LEVERAGE
STUDY GUIDE
SESSION 2
Why Are We to Give?
Importance of Accountability
SESSION 2 VIDEOS
Session 2 Trailer (1:28 min)
Full Session 2 (37:42 min)
SESSION SAMPLE
ENDORSEMENTS
TESTIMONIES
Brian Shepler, President & CEO of Blue Trust
Brian’s journey began with a college music scholarship, but a sense of regret led him to seek a new direction. A call from the financial aid office about a trust with specific criteria prompted a switch to math and economics. After an internship at Goldman Sachs, he joined a firm in Chicago with a kingdom-focused vision. Throughout his journey, Brian has continually sought God’s guidance through personal time, scripture, friendships, and life’s circumstances.Dave and Barb Emrich
Dave and Barb share their journey from non-believers to committed Christians, where they found financial unity through faith. They reflect on the challenges of living on a single income, building wealth, and planning for retirement, while emphasizing the importance of using their talents beyond just financial giving. Active in marriage mentoring and helping others, they also collaborate with the Everyday Steward group and are excited about their future investments.LEVERAGE TIPS
Plan with Purpose Proverbs 21:5 says, “The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance.” Integrate purposeful giving into your financial strategy. Set aside a portion of your income for charitable donations, aligning your financial goals with your faith and demonstrating stewardship over the resources God has entrusted to you.
READ STORIES OF GENEROSITY
Dr. David & Karan Gettle
David Gettle, M.D. went into medicine because, like many health professionals, he simply wanted to help people.
During David’s medical school training, he had the opportunity to work in a free clinic in inner-city Indianapolis. One day, after treating and releasing a young patient at the clinic, the child’s father came to him and gave him what he had to give . . . a stick of chewing gum. “I was just so humbled — here we are giving medical care to people who can’t afford to pay and could otherwise not receive care and this man offered me a stick of his gum. It was a huge act of generosity. I think about it to this day. He will never know how many people were impacted by his act of generosity to me.” A true, pay-it-forward moment began. And then disaster struck — literally.
David had always been attracted to the work of World Medical Mission, the medical arm of Samaritan’s Purse, which offered three-week volunteer trips throughout the world. But the organization wasn’t seeking emergency and trauma physicians, David’s specialty, until 1999, when he saw in their newsletter a specific request for professionals in emergency medicine. “I picked up the phone and called them. About six weeks later, I got off a plane in Macedonia and headed to the city of Gjakova, Kosovo, which had come under heavy bombing by NATO forces. True atrocities against humans were going on — the results were thousands of refugees and internally displaced people who had nothing. We went to what was left of the old town — it was still smoldering from an attack. Needless to say, I had never worked in a war zone. But now I had to get an emergency room up and running in one, despite the fact there was only very sporadic electricity and precious few supplies. We even had to use batteries to run monitors and other medical equipment. I saw injuries I’d never seen before, such as those from landmines. It was truly an eye-opening experience.”
After his return to the U.S., David made plans for a visit to Ethiopia on a six-month sabbatical from his position as vice president of medical affairs. That was when God began whispering to him that it might be time for a change from his current position. Very shortly after, he was working full-time for Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian international relief organization. “That was what God told me I needed to be doing — and I knew He was right,” says David.
David’s most challenging experiences were in Haiti and South Sudan. The relief teams were urgently called to Haiti due to a devastating earthquake and were met with enormous human casualties and a seriously damaged infrastructure. In South Sudan during their civil war, David recalls, “We could see the flash and hear the booms. They flew us out the next day. Those are the kinds of situations where we had to cover the people in prayer, because there was little more we could offer them than to show the love of God. In Kosovo, I learned you have to hit your knees before you hit the wall, because you cannot do this by yourself. I found out how truly dependent on God you have to be.”
In Bam, Iran, a stuffed teddy bear made the difference that medical care couldn’t after a 6.6 magnitude earthquake in December 2003, which killed more than 30,000 people. “So many people had nothing,” says David. “We were, of course, a Christian aid group working among a group of Muslims. One father took me to his daughter, who had a very serious spinal injury. There was little we could do other than get her name and location and turn the information into a central coordinating center, but we did give her a teddy bear. The girl’s mother and other women began crying, but not because we couldn’t help her. Her father told us, ‘It is because you gave her a teddy bear.’ We were able to show compassion, which meant a lot to them.”
During the past 10 years, David has, in his words, “been truly blessed to go to the largest international disasters,” both natural and man-made ones: the tsunami in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, the refugee crisis in civil war-torn South Sudan, the war in Iraq, an earthquake in Haiti, and most recently the earthquake in Ecuador. “When we go in, we start working immediately. We don’t go in to do an assessment, come back, and say ‘Here’s what needs to be done.’ We’re doing it — right then.”
Karan Gettle experienced God’s hand in a different way than her husband. Not allowed to accompany him on his numerous international medical trips because of the level of danger, and with absences of four to eight weeks, she stayed home — worried, of course, but “I always had peace beyond understanding. I never questioned that he was going where he was supposed to be. We never had a moment of hesitation that he should go. And, I’ve always had plenty of prayer
warriors who have been here for me. They pray for his safety, for the activities of the team, and for the people he’s serving. It’s a ‘front line’ of a different kind. We’re thrilled with how these decades of David’s work in crisis areas have changed us both. It has made us so dependent on the Lord.”
The Gettles note that you don’t have to fly halfway around the world to help others in need. The couple works with an inner-city organization in Indianapolis, gathering in a parking lot on Sunday afternoons distributing food and clothing to families, playing with kids or taking them trick-or-treating. “Whatever you can do to help people in crisis or transition — well, all I can say is you’ll receive blessings that you wouldn’t have imagined. I’m reminded of that every time I think of that stick of chewing gum from many years ago,” says David.
