In part 17 of How to Attack Lack, Ashley and Carlie share their remarkable real-estate testimony to illustrate how God shares a vision and goal for our finances and then fulfills it. When you give to God, you are giving Him permission to give to you!
Transcription
Announcer: Why live a normal life when you could be living, the abundant life? Welcome to the Abundant Life Program with Ashley and Carlie Terradez.
Ashley: Hello and welcome and to Abundant Life, we’re so glad you’re here with us in the lounge. We’ve got a program for you today, we’re talking about how to attack lack. And we’ve been talking about this for various programs previous, lots of programs.
Carlie: Yeah.
Ashley: It started off as a small series.
Carlie: It’s now a mega series.
Ashley: It’s been growing. But we’re talking about how to attack lack. And we’ve talked about how God wants to prosper you in your finances. God wants to give you an abundance for every good work. And we’re talking about how there’s things that we need to do, grace has already provided it, but there’s our part to do by faith. We need to, by faith, reach out and accept what God’s already done for us. And one of the things we can do is the work of our hands, we can put our hands to something.
We also looked at stewardship, how we steward, how we steward our finances, and then now we’re looking at giving. So those three things are really key, the work of our hands, our stewardship and our giving. And at the moment we’re looking at giving, we’ve spent several programs talking about giving, the different types of giving, and about how giving is really about relationship with God. It’s about us honoring God, it’s about us giving back to God. And God is the biggest giver, so He wants to give back to you. So when He asks you to give something, it’s because He’s trying to get more to you. And we want to share with you a story. It starts off really, and a good example of this is in …
Carlie: This is Exodus 36.
Ashley: Exodus, thank you. Exodus 36. And what does it say there when Moses has taken up an offering?
Carlie: Right. So this is when they’re building a sanctuary, and they’re bringing offerings and craftsman, and material was in, and are gathering all these things in order to build the sanctuary. And this is Moses, and in the end they had a problem. Okay? Because they had just too much stuff.
Ashley: That’s a good problem to have.
Carlie: That’s a good problem to have, right.
Ashley: Having too much stuff.
Carlie: Just too much stuff. How many pastors out there have a building project and you’ve had to restrain your people from giving, right? I mean, come on now, that would be every pastor’s dream, right? But here we are, we’re going to pick it up, this is Exodus 36, in verse four and it says, “Then all the craftsman who came were doing all of the work of the sanctuary came, each from the work that he was doing and they spoke to Moses saying, “The people bring much more than enough for the service of the work which the Lord has commanded us to do.”” They’d gone over the top, overboard here.
“So Moses gave a commandment and they caused it to be proclaimed throughout the whole camp saying, “Neither man nor woman do any more work for the offering of the sanctuary.” And the people were restrained from bringing for the material that they had was sufficient for all of the work to be done. Indeed, it was too much.”
Ashley: Wow. That’s where you hear people say, “You know God’s not enough, He’s too much.”
Carlie: He’s too much.
Ashley: In God’s economy, things are too much. He’s a God of supernatural abundance; praise God. And right here Moses had to restrain the people and say, don’t give any more. Don’t give any more it’s too much. Oftentimes we’ve experienced in our life, things have happened to us where God has just blessed us and sometimes it feels like it’s too much. And I’m thinking of the time when we was in a service and you actually ask God, this is an important part of giving by the way, is ask God what to believe for. Ask God what you should be believing for, ask God what you should be giving into.
We already established the different types of giving. We looked at the tithe, we looked at benevolence giving, we looked at offerings, we looked at first fruits. But when it comes to special offerings, ask … This was a special offering that they were doing for the work of the sanctuary. Ask God what you should be giving. Ask God what to believe for. Now was it a service?
Carlie: Yeah.
Ashley: When was it? Five years ago?
Carlie: I think-
Ashley: Somewhere around five?
Carlie: Maybe four years ago,
Ashley: Four years ago.
Carlie: Yeah Jesse Duplantis [crosstalk] actually came to our home church and he was preaching and Jessie’s just … well he has a revelation on prosperity anyway. But he’s big on vision. And he really just stirred my faith to believe God for something that was seemingly impossible. And so we asked the question, what are you believing God for that’s beyond what you can naturally believe for? And I just sat there in the chair for a minute and I’m like, Lord, what is it? What’s the next phase project? What can I believe you for that would be completely … if it was to come to pass, I would know it would have to be you?
