UNHINDERED | The Holy Pursuit of Money

Speaker: Justin Gingrich

Sermon date: September 13, 2026

Scripture: Acts 4:32-5:11

Series: UNHINDERED

Sermon summary

The desire for money isn’t necessarily greed. Acts 5 asks a more revealing question: what are we willing to do to get what we want? Manipulate, lie, put ourselves first, or exploit the trust of others? Ananias and Sapphira expose the danger of pursuing money, reputation, and spiritual status through deception.

Greed also creates spiritual hierarchies, teaching us to rank people by wealth, influence, and importance. When those hierarchies take root in the church, they become dangerous to the people of God.

More from our UNHINDERED series · Watch all sermons

Sermon transcript

Lightly edited from automatic captions for readability. Some transcription errors may remain; the recording is the authoritative version. Select a timestamp to open that moment on YouTube.

0:04 — Good morning, Restore. My name is Tolu, and it is my joy to read our Scripture this morning. Our reading will be from Acts 4:32 through 5:11.

All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. With great power, the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. From time to time, those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales, and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.

Joseph, a Levite from Cyprus, whom the apostles called Barnabas, which means “son of encouragement,” sold a field he owned and brought the money and put it at the apostles’ feet.

1:04 — Now a man named Ananias, together with his wife Sapphira, also sold a piece of property. With his wife’s full knowledge, he kept back part of the money for himself but brought the rest and put it at the apostles’ feet.

Then Peter said, “Ananias, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land? Didn’t it belong to you before it was sold? And after it was sold, wasn’t the money at your disposal? What made you think of doing such a thing? You have not just lied to human beings, but to God.”

When Ananias heard this, he fell down and died. And great fear seized all who heard what had happened. Then some young men came forward, wrapped up his body, and carried him out and buried him.

1:58 — About three hours later, his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. Peter asked her, “Tell me, is this the price you and Ananias got for the land?”

“Yes,” she said, “that is the price.”

Peter said to her, “How could you conspire to test the Spirit of the Lord? Listen, the feet of the men who buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out also.”

At that moment, she fell down at his feet and died. Then the young men came in and, finding her dead, carried her out and buried her beside her husband. Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events.

This is the word of the Lord.

2:38 — Let’s pray.

Father, we love you. Thank you for bringing us here this morning. We ask for mercy, Father. We ask for your kindness and your goodness with us. We ask that your Spirit would be here, redeeming and guiding and convicting and upholding. Father, would you help us to continue to declare your goodness boldly and unhindered?

Father, I pray especially this morning, as we talk about a difficult passage, would you relieve our fears? Would you help us not to be afraid to see that even here there is life, abundant life, that you desire to give us? Father, would you give us hearts of generosity, not of greed, but of trust and intimacy with one another? Not where we have to gain leverage over one another, manage one another, or even manage our image before one another, but where we trust one another in true love, intimacy, and vulnerability. Father, we need your help with that. We pray all of this in your name. Amen.

3:45 — You guys can be seated. As we get ready to jump into this passage this morning, I want to start by asking you a question. The question is this: Why are you spiritually malnourished? Okay. I’ll let you sit with that for a second. But when I think of my spiritual life, if somebody were to ask me, “Is your spiritual life healthy and full, or do you feel malnourished? Do you feel like maybe there’s more, or there could be more than there is? Do you feel kind of complacent? Where are you spiritually?”

As you think about that question, I want to propose this to you: I believe, as a pastor, that one of the reasons we find ourselves spiritually malnourished, one of the reasons we sometimes find our faith just boring, or uncompelling, has a lot to do with the fact that we do not know how to get what we want.

5:07 — I actually think a big reason we have disconnection in our spiritual lives is that we have an unhealthy relationship with our desires. When we have an unhealthy relationship with our desires, we find ourselves more insecure than we ought to be. We find ourselves leveraging more than we ought to be. And here’s the truth: I think we find ourselves clinging and holding on to things more than we ought to be.

So, as we look at this story this morning, I want to ask you: How do you fulfill your desires? The church has had a very complicated relationship with desire. It has a complicated relationship with sex. It has a complicated relationship with money. And these two teachings have done great damage in the lives of our souls.