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Steve and Linda Nelson
What if you gave away more money than you ever anticipated? What if you actually gave away more than you kept?
For some people, giving is itself a natural gift, embedded in their DNA. For others, like Steve and Linda, it’s a joy that was only discovered after some hard truths — about money and its purpose, materialism, and the journey not to just find Jesus, but to live a life as a disciple for His kingdom and not the world’s.
Steve achieved financial success at a young age in his career and life. With an income approaching seven figures and a very comfortable lifestyle, he thought everything was “pretty well set.” And when he went into his first planning meeting with his advisor, he assumed he would hear that he was on cruise control as far as future financial security. That wasn’t the case. The short story is that after learning how much he’d have to continue making to fund his current lifestyle and future retirement, Steve had an epiphany, suddenly realizing that “enough is never enough.”
“When I left the meeting, I went and prayed for several hours,” says Steve. “Linda and I knew that we needed to go in the opposite direction. I kept thinking about a quote I liked: ‘The truly free man is not the man who has everything in the world, but the man who needs nothing from the world.’ I was trying to get ‘enough’ for security, but what I needed to do was refocus so that I didn’t need so much. It was the way to real freedom — especially from fears and anxiety about ‘enough.’”
Steve and Linda drew their line in the sand: Everything above a certain lifestyle line would be given away. The couple actually wrote a covenant with God. They realized that there could be years they might struggle and they debated what that would mean to their giving covenant. But they also realized that if they didn’t fully commit to a line, their line would keep rising. As Steve remembers it, “If that happened, we would never give what God intends for us to give. At that critical point in our lives, our passion for giving began.”
The couple soon experienced what long-time givers know — the joy of giving money away far outweighs the joy of spending it on material goods. But suddenly, they did face a challenge, one they had considered when they wrote their covenant. Within 90 days of creating their covenant, Steve’s business suffered a setback when a major customer decided to phase out its business with Steve. The big question was: How would this affect their giving plans?
“Everything had suddenly changed,” says Steve. “But we know that everything might always change. We stuck with our plan — and, amazingly, I had some very big and very positive changes with my business. In a few short years, we were giving away three times what we said we were going to. That wasn’t what we pictured happening.” Even during subsequent challenging times — such as the recession of 2008-2009 — they maintained their generous giving. Says Steve, “All I can say is that God has been faithful to us every step of the way.”
In 2012, their giving took a different turn, and all because of a deceased newborn baby found in a dumpster. Moved and saddened by the fact that the child was a “Baby Doe,” Linda felt compelled to act. She contacted the coroner, inquiring about what would happen to the baby. When she learned that without someone coming forward the baby would be buried in a mass, unmarked grave, Linda felt like God said, “No.” She asked to adopt the baby in death and give it a name and a proper burial.
A new ministry was born. He Knows Your Name Ministry exists to honor every child with a name in life and dignity and honor in death, helping women and families say goodbye to children with burials, services, and headstones, including for aborted or miscarried babies. She’s also adopted a dozen nameless and abandoned babies in death, giving them the names they deserve.
Linda’s ministry began to blossom and it brought the couple to an epiphany. Meeting with their lawyer to set up a new 501(c)(3) organization for He Knows Your Name, the couple was given a full accounting of how much money they had
already given away. They didn’t really know — and were staggered at the amount.
“We never would have guessed that we even had that much money to give away,” says Steve. “I also realized how much that money would have grown had we kept it and invested it. So we sat down at our kitchen table and asked ourselves three important questions. Number 1: If we had known at the beginning that we were going to give away this much money, would we have signed on? The answer was no, because the number would have frightened us. Number 2: Would we do this again? The answer was yes, without a doubt. Number 3: If this money was put back into our bank account tomorrow, what would we do with it? How would it change our lives? In other words, what have we missed out on? Our answer was that we’ve missed out on nothing. With tears of joy we were overwhelmed with the thought of what we would have missed had we not given.”
That conversation left Steve and Linda asking the next question: How much more can we give? The answer to that question was that the couple committed to their first seven-figure gift, to an organization doing worldwide church planting with a strong focus on disciple building. “We don’t think of ourselves as people who can give a gift of that size easily,” says Steve, “but we felt led by God and His faithfulness to us.”
Steve and Linda are intentional givers, evaluating their gifts using various criteria. Their biggest gifts are reserved for those organizations with which they have a personal connection. One of those takes Steve to a remote area of the Ukraine three to four times a year where he serves as a pastor for a small ministry spreading the light of the Gospel there.
An unexpected, and very emotional, bonus for Steve and Linda has been learning of the giving of their four children.
“When they were old enough to appreciate it, we shared with them our history of giving and some of our larger gifts and the reasons why,” says Steve. “It was one of the sweetest moments we’ve ever had with our children. We’ve since learned that our kids give very generously to their own passions and causes — they don’t have as much to give, but we think they give more freely than we do. We’ve heard story after story of what they’ve done, which has amazed and challenged us even more.”
ADDITIONAL STORIES
Wahid Wahba
Transition from dentistry to missionary work, highlighting their mission trip to Sudan and meeting with the Sudanese president. They detail their expansion to 600 churches, meeting with the Pope of the Coptic Church, and establishing a Bible club with 4,200 members. They also discuss their involvement in leadership training and Walk Through the Bible ministries, and the establishment of their own organization.
Eddie Beal
An attorney with a civil rights background shares their personal journey of understanding the importance of generosity. They discuss the challenges and rewards of teaching this value to their child. The talk also highlights Blue Trust, a company dedicated to fostering generosity among people.
RESOURCES & LINKS
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