Ashley: It has to be a God thing. It’s not something like unbelieving for whatever, this, and then you could definitely make it happen yourself. This is like 100% God project.
Carlie: He dropped this into my heart. So now you’ve already mentioned the name, your seed deal.
Ashley: Right.
Carlie: Right? And I hear sometimes that people they get to bee in their bonnet, as we would say, they want something, and they sow a seed, a gift, and they say, “I’m going to name … this is my seed. I’m going to give this seed in order to get my jet or whatever it is that they’re believing for.
Ashley: And we’ve done that. I have to say that I did that fairly recently, it was probably four or five years ago where I tried to … we wanted to buy some property up in the mountains. And we went to this mountain property and we wanted to buy it, and we sowed a seed that was 10%-
Carlie: We claimed it.
Ashley: … of this property and we claimed it as ours.
Carlie: Whether it was right for us or not, we claimed it.
Ashley: And as I was doing it I remember just thinking deep down in my know, if you like, you know what? This is me trying to make something happen. This isn’t God. This is me trying to make something happen. And there’s a fine line there, and that’s why you need to hear from the Lord. You need to be sensitive to the spirit because He’ll show you. But in that instance, this mountain property, it was definitely me trying to make it happen. And I knew right then, I’m trying to manipulate the system. I’m trying to get something for myself. I’m trying to … I’m basically trying to make God move and that’s never a good thing. And that one didn’t work out.
And we gave a big seed and everything else, so the people we gave it to are blessed, but the house didn’t work out, the property didn’t work out. And then what happened was-
Carlie: We felt like we’d missed God.
Ashley: Yeah I’d missed God, it was definitely me. I’d missed God. But in this case you heard from God. This was different.
Carlie: So I’m there and I’m asking the Lord, what is it? And all of a sudden He just drops in my heart, we have two properties. And at the time our salaries were, I mean it looked like it was going to take forever to pay off both of our houses. We had a house in England, a house here in America, two big mortgages, and we’ve been paying on them. But we had multiple problems with our house in England and we just knew that somehow it was time that we really needed to sell that property. It’s kind of difficult being a long distance landlord anyway. But the people in that house were Christian family, friends of ours, and they’d lived there for 10 years.
And even though it offered for the people to buy the house from us and we would have helped them live there, they didn’t want to be homeowners and we didn’t want to evict them, we wanted to treat them honorably. So we’re kind of stuck in this catch 22 situation where we had a house in England that we really needed to sell, that we wanted to sell, but we didn’t want to do badly by the tenants. They’d been really faithful, and that they wanted to stay there. And then we had a house in England that we just seems like … a house in America that it just seemed like it was going to take forever to pay off.
Ashley: That’s good point. Let me interrupt you there because, and again, we didn’t do everything perfectly, but I’m just going to tell you some principles here. When it comes to money, we’re talking about finances here, we’re talking about attacking lack. We’re talking about receiving God’s supernatural prosperity. You never put people … You never put money before people. This is a godly principle-
Carlie: Or position before.
Ashley: Position before people, you never … Yeah. You know what relationship comes first. And these people that were renting our house out in England, they were good people, good Christian family. And I prayed about this and I really felt God telling me don’t kick them out. We had every right. They were living month by month on a month by month lease, we could have given them the notice and told them to move, and then we could have sold that house. And that was … We could have done that but I felt very strong, no, that’s not fair for them. They want to stay there. They raised their kids there, they’ve been there 10 years, or longer, 11 years I think, let them stay there, put them first.
And so we was putting people before money-
Carlie: And we hadn’t put the rent up in 10 years.
Ashley: We didn’t put the rent up. So any time there’s an opportunity where you can make some money, or you could do a deal, but it’s at the expense of relationship, or it’s going to hurt someone, that’s never God. Let me say that again. Anytime you can … So sometimes if you’re going after making a deal or negotiating, I teach a whole deal on negotiating, and I have a course called buy, sell, repeat. And part of that is talking about negotiating. But when I teach negotiating, it is never to squeeze the other person, it’s never at the deficit of the other person, it’s always both parties should be blessed. And if you’re going in and trying to hurt someone or trying to steal someone’s blessing and make it all about you, and you get the deal, you get the money, but they get hurt, that’s never God.
