Our Country

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the saints.

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My name is Chris Giesler, and with me are Michael Deere and David Kassin. And we have a couple of questions that have come in to us about our country, and so we thought we would tackle those together.

The first one, our country was built on Christian principles. What is the best way to get those principles back into society before we lose our country to socialism, where people worship the state instead?

And then the second one, our country was built on chattel slavery, not the Hebrew kind. Doesn't that mean that fundamentally our country is sinful and should be replaced with a more godly alternative?

Yeah, so these are a good pair of questions, and they offer us an opportunity for a little bit of humor.

Since we were built both on Christian principles and chattel slavery, then the obvious conclusion is that we were using principled

Christian chattel slavery to build our country. No, it's not exactly that.

We're going to get a letter now. Yeah. Wow, writing a letter, old -fashioned.

I'm old. That'd be great. I think that it's important to recognize that there were a lot of Christian principles at work in the reasoning for those who first came across.

Certainly there were trappers, traders, pioneers, but the pilgrims who came over had an idea of, well, they had hope.

They had hope for the future of their children and their grandchildren to be able to worship freely in a place where they would not be prosecuted by the state for not abiding by certain rules.

Many of the English separatists who left Britain and went to Holland couldn't make it there.

The culture wasn't good for their kids, so they decided to risk everything and come over to the

New World, and they brought with them Christian principles. And of course, the people that were with them that weren't

Christians, per se, still were embedded in Christendom with all manner of Christian presuppositions that were in place, and so this completely marinated everything that was written from the

Mayflower Compact to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and so on. So there's a lot of Christian principles that are there, and one

Christian principle is that everything is not going to be right until Jesus comes back.

So not all sin is going to be dealt with. Not all enemies will be a footstool for his feet until he returns, and the last enemy is death.

Chattel slavery, wherein there is man -stealing and this buying and selling of people as property, the splitting of families and so on and so forth, this slave trade, is not biblical.

In fact, it warrants the death penalty in the life of Israel when they were living under the Sinaitic Covenant. So we can see that God clearly showed this kind of slavery is unjust.

This kind of slavery is sinful and wrong. So to make sure I heard you correctly, you're saying that the kind of slavery where you're stealing people and forcing them into servitude is unbiblical and actually warranted the death penalty in Deuteronomy?

Yes. I think. Yeah, I think it was Deuteronomy. So how could these Christian men in that time call themselves

Christian and have slaves? Yeah, that's a good question. So the worldwide slave trade, which again, slavery has been a constant throughout human history, but when you go back to where we get the word slave, we get it from the word slave, where Eastern Europeans were enslaved and they were enslaved by other people, stronger and with more weapons than they had and so on.

The Roman Empire had many slaves and Paul writes about that. There were slaves in Israel and Moses writes about that and the prophets talk about it as well.

And the slavery that we would find in the life of Israel would be different under the purview of, let's say the judges versus the time of the kings versus the time of post -exile versus the time when we get to the

Roman Empire and the kind of slavery that Paul was writing about would be fundamentally different than the kind that Moses wrote about.

So it's helpful to be aware of that. And then when we think about the slave trade, transatlantic slave trade, as they say, and just remember that the slave trade was one third transatlantic and two thirds going the other direction into many

Muslim countries. Yeah, the Arabic slave trade, which continued before the

European one and continued long after the European one was horrible as well, but just numbers wise far exceeded it.

Right. And so the transatlantic slave trade, which was a third of all of the African enslavement, again, this was coastal tribes overpowering through weapons, inland tribes and taking them as captives and as properties to sell them.

So this is African tribes preying upon African tribes to sell them to two thirds of them going to the Muslims and a third of them transatlantic to the

European colonies. Of that one third, 9 % of that transatlantic slave trade came to the

Americas and came into the colonies. And so now we have people who didn't grow up here, they didn't belong here and here they are.

And then they're treated in ways that are not only unbiblical and sinful, but truly wicked and deserving of God's judgment.

So when it said our country is built on chattel slavery, okay, well, chattel slavery was a one ingredient in the recipe.

Yes, absolutely. Could have the country been built without chattel slavery? Yeah, yeah, you know, many countries were built without chattel slavery.

So that's obvious. It wasn't like an essential ingredient, but how could they be Christians and still engage in this?

Well, many Christians did object. Many Christians did object and wrote about it and wrote sermons about it.

