Testimony of Giving | Victor Vaughn

We're so glad that you're here. It's going to be a great day in the house of the Lord. It really is. Now, you may be wondering, why is Victor giving the message today? If you are, I am too. (Laughter) I mean, after all, you know, I've been in this church 33 years. And no one ever has asked me to speak on Sunday. (Laughter) Now, I'm not going to tell you the name of the person that asked me to speak today. But when Pastor asked me to give the message... (Laughter) I said, "Pastor, I'll do whatever you want me to do, but what do you want me to talk about?" I just think we really need to hear your testimony. And so, ladies and gentlemen, that's why I'm here today, to share my testimony. And as I do that, there's one thing, there's one thing that I hope comes out of that and is God will be glorified. Because it's all about him. It's not about us, it's about him. And so, for me to give you my testimony on giving, if you don't mind, I've got to go back and talk about my testimony on my salvation. And I've really got to go back to when I was nine years old. I was one of five siblings, and I was the youngest.

And my 16-year-old brother died in a tragic drowning accident. As you might imagine, that devastated our family. But what it made it worse was that we didn't handle it in the very best of ways. After the funeral, we just quit talking about him. We quit even saying his name. It was almost like that he had never lived. And as a nine-year-old little boy, I really struggled with how to process that. It was very difficult for me. I mean, I had just faced death up close and personal. And I had nobody to talk to. And that affected me for a long time after that. And as I grew, I had a number of brushes with death, if you will. One that I'll share with you, a friend of mine and I like to go joy riding before school every day. And I was probably about 16 or 17 years old. And we would love to go on this gravel road alongside of a lake and the lake was about 200 feet below us. And one day as we were driving down this road, my friend was driving. It was heavy fog and he was driving much, much too fast. And I remember just up ahead that there was a very sharp turn. And if you miss that turn, you go over the cliff 200 feet into the lake. And I screamed. I said, "Fill the curve." He slams on the brakes. We go sliding through the gravel a bit sideways.

And there's four wooden posts that acted as guardrails to stop that from happening. They were old and they were rotten. The first three one by one broke. The fourth one cracked and it stopped us. I was sitting in the passenger seat and I looked out the window 200 feet below me. It was nothing but water and nothing in between us. And I knew then that if we had gone over that cliff, it was certain death. I could look out my wind and see the front right wheel of that car spinning. And as I mentioned, I had a number of brushes with death. And so those situations coupled with my loss of my brother contributed to me having some significant fear of death. And I carried that with me for a long time. As time passed, I met Sarah. And we began to build a family. We were married, began to build a family. Our first pregnancy was twins, twin boys. And as they got to be about five or six years old, I began to get this overwhelming feeling, just overwhelming feeling that, Victor, you're probably going to go to hell when you die. But do you really want to answer the question? Why did you not at least raise your children to know the Lord? Why didn't you at least do that? It was convicting me a major way. And finally, I told Sarah, I said, "Why don't we start going to church?" And she said, "Let's go."

She had always been trying to get me to go, so we started going to church. And so after about, I don't know, four, five, six weeks, I began to get another overwhelming feeling that I couldn't shake, and that was, "Victor, okay, you've got your kids in church, they're in Sunday school, what are you going to do when you're going home from church?" And they start asking you questions about what they heard in Sunday school. What are you going to do? You don't read the Bible. You don't even have a Bible. And so again, I couldn't shake that. And so after a period of time, I went and bought a Bible, and I began to read it. Late at night in bed, before I would go to sleep, I began reading in the book of John. And if you had asked me then, "What's the book of John all about?" I would have said, "All it talks about is how to get to heaven." That's all it talks about. You see, what was happening to me, I didn't know it then. I'd know it now that the Word of God is living and powerful. It's sharper than any two-edged sword. And the Lord was causing those scriptures I needed the most to jump off the page at me. It was like neon lights hitting me in the face. And one night, laying in my bed, late at night, I asked Jesus in my heart, "Forgive me of my sins and lead me in the life that He has for me." And I turned over and went to sleep. The next morning, there was two things in my life that were radically different. The first one, that fear of death, just left. It was gone. I've never had a fear of death since then, and it was gone. The second one was, what you don't know is that up until that point, profanity was a very, very major part of my normal vocabulary. It's just the way I talked. The problem with that is, in the business world, when I would make presentations, you