God’s way is always a win-win way. And when you put money before people, that’s a big problem. You always put people before … money is the least thing. Jesus said, money is the least thing, but people are the true riches. Our relationship with God and people are true riches. People are eternal, money is just temporary. So always make sure you put people before money, it’ll go a long way, and including your family. Some people seek a job or something that’s going to take them away from their family, but they’ll make more money. Be careful when you make those decisions because you’re not going to get that time with your family back again.
I’ve never heard anyone on their death bed say, man I wish I’d traveled more and made more money. I wish I’d spent more time at the office, more time making more money. No, they always say, I wish I spent more time with my kids, I wish I spent more time with my family. So just remember, don’t put money, don’t put the bucks before people, it’s really important.
Carlie: Amen. So we treated the tenants well and we wanted, predominantly to be honorable to them. And so we could not see our way out of this situation, we were kind of stuck in the middle. But when God dropped this in my heart, He reminded me that we had two houses, two mortgages to pay off, and seemingly no way to do it. And so to really just put the idea in my heart to believe Him to pay off, not just one house, but both houses. I mean believe in God at that point to pay off just our own mortgage and the house that we were living in, would have been enough. But both houses.
And then He just stretched me. He was like, “Why just believe for one house when you could believe for both houses?” And this is me and God just having this internal conversation going on and I’m like, “You’re right Lord.” It’s not going to take me any more faith, it’d be completely supernatural if we paid off our one house so it’s not going to make any difference believing you to pay your two houses. And then He said to me, “Well, you know what? Every good goal has to have a timeframe.” I’m like you’re right Lord, what’s the timeframe? And He said, “How about two years?”
I said “Two years would be-
Ashley: Two years.
Carlie: … just fine.” So I just said in my heart to believe God to pay off both houses, which was probably $500,000 worth of money, probably?
Ashley: More.
Carlie: More than that. Maybe $1 million worth of money in two years.
Ashley: About 600,000, right.
Carlie: And looking on our … if you looked at our income at that point, you would have known that in the natural that was impossible.
Ashley: And here’s the important thing as well, God, relayed it on Carlie to pay off both mortgages. We assumed that mean, we was going to pay off both houses and own both houses. But that wasn’t the word from God. The word from God was pay off both mortgages, there’s a difference. So sometimes if God speaks to you something, you got to be careful, we’ve done this in the past. You get a word from God, you make a sentence out of it and you think it’s going to be a certain thing-
Carlie: You add to it.
Ashley: You add to it but it’s not. The word was payoff both mortgages, and that’s what happened in the end. So that was about four years ago.
Carlie: Yep.
Ashley: And then-
Carlie: And so I shared it with you and then honestly –
Ashley: She shared it with me I was-
Carlie: He laughed. It was funny.
Ashley: I was like, I didn’t say anything. If you can’t get an agreement, say nothing and do it. But I was like, this is literally impossible. I mean we’re talking about at least $600,000 worth. We were, at the time we worked for Andrew Wommack Ministries who paid us well, but let me tell you, they were not paying us anywhere-
Carlie: But not that kind of well.
Ashley: … we were never going to be able to pay that off in a decade, let alone in two years. We’re talking about 20 years or more to pay that off at the very most.
Carlie: So I shared it with Ashley, but honestly probably forgot about it for the next 18 months.
Ashley: And then about, I think a year later-
Carlie: Yeah 18 months later, I’d say.
Ashley: I was at church and our pastor stood up and we got Courage Christian Center in Colorado Springs, our pastor, Lawson Perdue, stood up on stage, he said, “We’ve got one mortgage payment to make on this church building. And once we make this last mortgage payment, we’ll be debt free. And I remember standing there on the front row of the church thinking, I could pay that off. And again, it was God telling me to do this. This wasn’t me searching for something. It was, I felt God telling me to do this. God was saying I could pay that mortgage off. So when he came off the stage, I said “Pastor,” I said, “I’d like to pay, make the last payment on this church.”
He said, “Well,” he said, “two other people want to do it.” He said, “You’re the third person that said they want to do that.” So, he was like Moses, he had to restrain the people, it was too much.
Carlie: Get in line.
Ashley: Three different people from the church wanted to pay the mortgage off. So he said, “You’d have to get in line.” I said to him, “Pastor,” I said, “I really want to do it.” He said, “No.” He said, “I think you should.” He said, “Okay,” he said, “come and see me tomorrow.” And he said, “You can pay it.” So I went to bed that night and I was like, all of a sudden I realized, I never asked him how much it was. I was like, it could be 10, $20,000 what am I going to do? I’m going to have to … I started panicking.
