This lesson was taught by the founding Pastor Willie George at a men’s breakfast at Church On The Move, Tulsa, Oklahoma on April 5, 2019 #000281

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Men and Money Part 3

By Pastor Willie George

….and so he started praying and God spoke to him and he came to me and he said, “God’s going to show you something about your money flow that you don’t yet see, and it’s coming very soon, and it’s gonna make a huge difference.” Just that little thought put me in a search, and I started making it a matter of prayer. God, what is it that I’m not seeing?

 I don’t know, I think it had to do with reading an airline magazine, because in the airline magazine there was a conference on negotiating by a guy named Chester Karras. I’d see that ad every time I’d fly, and he would charge a fee for his conference…a huge fee,

It was how to negotiate, and they would do these seminars in hotels all over the country.So, I thought, “why couldn’t I charge workers a fee?”, at first I thought I can’t, it’ll turn them off. But I finally did it, 20, 25 bucks a person.The attendance tripled. My money problem was over with that one stroke. Because when people started paying for what I was teaching, they were glad to get it. Not a one walked out and said “You ripped me off.” Nobody said that, they went out and said “Thank God I heard that, he helped me with my ministry.” And so that helped me pay my bills. 

I would never have made it to television with Gospel Bill, had I not learned how to make money. 1991 was one of our peak years for finances. We did about three million dollars in that era, and my business administrator came to me and said, “94% of all of our money comes from sales, only 6% from offerings. In all the years that I did “Gospel Bill”, there was one church, one, that supported me on a monthly basis to do the TV show, and they gave me $100 a month. And the month that I started Church on the Move, they cut it out. So then I had none. I had one time offerings here and there but no church ever supported what we did. They never looked at us like a missionary. If I hadn’t learned how to make money selling products, the ministry would never have happened. I look back on it now and I say, “Thank God.”, because I can communicate to people who are in business, and I can help people who are having a problem creating that supply. So here’s how you got to think: I’m not thinking about “How can I get your money?”, I’m thinking about “What do I have that you need that I can bless you with?” 

Supply and Demand

What do I have that nobody else is doing? What can I do better than what other people are doing? That’s where you start, and you start right now on the job you’ve already got. I think we dream and we think if we lived in an ideal world, I’d have this kind of a company I could do this.Can I tell you something, if you don’t start with the now, you’re never going to get to the new. It is the now that opens the door for the new. So I want you to see you need to start thinking about “what can I do right now?” Some of you ought to think about a sixth day project, something you do either after work, or on Saturdays. Nobody that I know of who’s ever made it successfully, works just five days. Everybody I know who has done well financially, spends the equivalent of six days a week working. That’s what the scripture says. “Six days shalt thou do thy labor.” I don’t think we got to be rigid and say you got to work full eight hours on Saturday, but one of the things I started doing is spending a couple of hours, after Deleva and the kids went to bed, honing my skills. We bought houses that needed work, in the evenings Deleva and I would fix them up. We would paint, we would recarpet, we would spend a little time in the evenings, we would spend a little time on our Saturdays working on that house. The first one we bought here in Tulsa, we made $10,000. The second one we bought here in Tulsa, we made $12,000. The third one that we bought here in Tulsa, we sold and made $54,000. I kept working up like that, and eventually we bought 80 acres of property in the country. When I sold that I made a million dollars off the sale, over what I put into it.

What I want you to see, is that I did that working my butt off. Every evening when I got in I put a few extra hours in. I paid for this, I paid for that, I improved the property, and one day it came time to sell it, and God blessed us. Listen to me, you have to take responsibility for your money. You’re expecting someone to look out for you, the company you work for, that’s great, it’s good to have a good boss, but I want to tell you something; In the long run, it’s gonna be you. I didn’t say you needed to quit your job right now, but you know what? Could it be that there’s something that’s close to your heart, that you could start doing on the side? You know for years we published children’s ministry curriculum, and I would go out and people would say “You teach on puppets, where do you get your puppets? I think we want to use puppets, but we don’t know where to get them.”, and so I said “I have a syllabus that I gave you. If you look on the back page, there’s six different puppet manufacturers.” My secretary was talking to one of those puppet people one day and they said they were laughing, “We’ve been following Willie George, we know where he goes. Everywhere he goes we get bombarded. Please send me your catalog so we know Willie George was just in New York, or he was just in Washington, or he was just in Indianapolis because we got bombarded with letters from all over Indiana wanting catalogs for puppets.” And one day while she was telling me that I thought you know, that’s pretty stupid. I must be the number-one salesman for about five or six different puppet companies, and I don’t get one red cent in commissions. So I went to church and found for five ladies that could sew, and turned them loose. Then the next time I went out to do a conference people said, “Where do you get your puppets?” “Right over here.” You know it never was a great stream, but it helped. You see these little extra things you do, it may not be enough to pay all of your bills, but it helps, and when that kind of money comes in don’t run out and spend it right away, use that money as get-ahead money. Buy tools for your business, use it to invest in making more money. Turn it and use it to get ahead.

Bread for the Eater Seed for the Sower

The Bible talks about money coming in two ways, it’s bread for the eater, and seed for the sower. And you know what a lot of people do? They eat everything that comes in as their bread, and they don’t think about any of their stuff being left over to plant a seed. You gotta hold back some of what you take in to plant a seed so that more comes in. That’s how money works.