Faithful Finance - Part 4

June 24, 2025

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

Faithful Finance - Part 4

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.

He said, they said, we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal and endowed,

meaning given to as a gift,

placed in authority over.

I'm using phrases that you could take and place in a doubt.

Okay.

Anointed with your creator,

certain unalienable meaning. You can't separate them from the person.

Unalienable means. And you need to hear this because this word alienate is important.

I alienate means to take something and take it away from me.

Okay.

To alienate, you need to understand that principle because it's an economics principle also. Okay.

Unalienable rights, meaning rights that can't be taken away. But by the way, in the law, you can give them away.

Do you know that in the law I have a right to remain silent, but if I decide not to be silent, I've alienated that right from myself.

Right.

Make sense.

Some. Most of my clients have the right to remain silent. Almost all of them don't have the ability to remain silent, but they do have the right. Okay, just letting you know, they will alienate that right.

Just left and right.

You get them in the jail and they just alienate and like crazy, you know what I'm talking about? They see them blue lights and they just. Alienating.

Alienating their rights right there. All right,

I go, well, what happened? Well, this happened. What'd you tell the police? Why didn't tell them that? Oh, great. That just don't work that way.

I think you probably told them the truth. Now you're lying to me.

In the room that we're talking in right now, you probably told them the Truth. When you saw them blue lights, I promise you, you did.

We're going. And by the way, we're going to have to go off those facts. Not your facts right now.

Just a little. I'm just kind of releasing some stuff right now. I had to deal with a little bit of that yesterday.

Just kind of let it go.

Let it go.

All men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights among them.

Meaning they're not. This is not a complete list,

but we're going to deal with these.

He's given us life.

So we came to a conclusion.

After studying the universe and studying humanity and studying God's word, we came to the conclusion that God is the author of life.

Right?

That God has made us free.

Free to choose his will or choose not his will.

Liberty,

the right to life.

Liberty. And then we put some mess in there, okay?

And I'm going to tell you it's mess.

I want you to hear me.

We do it today.

When we come up. When we don't know an answer to give to somebody, we come up with this same thing today.

It's the same process.

If you've got a child and they won't tell, you know, they're grown adult and you're trying to give them some wisdom, and then you realize that. You realize that they're just not going to do any of the wise things.

They're just going to keep doing their stupid stuff.

When you just finally give up, you finally say, this is the end of the conversation. So that can, you know, build that bridge so they'll come back. And later on, once they've done stupid stuff and messed it up, they'll come back for the information again.

Okay, this is what we say.

I just want you to be happy.

I'm just going to stand over here for a minute and let you think about that.

What is happy?

I'm not sure I know what holy is,

but I don't know what happy is.

I know what joy is,

but I don't know what happy is.

All right,

the right to life, liberty, and the third thing is property.

But we got a problem.

And every man in the room knew it.

They all knew it.

We got people who've been dialed by their creator with life and liberty, and they are people that we call our property.

So when we didn't know what the answer was to that question,

we punted it caused 750,000 deaths about 100 years later and destroyed most of,

well, a large portion of our country.

They punted it and said we would like for you to have happiness and pursue it.

But from philosophy and from God's word,

we understood that you could not have property that was a person.

Okay,

Now I'm going to teach you something. I'm going to teach in a little bit more detail, but I'm going to just lay it out there for you to kind of ruminate.

And we're going to talk about five minute break,

okay? This is something for you to ruminate on.

All right?

That's a Southern phrase. Just let it boil down, you know, kind of ruminate in it, simmer in it. All right.

I have the right to the product of my will and labor.

Okay?

Will, labor,

life,

the investment of my life's activities, my labor,

my will being, my desires, and what I put to that.

When I do those things, I have the right to the product of them. In fact, that goes back to Jesus.

He says, store up for yourselves. What is treasure. Treasure is the things that I have produced with my will and my labor.

Are you following me?

If someone else controls the product of my will and my labor,

then I am a slave.

All right?

The founding fathers knew that was a problem.

Every one of them,

that's a problem.

Because we all know if we're going to do this the right way, we can't have those slaves.

And then they punted and said, well, we just want y' all to be happy.

Did it make us happy?

Has it made us happy today?

Nope. We still ain't happy.

I mean, we ain't even happy. We never happy.

Never.

Just ain't never happy.

Because you can't be happy when you don't have the product of your will and labor.

You can't. So let's consider this happiness thing.

As we pursue happiness,

we pursue an elusive goal.

Because your happiness today may be your despair tomorrow.

So the pursuit of happiness is an illusory or an ever changing pursuit that you never, ever actually reach.

But you do have a right to property,

meaning you have a right to own or to possess the product of your labor and work.

I know many of you are going. You're only on page two. Yes, I know.

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.