Joe: Hey, good morning. Top of the morning to you guys. Hope you're doing awesome. Beautiful day today. It's actually late October as I'm recording this and unusually warm in St Louis right now. It's going to be 80 something today. But I wanted to talk to you guys was I'm driving home here about something that's really important, and I think this will be a short podcast because I don't I don't know how to talk about this and how important it actually is. I don't know if I could do this justice, but it’s so, so important. I think you're going to be surprised at what it is. I think this is the probably number one principle in business. If you want to be successful in business, I think this is the number one determinant for your success or your failure. And I am speaking from experience and I just I know it works. And this is a it's a spiritual principle. And I think this applies to you whether you believe in God or not. All right. Are you curious to know what I'm going to be talking now? I'm talking about being generous. I'm talking about the tithe. Talking about 10%. Yes, I said the T-word. I know I triggered some of you just now by saying the T or the time, because that's Etsy. If you're a Christian, it's a controversial topic a little bit because some people think you don't have to tithe. That's Old Testament. I'm not I'm not going to get into that. I'm not going to argue it. I'm going to give you a really good book that you guys should read if you're at all interested in this. But it's called The Blessed Life by a pastor named Robert Morris out of Texas, The Blessed Life. This book changed my life for. I've read about two or three times now, and I can look back, see, there's this thing again. I feel like I can do this justice. I'm going to try the best I can. 

Joe: But I promise you, if you guys listening to this, if you would apply this into your own life and into your business, you will be blessed. There's this spiritual principle of reaping and selling, and you reap what you sow. And if you sell generosity, if you're generous with your time, with your money, with your skills, if you're trying to give, always give instead of trying to get, you're going to be blessed. And when we give our first when we give the first of the first to God, he blesses us with this. And you know, I can quote you scriptures, man. I know a lot of you guys maybe are Christians, so I'm just going to tell you like it. Is that what it is? And whether you like it or not and whether you disagree with me or not, you may you might show me people that weren't generous, that didn't give any money to charity or didn't buy it. And you would be you would say, look, they were blessed. They were successful. How I would really question that if you dug really deep into that. So there's a did you know there was an Italian prophet in the Bible, the only a prophet from Italy in the Bible, you know what his name was. There's Malachi yeah and his name was Malachi and he was a prophet in the Old Testament. The last chapter, I think in the Old Testament, definitely the last book in the Old Testament. But it talks about this and God says, I dare you detest me at best, if I will not open the windows of heaven and pour out a blessing to you so great that you can't even contain it. And I'll rebuke the devour. I'll rebuke the enemy for your sakes. And I just dare you to test me in this. What's he talking about in that? The context of it is he says, you guys have been robbing me of my tithes and offerings and a guy that God does not need our money. He doesn't need it, really. And we're what are we robbing him of that? Right? We're robbing him of the opportunity to bless us. This is so deep and so profound that it's crazy. So I really want to encourage you guys to read the book, The Blessed Life. 

Joe: There's another good book I read called The Go Giver, and that's maybe a less religious book. And it talks about the being a giver, but there's just something in the way God created the universe, where when we are generous and when we when we care about other people more than ourselves, when we show our trust in God by giving him the first 10%, he will bless us. He will. And it's almost like it's kind of strange, like he'll bless you even if you don't even believe in him. You know what I'm saying? It's just a principle of faith. It's all his anyway. Way he can do more with a 90% with his blessing than he can with 100% that you don't give to him. So I could go on and on about that, but I'm going to wrap this up. I'll keep this a short podcast, but I want to challenge you guys to think about this. Robert Morris, pastor Robert Morris out of his church in Texas. It's called Gateway, and he has a podcast called Gateway something Church Podcast. I forget if you go there and if you go back to the August of 2023 episodes, August of 2023 episodes, there's about five podcasts that he did that were sermons talking about this whole thing. Every three years he does a series in his church about the blessed life and about being generous. And man, I just get so excited. I get excited about having the opportunity to give to God. We don't give to get. That's a big mistake, right? Like a lot of people use some of these Bible verses to kind of manipulate their people to give a lot of money so that you can get something back in return. Now we get to give, we get to give. And when we do, we bless God and he has to bless us. It's so awesome. It's an amazing principle. I get super excited about it. It changed my life. When I look back over my life and I see the times when I prospered and I did really well. And then when I was struggling, it was when I was tithing and when I wasn't tithing, not kidding, Not kidding. When I was dug deep into a world of hurt with my huge $520,000 federal tax lean that I owed maybe another 50 $60,000 to the state in taxes. I've talked about this before. And if you've ever heard this, yeah, this was five, six years ago now. I was embarrassed I got out of it, but I got into it because and then this is I can't say it was because I wasn't tithing, because it was more than that, because I was an idiot and I didn't pay my taxes. That's why I got into trouble with the IRS. Now, this is strange, and you might think I'm crazy, but I'm telling you, when I was in this deep, deep hole of debt and the IRS is threatening to send me to jail if I don't pay my taxes, I mean, people have gone to jail with the IRS for less than that. I thought it was a mess. Anyway, when I was in the depths of that despair, I started tithing again and God blessed us. I feel like I want to cry. God sort of blessed us and we so the IRS guys said, Hey, listen, you need to stop trying to payroll taxes off and just get current on your current taxes. We'll work with you on your past due taxes. And now I work with you in terms of like, I'd give you a discount because I couldn't claim hardship. I live in a nice house, have nice cars. Making really good money. Just couldn't pay my taxes because the debt kept on snowballing, getting bigger and bigger, and the penalties and the interest. It was just it was getting bigger. I mean, no matter how much I put into it. But anyway, so the guy said, stop paying your old taxes again for now to start getting current on your current taxes. And I did started tithing. I also started reading that book Profit first and started implementing profit first to my business. 

