Faithful Finance - Part 8

June 30, 2025

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

Faithful Finance - Part 8

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.

All right, so we get to what y' all been wanting to talk about.

By the way, many of you have come up to me and said, and talking. And I'm not. I'm not going to be able to explain everything for you today, okay?

And I will tell you that there's some answers I probably don't have on this.

There's definitely.

If I don't have answers on the word of God, and I've been studying it for 30 years, you can't ask me for three years to explain something that is worldly that I hadn't studied.

Like, I have studied the word of God, okay?

And just because I tell you that there is no answer does not mean that just because I tell you I don't have the answer does not mean that there is no answer.

All right? Somebody came up to me and asked,

well, where do you put your, you know, if you, if you buy a hundred thousand dollars and then in, in 20 years, it's only worth $10,000.

What do you. Where do you. Where do you. What do you do with your money? What. What do you do with that? Now, I want you to hear me today that what you're describing,

IBM drops in value.

Yahoo. Drops in value.

You know,

American Steel drops in value.

What you're describing,

by the way, your land,

prime land in a City today,

30 years from now is not prime land anymore.

Prime property is not prime as it used to be.

All right, I want you to hear me today. What you're describing at work is something that we talked about in the very first part of our study today,

and that Is entropy.

Entropy.

It's the reason economics is the dismal science,

is because everything tends toward chaos.

All right,

so is there any safe place?

Is there.

I'm going somewhere with this.

Is there any safe place to store up my treasure?

Yeah, there is.

I think Jesus talked about it. All right, so that's the whole point of why I told you, by the way. I don't know if I've mentioned this today, but I'm not selling anything and I'm not telling you to buy anything.

Why?

Because the treasure that you store is your treasure and between you and God. And that treasure is based off of faith. And that faith is based off of you hearing God's word and applying it to your life.

And I can't tell you what to do with your faith,

cuz it's not mine,

it's yours.

I can't tell you how you should walk with God.

I can tell you how God says you should walk with him. I can tell you from his word. But then you got to do the walking.

I can't do the walking.

If I could pay somebody to walk 10 miles for me every day, I'd pay for it.

I got the money. If you could walk 10 miles and take those calories off me today.

I pay you so much a day to walk 10,000 steps for me.

Okay?

But you can't.

You can't. And everything tends toward entropy. And it needs to be understood that way.

Everything is tending toward chaos. And the only thing that's not chaos but is orderly is God and his plan for this universe.

And by the way, the cool thing about that is you're a part of the plan.

You're a part of the plan.

So you've got to think through this for you and man. By the way, I didn't get into this, but man had the curse of he was going to have to survive off of the product of his labor.

Right? Isn't that what he told Adam in the garden after they ate of the fruit?

He's gonna. He says you're gonna survive off the sweat of your brow, off your labor.

And what you produce with that labor on earth will go away.

You can't take it with you. You can't. And by the way, I'll charge you $250 to come up with a document that tells people where it goes afterwards.

But they may just lose it immediately.

Right?

All right. The computer age.

Computers are individual devices that are used to run programs or apps that connect to the Internet,

giving you some basic understandings your computer has A processor on it. That processor connects to a bunch of other processors or more powerful processors and they talk to each other.

Okay?

Now that, that didn't just happen overnight, okay? I know we've got people that are live today that think everybody had a Spock style cell phone in their pocket when they grew up.

I can remember when I get and didn't get to talk to Kathleen from Princeton to Montgomery but once every night for five minutes, and that's all we could afford to pay attention to, talk for five minutes every evening.

And I had to call on a certain line so it ring a certain way at her house. They had two lines. And I called on the line that nobody knew the number for and it rang a certain way and they knew it was me.

And the reason that we did it that way is so nobody would answer the phone, talk to me, and we'd be charged for that talk.

Now, you can talk to anybody in the world at any time for nothing other than your daily or your monthly amount you pay to the cell phone company,

okay?

So like I said before, with technology,

that ain't the way we've always done it. Well, you ain't doing it today the way we've always done it, okay? I'm just letting you know, anybody who says to you that ain't the way we always done it.

Drove up in a car that works off of battery and gas,

carrying a cell phone with them.

Are you following me?

Driving on a road made of asphalt that used to be.

Well, I can remember when the asphalt ended at the entrance to Stillwaters.

My mama can remember where the asphalt. There wasn't no asphalt. 49, 34, 50. It was all dirt road,

okay?

Am I right, mama?

Yeah,

we got pictures of it. 34,

by the way, it ended right.

The asphalt when I was a little boy ended right at Stillwaters.

It ain't the way it's always been and it ain't going to be.

All right?

You need to understand what the web is,

all right? And the Internet.

