Transcribed from Sunday’s second service at Cornerstone Overflow Fellowship, delivered from a folding pulpit set up on the tarmac of the regional airport, twelve feet from the aircraft in question. Portions are inaudible due to a fuel truck.
This week we are telling you to buy a water filter straw, and we are right: Stuff to Buy Before Everything Goes to Shit
A pastor does not buy a private jet.
Write that down. Underline it. A pastor is bought a private jet, by a generous God, through a faithful people, using seed money that eleven months ago was sitting in your checking account doing absolutely nothing for the Kingdom. And now look at it. Look at what your seed money became. Turn your eyes to the tail number and tell me the harvest is not real.
Because some of you have been asking. I know. I hear the parking lot. I hear the Facebook group where Deacon Ray’s wife posts screenshots. So let’s walk through the agriculture together, one more time, slowly, like children.
Currently accepting payment in cash, credit, and questionable life choices for the "My Conspiracy Theory Is Better Than Yours" tee.
Last spring I stood in that sanctuary and I did not ask you for money. I want that on the record. I asked you for seed. Seed is different. Money is something you keep and it rots. Seed is something you throw at a man in a linen suit and then God does math on it. Brenda sowed her Peloton. Terrance sowed the settlement from the ladder. There is a young man in the tenor section who sowed forty-one straight nights of DoorDash, drove until three in the morning on a leaking clutch, and never once complained, and I want him to know: the leather in that cabin is butter. It is butter, son.
On the question of whether God flies commercial
He does not. I’ve prayed about it. God has never once been asked to remove His shoes. God does not receive a text at 4:50 a.m. informing Him that His flight has been rebooked through Charlotte. The Spirit moves where it wants, when it wants, and if you think the Spirit is going to sit in Row 14 next to a man eating a room-temperature Italian sub, then friend, your theology is smaller than your seed.
So when the paper runs it — and they will run it, they always run it, Pastor Buys Private Jet — understand what they are actually confessing. They are confessing that they never sowed. They have no harvest to explain, so they must explain mine. A dry field always has an opinion about a wet one.
And it’s not a jet, technically. It’s a Gulfstream. Which is a category of blessing.
Where the seed went, since you asked, since you keep asking
Some of it went into the ministry, obviously. We put a cold plunge in the baptismal — same water, double the anointing, and yes, four hundred dollars a month in ice, and yes, Roger got his shoulder healed in there and then his shoulder unhealed itself in the Chili’s parking lot, which is a faith issue between Roger and Roger. We launched the supplement line. We have an AI that answers your prayer requests in my voice at two in the morning, which frankly is more available than I have ever been, and it never once gets short with you about the thermostat.
We stream on eleven platforms. Eleven. There is a version of me on a vertical feed between a man deboning a fish and a woman explaining her divorce. That is missions work in the modern era and it costs money, and the money came from seed, and the seed came from you, and the harvest — beloved, hear me — the harvest comes to the farmer.
You are not the farmer. I want to be gentle here. You are the beautiful, willing, tax-deductible ground.
Deacon Ray asked to see the numbers. Deacon Ray is sowing into a different church now, out by the tire place, and we bless him, and we do not respond to his emails.
She’s named Faithful II. There was no Faithful I in the air — Faithful I is a 2016 Yukon with a cracked windshield, and she served, and she is at a nephew’s house now. Name your vehicles. It softens the audit.
Ushers are coming down the rows with the buckets. Nobody sits during a taxi.
Sow. And when you hear those engines start up behind me and you can’t hear my voice anymore, that isn’t noise, church. That’s your harvest, rolling out to the runway without you.