Carlie: Sell the car or something.
Ashley: I’m going to have to get a part-time job, I’ll have to do all this … I’ve given my word now.
Carlie: Yeah.
Ashley: So anyway the next day I went to see him and it was $3,300. So we was able to give that, it was a sacrifice, but was able to give the $3,300. We wrote the check, gave him the $3,300 personally, and he didn’t want to take it at first. And I was like, “No, don’t rob me the blessing.” So he took it, paid the mortgage off and he prophesied to me when I gave him that money, $3,300. He prophesied to me under the spirit of the Lord. And he said, “Ashley, God’s going to give you a house for $330,000 paid for, paid for house, supernaturally.” So I said, “I receive that. I receive that.” So, and in fact that was, we mix this up. That was about a year before the Jesse deal.
That was before the Jesse deal because he told me and prophesied, and we just totally forgot about that. So that was about a year before the Jesse deal. Then about a year later, because we had the two houses, so once he gave me that word, about six months or so later we bought this house in Colorado Springs, we got a great deal in it, it was a good find, and it was … God … In fact it was two houses we was looking at. One was up at the top of a mountain, and one was at the bottom of the mountain and we couldn’t decide what house to buy. And we had a down payment to buy the house, was getting a mortgage.
And a lady from England actually messaged us on Facebook and said, we hadn’t heard from her for like four or five years. She said, “I don’t know where you live or anything,” she said, “this sounds crazy but I had a dream about you last night.” She said, “You was deciding, there was two houses. There was a house on the top of the mountain and the house at the bottom of the mountain on the edge of town.” She said, “God told me buy the house on the bottom of the mountain, it’s good for your prosperity.” And I was like, “Wow, she’s not crazy, this is a word from [crosstalk] God.
Carlie: She didn’t even know where we lived in the base of the mountain.
Ashley: She didn’t even know where we lived. One was at the top of the mountain, one was at the bottom of the mountain, so we went for the one at the bottom of the mountain. It was a great deal, and we bought it. And then, so that was after we paid the church off. Then about a year later, Jesse Duplantis come to our church, and-
Carlie: Brought that word to me.
Ashley: … God gave that word to Carlie about paying off both houses. So we had one house in the Springs, and one house in England to pay off.
Carlie: So this whole process has gone on, but honestly, so I shared it with Ashley. But about 18 months into this two years went by, and life got busy and just forgot about it. And I was in church one day and God reminded me. He says, “It’s coming up time, it’s coming up due to pay those houses off.” I’m like, I suddenly remembered, hang on a minute, Yes it’ll be … in like six months time it’s going to be about that time. I said, God, thanks for reminding me. So I shared this with Ashley, I said, “Ashley, the Lord showed me today in church that, that promise is still good. ”
Ashley: Even though we only had like six months left, and both houses still had their mortgages on them.
Carlie: Nothing had changed naturally.
Ashley: We were nowhere near paying them off. In fact the one in England was such a big mortgage, we was just about paying the interest. And the one in America, we had paid down a little bit, but nothing like paying it off. So we still had huge amounts to pay on both of these houses, only six months to go. But we weren’t striving, we weren’t trying to go, oh, we want to make this happen. We were just resting in the load. And like I said, honestly, we’d forgotten about some of these things. So the Lord reminded you-
Carlie: He didn’t forget.
Ashley: The Lord never forgets, so Amen. So God reminded Carlie, and I went to praying about this house in England. I knew it was time to sell it, but the problem was, I didn’t want to kick the tenants out. I wanted to make sure we’re honoring-
Carlie: They were still there this whole time.
Ashley: Yeah. We wanted to make sure we was honoring the tenants in our house. So I prayed about it, and I prayed in the Holy Ghost. I tell people, if you don’t know what to do, pray in the Holy Ghost. Pray in your prayer language, it’s amazing when you do that. When you pray in tongues, you’re praying the hidden mysteries of God. You’re praying perfect prayers, and you’re praying and it’s bypassing your natural mind, and it’s your spirit praying directly to God’s spirit. And when you do that, it’s a perfect prayer. And I’ll tell you, it’s powerful when you do that.