The Internet is how computers talk to each other,

okay?

When they originally came up with computers,

people were writing programs to run those individual computers,

okay?

And there was actually a big,

big argument when the Internet and the Internet and Al Gore did not create the Internet, all right?

There was a big argument over whether or not you ought to have Internet or intranets,

okay? And what is an intranet? Well, if I got a company, I'm going to have my own computers, they're going to have their own programs and they're going to talk to each other, but they're not going to be linked to anybody else.

Or we can have an Internet where computers talk to each other, but then somebody's going to have to write a lot of programs so that those computers can understand each other.

And then you had a bunch of companies trying to do that.

And before you know it, IBM and Apple and a few other companies became the premier companies. And they had their own programs and their own methodologies for those computers to talk to each other, which became a problem over time because people were either on Apple or they were on IBM or Dell's or whatever,

two different types of computers. And so whenever we have a problem in the economy that is begging for somebody to create a technology for the solution to the problem.

Remember, technologies come naturally in economies that are trying to fix things and make things better.

All right,

so what happened was, is that we realized, you know, it'd be better off if the computers can all talk to each other.

And all the companies that invested all this money in intranets had to go back and invest in Internet.

They had to buy these computers that their servers could talk to the other servers.

Does that make sense? Everybody. Everybody understand that?

All right? By the way,

the web, or when we use the word web,

we've kind of replaced that word for apps or applications or programs.

All right? Those are the programs or applications that are built on the processors that talk to each other using those applications or apps.

Let that kind of sit on you a little bit and think through,

okay, the computers talk to each other using these programs or applications through the Internet.

All right?

The computer age works. Work this way. I'm going a little bit off sheep off sheet. I think computer age worked this way.

We had these giant machines that had these cards that you stuck in them,

and it made certain calculations, huge machines, machines as big as this room,

okay?

And those cards that they stuck in had. Had. Were programs. They were programs for that.

That computer.

Then slowly we began to miniaturize it,

and slowly we came up with different programs that did different things.

Finally, things worked their way down to people being able to have a computer in an office that just had a big CPU that sat under the desk, and those computers could talk to each other.

And then, you know, we. We hit that commercial where, you know, the guy comes running up with the.

With the sledgehammer and he throws it at the.

At the computer screen and everybody. And. And that was the commercial for Apple computers. And they came up with your own personal computer that you can have at your own House,

okay? And that computer operates in this way. It has a server. It has a. It has a.

I'm. You. I'm.

This is not the part that I'm really good at. It has a processor,

okay? And that processor has programs on it.

And that worked for a long time. And I can remember the first Apple computer is in the computer lab in my dormitory in the basement. And there were 16 of them down there,

and they were so cool,

and I didn't know how to use them at all.

And that was at Princeton in 1990.

I can remember them brand new. And the screen was like this big. And you just looked at it and typed in things. And when you type stuff, it came up on the screen.

And it was just unbelievable because my dad, all he had was a typewriter at his law office. And that's all I'd ever seen.

And I'd seen computers, but they were at schools, they're at institutions, places that you could actually own one. And one of my friends had one in. In our room.

He brought his own personal computer.

That's like driving a Ferrari at Princeton, going to campus. You know, if you go to Auburn or Alabama, you drive a Ferrari to campus and you're really, really cool. At Princeton, if you bring your own computer,

you were just really, really cool. And he had one, and I could actually type on it.

During certain times, he allowed such activity to take place. All right?

And so.

So those were those.

I can remember those days.

And then over the years, we begin to miniaturize and miniaturize them. And now they're on a phone,

and your phone has a processor on it,

okay?

And your phone can talk to the Internet over the air.

Over. Over the air with towers all around it,

and it can talk to computers all over the world.

Now, I'm telling you that for a reason, because there's a problem with those things. They tear up and they break.

Their processors get corrupted and corroded and get attacked.

And those attacks can be spread like a virus. In fact, they call it a virus,

and it can attack other people's computers.

And so there was a desire, and there was a desire in cryptography or the making of computers all the way back to before I ever saw one of them,

one of those personal computers.

There was a desire to create some program that was controlled by the processors but not in the processors,

that rather than you having to have the processor and the apps and the programs,

you could have all of those on the Internet. And your device just uses them for a fee,

very small. Fee.

And so cryptographers came up with what is basically today blockchain technology,

okay?

And blockchain technology is the building of what is a digital processor on the Internet.

So they've taken that physical processor and they've placed that physical processor in digital form on the Internet, which is maintained by millions of computers around the world that maintain it.

That we call them crypto farms or bitcoin farms. They're computers that build these blockchains,

and they maintain them by keeping a ledger 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.