From Army Officer to Teaching Pastor: Scott LaPierre on Financial Wisdom, Homeschooling, and Faith

Have you ever felt inspired by a story of transformation and change? This episode brings you the captivating journey of Scott LaPierre, a former schoolteacher and army officer, to his calling as a teaching pastor at Woodland Christian Church. Drawing from his personal experiences and the lessons learned along the way, Scott introduces us to his "recent book 'Your Finances God's Way'" and how his wife played a pivotal role in his writing process.

This discussion goes far beyond just a fascinating story; it's an eye-opener to the world of financial wisdom. Scott helps us to understand the relevance of financial statements and budgeting in our lives, and the concept of 'worthless purchases' that often drain our resources without adding any value. He takes us through the Stanford Marshmallow experiment, making us realize the power of patience in making wise financial decisions, even sharing a personal anecdote about a surprising deal he got on a new family van!

But it doesn't end there; Scott also shares his insights on financial stewardship and homeschooling. He passionately advocates for parents to involve their children in financial decisions, fostering financial literacy and generosity early on. Revealing why he and his wife chose to have a big family, Scott leaves us with a glimpse of his family life. Should you wish to explore more about his book or seek financial advice, Scott has generously shared his contact details with us. Gear up for an engaging and enlightening conversation weaving faith, finances, and family together.


Scotts Book, and Website info,
https://www.amazon.com/Your-Finances-Gods-Way-Biblical/dp/B0B2SJZGK1/ref=sr_1_4?crid=2ZBIK5BLNRSQ7&keywords=Scott+Lapierre&qid=1691364634&sprefix=scott+lapierre%2Caps%2C184&sr=8-4

https://www.scottlapierre.org/

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:15

Hello everyone, thanks again for joining me on another episode of the Dorsi Russo. Today we have a special guest with us. His name is Scott lit labriere. He is the teaching pastor of Woodland Christian Church in Woodland Washington and author and current speaker. He holds an MA in biblical studies from Liberty University. Scott and his wife, katie have nine good and a new. Passionate about homeschooling. Scott is a former schoolteacher army officer. Scott, thank you very much for coming on this show today.

Speaker 2: 0:54

Yeah, glad to be here, Dorisies, thanks so much for having me on the show. It's a privilege.

Speaker 1: 0:57

Absolutely. How did you go from a former schoolteacher to becoming a pastor?

Speaker 2: 1:05

Oh sure, yeah, that's a great question, one I'm always thankful to be able to answer because it's really my testimony.

Speaker 2: 1:10

I was not raised in a Christian home and I was an officer in the army and then I became a schoolteacher and coach, and when I was coaching and teaching, my brother died of a drug overdose and some friends invited me to a Christian church and I went to that church and heard the gospel for the first time, became a Christian soon after that, and I could elaborate I know we're talking primarily about finance, because I could probably take 30 minutes just sharing all this with you and so I became a Christian and I really thought I was going to teach and coach for the rest of my life because I enjoyed it so much.

Speaker 2: 1:44

But then, once I became a Christian, I really found my passion for ministry increasing and my passion for school teaching kind of decreasing, I guess you could say I wanted to tell students. I wanted to tell people to open their Bibles versus tell students to open their math books. And so then a position for a youth, a part-time youth pastor, became available in the town where I was teaching, and it worked really well with my teaching schedule because I had weekends and summers off with my youth. And then the church grew and then they heard me full-time as an associate pastor. But I really wanted to be preaching, be a preaching or teaching pastor, and so my senior pastor mentored me to become a senior pastor myself, and then we came to Washington in 2010, and we figure we'll spend our lives here, and so that's kind of the short story.

Speaker 1: 2:34

Okay, the short story of a long journey. Well now, where did you go up and did that affect who you became?

Speaker 2: 2:43

Sure, yeah. So I grew up in Northern California, a very small town. My wife and I grew up there together, and so it definitely did affect me. I wasn't familiar with you know kind of big city and probably some of the things that I might have been introduced there to there, and again, I wasn't a Christian at that time. So there's decisions I wish I would have made differently and things that have done done differently if I could go back. My my in-laws still live there and so we go back there and visit our hometown. Sometimes it's about eight hours south from here.