And what is lost in the nuance of it is many preachers, many theologians would write against slavery in particular, the particular kinds of treatment where they would say this type of slavery is bad, but they would not condemn slavery outright.

Why not? Because there was, at that time, there was a biblical form of slavery that could actually be handled righteously.

This is where the nuance is completely lost. Now that we're advocating for slavery, but there's a difference between the

Hebrew kind of slavery, which is like indentured servitude and work off of debts and stuff, helps prevent generational poverty, and what we call chattel, which is meaning property.

I mean, chattel means property, non -real estate meaning property, where you're treating the image bearers of God like things, and you control them, you control their progeny.

Basically, like you were raising cattle, and that's an affront to the image of God. But that is, you know, we're talking about nuance.

We're not saying that slavery is good. We're saying that there is a way for people who are absolutely destitute and poor in the righteousness of God's law, where they could work off debt, or sell off land, or put themselves into servitude, and then they actually had debts forgiven, and slaves were released, so they could go back to their land, so they didn't have generational poverty.

That's a far cry from the transatlantic slave trade, which, when you talk about slavery, that's, most people only understand that.

Right, and so, who has time to use careful, defined terms when you've got this big problem?

So, what began to happen with the abolitionist movement against slavery was -

Run by Christians. Which was run by many Christians, but some of them would not be what you would call

Orthodox Christians, or confessional Christians, or believing in the Trinity, or Jesus being raised from the dead, even, but they would still call themselves

Christians, and the point is, it got to the point where, if you said anything other than all slavery, bad, evil, then you were bad and evil.

Now, I know that in our modern days, we don't have such bombastic types of controversies.

We're much more intelligent and nuanced today, and can handle tough subjects with specificity, and keep cool heads, right?

Yeah, I've seen the internet, it's true. Yeah, so, there were many Christians who would say, look,

I am totally against buying and selling people like that. There are so many evils and wrong things that are being done here, but you have to understand that the

Bible does not use your bumper sticker that says, all slavery, bad, repeat after me, all slavery, bad.

That's not what the Bible says. In fact, it's not even fair to take a look at what Paul says about slaves, and then look at the way in which slavery was dealt with by case law in the

Old Covenant. Those aren't the same things. When Paul talked about households, Christian households, he reminded them not only about husbands, and wives, and parents, and children, but also about masters and slaves, and Paul himself saw himself as a slave of Jesus Christ in Christ's household, and he told

Christian masters to remember in their treatment of their slaves that they have a master in heaven, and that they are the slave of Jesus Christ.

So remember that when you deal with your slaves in your household, and then he told Christian slaves, remember when you do your service for your earthly master, remember you have a heavenly master, and you ought to be pleasing him in your life here, and that's not the only thing that Paul ever said about masters and slaves, but it's important to see that in the household codes, many times the kind of household that went to church together would be husband, wife, children, and the master walking in as an owner of a couple of slaves, and they're all coming to church together, and James has some things to say about how we receive everybody, and Corinthians has a way of saying how do we get together as households and have communion together, and there's all these instructions about how we're all coming together in a sense equal in Christ, but that doesn't erase all distinctives.

Right. And so many Christians are going to look at the

Bible and say, well, so you're saying all slavery is bad no matter what. Interesting, okay, well, then

I guess we're going to pretend like these parts don't exist in the household codes. I wonder what will go away next, proper relationships between husbands and wives?

Maybe perhaps proper relationships between parents and children. I mean, in Marxism, of course, which is part of the question, in socialism and Marxism, every single human relationship has to be split up into oppressor and oppressed.

Well, that's obvious when it comes to master and slave. Well, also, you know what else is really wicked and awful?

Patriarchy. Husband and wife, yeah. That husband and wife relationship, that is just as bad as master -slave, and that parent -children relationship, that's why parents are bad for kids, that's why kids need to go to the government schools.

The village. Yeah, so we have to do due diligence and not just go to the master -slave and interpret it as employer -employee.

Hey, we can apply that. We can't interpret it that way, but we can make some applications that way, but we can't interpret it that way.

I think a lot of Christians have been bullied by people who would take up the

Bible and say the Bible is problematic, not only because of what it says in the Old Testament about slavery, but like you said,

Paul tells Philemon to go back to his master. He doesn't try to say you need to run away, you need to try to stay free.

