John Bevere - God Rewards Those Who Multiply

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Hey everybody, welcome to Lesson Four. The title of this lesson is «More Will Be Given.» Now, we have established from the Parable of the Talents that to be faithful means we multiply. Those who multiply are judged by our Creator as good and faithful. Those who simply maintain possess a serious fault; they are worthless and lazy. Now, that’s not speaking of character; that’s speaking of productivity. It’s important that I continually reemphasize this to you. You’re probably feeling a lot of pressure right now. Remember, the ability is not yours; it is God’s. God gives this ability, and all it takes to operate in this ability is faith. That’s why you’re in this course right now; it is developing your faith, and now the gift of God begins to operate as you move out in acting on your faith.

Okay, let me just give an example. What if I hadn’t listened to those two women from the state of Florida and the state of Texas when they gave me that word? What if I hadn’t listened to them, and what if I hadn’t written? Where would I be today? I might be ministering to a couple of hundred people, but I wouldn’t have been ministering to the millions of people that God had called me to. What happens if you don’t act on the gift to surgically remove tumors from people or to paint beautiful pictures that God has put in your heart, which are actually His ability that He wants to come out and bless the world?

Let’s check our paradigm of faithfulness. We think being faithful is showing up on time and maintaining the things that we’ve been entrusted with. Our paradigm’s got to change. Maintaining and faithfulness don’t fall on the same page. I mean, you may have a businessman in the marketplace with a good business, making enough money to provide for his wife and children. He shows up for church on time; he may be an usher in the church. We say, «Oh, he’s faithful.» But in reality, he has the ability to open up new markets; he may have the ability to start franchises. Hypothetically, he might have the ability to open several stores across the city, but because he’s comfortable and afraid of venturing into multiplication, he maintains that one store. We call him faithful because he goes to church on time and provides for his family, but does that line up with the biblical definition of faithfulness? No, it doesn’t. He’s not multiplying.

Look, what’s the first commandment that God gave mankind when He put them on the earth? He said, «Be fruitful and multiply.» God wasn’t just saying, «Have children.» We’ve done that. He’s saying, «Anything that I entrust to you, return it back to me multiplied.» So Jesus is taking the first commandment that God gives mankind and applying it in this parable of the talents.

Let’s continue with Jesus’s words because it actually gets stronger, so I want you to brace yourself. Matthew 25:28 says this: «Then he ordered, 'Take the money from Larry and give it to Allison, the one with the ten bags of silver.'» Let’s spell this out clearly. Allison starts out with five, she multiplies, and she ends up with ten. Larry starts out with one, maintains it, and then the master orders, «Take that one and give it to Allison.» So, the math now shows that Allison ends up with eleven and Larry ends up with zero.

Now, I’m in prayer one morning, and I had not read this parable in quite some time. The Holy Spirit spoke to me so clearly this particular morning. I’ll never forget it. He said, «Son, I am more capitalistic in the way I think than I am socialistic.» I paused and thought, «Is this really God?» Before I heard this, I would have thought God was a bit more socialistic in His thinking. I remember that morning saying, «Holy Spirit, I need to see this from Scripture,» and He sent me over to the Parable of the Talents.

If God were a socialistic-thinking God, this is how the parable would have gone: Allison, Bob, and Larry all would have been given three talents each—not five, not two, not one; they each would have been given three talents. The results? Well, Allison’s faithful; she multiplies. Bob’s faithful; he multiplies. So you know what? They each would have ended up with six, and Larry, being wicked and lazy, would have maintained and ended up with three. The socialistic God would have taken one from Allison and one from Bob and given it to Larry, so they all would have ended up with five.

Do you see that? That’s how a hypothetical socialistic-thinking God would have operated. You can see that God is more capitalistic in the way He thinks than socialistic. It really burdens my heart because a lot of our young people in the United States are thinking a lot more socialistically these days.

Let me tell you the difference: a socialist rewards the person who is poor and the person who is lazy. Hear me out: God rewards the person who multiplies, and God takes care of the poor. There are people in need who cannot multiply, and the Bible tells us that we should take care of them; it is our responsibility as the church. So I want to make this really clear: socialists help the lazy and the poor; believers should help the poor.

Are you following what I’m saying? Because when you look at Larry, the response wasn’t, «Oh Larry, you only have one; we need to take from Allison and Bob to make sure you have enough.» No, He takes from Larry the one he maintained and gives it to the girl who has ten, so she ends up with eleven. Now listen to what Jesus says next; it’s wild. Jesus says in verse 29, «To those who use well what they are given…» Now let’s put it in context: what does «using well what you are given» mean? It means to multiply. So I’m going to read it that way: «To those who multiply, even more will be given, and they will have an abundance.»