So I tell people, if you don’t know what to do, if you’re in a situation where you don’t know what to do, pray in the Holy Spirit and spend time doing that. So I was praying in the Holy Spirit, thinking about that house, praying in the Holy Spirit, spending time doing that. And nothing really happened apart from I had an idea I was like, I need to talk to my friend. I got a friend, I only see maybe once or twice a year, he’s in Indiana. And I felt like the Lord said, “He’s got your answer.” Now he’s actually good at real estate. He has a lot of real estate in Indiana so I thought maybe he’s got a natural answer because-
Carlie: So we were talking thinking, he’s probably going to give us some insider information.
Ashley: Some plan.
Carlie: How to sell a foreign property or something.
Ashley: Yeah some plan.
Carlie: We’re like, he’s obviously really knowledgeable that’s why the Lord has showed us.
Ashley: So I just felt the Lord say, just impressed, and when you hear from God, we have a whole lesson on hearing the voice of God. But when you hear from God, sometimes it just like your own idea. Because you’re one spirit with the Lord, so I wasn’t 100% sure, but I just had a feeling on the inside, speak to this man. Dan, is his name. Speak to Dan, he’s got your answer. I was like, okay. So I told Carlie I said, we’ve tried everything with this house in England, it seems impossible. But I feel like Dan’s got our answer. And you said, “Well, why don’t you call him? You got his cell phone number.” And I said, “No, I’m going to see him next month at this conference.”
We’re going to be at a conference together and we’re both speaking at a conference in Denver, Colorado called Wealth Builders, I’m going to see him at that conference. I said, “I’ll talk to him then.” And Carlie said, “Well just call him now.” I said, “No,” I just feel impressed, “No, I’m going to wait and see him.”
Carlie: And honestly I was kind of a little bit frustrated with him. I was like the wife trying to like-
Ashley: You didn’t tell me that.
Carlie: … come on. Come on, hurry up and get with it.
Ashley: You just want to get it done.
Carlie: Yeah, I’m a get it done kind of girl.
Ashley: You just want to get it done.
Carlie: Yeah. But you just knew, the Lord’s timing. We have to have patience sometimes. God has a timing thing in this, right?
Ashley: Amen. In fact my friend, Greg Morris puts it this way. He says, “You can’t believe the promises of God, or receive the promise of God looking at your watch or the calendar. If you’re calendar watching or watch watching it, it’s like you’re digging up your seed, so don’t do that.” So I just relaxed in it and I was like, “No, I feel like I need to wait and see Dan in person at the Wealth Builders conference in Denver, Colorado.” So that’s where he’s at. So, I know, again it’s a long story, but it’s glory to God. This is a good godly story. So anyway-
Carlie: It’s epic.
Ashley: It’s epic. So I go to this conference in Denver, Colorado, and I’m all excited. I got to Dan and I say, “Dan, I’ve got this situation. I’ve got this house in England and we’ve got tenants in it, and I don’t know what to do with it.” And I laid it all out to him. And I was expecting-
Carlie: And you got to know, for the whole month we were so excited-
Ashley: This is our answer.
Carlie: … this is going to be it. We’re going to go to this conference, and we’re going to see Dan, and Dan’s going to know exactly what it is. So we had high expectations of this meeting.
Ashley: So I laid it all out to him. I said, “Dan, here’s the situation.” And he looked at me blank and he said, “I’ve got nothing.” And I said, “Seriously?” He said, “No, that’s impossible. There’s no way you can sell this house, you’re going to have to … there’s no way of doing it. There’s no …” Because I said, we got to keep the tenants in there. I don’t want to kick the tenants out, I haven’t got … I have to sell it, I haven’t got time to go over there and work it all out, I just needed to be certain. He said, “It’s impossible. You can’t sell this house in England.” He said, “You’re stuck with it. It’s impossible.” So I can’t even keep it anymore, so I have to sell it. He says, “Impossible.” So he says, “I’ve got nothing. And I said to him, “That’s okay Dan, no problem.”
Carlie: But on the inside-
Ashley: On the inside I was like, damn, I was like, you’ve missed it, God told me you had my answer and you haven’t got my answer. I was like, you’ve missed it, or I’ve missed it, or someone’s missed it. So I went to bed that night disappointed. This was a three-day conference. I went to bed that night, disappointed. The next day I come down and I see Dan come across the auditorium at me and he said, “Ashley, I want you to meet someone.” I said, “Sure.” So he pulls me over, he sits me down, and he pulls over this young lady and sits her down and he says, “Ashley, meet this young lady.”