Yeah, it's a really important point. He sends him back, but then the Christian, if we're embarrassed on that issue, on what the

Bible has to say about slavery, rather than yep, it says what it says, God's word is good, what he's doing is good, the way that he outlines it over time eliminates slavery when you're treating people as equals.

But if you flinch on that point and are embarrassed by that, like you said, eventually they're gonna start trying to embarrass you about the husband and wife relationship and the parents and child.

So think about this. There was shallow slavery and that was wrong and that was evil and that was bad.

And we can call it wrong and evil because the Bible does. Right, and we have standards and we say not only, we don't even have to cite

Mosaic case law, we can just look at the New Testament. Masters and slaves in the same household can belong to the same

Lord Jesus Christ and get along great. And did those situations ever exist in American history alongside the chattel slavery?

Yes. Now, the hot -headed, hard -hearted will say, you can't say that.

If you say that, you're saying all slavery is good. No, I didn't say that. You want it to be this all or nothing dichotomy, but reality is not like that.

So we need to recognize that slavery was a part of the history of our nation, as it is the part of the history of every nation.

It's actually part of our nation's present. The only thing that's fundamentally changed is only the federal government can own slaves.

And they do, a whole lot of them. We have a massive prison population and they use them as slaves.

So our country is still being built on slavery. Okay, and contracts are signed and inmates are used and slavery continues to be big business in the

United States of America. I mean, if you define slavery as forced labor, forced servitude, then yeah, we have it, prison industry.

And so in this regard, slavery is always gonna be a part of human society at some level.

And the point the Bible makes is not eliminate slavery. The point the Bible makes is do slavery righteously, which that's a hard pill to swallow.

Because of who I am and the age in which I've grown up, I would like it to be something different.

But there are many Christians who lost jobs and lost prominence and suffered a great deal of degradation and defaming because they refused to say all slavery is bad.

But they had to say, well, the Bible doesn't say that. Well, then guess what? Well, then the Bible's bad, right?

That's just a line of argumentation that goes that way. So our nation was built not just on chattel slavery.

We had slavery and we had more than chattel slavery. Chattel slavery was awful and it needs to be condemned.

But there was more than chattel slavery. There was other kinds of slavery. And there are other kinds of slavery today.

And I think that most of the time, especially presently, it's been done wrong.

But you know what our country was also built on? It was also built on the patriarchy.

It was also built on husbands, fathers, leading their families, the only one in the household having a vote, right?

And oh, if you were a landowner. Yeah. So there's many ingredients here. Chattel slavery is one of them.

Other forms of slavery were also there. How about patriarchy in many different flavors? How about land ownership?

How about this Marxist split? There are the people who own things and the people who don't own things.

There's the property owners and there's not the property owners. Let's have a big fight about that too.

So there are many, many ingredients that we can look at and say, well, what an awful thing that our country was built on.

Well, again, the question I think is worth bringing into the combination with the first one.

Okay, our country was built on Christian principles. History shows this. Now what's the best way to get those principles back into society before we lose our country to socialism?

And the flip side of that coin is, well, wasn't there a lot of problems with the way our country was founded?

So do we really wanna go backwards? But I think the answer in the scriptures is that Jesus Christ is washing his bride, the church, with the water of his word.

And if there's gonna be a bright Christian -saturated Bible -believing future for our nation, it's not because we're going back to anything, but we're moving forward.

So I think fundamentally, Christianity is about, it's gonna be more about hope than it is about retracing our steps.

I think we're anchored in the future, and I think that there is a version of a Christian nation, for the lack of a more clear term, that's gonna be a better version ahead of us than what was behind us.

Now what does that look like, right? Hopefully what that looks like is more people who are born again, more people who are regenerate, more people who love

Jesus because they're indwelt by the Holy Spirit, churches that are more understanding of the scriptures than our forebearers were, more ready to take all of these mounting resources full of Bible knowledge and so on and moving forward so that there is basically, for lack of a better term, a wildfire of Christianity spreading that can't be stopped.

Yeah. And so people call that revival and I'm looking forward to it, but I don't think it's gonna look like something where Christianity was just deeply cultural, where it was just kind of in the water and therefore

Christian principles just kind of oozed out of everybody's philosophy. Yeah. But there's a better version of that that I think is ahead of us.

I don't wanna go backwards to something that was prior. Does that make sense? Yeah.

So the question, the first one did talk about how the best way to get those Christian principles back in society.