Oh my goodness! God’s not against abundance; He’s against abundance having you. When you have the mindset that you’re on this earth to build the kingdom with the gifts that God has entrusted to you and you will be a faithful steward that multiplies what’s been entrusted to you, God will give you abundance. Others will be jealous; they’ll be envious. Why? Because they’re lazy; they’re maintaining. They want everybody else to be lazy and maintain like they are, so they will envy you multiplying and being faithful. Always remember that all criticism for you being productive and ending up with an abundance is sometimes not helpful; it’s actually to pull you back into a lazy, un-multiplying mode.

It’s really important that you understand that. But from those who do nothing—who’s doing nothing? That’s Larry. So let’s read it in light of the parable: «But from those who maintain, even what little they have will be taken away.» I’m convinced beyond measure that if I had not written the gift in my life to write would have never manifested; it would have been taken away. Even though God spoke to me and told me to write, I believe that’s when the gift was imparted into my life. When the word of the Lord came to me in the summer of 1991, saying, «Son, I want you to write,» I believe at that moment the gift was imparted to me.

I did not have the gift to write in high school; I made C’s and D’s in English. I scored 370 on the SAT in English. I didn’t have the gift in high school, but when God spoke to me, that gift was imparted. If I hadn’t acted, God would have eventually taken that gift and given it to someone else. That’s exactly what Jesus is talking about. So here’s something important to note: God’s way is to reward those who multiply with more, and He has no problem with them having an abundance. God desires us to have abundance as long as our heart is to build the kingdom of God.

I’ll say it one more time because I want you to hear it over and over: God is not against abundance; He is against abundance possessing us. One exception, and I’ve already stated it: we take care of the poor. It is so important. Now, I want you to stop and think about the gifts that God has placed in your life. Have you been developing those gifts? Have you been using those gifts? Remember, one began to invest; he worked, and the result of using those gifts resulted in multiplication. I want you to really write this down; I want you to meditate on this: God desires you to multiply in your effectiveness.

Now, I’m going to say this: the gifting on my life is writing and speaking. But let’s say I looked at a marketplace guy—a guy who owned three or four businesses—and I thought, «Gosh, man, I want to do what he’s doing.» I wouldn’t multiply because I don’t have the gift of entrepreneurship on my life. I could believe; I could pray until I’m blue in the face.

I’ll give you an example: a friend of mine has one of the largest commercial construction companies in Los Angeles, California. He’s very successful. I will never forget him sharing a story. He spent ten hours in prayer and ten hours reading his Bible because his church asked him to preach. He said, «John, I prepared, I prepared, I prepared.» He got up in front of the church and said, «It really wasn’t a good message.» But the next day, he walked out on the job site and had answers for everything. He said it was mind-blowing. He said, «Oh, do this, do that,» and people would come up to him saying, «We’ve got a problem,» and he would tell them how to fix it. He said, «John, it was almost scary how much I knew on the job site.»

Now, why is that? He spent time in the presence of God, and what multiplied was his gift of entrepreneurship. When he went into his pastor’s arena, it was good, and he blessed the congregation, but the real multiplication happened on the job site where he was called.

See, again, I want to emphasize don’t downplay the gift in your life. If God has gifted you in the area of dance, or let’s say training; if God’s gifted you in the area of coaching or teaching in healthcare, don’t despise it. It’s important to the building of the kingdom. You may say, «But I don’t see how this applies to building the kingdom.» You’re trying to connect dots that you’re supposed to believe, not actually see with your physical eye. There are times we have to trust that if God’s anointed me in healthcare—let’s say you’re a doctor and you save a person through your medical knowledge, allowing that person to go on to develop software that reaches pastors all over the world—you just impacted pastors all over the world through your gift.

You say, «What? Yeah, you saved the person through your medical gifting that God gave you, and that allowed that person to create a software package that blessed pastors globally.» So now, when you stand before the judgment seat, Jesus says, «Let me show you all the pastors in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan that you impacted.» And you go, «I never went to those places.» God says, «Well, let me show you how you did.»

I personally believe—though I don’t have Scripture to back this—that God has given every single one of us the ability to impact multitudes, no matter where we are in life, if we’re just faithful to multiply the gifts He’s given us. Now that we understand that faithful and multiply are equivalent and we’ve grasped the Parable of the Talents, let’s start moving into the practical aspect of how we actually multiply. This is where the course is going to get really good.