Now here’s this young lady’s prayer. She’s in England, and she got an inheritance for her. And she prayed to God she said, God, I want to invest this inheritance in real estate. I want a house. I want to be a landlord, but I don’t want to find tenants. Finding tenants is the worst thing, I don’t want to be trying to find tenants and vet tenants, and interview them, and all that. And I don’t want to do any of that. [crosstalk] rehab a house. I don’t want to rehab a house, I’m scared of doing all that. I don’t want to rehab a house. Her prayer was “Lord, give me a house that’s already got long-term tenants in it. They’re already signed up, they’ve already got long term tenancy there, and that’s what I want.”
And that she felt the Lord tell her, “Go to this Wealth Builders Conference in Denver, Colorado. She’d never heard … She only heard of one of the speakers, never heard of all the speakers, or anything, she just on a prayer from God, from England. Turns out she lived 30 minutes from our hometown in England. Now of all the place she could have lived. So God told her, “Go to this conference and I’ll show you what to do.” So she flew out to this conference, she went up to Dan, the same guy the next day and said, “Here’s my situation. I want to buy a house with long-term tenants in it. I don’t want to rehab it, I want to spend this amount of money,” which was the same amount of money as we was asking for our house. She says, “And I live in England.”
And when he heard this he thought, this is God. So he got us together and I said to her, where do you live? And she lived the next town down from us, she lived less than 30 minutes.
Carlie: And tat was one of her criteria.
Ashley: Less than 30 minutes from her house. She wanted a house within 30 minutes of her own house. That’s about the right distance if you’re a landlord. You don’t want to be too close to your tenants, but not too far away. And that was her prayer. So she came to this conference, she flew four and a half thousand miles around the world to this conference, and then we met together. We agreed on the price and it was the same price I needed for the house. We didn’t have to pay for realtors or anything. She just went back to England, sorted out with her lawyers, the solicitors. Wrote up a contract, we even had all our furniture in our garage, in our garage.
And she let us keep our stuff there. She didn’t even have to worry about the rehabbing the house, the tenants were happy. So the tenants won because they get to stay in their house, and pay the same rent.
Carlie: For the Christian landlord.
Ashley: Now they had a Christian, another Christian landlord. The new buyer, the lady was happy because she was able to invest in a house at the price range she wanted, just down the road from her, that already had long-term tenants, that was already rehabbed, already ready to go, and, and we was happy because we got the money released to us without having to do any work. We didn’t have to decorate the house, fix the house up. We didn’t even have to move our furniture out. It was all done for us. So that money, we sold our house and that money we got transferred. And when it got transferred from England to America, it was during the Brexit. And I don’t know if you remember about the Brexit, but when England came out of Europe, the Brexit exchange rate for America and England was the most volatile it’s ever been since 1970s.
Carlie: In the end, we were watching the little graph of the exchange rate going up and down, knowing that our money was stuck in limbo from the sale of a house. And at that point, these little blips up and down, that was like a $10,000 up or a $10,000 down. I mean it made a big difference when you’re transferring that amount of money across. And in the end I had to say to Ashley, “Listen, we’re just going to have to believe God. Quit listening to that stuff on the news about how the little points are going up and down, we’re going to believe God, that the moment that money transfers and hits the bank account over in America, it’s going to be exactly the right amount of money that we need.
Ashley: And that’s exactly what happened. The money came over to America. It hit our mortgage in America, on our house that we own in Colorado Springs, and paid the mortgage off exactly to about $100 too much. It was like the exact amount to pay that mortgage off. So there we was-
Carlie: Enough and extra.
Ashley: … Enough and extra. So there we was, we’ve just suddenly realized the two years was up, it was just before the end of the two years. We had a mortgage in England paid off, now someone else owned the house now but that mortgage was paid off. We paid that mortgage off with the proceeds of the house, so that mortgage was paid off. And a house in America’s mortgage was paid off, and we actually owned it. And there we was sitting. And the house had been valued, the house we have in Colorado Springs had been valued. And at that time it was valued at $330,000.
Just like our pastor prophesied when we gave that 3,300. He said, “You’re going to get house supernaturally paid for, for free $330,000. And the house was valued right then at 330,000.
Carlie: Praise Jesus.
Ashley: [inaudible] God, I’m telling you, God is trying to get stuff to you, not take from you.
Carlie: Amen.