Yeah, good. You alluded to them a little bit, talking about how regardless of whether you are a master or slave, husband and wife, child, father, whether you're a landowner, whether you're a business owner, there are principles,

Christian principles, especially in the New Testament, that talk about your conduct, that the way that we should behave in society, but the root of it is if there were more regenerate people who wanted to follow

God's way, to live in his kingdom according to kingdom rules, then society in general would be better and it would be better than returning to these

Christian principles and it would be better than trying to make up for the horror of that chattel slavery, whether through reparations or whatever else to try to undo the sins of the past or these people who try to go back to what the founders said and says we're gonna re -institute these

Christian principles here. You kind of sidestep both of those and you said, well, let's talk about families, let's talk about our churches and let's talk about regardless of what position you're in, you're living according to what

Christ has taught because Christ is living in you. Yeah, so getting principles back into society.

So when you look at the term principle, what comes at the first part of that word is prince.

For some people, the solution is get a Christian prince, have somebody who installs

Christendom. Kind of a top -down. By law, by system, by structure and then everybody will see that this is better and things will be better and will get better because of the structure and the system, okay?

Now, the model for that has been established when and where? Long time ago on a continent far, far away and although I'm grateful for things that we can learn from that, there's also some things that we can learn from that.

Yeah, yeah. And if we're going to talk about that first part of the term principle and who's the prince,

I think we have a king and his name is Jesus and he's king of kings and he is Lord of lords and we are a kingdom among the nations even as we are a family among families and there is a need for us if we're going to fight against lofty things, lofty arguments, being raised up against the knowledge of God and so on, if we're going to be against socialism,

Marxism, Islam, so on and so forth. Well, how are we going to do that? What is the best way to do that?

The power of the gospel. Right. Having people saved and bowing the knee to Jesus Christ who is king.

There's this plan that most people find very foolish.

It's called preaching the gospel and people are like, that's never going to work. Like I submit to you 2000 years of data.

Yeah. Come at me. Right. And it's not my idea.

I certainly wouldn't have invented that idea or recommended it but those who have turned the world, the oikomene, the

Roman empire upside down have come here too. They complain about Jason and Paul and Silas in act 17.

Well, how did they turn the Roman empire upside down? They went around preaching the gospel. Now, one of the problems that Christians have is like they're waiting for someone to speak for them when

Jesus told every single Christians, you ought to speak up. And I've heard some encouraging stories lately about Christians in the workplace or in other venues just speaking up and holding fast to what they believe and challenging those around them and finding all of a sudden

Christians coming out of the bushes saying, thank you for saying that I agree and I'll speak up too.

Wow, that was interesting. This is just simply like, hey, I'm going to very openly pledge allegiance to Christ, bow the knee to Christ, say, you know what?

Jesus is in charge, I'm gonna run things his way. I'm gonna follow the lamb wherever he goes. So just so you know where I'm at on this.

And again, the gospel is, people who think that the preaching of the gospel is us going around and begging people, please ask

Jesus into your heart. No, that's not the gospel. The gospel is the good news and it's all about Jesus Christ's person and work, the good news.

The good of the good news is Jesus Christ and the news of the good news is Jesus Christ. It's a heralding that he is king, that he has authority, this is his business.

I'm letting you know who's in charge. And when everybody starts talking that way and proclaiming that way and moving that way, the principles from our prince,

Jesus Christ, are being lived out, fleshed out, worked out amongst all his people and the kingdom among the nations becomes pretty bright, like a city set on a hill.

We get real salty, in a good way, salt of the earth. All of a sudden, we're the lamp on the lampstand, not onto the bushel, giving light to all who are in the room, even those who might prefer darkness.

But I think that's the plan. Well, we already have, so instead of installing like a prince from the world, we already have that prince.

So we already have the top down. He's already given us how to live. So now we need the bottom up, the bottom up.

We need the people living it. I've heard it described, we don't start with politics and then try to change the culture and then try to get into the church so that we can live free.

No, we live as the church and that works out into society. And then through society, when you have a godly society, they're going to elect godly magistrates rather than trying to install that system and then force the people to abide by it.

They're not going to if their heart's not there. Well, it's the only thing that's ever been consistent. Like if the instructions are, go therefore, make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the

Father, the Son, Holy Spirit, teaching them to preserve all that I have commanded you. All of this is about Jesus Christ, his authority as the one who died for our sins and was raised the third day and ascended to the right hand of the

Father and will return in full victory. We're going to be heralding that news. And that was the instructions from the beginning is the only thing that has stayed constant with the church from the beginning till now.

