Faithful Finance - Part 6

June 26, 2025

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

Faithful Finance - Part 6

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.

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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 by definition, if you have a will,

you understand that the product of your life is summed up in something,

and you want that to go somewhere.

Makes sense, doesn't it?

Well,

we had to come up with a technology,

and, man, we came up with some technologies.

And usually those technologies were things that were rare and valuable and desirable.

Okay, And I'm going to go through that in just a minute.

But originally,

we would have very unique seashells,

or as.

For some reason, the females in my family line,

when they're really, really young, they love rocks,

which is really weird.

My wife loved rocks when she was little.

My daughter, she had a collection of rocks.

And if you take my granddaughter out in a courtyard, the first thing she's going to look for is rocks. I don't know why,

but rocks seem to be very important now as they've gotten older. They like. They like, they still love rocks.

They just like really expensive, expensive, shiny ones. Okay?

They still love those rocks.

That being said,

rocks,

certain rocks have become currency,

a medium of exchange.

Salt was a major medium exchange. In fact, the Roman Empire ran on salt. Did y' all know that the best way for you to pay your soldiers was to give them salt?

And it was good for two reasons. First of all, their bodies needed the salt. They could actually use their salt to keep food,

to preserve it,

so that when they went marching to the next place, they could carry the meat with them in a preserved way.

It was valuable to the places that they went because salts only in certain places,

not every place has access to salt. In fact, I can remember very.

I can. I can Specifically, remember the salt licks that were on our property when I was a young man. And they were made for the cattle, they were made for the, well, the one horse we had.

And they were also made for the animals. Animals would come and lick that salt.

And salt was easily carry, carried, and you could easily measure out salt and you could trade it for things. And so the Romans paid their soldiers a lot of times in salt.

Then we came up with really, what has historically, for the last, really 3,000 years,

the, the best technology for a medium of exchange, which is rare and fine metals,

okay?

Specifically gold and silver.

Although copper has been nickel, tin,

have been of value,

have had value, have had great value for us.

But they would take some gold,

they would melt it down, they would stamp it with the face of the ruler,

which meant that the ruler was saying that this was pure gold,

pure silver,

pure copper. That's why they put the faces on it,

so that you know that it comes from an official who is saying, this is purely this.

And if any of you have been on the Internet trying to buy gold and silver, you, you'll find out that there are people out there who are selling you,

not gold and silver,

okay? They're selling you trash. That's not really gold and silver. Gold and silver has been a great medium of exchange, okay?

Historically speaking, it has always been a great medium exchange. However, it is not in any way, and I want you to hear me today, it's not any way a perfect medium of exchange, okay?

It's not perfect because it doesn't fit all the,

all the elements of a currency that would make it perfect.

All right? So when we're talking about a medium of exchange, by the way, we're getting to bitcoin. I don't know if y' all know it or not, but we're getting to it.

Okay, all right,

when we talk about it, we need to talk about what are the, what are the,

the, the elements of a medium exchange? Well,

currencies, six elements. And by the way, this is how I really got to bitcoin, okay?

Because my son in law came to me and he asked me, my son in law is a,

is a computer programmer. He's a software engineer.

And he asked me about three years ago, he said maybe two and a half years ago,

three years ago, he said, chad,

what do you think about bitcoin? And I said, what everybody says about bitcoin, you know, it's some kind of hoax. It's a pyramid scheme. It's some, something, it's probably some Mess, I'd stay away from it.

That's what I told him. Totally out of ignorance. Told him out of ignorance. I told him that.

Well, about two weeks later, I was watching one of my nerd shows. Okay, all right. And you go, what are your nurtures? It's either about science, history, or economics, okay?

My nerd shows, Kathleen can't stand them, but I watch them.

I'm either going to be watching something about science, history, economics,

or of course, the most important thing, football. All right, so science, history, economics, or football, okay? And I was watching my nerd shows and somebody said on there who I really, really respected.

I really like this guy. I've learned a lot from him. He said,

bitcoin is purest techno, purest currency that has ever existed.

And I go,

huh?

Because I knew what that meant.

Because I remember in my economics class, one of my economics courses,

that currency has certain elements and there was no such thing as pure currency. And so when he said bitcoin is the purest currency that ever existed,

that piqued my interest.

So what did I immediately do? Well, I googled the elements of pure currency because I needed to remind myself of those things.

And I'm going to explain those things to you because it's important that you get this, okay?

Currency has durability,

all right?

Durability means this,

that, that a currency in its. In its natural form has got to be able to last over time.

All right? Now I give you at the end,

BTC is bitcoin, okay?

BTC exists in digital state maintained by computer farms around the world forever.

All right?

Now you go, well, what about other forms of currency? Well, the currency that you carry around most of the time today in its purest form is not very durable.

In fact, dollar bills are exchanged out pretty regularly by the Fed.

