a little out of fashion. And when I’m talking to people that have made these adjustments, it surprises me, although it shouldn’t, how often I hear people say it wasn’t really as bad as I thought it was going to be.
I know a business guy who had to lighten up his load quite a bit. He recently told me that his life is a little simpler for him, actually. There’s less to worry about, less to maintain, and less to insure. And often when people have to part with some stuff in a downturn they say to me, “Relationships are taking their rightful place in my life. Relationships are becoming more central to me instead of things driving everything.” And they often say, “God seems closer to me, too.”
In a downturn, some people learn contentment on a level they’ve never known before and it’s a powerful thing. Paul says it can be learned. When you gain mastery of this contentment idea, it’s one of the most liberating dynamics in you life. Instead of the frenetic non-stop quest for more contented people, learn how to say an incredibly powerful six-letter word. The word is, “enough.” Would you say it with me? Yeah, enough square footage, enough stuff, enough clothes, enough toys, enough gadgets, enough flat screens, enough extras. Enough. Enough. That six-letter word can emancipate you from a kind of insidious addiction to an ever-escalating cycle of consumerist insanity. Contentment can set you free.
I have a grandchild now; he’s two years old and I love this little guy! Sometimes when I’m busy maintaining my stuff, this little guy is twenty or thirty feet away from me wanting to relate to me. But, I’m shining up my Harley, or I’m maintaining some other piece of property. More recently I’ve been thinking, “Why would I do this? Why wouldn’t I play with this kid?” These are the kinds of things you start to notice and pay attention to when you’re in a downturn. How sometimes less can actually be more. It can open up space in your mind and space in your heart and space in your schedule for relationships and even for God.
Sixth thing that I’ve learned in a downturn is that often other people get hurt in a downturn even more than I get hurt and I therefore have the privilege before God to help them. Every time I’m in a downturn and I think I have it bad, I run into friends or people from church or in my neighborhood who got hurt a lot worse. In the very early days of Willow Creek, my wife and I worked three years for nothing because our church had nothing. They couldn’t pay us and so we took in borders and I had a night job. It was very hard, but eventually the church could pay us a little bit. I will never forget when Lynn and I finally had saved up one thousand dollars of disposable income, which had come in twenty-dollar chunks or forty-dollar chunks from little jobs we did or some payment from the church. Right about that time when we celebrated that achievement of having a thousand dollars of disposable income, it was in the early eighties and we went in to a downturn.
At that time, new guy came to our church. We were still in the movie theater and he stopped me after the church service. He was elderly, he was broke, and he had lost his wife. Already he was very shaken by this downturn and he was going to lose his condominium. It was the only thing he had left in his life and that’s where he intended to die. And he was going to lose that condominium unless he could come up with a thousand dollars. He asked me if the church could lend him some money. I shared that the church didn’t have a thousand dollars right then, and was, in fact, in debt. He said, “Okay, I understand, I understand. Would you pray that some how, some way, God would meet this need?” I said I would and we prayed. On the way home, I thought that maybe my wife and I could meet his need – we had a thousand dollars. And so, I went home and told Lynn about it and, if you knew my wife, you would know that this was a no-brainer for her. She said, “There’s a reason why God gave us a thousand dollars; we could help this man.” And we did. And he was able to make his payment, he got a part-time job, and he wound up dying in that little condo many, many years later. But I think five or six years later he stopped us after our church had moved into our new building. He had become a Christian and wanted to pay that thousand dollars back to Lynn and me. We said, “There is no way that we would do that. God built our faith by doing what we did for you.” We felt in tune with the Holy Spirit. Jesus taught repeatedly if you have two coats give one to someone that has need. If you have extra food in the cupboard, why wouldn’t you freely share it?
What we’re learning these days at Willow Creek, during this downturn right now, we’re learning that this era in a downturn is when our church can really be the church to one another. Willow Creek’s a very large church and we have the very rich and the very poor and everyone in between. I stood up a couple weeks ago and I said, “Gang, here’s what’s going on. We’re all affected by this downturn. Some of you for the first time in your lives you are going to have to raise your hand in this church and say I need help. You used to bring food to our food pantry now you need to go to our food pantry. You used to give the extra offering that we would use to help people in need and now you’re going to have to be one of those who has to raise his hand and say I’m the one who needs the extra offering.” So, I was cheering on our church to be the church to one another. And afterwards, my staff let me know that we had hundreds and hundreds of people raise their hands to say, “Can the church help us?” Then my business manager let me know by Wednesday of that week we had the need for tens of thousands of dollars according to what we heard from all these people who were really excited about being the church to one another, at least on the receiving end.