6:00 — What I want this morning is for us to find life. I want us to find the genuine, actual life that the Spirit offers us and desires to give us, particularly in our relationship with money.

Here’s the thing: None of us wants to be greedy. That’s not how any of us wants to be remembered. When our kids are thinking about us, they don’t want to say, “Yeah, Mom was always greedy. Dad was so greedy.” None of us wants that legacy. The reality is that all of us, I think, desire to have a healthy relationship with money.

And yet our relationship with money brings so much anxiety into our lives. It brings so much guilt into our lives. And it brings secrecy into our lives. So this morning, I want to invite us into the life the Spirit gives us. Would you ask him right now to help you with this?

6:57 — As I mentioned, I didn’t want to preach this story. In my original preaching plan, I took it out. Then I realized that there are a few stories in Acts that are crucial, key moments for understanding the entire story as a whole. This is one of them.

But here’s the thing: I told you I hate preaching about money. I preached about money for the first time in four years last December. That’s how long it took me to work up the courage to do it. Like you, I’ve seen so many unhealthy relationships with it. I’ve seen pastors abuse it, and I got so far away that I thought, “I don’t even want to get close to it.”

But I will tell you this: As difficult as this story is, it actually made me excited to preach about it, to talk about it, and to share it with you. There is real reassurance and life that this story offers.

Ironically, when I really began to dive into it, I did what I do whenever I get insecure about something: I bought about ten books and read them. As I went through these books, I finally began to understand some of the deeper things happening in this text, how beautiful and life-giving they actually are, and how invitational they are to us.

8:19 — What I want this morning is for our desires around money to be healthy and whole. I don’t want us to feel guilty for the wealth we have, and I don’t want us to feel guilty for what we’re not giving.

Let me say that again. I don’t want us to feel guilty for what we have, for what we’ve earned, for what we’ve done, for what we’ve accomplished, or for the success we’ve known. And, look, I mean I do not want us to feel guilty for what we’re not giving. Neither of these is a healthy, good place to be.

If you feel guilty for what you’re not giving, then you’ll just give out of guilt, which is never good. You’re just doing something because you feel guilty. Even relationally, we know that isn’t healthy.

Or we’ll have success, and God will bless the efforts of our hands, and we’ll find ourselves with wealth, but we’ll have an unhealthy relationship with it. We’ll feel guilty for having it. It’s like feeling guilty for being happy. Either of these is a very unhealthy place spiritually. I do not believe this is where the Spirit wants us to land as a church or as Christians.

So we’re going to look at how we fulfill the desires of our hearts, because God has given them to us. That’s why I titled the sermon “The Holy Pursuit of Money.” That doesn’t feel right, does it? The idea of pursuing money feels evil to us, and it’s not. Nowhere in Scripture does it say that. There are plenty of people who pursue wealth and pursue success. That doesn’t mean it is inherently evil.

I want us to have a healthier relationship with what we want. I tried to cram way too much into the sermon. I thought, “We can do this with sex. We can do this with money.” We’re going to do it just with money this morning.

10:07 — What I want us to do is have a healthy, life-giving, whole relationship with the blessings God has given us, so that when we give, we don’t do it out of guilt, and when we enjoy them, we freely enjoy them. We don’t feel as though we have to be secretive about them or hide them.

I think if we could learn these two things, we would find a great deal of balance in our spiritual lives. We would find ourselves more trusting of the church and of others. So, this morning, we’re going to look at what really happens in this story.

Proverbs 19:22 tells us this. This goes back to the first question I asked you to remember as we started this passage: What did they do?

Proverbs 19:22 says, “What a person desires is unfailing love; better to be poor than a liar.”

What a person desires is unfailing love. We’re talking about desire here. The desire of our hearts is unconditional, unbounded, unfailing love, acceptance, and embrace. Knowing this, it turns out that it is better to be poor than a liar.

Here’s what happens with these two individuals in the story, Ananias and Sapphira. Peter’s concern about what they have done isn’t the fact that they didn’t give more. I want to point this out. Peter doesn’t come to them and say, “You should have given everything like Barnabas did. Why didn’t you give more?” Peter’s concern is that they were willing to lie to get what they wanted. Do you see the difference here?