Speaker 1: 3:14

Because, obviously, because you know being a Christian and being a pastor and telling others about Christ. What's your biggest passion, would you say?

Speaker 2: 3:25

Oh, okay, very good. So I like writing. I that's kind of I may I shouldn't say it that way I like taking my sermons and turning them into books that might be the better way to say it and I also like doing some speaking. I get to do some traveling and speaking. My elders graciously give me about six to eight weekends per year to go do some speaking. It's primarily marriage conferences After I, after my marriage book was published that kind of opened the door for marriage conferences and so earlier this year I was in Georgia with my wife in Oklahoma to do different marriage conferences and but that's pretty much that all that keeps me pretty busy, along with my family. You know nine kids. Our 10th, our 10th child, is going to be born in October.

Speaker 1: 4:05

So, yeah. What made you write your book? Go find it in God's way.

Speaker 2: 4:12

Sure, yeah, that's a good question. So if I make this kind of simple, let's say there's two ways that pastors prepare sermons. One way is they kind of have abbreviated notes. They might even use like note cards or some card stock and put notes on it, kind of reminding them what to say, jarring their memory. Maybe they have a bit of an outline. And then there's another type of preacher who writes out their sermons or manuscripts them, and I'm definitely in that category.

Speaker 2: 4:36

And so my wife is a real wonderful spiritual woman and I go over my sermons with her. So she saw how hard I was laboring over my sermons and I'm polishing them, refining them all week. So by the time I get up to preach that sermon, I'm super familiar with these notes and I've really written them out very thoroughly. So Katie was always telling me hey, I need to, you know, turn my sermons into books. And I kept putting it off because I was so busy. And then I finally preached on marriage at my church and the running joke is it was supposed to be the marriage month but it became like the marriage year because I just kept preaching on marriage and people seemed to be enjoying it. And so Katie said, hey, this, this needs to be your first book. You need to take these marriage sermons, turn them into a book. And so that I just kind of jumped into it I had no idea what I was doing. You know, super, super ignorantly thought I'd kind of go to the Thomas Nelson website and, you know, give them my manuscript and then they're going to turn it into a book for me. And if you don't know this already, most all big publishers and most middle, mid-sized publishers and even some small publishers have one statement on their website we do not accept unsolicited manuscripts. And so there's a whole, that's a whole other story, because I could tell you about how you send query letters and proposals and get a literary agent and all that stuff.

Speaker 2: 5:54

But after I wrote my marriage book, I wrote a finance book, a book on work and rest. God's Way is kind of my brand, you know, your marriage God's Way, enduring trials God's Way, work and rest God's Way. And then I preached on finances at my church and turned that into a book as well as more kind of on stewardship, I would say. But there was also an amount on finances, and so then that became your finances God's Way. But really that was born out of just seeing another need. In my church I don't write separately from my preaching ministry, so if it's in a book, I've preached on it, because I don't have the bandwidth to write separately from my preaching.

Speaker 1: 6:29

Right.

Speaker 2: 6:29

And so I'll see a need in my church, and then I might preach on that, and then that becomes ends up becoming a book.

Speaker 1: 6:37

Yeah, I know what you're saying with. You know, with the preaching. If I do the same thing as a preacher myself, I write out every word. You know that I'm going to say. I write it out. You know word for word, and I'm also a lawyer, so I know how difficult it can be to you know, get your book out there and get it published and whatnot. I learned the second way when I updated my book. I learned, you know, go straight to Amazon and have them, have them sell it.

Speaker 2: 7:09

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 7:11

What? How do you find it? It's got way different than other finance books.

Speaker 2: 7:19

Yeah. So kind of speaking of the publishing journey. If you're fortunate enough or you work hard enough, or however you want to say it, to get in contact with a publisher, even get a publisher to respond to you, one of the questions they're going to want to know is how is your book different than all the other books on that topic? So, for example, I mentioned my marriage book. Well, they want to know if your marriage book is like all the other marriage books out there. There's no reason for us to publish it. And so, with my finance book, when I was dealing with Harvest House, your proposal is going to answer a lot of these questions. You're going to you're going to distinct, compare your book to other books and distinguish your book from them.