couldn't use that language, so I would have to really stay focused not to use those words when I was making presentations or even talking with people in the business realm. You couldn't do it. Gone that morning, never, ever had an issue with that again. He just took it out of my vocabulary. And ladies and gentlemen, that moment I knew two things. Number one, I knew I was saved, and number two, I knew that God had a plan for my life. I knew it with everything I was. Okay, so we continue over time, and I keep reading the Bible every evening before I would go to sleep, and one night I come to the book of Malachi, chapter 3, verses 10 through 12. Probably the most infamous scripture on tithing in the Bible, and if we could just throw that up there, please. Before I read that scripture, I need to share with you what my mindset was before I read this, I would go to church, and they would pass that offering bucket by, and I would put a $10 bill in it, and then for the rest of the day, I would be mad about it. Now, what a waste of money that was. And if the pasture would say anything about giving or tithing, I would sit there in the auditorium, and I'd go, I saw they talk about it, and all they want you to do is give, give, give. Tithing, have they lost their mind? I mean, how am I supposed to pay my bills if I give 10% to the church? What am I supposed to do? That was my mindset. Some of you may be able to appreciate that, but that was who I was until this. Giving all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house, and try me now in this, says the Lord of Host. If I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you such blessing that there will not be enough room to receive it, and I will rebuke the devour for your sake, so that he will not destroy the fruit of the ground, nor have the vine fail to bear fruit for you in the field," says the Lord of Host, "and all the nations will call you

blessed for you will be been saved two or three months at this point. And when I read this about three or four things jumped at me, first of all, he says, try me in this. Other versions say, test me in this. The Lord of all is telling me that I can test him. And then if I test him, he promises three things, that he'll open those windows and pour those blessings out. Number one, that number two, he will protect me from that devour. And number three, he will give me favor. And I sit there that night and I thought about that scripture a lot. And then I just said, okay, Lord, I'm going to test you. Let's do it. Let's do it. And I made that decision that night. The next day, I sat down with Sarah and I said, let's do this. Let's start typing. And she said, I want to do it too. But let me run the numbers. I said, okay. And so she comes back to me later and says, Victor, here's our take on pay. If you take away our bills and our living expenses, there's not much left. If you take the tie out of that as well, I don't think we can pay our bills. I don't think we can. And I looked at Sarah and I said, do it anyway. Don't try and figure it out. And if you're asking me, Victor, were you scared? Yeah, I was. But I was going to test it. I wanted to know, but I was. Fast forward about another two or three months. Sarah and I are at church on Wednesday night. At the end of service, they do an altar call for anybody that wants to be prayed for them. We came forward. And when we got to the altar, this lady walked out on the edge of the stage and she pointed down at us and she said, the Lord has a word for you. And then she began to sing this. And essentially what it was is, I'm drawing you into myself. Don't be afraid. I have pulled you out of the mud in the mire. Don't be afraid. I have called you by name. I have you in the palm of my hand. Don't be afraid. I have a plan for your life to bless you and prosper you. Don't be afraid. So the theme of that prophecy was, I got you. Don't be afraid. On the way home that night, guess what? I was afraid. I was afraid. I looked over at Sarah and I said, honey, I think we're going to lose our job. Two months later, I was asked to lay off a significant part of my staff. After I did that, myself, two of my colleagues and my boss, we all got laid off. Right now would be a perfect time for you to say, hey, Victor, how's that timing working out for you? Well, that wasn't the way I looked at it. You see, the company I was in was a very corrupt company. I was very uncomfortable there in many ways. The leadership was really toxic. And I just believe that the time that the Lord just wanted to get me out of there.