As I was going through all these books and sermons this week, trying to figure out what I was going to say, I finally found a definition of greed that I like. When I say I like it, I mean that I think it is healthy. I think it reflects what the Scriptures say about greed.

Here’s the definition of greed that I want to give you this morning. We’ll see how Ananias and Sapphira were greedy, and it wasn’t because they had land. It wasn’t because they sold the land. It wasn’t because they wanted to keep the money for themselves. None of those things made them greedy. What made them greedy was their deception.

I found this definition of greed from a pastor in California: Greed is not measured by how much you have. It is not measured by the land you own. It is not measured by the land you sell. It is not measured by how well you do in the stock market. It is measured by what you are willing to do to get there.

Let me say that again: Greed is not measured by what you have. It is measured by what you are willing to do to get what you want. It is measured by what you are willing to do to go after the desires of your heart.

13:02 — So, right off the bat, for those of you who are Type A personalities, who work hard, who might have endured long hours in undergraduate or graduate school, or who might work long hours at the office: You are the reliable, dependable person. You work hard at living a life of integrity, and you’ve been rewarded for that financially. Don’t feel ashamed of that.

Ambition, drive, and success are not greed. I don’t think we should define those things as greed. If we do, we start to cut our own feet out from underneath us.

I remember wrestling with this, and I still do as a pastor. Especially early in my career, there was this assumption from some people that you were wrong for being a lead pastor simply because you had the job. They assumed you were power-hungry and ambitious, that you wanted to grow a church and get book contracts and all of that.

For the longest time, I was afraid of my own ambition to grow Restore. I tried to be humble about it: “I want to grow, but not too big. I want success, but not too much.” But can I tell you the spiritual fruit of that in my own life? I’m going to be honest with you for a second. My family struggled. We struggled to pay bills and keep things running. I had to get a second job at one point. I didn’t get to see my kids on the weekend because I was working, because I was afraid. I was afraid of my own ambition.

Part of what we do, as Willie James Jennings says, is lump together these desires of our hearts and label the whole thing sinful.

But some of you have wealth because you were wise. You figured out the right investments. You put in the homework. You were patient. You saved. And all of a sudden, we feel guilty for the fact that we labored long hours in graduate school or laid a foundation for a career, and now we’re experiencing some success. We’re recognized for the value we bring to our company, and we start to feel guilty for it.

I don’t think this is biblical at all. Yet I do think this is how we start to think of money. We start to think of the pursuit of money as evil, and I just don’t think you see evidence of that in the Scriptures.

15:13 — What Ananias and Sapphira do, which Peter objects to, is what they are willing to do in order to get what they want. You want a big church? Great. Go for a big church, but make sure you don’t start compromising along the way. You want to be successful financially? That’s great. But all of us know people who are willing to cut corners and make compromises. What do they do? They do what Ananias and Sapphira do. They bring great destruction to a community. They grow suspicion. They grow distrust.

I’m willing to bet every single one of us knows somebody like that in our workplace. What I don’t want us to do is confuse ambition, drive, and success with greed. I think we start making ourselves feel guilty for being human, and that’s never good. That’s never healthy.

In Matthew 5:15, Jesus says, “People do not light a lamp and put it under a bowl.” Look, if you’re good at what you do, don’t try to falsely humble yourself because you’re afraid of being too successful or because someone has convinced you that it’s wrong.

Abraham, whom I mentioned earlier, is blessed by God with great wealth throughout his life. There are moments when Abraham is faithful to God, and God gives to him generously. What made Abraham the father of faith was that, even with all of his wealth, he stayed hospitable. He stayed generous.

Some of you know Abraham’s story, but he is always kind of contrasted with his nephew Lot. The two live parallel lives, but Lot keeps going one way and Abraham keeps going the other way. One of the distinctions that pulls Lot this way and Abraham that way is that Lot repeatedly puts himself first in order to gain, while Abraham is willing to take second place in order to keep peace and preserve the relationship. He’s willing to give things away in order to make peace with enemies. We see this often in Abraham’s life.

The difference between the two isn’t that one had wealth and the other didn’t, because they both had wealth. It’s how they operate their lives with the wealth God has given them.

