20 — Good News, etc. — April 2010 nc/sd
Trusting God with your fi nances . . .
Continued from page 1
speed and power as it silently crosses the open ocean, recession hit with little warning or preparation, destroying most portfolios and bank accounts in the second half of 2008. For Steve Myatt, senior pastor of Vista Assembly of God, the news could not have been more swift and complete than if he had had his back to the sea when the tsunami hit. “Our church had been really pressing
into God like no other time,” Myatt recalls. “We went into the fall in a 40-day fast, everybody picking what they wanted to fast, as I did a total fast except for water and a lemon drink thing. I knew giving had been down, but we had always had a cushion in the bank — but that summer we had basically depleted our cushion.” One day the pastor was approached
by his secretary, asking what she should do about that week’s bills and the staff
payroll that was due. “I don’t know what to do,” she said, “we don’t have any money to pay the bills this week.” When Myatt directed her to take money from the church’s savings, her response was simple, “I already did that and there is no money left.” “Immediately, fear just kind of took
over,” Myatt explains. “I’m thinking ‘oh, my gosh, what’s going on here? Are we falling apart? How are we going to make it?’” As he looks back on that moment from a
current perspective, Steve Myatt believes God had been preparing him for this crisis over several months. During the Easter season of that same year, another time when the church had been “pressing into God,” he had come under spiritual attack while delivering his Easter morning message, again by an unexplained sense of fear. “It just came on me suddenly and I couldn’t
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speak.” Seeing something was wrong, members
of the congregation “went to battle stations,” as Myatt describes it, “going to prayer and interceding for me. We broke through it — barely — and it was an incredible breakthrough. We had more people saved that day [than ever before], but it messed me up.” That Easter began for Steve Myatt what
he now calls “a journey to a whole new place spiritually,” a place where “God broke the fear off of me” and replaced it with a hunger for Him. “I want to see miracles. We’ve prayed for the sick and seen people healed. We’re pressing in to so much of what Jesus did and that was part of the 40-day fast. So the enemy is going to come against that, but God turned it around for great things.” At the moment when the bank account
was empty, however, the miracle was still a little fuzzy. “All these thoughts are running through
my head,” Myatt says, returning to the story, “and then I just felt the Lord say ‘trust me, trust me in this,’ and I declared to the offi ce we would not be led by fear, that God is in control and we would walk in faith.” Calling together the leaders
anything about the dire fi nancial situation the church was in — to write and deliver a check to the pastor … for $5,000. Money in hand, Myatt went before his
congregation the next Sunday to share what was happening with the church, how he and the leadership felt the Lord was leading them to a way to get out of trouble, and how he felt the church was being obedient to Scripture in the action. “And we took the check and we prayed over it in all of our services, and then following the third service I went to deliver it to the pastor.” To expect that the San Marcos church
had been experiencing a shortfall of exactly $5,000 should be a given for anyone who knows the Lord, but the immediacy of God’s blessing to Vista Assembly was still a little overwhelming. “Within a week,” Myatt says, awe still
of the church, and with no clear solution at hand, the group went to their knees to pray and to wait on what the Lord would have them do. They prayed and prayed “and I felt like God just dropped it in my heart that we needed to sow a seed,” Myatt continues, “that we needed to give money away before God would release. We were united in that, but my secretary pointed out that we didn’t even have money to give away, so I said, okay, let’s trust God to provide the funds.” Their prayer was that God would
provide $5,000, which the church would give specifi cally to a church in the San Marcos area, which was also experiencing fi nancial troubles, but was totally unrelated to Vista Assembly. “We wanted to make sure there was no benefi t to us,” Myatt explains. Prayer was answered when a member of the church leadership revealed God had instructed him — before he knew
“The re i s a great blessing in our giving and learning how to trust Him with our fi nances.”
in his voice almost two years after the fact, “we had over a hundred thousand dollars come into the church. Some could say it was just making the need known that generated the income, but we saw it as a direct response to sowing the seed. We ended the year in record giving, and it hasn’t stopped. We ended 2009 in another record year of giving.” The church’s experience hasn’t
been lost on its congregation, either. “It’s become a lesson for the entire church in their own personal fi nances in learning to trust the Lord. It has spurred
everyone on in the whole tithing and putting God fi rst in your fi nances.” And the Lord has blessed. “People have
stepped out on their own and trusted God and are sharing testimonies of how miraculously God has provided, you know, checks in the mail unexpectedly, salary increases, new jobs. It caused in me to be more bold about talking on Sundays about our fi nances and about trusting the Lord, and so pretty much every Sunday now I talk — when I take the offering — about how important it is to trust the Lord, and I try to give a different Scripture, a different spin and just remind everybody what it means to give to the Lord. “This has changed my whole view on [tithing]. The people need to be instructed on the importance of giving because it is a spiritual principle and they don’t know how to get God’s blessing if you don’t teach them, and there is a great blessing in our giving and learning how to trust Him with our fi nances — that we learn so much about the faithfulness of God.” That might be the story, but Steve Myatt
has found it to be just a chapter in the Vista Assembly experience, and in his own journey as a pastor. It has led to a renewed passion in the church body for what he called “the real deal” of the Lord.” It is not “a formula or program,” he cautions, “okay if you do this and this, then God will do this. It is out of relationship that God shows you what He wants you to do. Another person could do the exact same thing we did and may not see the same results. God may want him to do something different. “It really has turned into an exciting adventure,” Myatt concludes, “with all the glory to God.” These are adventurous times for the
people of the Lord, some might say. Adventurous and worthy of a personal test, eh?
❏
ssmith@tamarismedia.com.
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