Ashley: When he told me to give that $3,300 to my church, it wasn’t because I had to give my money over, it’s because He was trying to get me a $330,000 house paid for. And now, because we haven’t got a mortgage, when we felt the Lord call both of us to leave our full-time managers, positions at Andrew Womack Ministries to give up both our salaries, we was able to do that because we haven’t got a house payment. We haven’t got a car payment, we haven’t got any payments. We were payment free so that was a big move for us to be able to run a ministry full-time and not take a salary from our ministry, because we didn’t have a house payment, we didn’t have a mortgage payment.
So you see what God did there? God was trying to get stuff to us. And I’m saying, that’s a supernatural story of God’s increase. But it started with a word from God, it started with giving, being obedient to God, and I’m telling you, it worked out. We prayed in the Holy Ghost, we heard from God and it worked out. And what God’s done for us, He’ll do for you. It won’t be exactly the same thing, but whatever it is you need, whatever the desires are in your heart, God will give you those desires. If you delight yourself in Him, He’ll give you those things. Just get a word from God, ask God what to [crosstalk] believe for rather than us just going out, what are we going to believe for?
Pray in the Holy Ghost and ask God, what should we believe for? And He will show you what to believe for, and He’ll make it come to pass.
Carlie: Amen.
Ashley: This has happened time and time again in different situations. And it’s amazing when God does this, but when you give, you’re giving Him permission to give to you.
Carlie: Amen.
Ashley: When you give to God, you’re giving permission for Him to give to you. And that’s one of the most important things about giving. Get a word from God, ask God how much to give, where to give, who to give to, and He will show you because He’s trying to get things to you. He’s not trying to take from you, He’s trying to get things to you, praise God. So, both mortgages paid off within the two years, and now our house worth more … it’s worth more now but at the time it was worth 330,000, just like was prophesied to us.
Carlie: This is no problem. I feel like there are people watching today that are just thinking, I’ve got this problem, and it’s been hanging around for so long, it’s like part of the furniture. It’s like a relative in the house. It’s got a name. But it’s just such a big problem that you’ve gotten used to living with, and you just feel like it’s never going to change. But the Lord can, He can intervene, right?
Ashley: Amen.
Carlie: He can intervene. He has ways to solve your problems that you haven’t even thought of yet. But if you just keep living with them, just like we did, and just thinking, oh, just they’re always going to be there, I’m just going to chip away and chip away. No, invite God into the situation. Because I’m telling you, He has supernatural means at His disposal. When we get in a relationship with Him, when we take our problems and we give them to Him, we cast our burdens unto Jesus, He is more than enough. Amen? He has so many resources at His disposal, ways and ideas and solutions to those problems that you’ve never even thought of.
So I just want to encourage you, don’t carry your burdens, right? However big they are, how ugly they seem, cast them unto Jesus. Because He’s big enough. He’s big enough. But first of all it means coming to the Lord, inviting Him into those situations, and being in a place where you can hear Him speak to you. Amen?
Ashley: Amen. And when He speaks to you, be obedient. But when He gives you a word, be obedient.
Carlie: Amen.
Ashley: We’re nearly out of time but I want you to know that God is the God of impossible. You can … All things are possible for those who believe. And if you, like Carlie said, if you’ve heard this story and think, well, that’s okay for them, but what about me? Now, God’s no respecter of persons, and what He did for us, He’ll do for you. Just believe God, praise God, believe God today, and He’s the God of impossible. So this is the Abundant Life. We’re talking about how to live the abundant life. We’re talking about how to attack a lack in our life. We’re talking about receiving the prosperity of God.
And this is just part of it, listening to God and being obedient in your giving, praise God. And God’s going to get things to you because He loves you and He wants the best for you. Amen? So thanks for being with us today, we’re going to be back real soon with some more lessons on living the abundant life. So until next time, go out and live the abundant life
Announcer: To order your copy of this teaching, visit our website, terradez.com. Download your free copy of Ashley and Carlie’s teaching notes at our website, terradez.com. Coming up next on the Abundant Life Program.
Ashley: I tell people this, if you really want to see God’s blessing on your life and you want to see increase in your finances, it’s really good to put your hand to something. And somebody is saying, “Hang on a minute Ashley. You’re talking about work?
Carlie: You mean I have to do something?
Ashley: We’re beyond work now-
Carlie: We’re spiritual.
Ashley: This is a new covenant. This is-
Carlie: I feel this was a spiritual.
Ashley: We don’t work anymore. Well, let me show you some scriptures on this. In Genesis 2:15 Genesis two, God actually made Adam for the purpose of work.
Announcer: Join us next time for the abundant life program with Ashley and Carlie Terradez.