Faithful Finance - Part 3

June 23, 2025

Hope Alive: Applying God’s Word to Your Daily Life

Faithful Finance - Part 3

I am Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and had been serving as a pastor for 25 years. I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life. The purpose of studying scripture is that you might know the character of Jesus Christ, and that you might see the world from the Father's perspective. That you gain wisdom that changes your life. I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open His word to you and allow you to see Him and to know Him. To know His will, that you might glorify Him and that you might walk in faith and power each day, especially today. In Jesus name.

If you would like to revisit today’s Bible study, please visit our website at https://hopealive.buzzsprout.com/ to download the transcript. 

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Transcript

This is Chad Harrison, and you're listening to Hope Alive, applying God's word to your daily life.

As we finish the book of Deuteronomy, we're going to step aside for a few weeks and publish a workshop I did in August of 2024 called Faithful Finance. In that workshop, I explained our current economy, our current financial situation,

and did it from an economic background and a historical background, and most importantly, did it from a biblical perspective. In that workshop, you're going to find out why we are where we are as an.

As a nation, as far as our economy and what we should be looking at and why we should be looking at it for the future, not only for the future of the finances of individuals, but the future of the finances for our churches and for our country.

And so I would encourage you to just spend some time listening. Even though it is being published here a year later,

it is still true and it is still current for today.

So energy equals mass in weight.

Some human way to calculate it times the speed of light squared,

which is a perfect explanation of how God made the universe.

By the way, the one who came up with that understanding,

he was looking at light from a clerk's desk shining on a tower with a. With a clock on it,

and he said to himself,

if our God,

how would I have made this?

And that's how he came to that understanding. If I were God, how would I have made this? That's Einstein.

And it led to one of the greatest.

Well, one of the greatest equations of all time, one of the greatest understandings of the universe of all time. And by the way,

so that God could prove that he honored that question,

he gave him the theory of.

Huh?

Yeah. The theory of relativity and the theory of special relativity, which means he gave him two equations that have fundamentally altered the way we understand the universe and yet take us all the way back to Genesis and explain exactly ways the universe functions.

All right, now, I'm telling you that for a reason,

because this universe is super, super orderly,

and it's become disorderly because of sin.

In fact, if entropy has its way,

you'll. If you'll. You just do your research. If entropy has its way, eventually the universe will be a bunch of matter,

not in any form, meaning there'll be no planets, there'll be no stars, there'll be no solar systems.

They will just be mass in what is called a low energy state,

meaning mass and energy will just come to its base. Nothing.

And when science talks about the universe,

the universe collapsing, or the universe being destroyed, they're not talking about energy or mass being taken away. What they're talking about is it becoming totally chaotic and nothing.

Which, by the way, isn't that what the Bible says?

Isn't that what the Bible says?

That. That the universe,

that. That sin causes chaos and nothingness.

But.

But God has given us a gift that changes those things,

and that is the ability to hear His Word,

believe His Word,

act upon His Word and change the world that we live in.

All right? I want you to hear me. He's given us the. He's given us the revelation of His Word.

He's given us the Holy Spirit to explain that to us.

Then he's given us the ability to trust it and act upon it, which is the process of faith.

Okay,

so how do I effectuate. How do I faith fix chaos?

How do I fix the trouble of sin?

Okay, is I hear God's will.

I believe God's will. I act upon God's will, and I see God's work at hand in my life.

All right?

And that will and that process was epitomized in one person's work.

Who is that?

Jesus. That's exactly right. Remember when he's in the garden and he says. He says, if it be. If. If it's possible,

let this cup pass from me. Meaning this is. This is a. This is. This is a work to be done.

All right?

But he says,

but not my will.

Your will, which means he's heard God's will.

He has believed God's will,

and now he's at the time where he chooses to act in His Father's will.

Okay, you go. Well,

I thought Jesus was God. He is God the Father is the will of God. God the Son's physical manifestation. God of God. God, the Holy Spirit is the power and the eternal presence of God.

Okay, all right. That's. That's. That's. And you. You were made the same way in his image. You have a will, a heart and a mind.

Okay, A cardio and a suco.

All right? You have a soul just like the Father.

You have a physical manifestation of you.

We like it less and less every day.

Okay? Physical. There's a physical manifestation of who you are. Jesus is a physical manifestation of God. You're the physical. Well, anyway, that thing sitting there is a physical manifestation of you,

right?

And then finally we have a new human spirit, which Jesus told us in John chapter three, you must be born again.

We have a new spirit. God has a spirit. That spirit is that in. That spirit contains eternal life in the power of God in the Holy Spirit contains the eternality and the power of God.

That's how we're made in the likeness of him.

Make sense?

All right,

now we have to understand the power that we have.

You need to know this.

You gotta. You gotta get this preacher. I thought we was getting a bitcoin. We are. Listen, I've got. I mean, I've worked hard on this. I even set it up so Trump could come in and handle things this afternoon for me after I've explained it.

Okay. He could kind of sweep up for me this afternoon at the bitcoin conference.

That's a joke. But, you know, it's funny because we planned this way before he planned to be there. All right, so, so, so we've got.

We've got.

We've got. We've got God's plan. We've got God's creation. We've got man in the middle of that plan and that creation,

and we've got how we actually do work in that creation.