Speaker 2: 7:55

And so what I told Harvest House was this book is thoroughly biblical. It's not just practical financial advice although there is some of that. It's more of a spiritual book talking about the heart and how we're stewards and how we're supposed to stewards. God's resources finances being one of them for his glory, for his kingdom, have an eternal spiritual perspective on our finances, which is really the perspective we should have on everything marriage, parenting, employment and work. And so there's a lot of finance books out there that talk, tell you how to invest or give you instruction on saving and so forth. I want to kind of deal more with the heart and help people be good stewards of their finances. Although that we do talk about saving, giving retirement, investing are in the book as well.

Speaker 1: 8:47

Do more? People have an income problem or spending problem.

Speaker 2: 8:53

Yeah, good question. Most people have, at least in the United States have spending problems plural, versus an income problem singularly. So if you live in the United States, you're more than likely there can be some exceptions for any of your listeners. I don't want them to get offended, but for most of your listeners, or perhaps all of them, if they live in the United States, then they are some of the wealthiest people throughout, not just the world, but throughout all of human history. And so, and then some people say, well, things are more expensive here, things are more expensive here. But even have a chapter in my book and part. There's a section where I talk about how wealthy we are as Americans. Even when you take cost of living into account, we're still substantially, you know, depending on the country, anywhere from two to a hundred times wealthier than people in other countries, even factoring in cost of living. And so when you make that much money, as Americans do, then you more than likely do not have an income problem, you have spending problems, and so that's what a lot of my counseling involves looking.

Speaker 2: 9:59

If people tell me they want to get counseling for me for finances, I tell them before you come in, you need to bring in your financial statements so I can see them. I mean, and you need, I need to see your spending over the last couple months and I need to see how much money you make, because people generally kind of look at their finances this way and I'll use round numbers. They say, okay, we make, we make $7,000 per month and we only have our mortgage payment is only $3,000, and then we have, you know, $2,000 going or $1,000 going toward our vehicle or vehicles and we spend $1,000 on food, so that's $5,000. We should have $2,000 left over, but we find that it's very tight every month and we're not able to save and what you notice is the spending problems eat away at those, at those that $2,000, and so I generally try to address those spending problems with people, like a lot of small purchases they make that end up adding up over time. You know the number of times that they go to Starbucks, the number of times they eat out, you know the number of extra things they buy when they go to Walmart or Target and I'm not at all saying people can't, you know, eat out or go to the movies.

Speaker 2: 11:17

We actually just went to Sound of Freedom and we don't go to movies. But we wanted to support this movie and so I'll just put a plug in for Sound of Freedom. We took some of our oldest kids and we thought it was a really incredible movie. So I'd highly recommend anyone. And I have no, no horse in that race, I just think it's a great movie and I'm thrilled to see it succeed. It deals with a very important topic and I was glad to go throw some of my money, you know, toward that.

Speaker 2: 11:39

But otherwise we don't really go to go to movies much, and I'm not saying you can't eat out or go to Starbucks, but when you, but that's where that $2,000 goes and most people don't know that and so when you bring in their finances and you say, hey, there's this, this, this and the next thing you know, if you go to Starbucks like any coffee shop on the way to work five times, you know, per week and you do that, there's about you spent about $7,000 on coffee in just a few years and people are shocked to see that. The other thing I talk about is what I call worthless purchases, and I don't mean it's a worthless purchase and that the item doesn't have any value. I mean that it's a worthless purchase to the individual. And so a worthless purchase is something that you don't use or that does not benefit you over time. And so if you bought that piece of clothing, no matter how nice it is, if it just sat in your closet and you didn't wear it, that's a worthless purchase for you. If you bought that item and it just sat on the shelf in your garage, you know, or the top of your closet, that's a worthless purchase for you. So worthless purchase is just something that had no benefit or value to you. And we make many most of us make many worthless purchases. I talk to people about that. You know the small purchases, the add-up.