17:37 — So when Proverbs 19:22 says, “What a person desires is unfailing love; better to be poor than a liar,” most of our greed comes out of a desire to be respected or to be happy. I think people get greedy for one of these two reasons.

These are the things we buy into. If I want to be more respected or happy, I have to be successful. So we often make the acquisition of things, both success and money, our highest priority. They are very closely connected with each other. They’re not always the same, but they are closely connected.

We make this our highest drive: “If I can gain success here, then I will be accepted. If I can gain this amount of money, if I can be seen in this kind of car, then I’ll be accepted.” For a lot of us, it’s our parents. You’re working and working and working for your parents’ approval. You’re just waiting to hear your mom or dad finally say, “Look, you made it. Good job. I’m impressed with what you have.”

This is a lie that confuses us, but it seduces us. It convinces us that we ought to do anything in order to gain acceptance or respect.

Truthfully, this is what led to the housing crisis around 2010. I was graduating from college at that time. I couldn’t find a job because the economy was in shambles. But what was floating around during that time? “It’s better to be a liar than a renter.” That’s the whole philosophy that got us into the trouble we had. As long as I’m not renting, it doesn’t matter what I have to do to be successful, even if that means being a liar. It’s better to be a liar than to be a renter. Then the entire economy collapsed under that idea.

This is why Proverbs says it is better to be poor than a liar.

19:34 - We have ambition. We have drive. We pursue success. But it is better to have those things with integrity than to gain those things and lose our integrity. This is why I think Jesus says, “What does it profit a person to gain the whole world but lose their soul?”

Jesus isn’t saying, “Don’t be successful.” He’s saying, “Look, pursue these things, these desires of your heart, but make sure that as you pursue them, you don’t make spiritual compromises along the way that damage your soul and the souls of the people around you.”

20:07 — This leads to another idea about wealth that I think we buy into, and we’re not quite sure what to do with it: “If I could just have a little bit more, then I’d be okay.”

Gallup did an interesting poll a couple of years ago. They asked people how much more money they needed to be happy. What they found was that the average amount people asked for was $10,000. But here’s the thing: It didn’t matter which income bracket you were in. Everybody thought, “Another ten thousand will make me happy.” Some people making thirty thousand said another ten would make them happy. People making one hundred twenty thousand said another ten would make them happy.

Obviously, the standard is changing. The authors concluded that our perception of whether we’re doing okay has very little to do with how much we actually have.

We see this in Ananias and Sapphira. They sell their land. Peter says, “You could have kept what you wanted and given what you wanted.” But they wanted more acceptance and more recognition, so they were willing to act deceptively to get it.

21:08 — Gregg Easterbrook, an author, did something similar. He asked people how much money they needed to be happy. What he found was that each income bracket said, “I need to double my income in order to be happy.” Somebody making thirty thousand said, “I need to make sixty, then I’ll be happy.” Somebody making sixty said, “I need one hundred twenty, then I’ll be happy.”

Again, it’s the same thing the Gallup poll found. How content or whole you feel has very little to do with what you have. Just like Ananias and Sapphira when they sold their field, their contentment and their desire to be part of the community had very little to do with what they had or what they were willing to give. It had everything to do with how they could leverage themselves to be accepted.

We don’t know their motives for doing this, but we assume it was something along the lines of wanting acceptance in the community or respect. Barnabas had sold his field. They probably saw the love and trust Barnabas gained from that. Maybe they wanted that too.

22:05 — Ecclesiastes 5:10 tells us, “Whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income. This too is meaningless.”

Here’s what I want us to take away from this: In our pursuit of wealth, we have to understand that just because we gain more doesn’t mean it will give us what we want. Especially if we’re willing to sell our own souls to get there. Especially if we’re willing to lie to get there. Especially if we’re willing to create suspicion in our community to get there.

David Stubbs, a theologian I quoted a couple of weeks ago, says what I think most of us need as we wrestle with money: “Israel rejects God not because they want to be more, but rather because they’re willing to settle for less.”

I think we do the same thing with our money. Our money and our pursuit of it, at the end of the day, aren’t about how much more we get. We find over and over again that how much we get is relatively irrelevant to how content we feel with what God has given us or how we use what God has given us.

