Session 5
How Much Are We to Give?
Session 5 Videos
Testimonies
“It gives me great pleasure to endorse this curriculum, and I endorse it because of the two men who conceived and constructed it. I know few people who are so committed to truth and believe that God provides wisdom for every financial decision and every decision in life. Russ and Ken are two Giants of Faith and I endorse them in this curriculum with total confidence of its powerful message that will transform lives.”
“I’m grateful for Ken Boa and Russ Crosson writing their book, Leverage, which provides very practical ways of living and giving generously. What a blessing to also have this interactive Study Guide and video-based curriculum to encourage each of us in our own financial stewardship & generosity journey as we hear inspiring stories from people who are leveraging their time, talents, treasure, and influence to bring more of God’s Kingdom here on Earth as it is in Heaven.”
“What a wonderful joy and privilege to be a part of the Leverage series. The focus of this important resource is on the faithful stewardship of the resources God places in our hands in such a way that leaves a legacy of generosity while placing the spotlight on lasting, eternal values. This is such an important, timely, and helpful gift. So grateful for the emphasis and message of the Leverage series!”
Leverage Tips
Experiencing God’s Provision: A Personal Journey
The speaker shares a personal journey of experiencing God’s provision during a financially challenging time in grad school. Despite hardships, he chose to give generously and witnessed blessings. He uses his experiences to inspire others in church activities, emphasizing God’s faithfulness and the benefits of giving. His life story serves as a testament to God’s provision, with a desire to pass this message to future generations.
Read Stories of Generosity
Steve & Linda
What happens when a couple draws a line in the sand and ends up giving more than they keep?
"Drawing a Line in the Sand" - Steve & Linda
What if you gave away more money than you ever anticipated? What if you actually gave away more than you kept?
For some people, giving is itself a natural gift, embedded in their DNA. For others, like Steve and Linda, it’s a joy that was only discovered after some hard truths — about money and its purpose, materialism, and the journey not to just find Jesus, but to live a life as a disciple for His kingdom and not the world’s.
Steve achieved financial success at a young age in his career and life. With an income approaching seven figures and a very comfortable lifestyle, he thought everything was “pretty well set.” And when he went into his first planning meeting with his advisor, he assumed he would hear that he was on cruise control as far as future financial security. That wasn’t the case. The short story is that after learning how much he’d have to continue making to fund his current lifestyle and future retirement, Steve had an epiphany, suddenly realizing that “enough is never enough.”
“When I left the meeting, I went and prayed for several hours,” says Steve. “Linda and I knew that we needed to go in the opposite direction. I kept thinking about a quote I liked: ‘The truly free man is not the man who has everything in the world, but the man who needs nothing from the world.’ I was trying to get ‘enough’ for security, but what I needed to do was refocus so that I didn’t need so much. It was the way to real freedom — especially from fears and anxiety about ‘enough.’”
Steve and Linda drew their line in the sand: Everything above a certain lifestyle line would be given away. The couple actually wrote a covenant with God. They realized that there could be years they might struggle and they debated what that would mean to their giving covenant. But they also realized that if they didn’t fully commit to a line, their line would keep rising. As Steve remembers it, “If that happened, we would never give what God intends for us to give. At that critical point in our lives, our passion for giving began.”
The couple soon experienced what long-time givers know — the joy of giving money away far outweighs the joy of spending it on material goods. But suddenly, they did face a challenge, one they had considered when they wrote their covenant. Within 90 days of creating their covenant, Steve’s business suffered a setback when a major customer decided to phase out its business with Steve. The big question was: How would this affect their giving plans?
“Everything had suddenly changed,” says Steve. “But we know that everything might always change. We stuck with our plan — and, amazingly, I had some very big and very positive changes with my business. In a few short years, we were giving away three times what we said we were going to. That wasn’t what we pictured happening.” Even during subsequent challenging times — such as the recession of 2008-2009 — they maintained their generous giving. Says Steve, “All I can say is that God has been faithful to us every step of the way.”
In 2012, their giving took a different turn, and all because of a deceased newborn baby found in a dumpster. Moved and saddened by the fact that the child was a “Baby Doe,” Linda felt compelled to act. She contacted the coroner, inquiring about what would happen to the baby. When she learned that without someone coming forward the baby would be buried in a mass, unmarked grave, Linda felt like God said, “No.” She asked to adopt the baby in death and give it a name and a proper burial.
A new ministry was born. He Knows Your Name Ministry exists to honor every child with a name in life and dignity and honor in death, helping women and families say goodbye to children with burials, services, and headstones, including for aborted or miscarried babies. She’s also adopted a dozen nameless and abandoned babies in death, giving them the names they deserve.
Linda’s ministry began to blossom and it brought the couple to an epiphany. Meeting with their lawyer to set up a new 501(c)(3) organization for He Knows Your Name, the couple was given a full accounting of how much money they had
already given away. They didn’t really know — and were staggered at the amount.
“We never would have guessed that we even had that much money to give away,” says Steve. “I also realized how much that money would have grown had we kept it and invested it. So we sat down at our kitchen table and asked ourselves three important questions. Number 1: If we had known at the beginning that we were going to give away this much money, would we have signed on? The answer was no, because the number would have frightened us. Number 2: Would we do this again? The answer was yes, without a doubt. Number 3: If this money was put back into our bank account tomorrow, what would we do with it? How would it change our lives? In other words, what have we missed out on? Our answer was that we’ve missed out on nothing. With tears of joy we were overwhelmed with the thought of what we would have missed had we not given.”
That conversation left Steve and Linda asking the next question: How much more can we give? The answer to that question was that the couple committed to their first seven-figure gift, to an organization doing worldwide church planting with a strong focus on disciple building. “We don’t think of ourselves as people who can give a gift of that size easily,” says Steve, “but we felt led by God and His faithfulness to us.”
