There’s more to the story of the Lakewood Church pastor’s amazing house flip: How were Joel and Victoria Osteen able to unload their townhouse in order to buy that house they made so much money on?
Readers of Joel Osteen’s previous book — Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential — already know the answer. From page 265:
Victoria and I had been married a few years when we decided that we wanted to sell our townhome and buy a house. We put the townhome on the market for six or eight months, but we never had a serious offer. Hardly anybody looked at it, even though we were praying regularly, asking God to help us sell it.
We really wanted the other house, but we couldn’t afford it until we sold our townhome. Finally, we decided to do more than pray. We needed to sow a special seed in faith, believing for that townhome to sell.
There’s more!
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“Sowing a seed in faith,” Osteen explains elsewhere, means exercising your faith through giving. He continues:
At the time, we were making double mortgage payments on the townhome, in an attempt to pay the principal down sooner. We decided to make the one required payment, and we’d sow the second part of that money as a seed, believing for God’s favor. We did that faithfully for several months, believing for the townhome to sell. After about the fourth month, we got a call from our Realtor. She said, “I have good news! I’ve got a contract for your house.”
“That’s great,” I said. “How much is it for?”
She said, “Let me just come by your house and talk to you about it.”
My heart sank. Usually when the Realtor wants to talk to the seller about the received offer, that means the offered price is low. But when she arrived at our home, we were pleasantly surprised that the contract was for the full price we were asking for our townhome. We thought we’d have to discount it thousands of dollars. But I believe, because we sowed a seed in faith, God not only brought us a buyer, but He did more than we could ask or think. He gave us even more than we were hoping for!
That’s just how our God operates.