Speaker 2: 12:56

I talk to people one of the spending problems just deals with impatience. I'll tell people if you're gonna make a big purchase now big is relative, but a big purchase let's say a vehicle, we'll use a vehicle you should wait at least two to four weeks before making that purchase and during that time you should do your research. And one of the reasons that I tell people to wait two to four weeks is that most of the regret people have associated with bad purchases or purchases they wish they hadn't made. That regret occurs over about two to four weeks after the purchase. And so if you wait two weeks, there's many times where people wait the two weeks and then they end up saying you know, I'm super glad that I didn't buy that, but if you don't wait the two weeks, then you end up with the regret. And so I tell people if it's a big purchase you know putting that pool in or whatever the case then wait two weeks. And then the other thing the other advantage of that two to four weeks is to do your research. Just today we're talking about I actually had to cut the meeting short to come for this interview, but we have a strip next to our driveway.

Speaker 2: 14:05

I don't want to bore you with all the details. My dad passed away. My mom moved in with us. We have an addition we want a larger driveway and that means turning this strip of gravel into concrete or asphalt. Well, I've got like. He's the first.

Speaker 2: 14:19

The guy that came today is the first of four to five estimates that are going to come out today for me to compare all those prices. But I ended up finding these people by talking to or texting all of the construction guys I know mostly guys in my church, even some guys that I've paid to do some work on our house. Actually, two of the guys I paid are guys who have worked on our house before Christian brothers and I said who would you recommend for this? You know, I didn't go on the internet and search. I did the research by talking to people and get recommendations. So if you're doing a patio, if you're putting a pool in, if you need electrical work, if you're doing plumbing some big, if you're going to remodel your kitchen, go ahead and wait two to four weeks before doing it and try to get as many estimates as you can. So have you ever heard of the Stanford Marshmallow experiment before?

Speaker 1: 15:02

No, I haven't.

Speaker 2: 15:04

Okay, well, for any of your listeners, they should go check it out on the internet because it's a super entertaining experiment. And so what happened with Stanford? Took these young people kids probably, I'd guess anywhere from, like you know, five to seven years old and they brought them into this room, one at a time, and they sat them at this table. And then in the middle of the table was a plate with a marshmallow on it, and they told these kids if you'll wait and I can't remember how long they had to wait, maybe I don't know if it was 10 minutes, 20 minutes If you'll wait, I'll come and bring you another marshmallow, or you can have this marshmallow right now. And you're watching the videos of these kids, you know, and they're like salivating. You can see they're wringing their hands, they're straining at the table, trying not to eat this marshmallow, they're leaning, they're, you know, they're wringing their hair and things like that, and you're almost like watching the video, pulling for them like come on, you can do it, you know, don't eat the marshmallow. And so this is just the beginning of the study. So then they followed these kids over the next 20 years of their lives, and what they found was very significant, and I'll explain the application for Christians and for finances in just a moment, although I do think it'll it'll become evident.

Speaker 2: 16:13

When they followed these kids over the next 20 years of their lives, they found that those who waited to receive the second marshmallow proved to be successful or better than all the other kids that ate, literally in every area of life. They did not find an area of life where those who waited did not end up doing better. Talking about like, obviously, with finances, with employment, with family, with purchases, with education, with income and with body mass index. They check their body mass index and you can guess that the kids who ate ended up being unhealthy or having higher, higher fat percentages, and so the whole point of that is the value or virtue of patience and self control. Now, you know, as a Christian, and all of your Christian listeners also know, the value that the Bible puts on patience and self control. You know. So the Bible is giving us a counsel that's not just godly but also very beneficial to the average person, and that's one of the things that I want to.

Speaker 2: 17:17

You know, the book of Proverbs is the book of wisdom, and it gives us practical application for daily life. You know if you're going to apply the book of Proverbs, you're going to do better relationally with people. You're going to be a better listener. You're going to like James one says you're going to be slow to speak, quick to listen. You're going to be more self control. There's a ton in Proverbs about finances, right and so yeah, those are. Those are some of the spending problems. People are impatient and what we purchased and I might be talking too much. Am I talking too much here?