The very next weekend, a young couple I had never met stopped me after the service. The husband said, “While you were standing up there last week saying that this is when the church has to be the church, we both felt that God whispered to us that we have plenty. We haven’t been affected by the downturn.” They gave me a check – a check for over a hundred thousand dollars. They said, “We want to help the church be the church, and when that’s gone, you come back because we have never been a part of a church that could be the church in a downturn and we are going to do everything in our power to be on that helping side.” Isn’t that a beautiful spirit?
And friends, that happens in a downturn. The dream of an Acts 2 church is the dream of an interdependent community of believers – where the rich care for the poor. It’s where people go through hard times and admit it. They don’t play church; they step up and they say, “Can you help me?” And then others say, “I can help you and it’s a joy to help you.” I predict that in the coming months, and perhaps years, the church of Jesus Christ around the world is going to have an opportunity that it hasn’t had in great financial times. It’s going to have the opportunity to meet each other’s needs and create this interdependent loving community in ways that weren’t possible when it was all up and to the right. I pray that for this congregation. I pray it for every congregation, that we will be the church to each other and to the watching world. It’ll have a powerful witness for Jesus Christ.
One more thing that I learned in a downturn, and I’ll close with this, is that whenever the season of the downturn comes to an end and the dark clouds lift and the sun peaks through and it all gets a little bit more normal, every single time that’s happened in the past, I’ve always fallen to my knees in recognition and in thanksgiving to God for having proven himself faithful to me, to the Hybels family Every single time.
We went through a downturn in the mid-seventies right when we were starting Willow Creek. There was the downturn of the early eighties. There was black Monday in 1987. There was the recession of 1991 and 1992. There was the tech crash of 2001. And, of course, all the economic trouble that happened around 9/11 (2001). I was affected by every one of those downturns in the last thirty-something years, but when they were done, I had to say God, “You know, you did meet my needs. I did have shelter through each one of those downturns. I had sufficient food, my family survived, and I’m still standing. In every other downturn, God proved himself faithful to me.
So when this downturn hit, and when I could tell it was going to be a doozy, I made a commitment. My commitment is that I’m not going to wait until after this economic thing corrects itself before I declare my faith in a faithful God. I’m not going to wait until all of the smoke clears and the dust settles and then be anxious every single day between now and that day when it all works itself out. I’m not going to wait until the end this time. Every day when I get up I’m going to say, “God, you were faithful to me and my family and our church in every other downturn. I believe by faith that you’re going to be faithful to me and our family and our church during this one. And I’m going to trust you in this storm, through this storm, while the waters are raging, and while the wind is still howling. Maybe there’s someone in this congregation who wants to take that same kind of pledge. To say, “From this day forward, I’m going to declare my faith in the providing hand of our great God. I’m going to trust him and not cave in to fear. I’m going to walk with him hand in hand and not let go and fall into the abyss of discouragement. I am going to trust him every day in every situation until this whole situation works itself out”. Anyone in agreement with a pledge like that? Yes, I am. I think we all are.
It brings me back to a song that I watched my father sing, and he’s been in heaven now for a long time. But when I was a little kid in Faith Christian Reform Church in Kalamazoo, Michigan, we’d sing a great hymn: “Great is thy faithfulness, oh God my Father…” And my brother and I would be standing there screwing around, not paying much attention, and we’d look up at my dad and see this very powerful business guy singing with a tear running down his cheek. I’ve never forgotten that. I thought, “Oh man, he’s seen God be faithful for a longer time then I have. He’s got more to sing about. He’s had many more life experiences where the faithfulness of God proved itself and that’s why he’s singing the way he’s singing and my brother and I are not singing at all.”
Many of you have seen God be faithful through a whole lot of stuff. And we’re going to end this service by giving all of you an opportunity to express your faith in the faithful God as we sing this great closing hymn, “Joy to the World!”

May the Peace and Strength of the Lord be with you and yours, Dewey Sharon and family

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