Is Fear Keeping You from Success?

Tony Morehouse owns a kitchen remodeling business that brings in more than enough to provide for his family. He believes God has blessed his business, because he is a faithful tither. When he first learned of the concept, it was hard to do. “Ten percent. That’s a lot of money,” Tony recalls. “Coming from a kid whose parents put $5 in the plate, because that’s what we thought we were supposed to do.” So the last thing the Morehouses expected was for the distributor for Tony’s company to go bankrupt. He had $200,000 in deposits for kitchen renovations and no way to fill the orders. His boss told him to keep taking deposits and not tell new customers their distributor went bankrupt. Tony couldn’t do it and quit. “I remember coming home and telling Nancy,” he says. “I didn’t know what would happen next. All the sudden you go from having accounts and income to nothing.” Tony admits that stopping their giving to their church and to CBN seemed like the logical thing to do. “That is the thing that you don’t have any formal obligation to. It’s just your word against God’s, and that’s the first thing you think about cutting.” Nancy said no way. She recalls, “Now that we had learned that giving to God and the blessings that come from that outweighed the scariness of watching the checking account go down and figuring out how we were going to pay the mortgage, it was just never an issue.” The Morehouses called every client and explained what had happened and devised a plan. Tony got a job with a competitor, and he prayed that the new company would help him fulfill his back orders. Thrilled that he came on board with $200,000 in deposits, they were happy to fill the orders. But during the months Tony was trying to clean up this mess, Nancy was getting a message: give more. “Every time I turned around, somebody, Gordon [Robertson] or Terry [Meeuwsen] or one of the hosts or the story would say, ‘You got to do it.’ Here it is from the Word: Mark chapter 4, ‘The good soil comes from those who hear and accept God’s message.’” Tony adds, “I remember Nancy coming to me and saying, ‘I think we need to increase our pledge to CBN.’ I said, ‘Have you gone off the deep end? There is no way.’ She said, ‘[We] need to become Chairman Circle members.’” By now Tony had fulfilled his back orders and felt God was telling him to open his own business. Nancy says, “I drove down the street, and I just happened to run into someone at high school who had a building [with] the right square footage. He just happened not to have a buyer. All of these things! There was no way it wasn’t God.” Today the Morehouses have two showrooms and bring in a million and a half in sales. They feel strongly God has blessed them so much, because they have stood firm on listening and obeying in all areas of their lives, including their finances. “You can’t be afraid,” Tony says. “You got to step out in a leap of faith and put all your trust in Him. If you do it, God will give back more than 10 fold. You just have to have faith.”