Steve and Linda are intentional givers, evaluating their gifts using various criteria. Their biggest gifts are reserved for those organizations with which they have a personal connection. One of those takes Steve to a remote area of the Ukraine three to four times a year where he serves as a pastor for a small ministry spreading the light of the Gospel there.
An unexpected, and very emotional, bonus for Steve and Linda has been learning of the giving of their four children.
“When they were old enough to appreciate it, we shared with them our history of giving and some of our larger gifts and the reasons why,” says Steve. “It was one of the sweetest moments we’ve ever had with our children. We’ve since learned that our kids give very generously to their own passions and causes — they don’t have as much to give, but we think they give more freely than we do. We’ve heard story after story of what they’ve done, which has amazed and challenged us even more.”
Monya & David Giles
How can a couple give away more than they ever imagined and still find themselves blessed beyond measure?
"We Haven’t Been Able to Out Give God"" - Monya & David Giles
“It has been a journey we never imagined. I grew up on a farm with holes in my blue jeans. I never saw myself ‘here.’ We have a nice old house and a nice little yard and a woodworking shop. That’s really all we need.”
The journey that David Giles describes is one that has taken him and his wife, Monya, from a young married couple with the typical struggles of career, finances, and raising kids to a place where they have literally given it all away.
As a 30-year-old, David started as a manufacturers’ representative in Houston, Texas, selling combustion equipment. With that first company, he experienced unexpected success. “As an independent sales rep, you can do pretty well,” says
David. “After a while, though, the business was making more money than I had ever imagined. That’s when we got connected to Crown Financial Ministries and began living our lives by their principles, one of which is God owns it all, and we are only stewards of God’s possessions. We began donating to multiple causes and more money seemed to just keep coming in.”
Says Monya, “We weren’t able — then or later — to out give God. It didn’t matter how much we gave away, He just kept pouring more in to us.”
After years in Houston, David and Monya moved north of Austin, where David started a company, making equipment for the oil industry. “I thought of it as a retirement hobby,” says David. “But it really took off — my hobby ended up being more successful than anything else I’d done. I was praying that God would actually unload this successful hobby by sending me a partner. He did, and I turned my attention to the next thing.”
David and Monya had been long-time clients of the National Christian Foundation (NCF), a non-profit group that helps generous givers simplify their giving, multiply their impact, and experience the joy of sending more to their favorite causes than they ever dreamed possible. The organization’s mission is to mobilize resources by inspiring biblically-based generosity. With the daily burden of running an unexpectedly successful “hobby business” off David’s shoulders, the couple changed their giving strategy. Rather than income coming to them and them giving it to NCF after they paid taxes, they contacted NCF to set up a donor advised fund. To fund the new giving strategy, David gave 40% of his company’s ongoing revenue to the NCF fund; 50% of the company went to his partner.
“Not only does the income bypass us, it allowed us to name our two daughters, two sons-in-law, and our son as the board of directors for the fund,” says David. “They are responsible for researching the causes we want to fund and finding causes they believe in and want to fund themselves. Our children have taken responsibility for this, and with a true passion. Not only do they provide direction for our NCF funds, but they have taken on their own personal charitable giving.”
One of the causes David and Monya consider very dear to them is Relief Network Ministries, founded in 2001 in League City, Texas, with a mission to help end the water crisis in Nigeria. The organization’s over-arching goal is to significantly
reduce the cycle of poverty and disease attributable to the water crisis. It focuses on ways to alleviate the adverse consequences of poverty and illiteracy, such as poor hygienic standards and inadequate skills for gainful employment. Relief Network Ministries’ motto is “Water 4 Life in Jesus’ Name.” David and Monya got an interesting first introduction to the founder of Relief Network Ministries, Ambrose Ochiabuto Sunny Okorie.
“In Houston, we went to a mid-sized church,” says David. “One Sunday, a man in full Nigerian garb came in. He certainly stood out from our normal crowd. That’s when I first met Sunny and began to get to know him. Sunny and Relief Network drill about 15 to 20 water wells each year in Niger and Nigeria. Because he’s well known for his work with the wells, he gets a chance to preach in churches. He told stories about three or four hundred people coming to Christ after he preached. I thought surely he was exaggerating, but he’s not. I got independent verification on those numbers. Sunny leverages his well drilling into preaching and soul salvation — it’s a full package and it is our favorite charity as far as return on investment.”
When David and Monya reflect back on their years of giving, they point to the teachings of Crown Financial Ministries. “We began living by the Crown principles that God owns it ALL! God requires a tenth, but He is more interested to see what you do with the remaining 90% He has given you to steward,” says Monya. “We never saw God fail us — even when our son, Michael, was diagnosed with a brain tumor at the age of seven. We were secure in the knowledge, all through Michael’s treatments, that God had a greater interest in our son than we did — we were only the stewards. Kind of like Abraham with Isaac, we had to trust that God knew best — whatever the outcome. Everything belongs to God, not just money.”
The coolest thing, say David and Monya, is that the “giving legacy” has been passed on to their children. “It has been wonderful to hear their stories of supporting people and causes — they have a real heart for giving. Oh, they certainly heard us go on and on for years about building up treasures in heaven and why we do what we do with our giving. Our children understand the difference in needs and wants. Because they can say ‘I don’t need that’ it’s easy for them to give. When we first made our will years ago, our children were small and it took us a while to figure out that the worst thing we could do was to give them too much money. We have a lot of blessings from being poor in our younger years. We did not have a
refrigerator or stove for our first six months of marriage. There are lots of memories and lessons we learned. We don’t want to deny them the blessings and memories that their own hard work can bring. Giving them too much or leaving too much could cause harm, so we choose to give it away instead.”
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