Joe: So then after I got current on my current taxes, they put me on a ten year payment plan to pay back my old taxes. And I'm like, Yeah, we're fine. You'll stay out of jail, We'll let you keep your house, will let you. We won't kick your family out in the street as long as your current on you stay current on your payment plan for your old taxes and just communicate with us, stop ignoring our letters and all that stuff. And so at ten years, man and can you imagine my payments on this thing? But I will share the numbers. But it was significant, right? It was. It was more than most people make in a month. And that was my monthly payment. I pay that thing off in a year and a half. Supposed to be ten years. I pay it off in a year and a half. I can't explain it. Like there were some things I like. We started tithing, started getting more disciplined over money. I hired somebody to do the books for me. We started taking money out of every dollar that came in. I went to, you know, two or three different buckets. Just read the book Profit First. But in my personal finances, I didn't tithe my revenue from my business. I time that the salary that I would put myself on. Started tithing and God turned it around off. He turned it around And I you know, I look back and it's just like it's a mystery to me. I can't believe I mean, I do believe, but like, it happened way faster and I've been more prosperous and more blessed than I have ever been. And we've been faithful with the tie ever since in the past, You know, I kind of tithe when I wanted to when I when we when we could afford it. But, man, you know, there's a friend of ours pastors, a church down in South County in Saint Louis, and every year they talk about ties to their memberships to the members there. And one of the things they do is they tell people, listen, God said, put me to the test. If I won't bless you, if you tithe, I will. But God said, that's the only time in the Bible he said to test me. And so the church says to their people, this says, Listen, what we're going to do now, if you've never tired before and you want to start tithing, we're going to make this completely safe for you. We're going to take away all the risk. And they say this if you tithe and at the end of the year after your tithing, if you are not more blessed, then we will give you back all of your tithe money. And they say like this, we don't need the money. I mean, we do. But like, this isn't about the money. This is about you and your relationship with God. And God wants to prosper you. God wants to bless you. And so he says the test. So let's test him right now. And they do this to everybody. They say, Listen, if you tired after 12 months and you are not more blessed at the end of that 12 months, then just let us know. No judgment on us, right? We won't tell anybody. We'll refund you all the time that you sent. And they did. They've done this every year for, I don't know, 15, 20 years. And never once has anybody ever come back to them and said, hey, I'm less blessed now. I'm not blessed. And I want I want my tithe back. No one's ever done it. So I want to challenge you. I want to put you to the test. Test God on this thing, I'm telling you, I'm speaking to one person out there is listening to this and you're getting it and it's something's clicking inside of you and something in your heart is saying, Yeah, you know what? Joe is right. I need to start tithing again. I need to start being more generous. I need to start opening my hand instead of just closing it tight fisted. I promise you this. God will bless you. All right. That's all. I got. Joe: So few resources real quick. I brought up to you right in this podcast. Number one, read that book, The Blessed Life by Robert Morris. It'll change your life, it'll rock your world, I promise. The other book I recommended was Profit First, and I've talked about that book a lot. Amazing book. And then there are some podcasts by this guy Robert Morris on his podcast called I think it's just called Gateway Church is the name of the podcast and go look for about four or five episodes starting in August of 2023. And one of them is called Principle of First. The other one is called Is There a Test? And you'll find about four or five episodes right during that timeframe where he did the series go, go check that out. I think you can also just Google The Blessed Life. Robert Morris. And they might even have on there some of these same podcasts or some videos that he's done in the past on the series that kind of goes with the book. I don't recommend reading, watching the videos instead of the book. You need to do both because they talk about different things. It's not like the sermon or the podcast is a summary or repeat of the book. They're just they're completely different and but they're all they all tie together and it's really, really good. All right. Appreciate you guys. Love you all. Bye.