Permanent work,

ongoing work.

Work that actually has a point to it.

Okay,

now let's talk about how. That's how we're endowed with that, because we're going to get to the. To the history and the.

To the. To the history of.

Of how we've gotten to where we are in the. In the economy, in the society that we live in.

About 250 years ago,

a group of people met and wrote a document which was the product of a few hundred years of.

Well, it's a few hundred years of thinking and humanity considering God's creation,

considering God's Word and how we should actually do things and where man fits in that. And that's called the Renaissance.

Okay?

It's the culmination of.

Of really the dissemination of God's Word throughout the world through the printing press.

All right? And as the printing press printed out God's Word. God's word began to be disseminated, began to be translated in different languages.

You had English versions of the Bible being written. And I know y' all think the King James version is the first original version of the Bible. It's not.

There've been many translations. And when I say translations, remember, we have the original Hebrew and Greek.

We have documentation of it by the thousands. I've already explained that to you. We have over 25,000 original manuscripts of Scripture, meaning they date back within a few hundred years of the actual penning of them by the author of those books.

We have 25,000 of them. The second best.

The second best book from Antiquity that we have manuscripts of is the Iliad and the Odyssey, and there's 700 and 500 of those.

So we've got 25,000 original manuscripts of the original Greek and original Hebrew. We know exactly what was written.

Now, I've had a long conversation with somebody in our church about the difference. You know,

how do I find the best translation? Well,

it's hard to find the best translation of the Bible. I'm going to tell you. You know why? Because. Cause human language changes,

right?

The way we spoke 50 years ago compared to the way we speak today. And if you have any questions about that, you just go to Pastor Terry and ask him about those things, okay?

But the way we spoke 50 years ago and the way we speak today.

The way we speak today is totally different. If you went back 50 years, you could understand it, but it would sound funny. If you went back 100 years, it would sound real funny.

If you go back 250 years, you're going, I'm not sure. I'm knowing everything they're saying. You go back 500 years and it's like,

well, Beowulf, y' all read it, right? Or tried to read it, or what was that?

And is that really what he said? I'm not even sure that's what he said. When we read Beowulf, there's no way you really know that that's what that was.

Well, by the way, the original King James was written in the same English as Beowulf. We have the 27th edition of the King James Version, which means they've updated the language over the years because you got to.

Because human language changes.

It changes all the time.

And as humanity took the word of God,

translated it over and over and over again,

human beings began to understand God's word and began to want to understand how God works in his universe.

And so they needed something to work through that, and they became.

They came up with. We need an area of philosophy that's beyond, you know, the philosophy of Greece,

the Greek philosophers,

beyond the Roman philosophers. We need to come up with a philosophy of the universe that God made. And we called it the Philosophy of Natural Things.

Did y' all know that it's called the Philosophy of Natural Things?

We've shortened that,

and we call that now science.

Science is the philosophy of natural things,

or it is the understanding of how things work in the universe that we live in.

Right.

We also began to study how human beings effectuate that.

And so when we came together and we realized that we have this monarch over Here, who's deciding our will and our future.

We don't want that monarch deciding it because he's deciding it in his best interest and not my best interest.

Right?

He's deciding things according to his will and not my will.

That doesn't work in what we've come to understand over the last couple of hundred years.

That doesn't work.

So we started this letter to that guy.

Did y' all know that?

We did.

And we started that letter and we said,

we hold these truths,

right?

God's the truth.

We hold these truths to be self evident. Meaning it's just obvious to everybody,

right?

This is not some. It's not something that, that, that,

that you and I can argue over.

These are just 3, 400 years of the Renaissance.

3, 400 years of everybody being able to read God's word.

We know now this is true,

that all men are created equal.

Body, soul, spirit.

All of us made in the image of God. Body, soul, spirit,

we're made equal now. Don't you hear me? We're not made the same.

We're made equal.

You go, what do you mean, same? Well,

the cool thing is, and man, I watched a video yesterday, I know it's weird, but I watched a video yesterday.

And do you realize that you really didn't come from your ancestors?

You just came from some of your ancestors.

By the time you get about 10 generations from your ancestors,

none of the DNA they have is given to you.

Did you know that? I didn't know that. It was. It was the strangest thing I ever watched before. But they were explaining to you, you get 20 generations back,

none of those folks,

you got nothing from them. No DNA from them.

By the way, if you do the math, back,

you get to 30 generations and there's like 20 billion people in your lineage,

which can't be, by the way,

because there ain't never been 20 billion people on the earth.

And I said that Southern style, you know, they ain't never been 20 billion people on this Earth.

Okay?

So you are. You are not only unique, you are historically unique.

We're equal,

but we're not uniquely the same.

We're not.

There ain't never been one. Like you and your mama and grandmama said it many, many times growing up,

they ain't never been one like that one,

you know, and there hadn't. And you go, well, why is that the case? Why? Why? Why is that the case? Well, because God wants to uniquely glorify himself with you.

He wants. He wants. He wants to take you and all your uniqueness and mess upness and brokenness and fix you,

give you life and prove that He's God because He's the author of space and time and matter and energy.

He's the author of those things and you're proof of it as you go today I pray that the Lord will bless you and keep you, that he'll make his face to shine upon you and that he will give you hope and peace today in Jesus name.