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If you’re going to contribute anything to anybody’s life

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you gotta care, you gotta love and then invest what you do have

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I have to decide that my Saturday afternoon where I'm used to taking a nap,

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I'm willing to sit in a living room with a bunch of people and talk about Jesus.

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I'm also willing to go out in the back yard 

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to a young man who is playing catch football with himself

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whether this is an unbelieving child in the neighborhood

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or one of our own children that just wandered out there and no one else is out there yet.

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I have to get up from whatever it is I'm doing 

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and go say, “Ya know, the kingdom of God is kind of like throwing a football up in the air. 

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You throw it up in the air and when it comes down there's fifty people there to catch it.

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I'm not an alien substance to them as some other generation that doesn't understand. 

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I'm out there giving myself away.

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These kinds of things you actually end up with enough energy to do it 

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when you see their smiles, and when you watch them change 

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and when you see them give their life away to Jesus at some later point. 

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It's these small things, a conscious effort to say

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if I give my life away it’ll come back multiplied. 

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It will. It will. It will.  

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But if I sit at home theorizing about it 

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and waiting until Sunday night's meeting to talk about something that I read last Tuesday

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it’ll never happen. 

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All this stuff that we're talking about has to do with practically, literally, giving away the smallest pieces of your life 

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which involve time, health, and money resources 

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The stuff of life is the stuff you give away.

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I don’t have great stuff, but what I have is some time, some love because God invests in that. 

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It’s just the process of going to the cross and sacrificing something I do have.

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my time, my space, my reputation if need be, all my money

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Give everything you own and give to the poor.. What’s that?

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The widow with two mites is the only one Jesus noticed because she gave away everything. 

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He didn't care about the amount of money. He cared about the content of her heart.

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And she did in secret what the Father is shouting now from the rooftops.

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Everybody does that - you have ekklesia.  You have a People, rather than a bunch of persons.