They take up old bills and they produce new bills. They take up one old bill and they produce three new bills,

all right? They produce new and new bills all the time. And by the way, they figured out that that cost a lot of money and it's not super efficient or effective to produce those bills.

In fact, a few years ago, they tried to quit producing pennies because pennies cost about three or four times what they.

They are worth to create,

all right?

And they're not super durable any either. But I got a lot of them with wheat on the back of them and stuff like that because I like coins too, because I'm a nerd,

all right? And so I know I was a college football player, but I was a nerdy. College football player. Okay? All right. And so I like those things. It's got to be divisible.

Divisibility is important for a currency,

okay? It's got to be able to divide in lower and lower, lower, lower forms. And, and you, you've, you've heard of shillings and, you know, all these different currencies that existed over time, and they all have a form that's lower and lower and lower of them.

We have that.

We've got the $100 bill,

the $50 bill, the $20 bill, $10 bill, the $5 bill,

the $1 bill,

the 25 cent piece. We do have a 50 cent piece, by the way. And we have a whole dollar that's in coin form.

We've got the nickel, the dime, and the penny.

It's divisible. Currency has to be a divisible. Now, in Roman times, that was always a problem because if I gave you a gold piece for maybe all the labor you did during a war,

well, then what do you do with that? Because it's got that stamp of that Roman emperor on it, which means it's real.

But if I start breaking it up into pieces, then I kind of lose the stamp of reality on it,

and so it becomes a little bit of problem. Then I got to trade it with somebody and they've got to give me more of those coins in smaller form with the same stamp on it.

And then I got to trade those for maybe currency that's not the same in that I've traded the gold for the silver,

and they gave me a whole bag of silver coins for one of these little gold coins.

But it's still divisible.

Bitcoin is divisible to the 110 millionth.

1, 100 millionth. Okay? It's divisible to.

If you'll count them right there, that is nine zeros.

So one Satoshi, which is the lowest form of Bitcoin,

is one times 10 to the negative ninth power.

Okay?

One times 10 to the negative ninth power. That's the value of a satoshi. And the one being a bitcoin. Okay? One bitcoin equals one times ten to the negative ninth power satoshi.

Okay, makes sense.

All right, so it's intensely divisible. It's gotta be portable.

All right? And portability doesn't mean just that I can carry it. Okay, that is not enough.

All right? Portability is more important. I gotta be able to carry it and keep it safe while I carry it.

Okay?

And so silver and gold historically have been really good for that,

because silver and gold were valuable, but not super valuable.

But one gold piece today is approaching somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,500. 22, 23 right now.

So if you've got a gold silver dollar, I mean not a gold silver dollar, a gold dollar,

a United States gold piece that is 1 ounce is worth $2,500. How many of y' all want to carry 10 of those in your pocket around town?

Well, that's $25,000 that you're carrying in your pocket.

It's not a good idea to do that. Okay.

Even though I can carry 10 gold pieces in my pocket,

I can't safely carry 10 gold pieces in my pocket. And by the way, I need to have a double lined kevlar pocket to put it in. Am I right?

Along with several ornaments on my back to protect the kevlar line pocket that I have my gold in.

A good currency has to be portable.

By the way, bitcoin can be carried on your phone, be paired on your computer.

It can be carried in a little bitty flash drive.

It's intensely portable. It can be taken.

Millions and millions and millions of dollars of bitcoin can be taken in your pocket anywhere at any time.

And nobody know what they. What it was. And they wouldn't know it was of any valuable currency. Needs to be uniform,

all right? It needs to have uniformity. And that's one of the elements of it must be obvious aspect of money to produce. Prove it's not fake.

Remember, those gold coins had the stamp of the emperor on it. That means the emperor says that they were fake. Now,

every currency like that historically has crashed.

Okay, you go gold crashed. Yeah.

Because this is what the emperor started doing.

He said, let's make it 90% gold and 10%.

What color metal is copper?

So we'll boil some copper in with that gold, and it'll still be an ounce, but It'll only be 90%,

by the way. Do y' all know the United States, the government did that with silver coins.

Yeah. They started debasing those coins by making them not pure silver. And they did that for a few years. And then they realized, you know, we're doing the same thing the Romans did,

which doesn't work well. So let's just totally get rid of the silver period.

Okay? It's really what happened.

But that would happen. And slowly, slowly but surely, people began to realize, I don't have a gold coin. I have a copper coin.

I don't have a silver coin. I got a tin coin. Or a nickel coin.

And so they began to debase the currency, which means the value of the medium of exchange that people were using in their economic system was not worth what they said it was.

Which undermines your. What economy?

It undermines your economy,

which ultimately destroyed their economy.

That's why debasement of currency, which means to take the value of it and make it less and treat it as if it's the same,

is a problem.

It is the problem historically,

of great empires.

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.