What if the life you have worked so hard to build is the very thing keeping you from the life Jesus is offering? In the third message of the stewardship series “Our Money Story,” Rev. Erica Allen turns to the rich young man in Matthew 19, who has followed every rule and still senses something is missing. Jesus’s answer is not another task to complete. It is something to release.

Drawing on her years in prison ministry, public housing ministry, and church planting, and her current work helping churches fund what God is calling them to do next, Rev. Allen reflects on how people with almost nothing and people with almost everything can be held captive by the same fears.

Through a viral doorbell camera video from Halloween night and the quiet example of her mother’s tithing, she invites us to ask what we are still gripping tightly, and what might happen if we opened our hands.