I think the problem with our money isn’t that we need more. It’s that we’re actually willing to settle for far less than God wants us to have. We’re willing to settle for far less than what God desires to give us, which is a life of wholeness and generosity and connection.

We might have more, but at the end of the day, I think we’re actually settling for less. More doesn’t necessarily mean more. In fact, in God’s kingdom, more can sometimes mean settling for far less.

23:49 — As we look at how the community was impacted, remember our first question: What did they actually do? Their crime wasn’t that they sold the land and didn’t give it all away. Listen to this for a second: Their crime was not that they didn’t give away more money.

In almost every sermon about money, not every one, but a lot of them, there comes a point when the pastor says, “You need to be giving more.” That wasn’t their crime. Peter says, “You could have kept whatever you wanted.” Their crime, the thing that brought death, division, distrust, and suspicion into the community, was that they were willing to sell their souls in order to get what they wanted.

For those of us who want to achieve and see success in our lives, here’s the thing: Getting it by making compromises in our souls will never actually give us what we want. The more we wanted actually becomes our settling for far less.

The second question I want us to ask is: How was the community impacted? Only intimacy and trust can protect a community against leveraging, managing, and manipulation.

25:03 — This is why [word unclear] is saying, “You do not have to hide here.” There are deep biblical truths behind that. I do not want us to feel as though we have to gain leverage over one another to gain permission.

I love that about you because I do think you reflect genuine humility. There aren’t families at Restore where people say, “Those are the so-and-sos. You’ve got to know them if you want to get anything done around here.” I love our board. Board members serve, and a lot of the time, people don’t even know they’re on the board. Not because we’re being secretive, but because they’re playing bass rather than saying, “Serve me.” They are serving others. They are volunteering with the kids.

At the end of the day, people don’t look at them and think, “You’ve got to get to know those people in order to get something here. If you want your way, if you want to be respected here, if you want to be accepted here, start getting to know them.”

Some of the most unhealthy church environments I’ve been in had that aspect to them. The youth group I grew up in was toxic to its core. It took me years of therapy to work through it. Why? Because there were cool kids the pastor liked and everybody else. If you weren’t in that group, you were in this outside group. It was very obvious.

Obviously, I was in that outside group. There were rings, and I just kept getting pushed farther and farther out until, eventually, in college, I said, “You know what? I’m just going to renounce all of my faith. I don’t believe any of it anymore.”

There was a hierarchy. Social and spiritual hierarchies are so dangerous in a church.

26:15 — Ananias and Sapphira are playing the hierarchy game. They’re trying to bring hierarchy in. Barnabas sells his field. I imagine that generated real trust in the community because of his sincerity. They looked at that and said, “I want a little bit of that, but I’m not going to do everything he did to get there. I’m going to compromise a little bit here. I’m going to compromise a little bit there.”

This is how their greed starts to bring death to the community. They start to create a community where there is hierarchy, where I have to fall in line somewhere and wonder, “Where do I fit in this?”

26:58 — In Acts 4:33, we read a little of the preceding chapter because these stories go together. Luke tells us there was no need among the people because of their generosity. The word he uses is that there was “great grace.”

Careful commentators will tell you this isn’t necessarily God giving them grace. He has already done that. This grace they are giving is the embodiment of God’s goodness to one another.

Luke says that if you want to see a healthy spiritual community, look at the grace being fostered, cultivated, embodied, and created among its members, so that those who had need didn’t have it and those who had could give. That’s what a community is. It wasn’t about leveraging. It was, in fact, about giving.

27:45 — Money is not evil. In fact, careful commentators, including Willie James Jennings, will tell you that the money in Acts 4 starts doing what money usually doesn’t do. It starts bringing people together. It brings people into a place of trusting one another. It starts breaking down barriers. It starts breaking down division. It causes them, in vulnerability and love, to begin trusting one another.

As I invite the band back up and we get ready to close, we’re going to take an offering this morning. I’ll talk a little bit more about that. I know you’re thinking, “He’s going to ask for money. Watch.” I am. But wait.

Here’s the thing: You’re thinking, “Man, so God just wiped these guys out? They lied and then they died? What is this about? That seems very harsh.” I struggled with this. I have always struggled with this story for this reason. What is God’s Spirit doing here?