And so he did. They did give us a severance and we did tie that severance. And I ran the numbers of how long is this stuff going to last? How long is this money going to last? And I calculated that we could make it to about Christmas. And so my prayer was, Lord, I need a job by Christmas. Help me get it. Well, a couple months later, it was proven that I'm not a mathematician. And so I realized that maybe more like thanks given. So I prayed and I said, Lord, I need that job by Thanksgiving. And that very night, God answered that prayer. That night, I'm sound asleep in the phone rings and I pick up the phone and it's a dial tone. And I hang the phone back up and I look at the clock beside my bed and it's 1159. And when I saw that, this voice, this only happened to me twice in my life. And this was one of them. And I knew it was the Lord spoke to me. And it wasn't here. It was here. And it was loud and it was booming. And he said, Victor, not only will it be the last stage, Not the answer I was looking for. And so I first of all think, "Praise God, I heard from the Lord, and then I realized what He said, and I went, "Oh, oh, no." Okay, so time went on. We get to the very beginning of December. We have $50 in our banking account, $50. And we got a $2,500 month mortgage due. We're trying to figure it out. Sarah and I are figuring out, where can we get money to pay this mortgage? We checked the mail that day, and there was a letter from our mortgage company. And then the letter was a check for approximately $2,500. And it said, "You have overpaid on your escrow, and we are returning that amount to you." That enabled us to pay that mortgage, but for full disclosure, a few months later when we sold that house at closing, the closing agent said, "I hate to tell you this, but your mortgage company made a mistake when they sent you that check. You had not overpaid on your escrow, and we're subtracting that from your proceeds." And she was afraid that we would really be upset with them. And Sarah and I just looked at them and started laughing. I mean, that's God. That's God.

The next day or two, we get two job offers. Two job offers, one of them is from a pharmaceutical company in St. Louis, and it is a fantastic offer. This was a company that was doing about $100 million a year in revenue. They had a very bright future, a great leadership team there. I was excited about it. It would have been a good position, a really good salary, and I would be working for a guy that I really liked. Everything I was looking for in my next job. About the same time, I get an offer from a little bitty company in Northern Kentucky, and they had no products, no revenue, and no money. Not a great situation, and they only had five employees. And so clearly, I'm going to take the one in St. Louis. Stable company, very successful company, great position, great salary, a guy I really liked. So I picked up the phone and called those people. I'm dialing the number, and as I'm dialing the number, my whole inside starts shaking, and I just hung the phone up. I waited probably an hour or two, and I picked up the phone again and started dialing that number. And as I'm dialing it, everything about me just says, "No, no, no, no." So I hang the phone up. No peace, no peace. And so I picked up the phone and called the little company in Northern Kentucky, and I said, "Let's go." And so I accepted that job. All of my friends said, "Do you have lost your mind, boy? What are you thinking?" And I said, "Yeah, maybe so, maybe so." So full disclosure, the company in St. Louis, two years later,

they got bought out by another company, and every person in that company lost their job. So God knew what he was doing, didn't he? So I accepted this little job in Northern Kentucky. I'm the sixth employee, something to be proud of. And those first three or four years were very difficult. A lot of adversity. The first thing we had to do was we had to raise money. So we raised money, we bought a little manufacturing facility in New York. And as part of that manufacturing facility, they had a product there that had been on the market for 40 years, and there was only two or three doctors in the country that were using it. And the reason was nobody had ever told anybody about this product. It was just there. So we thought, "We can do something with that product." So we started telling doctors about it, and they started using it. And they began to get miraculous results with it. I will say then, and I said now, that there was an anointing on that product, a God anointing on that product, because it worked better than it should have. And so we began to grow after about four or five months. from the FDA. And it said, "Gentlemen, that product is not approved. Stop promotion and stop distribution." Well, we knew that was a mistake. It had been on the market for 40 years, and it was being used by doctors, right? We knew that. And so we just figured it's a mistake. So we reached out to the FDA and we requested a meeting with them to discuss, and they politely said, "No. No meetings." So what do we do? So what do we do? Well, we got two options. We can either go find another job, because without that product, we don't have a company, or we can push back and fight the decision that was made. At that moment, guys, I had total peace, and it was peace that Jesus was given me. It was a peace from the Lord. I just never believed that He brought me there for this to happen. And so we decided to fight. And since the FDA wouldn't talk to us, we reached out to the oversight committees, congressional oversight committees that had oversight to the FDA. There