Speaker 1: 17:44

You're a good listener.

Speaker 2: 17:46

Okay, so here's that. Here's a situation that happened with us. We were, we needed a new van because we had a mini van but it couldn't hold all of our kids. We had to kind of take the next step to a 15 passenger van. And so I don't know any. I can't work on vehicles. I can't, I take I do, I have. I pay people to do everything on vehicles for me because I'm not handy.

Speaker 2: 18:09

So I don't know what a good price is on a van and I was not looking forward to trying to get a 15 passenger van, which I thought was going to be a pretty big purchase for my family. You know, and I'm a we're a single income, I'm a pastor, we don't have a ton of money to throw around or anything. And so I started this Excel spreadsheet and you know, because I'm applying the same principle, waiting two to four weeks and doing all my research and so on this spreadsheet I have, like the different models of vans, I had the year, I had the mileage and obviously I had the price, and I developed kind of this little formula and every day, every time a van popped up is, I added it to this spreadsheet and I did that every day, so that I probably had like, if you have, you know, five, six vans you're adding per day. I probably had 30, 40 vans on this spreadsheet and by that, you know, a week into this I could tell pretty quickly the average price for vans and a good price. But I was kind of looking for like an exceptional price and so I wasn't really biting because it wasn't a desperate situation for us. You know, we could still get around. It was a little tougher, we might have to take two vehicles instead of one, but I was watching my spreadsheet so that I could see when something came available.

Speaker 2: 19:17

And there's this one day that this van pops up. You know, I plugged the information into the spreadsheet and it just looked like this incredible deal. It was such a good deal that I doubted that it was correct. The information was correct, and so I call the number associated with that van and the gentleman said something like wow, you're fast, because I just put that up there and you're the first person to call. And I said I want to confirm that this is all. This information is correct the year, the mileage, the pictures and everything. And he said yeah, and so I knew I wanted to buy and I didn't think it was going to last long, and so I told the gentleman. I said well, I'm about four hours away, I don't want to start driving there and have you sell the van to someone else. And he said, well, if you'll head here right now, I'll wait, you know, four or five hours and we'll stay in contact and I'll, and you know, I won't, I won't sell it to anyone else. And I said, okay, thank you very much.

Speaker 2: 20:05

And I you know my dad hopped in the car with me. We drove over there so he could drive the car back. I showed up and the guy said boy, you must. You know, this must be a really good deal, because since you called me like 500, you know the phone hasn't stopped ringing. And I said is it not your van? And he said, no, there's a guy that owns a restaurant and he just wanted he just wanted me to get rid of it, because he bought it for his restaurant and he never used it and that explained why I didn't have any miles on it. And it had this logo with this kangaroo on the side, because the restaurant was called the Rue. So it's kind of a unique, nice, nice looking van I got.

Speaker 2: 20:37

We have. We have a bunch of large families in our church and so everyone has a van, so we actually got. You know, a lot of people I'm not everyone, but a lot of people have 15 passenger vans, and so we got to have one that stood out there with the, with the kangaroo on the side of it, and so the guy was really nice and I said, well, thanks a lot, you know, for for selling this, and, and I think, to be honest, you know, it was probably 30 or 40 percent cheaper than it should have been. It probably should have been $5,000 or $7,000 more, you know. So I felt really, but the whole point is simply that I wouldn't have known it was a good deal unless I did my research, and so that's one of the things I highly recommend to people Take your time, be patient, sit on your money. You know the story of Jacob and Esau. There's a whole bunch of stories in the Bible of people being impatient. You know, jacob was impatient because he didn't want to wait for the birthright that God said he was going to receive, so he conned his brother, and then Esau was impatient because he would not wait to enjoy his birthright, he was willing to give it to his brother Jacob. So both of them were impatient and it was super problematic, and so the Bible really stresses the value of patience, and so that's what I think is one of the major spending problems in patience.