It wasn’t until I read Beverly Roberts Gaventa, one of my favorite commentators, that I began to see it. She pointed out that we read that Satan moves in Ananias and Sapphira. This isn’t actually about them at all. This is about Satan’s opposition to the church. And, just like Judas, there is no place for this. There is no place for deception. There is no place for leveraging.

The two times in Luke’s account of the church and in the Gospel of Luke when Satan enters a community, it is surrounded by money and greed. What does Judas do? He betrays Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. We see money play into it. But it’s not just that the money is there. It’s that people start leveraging, using, and manipulating to get what they want. That’s what Judas does.

She says this is actually a war between God and Satan. Ananias and Sapphira become Satan’s pawns in this. This has very little to do with them. At the end of the day, this is about Satan trying to destroy the community, the trust, and the love of the people of God.

29:51 — What I want to suggest this morning is that church isn’t about how much we suppress our desires. I think we’ve grown up with a shallow view of Christianity that says church is where we bring our desires in. [Transition unclear.] We figure out how to pursue those longings of our hearts safely and truthfully with one another.

Let me say that again: That’s what Ananias and Sapphira failed to do. That’s what Barnabas does. It’s not about how much you can deny yourself. It’s about how much you can pursue the deep desires of your heart among these people, safely and truthfully. It’s about how much I can pursue and how much I can live into what God is doing for me.

30:42 — We read this at the very beginning in Genesis. God says to Adam and Eve, “You may freely eat of any tree in the garden except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” That word freely is a Hebrew expression. It’s hard to translate, but it is God saying, “You can indulge in anything your heart desires.”

That’s how he sets up the Garden of Eden: a relentless pursuit of your desires, but desires pursued in a way that brings wholeness, love, and connection to God’s people, not division, leveraging, managing, and social hierarchies. Those are toxic for God’s people. They bring death to God’s people.

That’s what Ananias and Sapphira ultimately did. They brought death to God’s community because of their willingness to gain leverage over one another to get what they wanted.

31:34 — We are going to take an offering this morning, but this morning is a special offering. If you follow us on social media, you know we partner with a couple of community organizations. One is Casa Grande, an affordable housing community about four minutes from here. The YMCA also partners with them, and I serve on the board of directors here at the YMCA.

Last Saturday, their community experienced a devastating fire. Three families were impacted. Eight children were impacted. The oldest is only thirteen, and the youngest, listen, is just two weeks old.

I went out on Thursday and spent some time with Mama and baby. She is two weeks postpartum. That’s when you should be healing and resting, getting to nurture your little one in a safe environment. They have nothing.

When I met with Cynthia, the property manager, on Thursday, they had found a crib from a neighbor that the baby was sleeping in. But there were no beds. There were no bottles. They lost everything. The fire started in one apartment and spread to two others. Another apartment is home to a single mother with three children. They have nothing.

We’re going to show a quick video, and we’re going to take an offering. Here’s the thing: Everything you give today through tomorrow at midnight, one hundred percent of it, goes to those families. Anything you put in the plate today, anything you give by scanning the QR code, or anything you give on our website between now and tomorrow at midnight will go directly to those families. It will go directly to making sure that Mama and baby are cared for in this time of need.

33:12 — We know what it’s like to lose everything. We’re coming up on the two-year anniversary of our church theft. For those of you who weren’t here for that, somebody stole our church trailer and everything we owned. The only thing we had was an iPad that Lindsey had left in her car and hadn’t put in the trailer like we usually did. That was the only thing the church owned.

We know what it’s like to lose, and then to have the love of a community come around and help us get back on our feet. Paul tells us that we have been comforted so that we can bring that same comfort to others. Church, what I want us to do this morning and over the next forty-eight hours is bring the same comfort God brought us in our time of need to these families.

We’ll watch this short video, and then our ushers will pass the offering plates.

34:46 — Yeah, it happened Saturday around nine o’clock. I got a phone call from the resident that an apartment was on fire. I had to run over here and try to see how bad the situation was.

This is where the baby was sleeping, in this room. All her stuff got wet. It was all flooded in here. Flooded. They had to cut the roof open to try to put the fire out because it was already spreading to the second apartment next door.