was two of them. We reached out to those congressmen and those senators, and we told them the story. And within two weeks, we had a meeting with the FDA. Now, I want you to think about this. This is one of those God moments. One government agency gets us a meeting two weeks later with another government agency. Come on now. Come on. From that meeting, there was a plan put in place to bring this product back to market. Hallelujah. So we began promoting that product. We began expanding. Things are going great. Revenues growing. We're excited about the future of the company. And we're about two years into this, and I get a call one morning, and it's the president of the company. And he said, Victor, the only raw material plant in the world that supplies the components of this product blew up last night and completely blew up. Nobody was harmed because it was during the night. But that's devastating. Our stock went from 60 to 12 overnight. The prognosticators we're saying it's going to take at least two years to be able to come back and bring that product back to market. I was on a phone call later that day with our global CEO from London, and he broke down crying. And I found myself encouraging him. It's going to be okay. It's going to be all right. And the reason I was doing that because I felt total peace, I really, again, I just didn't think the Lord brought us there to have this happen. So the good news is we had 90 days worth of that product in our warehouse. We had 90 days worth three months. And so we figured we got to figure this thing out in three months. And if I shared with you the doors that were open and the doors that were closed by the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, you would be blown away. His hand was all over this thing. I would love to share some of that with you, but he just don't have time. It was just amazing how we saw God move. And in 84 days, we ran out of product on a Friday in our inventory, and we got new product on Monday. And we were back up and running. And during that time, not one patient that had been taking that product went without it, not one. God moved. God moved. Now, at this point might be another time that you might say, Victor, how's that tithing going for you? Well, let's just review what we got so far. God took me out of a toxic company. He kept me from going to a company that I would have lost my job at two years later. He sent me to this little bit of company in Northern Kentucky that he had a plan for them. He knew the plan he had for them, but you know what? So did the enemy. And so the enemy tried to destroy that little company through the FDA, and God said no. The enemy

tried to destroy that company with that explosion. And during that time, God did a work in me. It's pretty hard to describe. A work that I would never change. He gave me great peace. He built my faith. He taught me to trust Him. He gave me courage. He gave me endurance. He gave me a fighting spirit. He gave me all those things, and so I'll tell you that three or four year period of time in my life, I wouldn't change it for anything. Nothing. Because it did more to make me the person that I believe that God wanted me to be than anything else during that three or four year of adversity. So do you want to hear the rest of the story? That very product went on to become the number one prescribed product in that therapeutic category, by far. Many lives were changed. Families were changed. The company enjoyed great success. We were able to buy other companies, launch other products in other therapeutic areas. And that company was blessed greatly because of that. And Sarah and I was too. Now if we can go full circle for a moment and just go back to Malachi and say, "Okay Victor, you tested God.

You tested Him." We'll see how that worked out. If we could put that scripture back up there. Remember that night in my bed, I said, "I'm going to test you on this. You told me I could." We'll see how he scored on this test. Let's just see. He said that he would open the windows of Heaven and pour out such blessings I wouldn't have enough room to receive it. Did you notice the word windows is plural? It's not just a finance thing. It's a blessing thing. It's a peace thing. It's a relationship thing. It's a health thing. There's so many windows that are open. I really do believe they're infinite. He opened all those windows. And there's a lot of things that are much more valuable than finances. So let me just share some of those things where my wife and I are both saved. My three sons are all saved. My three daughters-in-law are all saved. My grandchildren that are of age are all saved. How do you put a price on that? It's infinite, isn't it? It's infinite to know that your family is saved.

Add to that our family's healthy. Our family loves one another. We're very close to one another. We all live close. We are blessed beyond imagination from the Lord. Period from the Lord. And yes, we're blessed financially as well. But look at the second bullet if we can have the thing again. He will protect us from the devour. Well, I've already shared some of that with you, right? I've shared some of the business things he protected us from and he did the same thing in our personal life. So he passed that test too. And the third test that he would give me favor, right? All nations will call you blessed for you will be a delight for that. He will give us favor. Well, I have found that the Lord has given me great favor with the people that I work with and for and that work with me work for me. He's also given me favor with my family. He's also given me favor with pastor and the staff here. And guess what? He now he's given me favor with you. And you know why I say that? Because nobody's thrown anything at me yet. You still might, but you haven't yet. And so at this point I would like to make a very strong statement. It's a statement you may not believe. And that's okay. It doesn't mean it's not true. But I would rather die than not tithe.

I would rather die than not tithe. And you may say, "Well, Victor, that's kind of crazy." That's how I feel. Not really, no. Although he does. That's not really why I say that. Because keep in mind, those finances are temporary. I'm talking about the 10 percent that I return. Because that is eternal. And I see what God does with that. And I don't want to miss any of it. So if you're going to make me stop tired, then I just soon die. Because think about that time what God has used just this year in this church. Do you know that approximately 6,000 people just this year in this church have raised their hand when they were asked if they wanted to accept Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior? 6,000. Ladies and gentlemen, what the Lord is so great at is taking people's permanent eternal addresses and changing them from hell to heaven. That's what he does. And he uses that 10 percent to do it. And I just want to be part of that. Because he's so good to us.