Speaker 1: 21:43

Yeah, going back to what you said earlier about Starbucks, I'm guilty of that Because I met Starbucks almost every day. I'm definitely guilty of that, and I also work at Target, so I can you know, I can you know, I can see.

Speaker 2: 22:01

Pick up those extra items.

Speaker 1: 22:02

Yeah, I mean everybody, you know all the people buying all these items like where do you get the money from? Because I definitely don't have it. Yeah, I definitely don't, you know, earn that kind of money at Target. No, we've heard that for years, at least in the Christian faith and Christian community, that the Bible says, you know, the love of money is the root of all evil. Is that really true, as many of us have heard?

Speaker 2: 22:35

Right, yeah, so I'm not. I'm not anti King James. Two of my elders use the King James. I like the King James. There are versions of the Bible I don't like that. I would not use like.

Speaker 2: 22:44

That are paraphrases, maybe like the message and so I like the King James, but unfortunately the original they translated that verse for in 1st Timothy 6 as money is the root of all evil and so that does two things wrongly. You actually said it more correctly than the King James does. You said the love of money. So that's one of the problems. The problem is not money itself.

Speaker 2: 23:07

Money is what I call amoral. It's not moral or immoral. It's like it's just like guns or it's like vehicles, their tools, their resources, and our world likes to make it kind of gets things wrong. You know, kind of get wants. The world wants us to think wrongly about the Bible, and so the world tells us that guns are wrong. You know guns are not wrong. Guns are amoral. It's what you do with a gun that is moral, like defending your family. Or immoral, robbing a store.

Speaker 2: 23:35

And similarly, money is amoral. It can be used in great ways giving to the church, supporting the spread of the gospel, you know, providing for missionaries, providing for church planting, and it can be used immorally, obviously being spent on gambling establishments or going to prostitutes or something like that. And so it's not money that's the root of all evil. It's the love of money, and money is not even the root of all evil. Even the way that's worded it says money is the root of all evil. There's plenty of people that has nothing to do with money, and so, yeah, that's an incorrect statement. In fact, some of the some of the godliest people I know happen to be very wealthy, but they use you wouldn't even know it because they're humble and they live modestly and they use their wealth in very God-honoring ways.

Speaker 1: 24:18

What do you think about debt and what the like would give us to pay off debt?

Speaker 2: 24:24

Yeah, so I'm not I'm not a fan of most debt. I think there's some reasonable debt and I've kind of changed that and I've kind of changed somewhat even in this area over the years. So consumer debt, which would be debt for like vacations, clothing, food, are, is debt that I do not think we should incur. I don't think people should have automobile debt. Maybe they've heard before that you know, once you drive a vehicle off the lot, it depreciates by like 15, 20%. I mean that's an incredible amount of money to lose. You know you got to be at a poker table to lose money that quickly, and so a new vehicle is a bad idea. You can buy a new used vehicle or a used new vehicle, however you want to say it. You can buy used vehicles that are very new if that's your thing, and so don't, just don't buy it from the dealership and you'll save a lot of money and you'll still have something with low miles and it can be, you know, only less than a year or two old if you want. So I don't, but people should not have automobile debt, and the only debt that's reasonable to me is mortgages or the debt, I think, for real estate purchases.

Speaker 2: 25:29

I think real estate can be a pretty great way to build wealth and serve the Lord. You know, if you buy an extra house and have it serve as a rental property or an Airbnb, you can also use it for missionaries to stay there. I was just talking to a guy about this yesterday that there's a house for sale A few houses up from us. We don't have the cash from it, but I thought if we've made the down payment and it was a good price, you know had had the mortgage on it we could use it if missionaries came and stayed. So I do think that could be a good, a good investment as well. But yeah, I'm not a fan of debt and I think most people need to get rid of their college debt credit. I have a credit card to build credit, but people should not be. The rates on those are terrible. So pay off your credit card, you know, soon as you can after spending money with it right, I could get rid of the end here.

Speaker 1: 26:16

The last question I have, and what advice do you have for parents who want to help their guild and be good for an entry steward?