She probably wasn’t able to take anything. We trashed everything. All her groceries, all the food, some food is there.

When something like this happens, about how long would it take them to rebuild? Would they even be able to rebuild without help?

No, there are no words for that, to be honest. It will take a while for them.

Cynthia, tell us a little bit more about this property and the families that live here.

Casa Grande has been in partnership with the YMCA for the past twelve-plus years. We’ve been with the Y and, of course, with your help as well with Harvey and the other stuff we’ve had going on here at the property.

We had a fire over the weekend. Everything was destroyed. We had three families who lost everything. One, in particular, has a two-week-old baby. So here we are, asking Pastor to see if he could come and help us with something for the families, especially the baby and the mom. As you all can see, she just gave birth, and it’s hard. It’s hard on all three families.

36:29 — Restore, this is an opportunity to ensure that they can rebuild their lives and that they do not have to do it alone. There are a couple of ways you can help. You can go to our website. We have set up a special page for this giving opportunity. We have an Amazon wish list that will go to each of the three families impacted by this.

You can also go to our giving page, [restorehouston.org/give](https://restorehouston.org/give), and give there. One hundred percent of your donations will go to helping these families rebuild their lives. Just make sure that when you give, it is designated to the Casa Grande Fire Relief Fund.

Restore, I know that you are a generous church. I know that we can do this. Let’s make sure these families don’t rebuild alone. Let’s be the presence and embody the goodness of God through it all. Let’s sing of the goodness of God together as a church.

37:59 — As we’re passing out the baskets, I want to quote Paul and say, “Give joyfully.” There is no compulsion to give out of guilt. If you’re not in a place to give right now, that’s okay. No one is judging. You can pass the basket along.

As we move into the next portion of our worship service, we’re going to take communion. We take communion at Restore the way we do because I truly believe, as Paul writes, that we, as one body, participate in the one bread together.

This is a moment when, as a church, we get to come together. We’re not leveraging, manipulating, hiding, lying, or trying to figure out who’s who to know around here. Everybody, including me, our board members, and our kids ministry volunteers, gets to come to the table of Jesus as one body in vulnerability, trust, and intimacy together.

38:46 — We have someone from our community lead communion each month to help us see this. Tolu is going to lead communion for us this morning. Friends, you are the body of Christ with Tolu. You share a church with her. You share a body of Christ with her.

So this morning, we’ll listen to Tolu’s heart as she shares what you mean to her as her body in Christ. We will celebrate what God has done for us together as a community, as one church, as we participate in the one bread. Watch the communion video now.

39:33 — Restore started to feel like my church when I started to feel less and less of a need to perform.

I have always been someone who wanted to bring joy and comfort to others and make them feel safe. It got to a point where, if I couldn’t make them laugh or smile or satisfy some need of theirs, I took it as a personal failure.

Being a person who wants to bring joy and comfort to others is not a bad thing. But here at Restore, I had to learn to reassess the reasoning and intention behind that. I’ve learned to become okay and just relax in the awkward silences and in not knowing what to say. Now I’m learning to let go of that responsibility, and it has allowed me to bask fully in the joy of others.

40:47 — I feel like I see it more and more every day and with every experience I have in this church and with the people here. Like I said earlier, taking on that personal need to be someone who brings joy to others didn’t allow me to look at myself, my own vulnerability, and who I am without the expectation that I placed on myself for other people.

I’m learning to let go and stop watching people’s expressions so closely. I’m learning to stop watching how bright their smiles are or whether they’re looking away too much. Like I said before, I’m learning to enjoy those awkward silences with people and just be present with them as they are, as I’ve welcomed them to be.

I’m also allowing myself to be as I am with them and not worrying or overthinking whether the person I am is good enough.

42:09 — What I have come to love and enjoy about Restore is the love. I firmly believe that God knows best what the hearts of his children need and that where his love is, he is.

No matter their circumstances or their condition, or even [wording unclear], as long as his love is there, he will show them what they need and provide it for them.

For me, like I said, it’s the love. I want others to experience that love. Even as it has revealed some uncomfortable truths for me that I’ve had to reconcile with, the love has also soothed me through his people here. I would really love for others to come and experience that comfort and love as well.