Jack & Phylis MourningIn the Spring of 1997, during prayer the Lord spoke to me. He said, “Son, I have noticed you watching your 401k account to see if it has increased in value. If you invest your money in My Kingdom, do you think I can give you a greater return on it?” I said, “Sure,” not knowing exactly where this conversation was leading.
Phylis and I have three daughters, our oldest was a senior in high school at the time. As with most families, saving for college was a challenge. We had just begun to put some money in a college fund and we wondered how we would ever have enough when the time came for each of our girls to go to college.
We lived in Kentucky at the time and a young couple who attended our church had been praying about God’s will for their lives. They felt God calling them to leave everything and go to the Ukraine as missionaries. They sold their house, took a two-year leave of absence from his architectural firm, and began preparing to take their two young children half-way around the world.
As the Lord began to whisper to me that day in prayer, He told me He was not asking me to give up everything and go to the Ukraine as my friend Allen was. But He was asking me to support Allen’s ministry. God impressed on me to give an amount that was five times larger than any single gift Phylis and I had ever given. It would exhaust most of the savings we had been accumulating for college expenses. But God invited me to watch this investment grow. I had prayed. I had heard. I had to obey.
This coming May will see the end of a seven-year stretch during which each of our three daughters graduated from college. And God supplied every penny. If we had allowed fear and doubt to keep us from obeying the voice of God, that little college fund that we had started 10 years ago would never have been enough on its own. But just like Jesus’ parable of the loaves and fishes, when we placed what little we had in God’s Hands, there was more than enough to go around. The return on our investment was amazing.You can never out-give God!
Richard & Carolyn MillerGrowing up the son of an Assemblies of God preacher, I learned to give at such an early age that it never crossed my mind to do anything else but give tithes and offerings to God’s work. Our family never missed an opportunity to give from the resources with which God had blessed us.
After Carol and I married I quickly learned she felt the same way I did—you can’t go wrong giving to the Lord’s work. In all of our 27 years of marriage we have faithfully and cheerfully worshiped the Lord by bringing His tithe and our offerings to Him. God has proven His word is true and blessed us beyond our ability to comprehend it. It has been such a blessing to look back and see the fruit of seeds planted along the way. God has blessed us with health and happiness. He has done just as His word declares in Malachi 3:10 “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in My house, and test Me now in this, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open for you the windows of heaven, and pour out for you a blessing until it overflows.”
Early in 2005, Pastor Scott announced we needed $600,000 to pay for our sewer connection and new parking spaces because of the tremendous growth we were experiencing in our church. Pastor Scott said he felt God was giving the people of our church an entrepreneurial spirit and that we should be sensitive to the opportunities the Lord would send our way in the weeks and months to come. That very week three unusual opportunities came to me. Carol and I felt God wanted us to give a certain amount that was the largest single offering we had ever given. We cheerfully gave that exact amount with excitement in our hearts. With just one of the three opportunities mentioned above, God returned to us a little more than double what we had given towards these projects.
If we were to write about all the things God has done for us in 2005, it would take many pages. I believe God has great things planned for The Oaks Fellowship in the next few months and years—more than we can even begin to imagine. What a thrill and blessing it is to be a part of God’s plan and to be a vessel that He can use to channel His funds for ministry opportunities.
