Well, welcome to the third week of the series called Margin.

Today I want to talk to you about financial margin as we dive in.

If you have your Bibles, you may open them up to Proverbs 21.

That's where we will start Proverbs 21.

I'd like to ask you at all of our locations.

It could be a little bit of a private question, but you guys are usually very transparent and bold.

I wonder how many of you would just go ahead and say in front of the world and everybody that you occasionally or maybe even often have some financial stress in your lives?

How many of you would say that is true?

Leave your hands up for a second.

Just look around and see just how normal this is.

And our culture today, financial stress is completely normal.

You see it in most everyone you come in contact with.

Today, living paycheck to paycheck, it's absolutely normal.

Having monthly payments, normal, debt, normal, worry, anxiety, fear, especially in a slow economy, very normal.

Sadly, having tension in your relationships, fights if you're married, is very, very normal.

Sadly, again, having little or no financial margin is very, very normal.

That's one reason we do not like normal, because normal is not working.

Financial margin, if you're taking notes, I want to give you a working definition of margin that we've been using throughout this series.

What do I mean when I say margin? Our definition is this.

Margin is the amount available beyond what is necessary.

It's the difference between what you have and what you need.

So, financially, we could say this.

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