Speaker 2: 26:25

Yeah, yeah. So we have nine kids that were homeschooling and you know, with the tenth on the way, the homeschooling journey for us doesn't look like it's ending Anytime soon. And my wife turned, but she's 42, I think, and so you know, we know some people that have kids and there, when they're 45 or 46, so maybe we'll even have another kid or two after this. Yet we and we never. It wasn't like some people like oh, I can't believe you have ten kids. It's like I can't believe I have ten kids. You know, I'm surprised by this too. So we didn't. It's not if someone said did you want to have a lot of kids? I didn't want to have a lot of kids, I wanted to have as many kids as God wanted me to have. It could have been 357 to Maybe none, and then we adopt or something. So this is, this is where we're at. We're thankful for all the kids God gives us.

Speaker 2: 27:09

Now, with that, said we, because we're homeschooling, we don't have to follow, kind of the public school curriculum. So I've got a lot of my kids reading real estate books. I'm talking to my kids about finances regularly. I'm talking to them about being good stewards, being frugal, and so you need to. I'm talking to our kids about giving, so you need to involve your kids in In these decisions you're making. Let them see what you're doing financially. When you buy a vehicle, let them know that you bought it with cash, that you did not go into debt to buy this vehicle. Let that like. Even yesterday there was a minivan right up the street. Well, I talked to the kids about it, came home, took the van, put it on the Kelly blue book to see, to see the value of it and what they were asking. And I'm talking to the kids about this. I want them to see how we do things. So just involve your kids and they just decisions.

Speaker 2: 27:55

Even though the Bible says don't let you, regarding giving, don't let your right hand know what your left hand is doing, I do think it's reasonable to tell your kids, when you're giving to the church, that they see the importance of being of Generosity, and so just try to involve your kids, teach them, because if you go to school like I went to school, I mean I've got two, two masters and a bachelor's. I spent a lot of my life going to school and when I was in school we didn't learn a lot of financial stuff, which is unfortunate. I was busy taking classes that have no value for me today. I mean, maybe for people that become engineers, it values them, but you know, I'm taking physics and chemistry and calculus and and Just because the direction of my life, none of that helps me.

Speaker 2: 28:34

It would have been more beneficial for me to have taken some learned about finances at a young age and start saving when we make some investments. I told my kids I said if you want to invest with me, if you want to give me some money toward this investment, you will get the same return that I get. Based on, you know, if I, if we give $100 and my kids give, if I give $90 on my kids give $10, so we give $100 total, my kids are gonna get 10% of the return. And I tell them that we keep track of all that so that they can get the same return per you know, with proportionately, than I receive, and so I just think it's really important to involve our kids right.

Speaker 1: 29:13

Well, scott, think of anything for coming on, because they would greatly appreciate having you. And where can People meet you? And where can people get your book and find out more about you?

Speaker 2: 29:26

Sure, yeah, dorsey. Well, my website, scottelop hereorg just my name, scottlapireorg my website is pretty much the hub, you know, and all the spokes go out from that to my youtube channel, my Podcasts, my books, my speaking engagements, and you can find my social media profiles from there. But you can find my sermons. My conference message is guest preaching on YouTube and that's probably the best place if you want to listen to some of my sermons. You can find all my books on Amazon and on my website. I have a free gift for your listeners if they go there.

Speaker 2: 29:58

I know we talked about finances, but it's a. It's a short read called seven biblical insights For Christ centered marriages, and if people just go to my website they can download that for free and I hope it'd be a blessing to them and so and might. This will be in the show notes, you know, dorsey. Dorsey will put the my website and probably maybe the Amazon link there so they can find find stuff and if anyone has any questions, there's a contact page on my website. People can reach out to me, you know, if I can help you in some way, and so I appreciate what you're doing, dorsey. I appreciate you and your, your ministry. Thanks for encouraging so many people by your joy and attitude, and it's just a privilege to come on the show with you today. So thank you, god bless you and your listeners.

Speaker 1: 30:35

God bless you as well. Guys and girls, we think again for coming on and listening and being encouraged and inspired by this episode, and until next time, god bless. Bye, bye, bye.