“The only investment I ever made which has paid consistently increasing dividends is the money I have given to the Lord.”—J. L. Kraft (head of Kraft Cheese Corporation)
“The person who waits to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything.”—Samuel Johnson
“Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.”—J.B. Phillips
“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot lose.”—Missionary Jim Elliott
$1.00 spent for lunch lasts five hours.
$1.00 spent for a neck-tie lasts five weeks.
$1.00 spent for a cap lasts five months.
$1.00 spent for an auto lasts five years.
$1.00 spent for a railroad lasts five decades.
$1.00 spent in God’s service lasts for eternity.—Roger W. Babson
The story is told of a man who had a horrible dream. He said, “I dreamed that the Lord took my Sunday offering and multiplied it by ten, and this became my weekly income. In no time I lost my color TV, had to give up my new car and couldn’t make my house payment. After all, what can a fellow do on $10 a week?”
If the Lord took your offering, multiplied it by ten, and made that your weekly income, how much would you make?
Some retailers are concerned about the the fact that there are only 26 shopping days between Black Friday and Christmas day this year. Yet, the National Retail Federation expects Americans to spend even more than they did last year. They estimate that we will spend $602 billion on Christmas gifts and merchandise. That is close to $85 for every person alive on the face of the globe.
It is amazing that at the time of year we set aside to honor Christ’s birth, we can easily be consumed with ourselves.
In May of 1948 three men robbed a bank in Hoyt, Kansas, getting away with $1,000. Shortly thereafter two men were killed in a car wreck, and police thought they were the robbers and the case was closed. Four years later, however, something unusual happened. On a Sunday morning at the Seward Avenue Baptist Church a young man named Al Johnson stepped to the pulpit and revealed to the congregation that the day before he had gone to the district attorney and confessed his role in the crime.
When the Cornerstone Bank in Waco, Nebraska, was robbed of some $6,000 in November of 2012, the bank employees were able to give the police a fairly good description of the teenage girl who pulled off the crime and the car in which she escaped. As it turned out, the investigators didn’t really need those descriptions, because the thief recorded a YouTube video titled “Chick bank robber” boasting of her criminal prowess.
Things bought at garage sales don’t usually end up on the evening news, but a Chinese bowl bought by a New York family in 2007, became famous in April of 2013. The new owners paid just three dollars for what turned out to be a bowl from the Northern Song Dynasty that was more than one thousand years old. Until someone told them what they really had, the family had the bowl stuck on the mantle over their fireplace. When they placed the bowl with Sotheby’s Auction House for sale, it was estimated to go for approximately $200,000.
James Marshall left his family’s home in New Jersey as a young man and, like so many others, began a migration west. After contracting malaria while living in Missouri he was advised to go further west, and in 1845 he arrived in California. He worked a number of different jobs and served in the army during the Mexican-American War in 1846. When he got out, a man he had earlier befriended, John Sutter, entered a partnership agreement with Marshall to build a sawmill.
When 67-year-old carpenter Russell Herman died in 1994, his will included a staggering set of bequests. Included in his plan for distribution was more than two billion dollars for the City of East St. Louis, another billion and a half for the State of Illinois, two and a half billion for the national forest system, and to top off the list, Herman left six trillion dollars to the government to help pay off the national debt. That sounds amazingly generous, but there was a small problem—Herman’s only asset when he died was a 1983 Oldsmobile.
Charles Spurgeon told this story of his grandfather James and his faith in God. “He had a large family and a very small income, but he loved his Lord, and he would not have given up his preaching of the gospel for anything.” One day the cow on which the family relied for milk for the children suddenly died. James Spurgeon’s wife was greatly concerned, but he said, “God said He would provide, and I believe He could send us fifty cows if He pleased.”
So many people think if they just had money, everything would be different. What many who do get money suddenly find is that things are different—it gets worse. When Jack Whittaker won the Powerball lottery prize jackpot of over $314 million on Christmas day 2002, it was at the time the largest prize won by a single winner in US history. Whittaker was already a successful businessman, but the sudden windfall proved to be anything but a blessing for his family.
Henry Heinz, born in 1844, to German immigrants in Pittsburg, PA, helped support his family as a teenager by growing and selling vegetables in the family garden. After graduating from college and getting married, he started a business selling horse radish. In 1875, a national financial collapse drove the young company into bankruptcy. Despite the legal freedom bankruptcy gave him, Heinz regarded each of the company’s outstanding debts as a moral obligation and personally paid back every penny.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Hetty Green may have been the biggest miser who ever lived. Her father died when she was thirty leaving her an inheritance of more than $100 million in today’s money. Though it was unusual for a woman to be involved with banking and investments at the time, she concentrated all of her efforts and attention on growing the family fortune.
”A father gave his little girl two dollars and said, “You can do anything you want with one of the dollars, but the other dollar belongs to God.”
With joy she ran to the candy store. On the way she tripped and one dollar fell into the storm drain. She got up and said, “Well Lord, there goes Your dollar.”
In 1995 the nation was stunned when news broke that an elderly woman named Oseola McCarty had donated $150,000 to the University of Southern Mississippi for their scholarship fund. This eighty-seven-year-old woman had been forced to drop out of school in the sixth grade to care for her family. For more than sixty years she made a living washing clothes for hire in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, saving as much as she could from her meager pay.
A woman who traveled abroad without her husband got to Paris and found a fabulous bracelet she’d been looking for. So she sent a wire back home saying, “I have found this beautiful bracelet, one I’ve been looking for all my life. It only costs $7,500. Do you think I can buy it?”
Her husband wired back a short but firm reply, “No, price too high!” And he signed his name. But in the transmission, the comma was left out and the message read, “No price too high.” Oh, she was thrilled! Omitting that comma almost put that guy in a coma.
Roger Babson, an American historian, was visiting the president of Argentina about one hundred years ago when the president said to him: “You are a student of history, Will you please tell me why it is that South America, with her unlimited resources, and having been settled earlier than North America, has nevertheless made much slower progress in civilization and material prosperity?”
Mr. Babson threw the question back upon the president by saying, “Mr. President, you evidently have studied this question yourself, and I would be interested to know your answer to it.
The Baptist preacher Dr. George W. Truett accepted an invitation from a church to preach the dedication sermon for their new building. He arrived at the church about ten minutes before the service started, and was told that the church needed to raise $6,500 by the next day in order to finish paying for the building. The church officers told him that they were depending on him to raise the money.
Dr. Truett preached the sermon then said, “These men bid me to tell you that you must give $6,500 in cash, which is all due tomorrow. Will you provide it?”