The Richest Poor Man in Nashville

Rich Mullins wrote Awesome God in 1988, and it became one of the most recognized worship songs in modern church history. The royalties alone could have funded a very comfortable life — a house in Nashville, a well-equipped studio, the kind of security the music industry rewards its successful artists with.

Mullins chose differently.

He arranged for his royalties to flow directly to his church. The board paid him a salary pegged to whatever the average American worker earned that year, and everything above that went to charity. He never knew how much his songs generated. He didn't want to know. He eventually moved to a small dwelling on a Navajo reservation, teaching music to children.

Friends and interviewers pressed him on why. His answers always circled back to the same idea: following Jesus meant holding everything loosely, especially the things the world said you had earned.

He died in a car accident in 1997, at forty-one, owning almost nothing.

Jesus told His followers, "If anyone would come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross" (Matthew 16:24). Most of us hear those words and nod respectfully. Rich Mullins heard them and gave away a fortune he never bothered to count. The question for us this morning is not whether we admire that kind of surrender — but whether the love of God has made us willing to practice it.