There've been various, pun somewhat intended, incarnations of the church where you have highly organized imperial church.

You've had the mixture of the state and the church in both the continental and the

English Reformation. And you've had a variety of different experiences.

But the one thing that's been constant that has brought glory to Christ and good for people in this world is the preaching of the gospel.

And that's what we appreciate about. When we go back and we read about our reformer forefathers, what do we like most about John Knox?

What do we like most about Calvin? What do we like most about Luther? The exciting parts, where they stood up and they were bombastic and that's the stuff they make movies about.

That's what we like to see. But in those moments, it was what? Preaching the gospel. And of course, people will be interested in Geneva.

Of course, people will be interested in Scotland. Of course, people are going to be interested in Wittenberg and the

Lutheran Germany and so on. That's interesting. But those are symptoms of what happened when the gospel was preached at a certain time in history and the symptoms were manifested in these statist forms because that's the way that culture was.

And the light of Christ is hitting all of that culture in a certain way. And now, we live in a different time and the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is timeless, being preached again and again, is going to have a different reaction.

It's not going to look like the cantons of Switzerland trending Protestant or Catholic and then going to war about it.

So in this pair of questions, you have, if we just assume that they're both Christians, it would say, a

Christian person says, I would like to get back to the Christian principles on what this country was founded. And the next second question is, he says, no, this slavery thing, this has made it inherently sinful and we need to replace that with a more godly alternative.

They're not that far apart. They actually both want a government and a society that better reflects what they see in scripture.

So you have, I mean, for lack of a better term, you've got one guy on the right, one guy on the left, and they're saying, we need to fundamentally transform society into something that better reflects

Christ. The person on the left is like, we need to help the oppressed and the oppressed do not oppress the widow and the orphan, don't be like these, and then greedy capitalists who do that.

And the guy on the right says, no, we have to get back to the Christian principles, private property and whatever else. You have one person on one side, and one person on the other side, and they're here with you right now.

And your response to them is, well, the solution is to preach the gospel. Is that right? Yeah, so here's option

A, here's option B. I think the answer is no, right? So I think the answer is no. It's a matter of why were the

Christian principles oozing out of everybody's philosophy near the time of the formation of our country?

How'd that even happen? Because preaching the gospel preceded that. What has proven over time to erase chattel slavery and other true evil and injustices in society over time?

The preaching of the gospel that affects Christians who are then magistrates, who then pass righteous laws in clever ways like William Wilberforce, right?

Perfect example. So William Wilberforce does this, why? Because he's a believer. How did he become a believer?

Because the gospel was preached to him. So we have Christian magistrates, and today we have Christian sheriffs. We have

Christian politicians today. We have Christian businessmen today. We have Christian lobbyists today.

We have Christian think tanks today. We have Christians just about everywhere doing all sorts of things, and we've only left to them their abortion clinics, right?

So Christians are flooding every part of society, and what we need to do is wake up in the morning, pledge allegiance to Jesus Christ the

King, and go out and say whatever he says, that's what we're gonna do, and be loud and proud about that, and not back down.

That, I think, is what people who hate Christ are most frightened of.

Christians who aren't afraid of men. Christians who no longer fear men. Christians who no longer fear death.

Christians who simply fear the Lord. That is the greatest fear of people who hate God and hate

Christ, that Christians would live in that confidence and in that hope, and just be bold and go forward.

And everybody, the previous generation that would pray for revival every Wednesday night, the previous generation that preached about revival every other

Sunday night, they would recognize that as a revival, and it should be our desire as well. And so that has to start with me, you, and you, and just say, hey, this is what we do.

And we do it, we model it for our kids, model it for our wives, model it for our friends, stir one another up in our local churches.

This is how we roll, let the chips fall where they may. I'm not gonna be rude about it, but I am gonna say, hey, look, we don't do that, because I think

Christ is king here. Yeah, and there's no area where that doesn't take place. There's no neutrality in certain areas, and you keep that in private or family life or church life, but everywhere else, you stay silent.

It's no, all of it is his. Yeah, that's right, he's the king of all kings, the lord of all lords, and that includes the

HR department. Right, very much so. Well, I think that about answers those questions. Let's move on to recommendations.

Michael? Yeah, I'd like to recommend a book by Kenneth Gentry, As It Is Written, and the subtitle is

The Genesis Account, Literal or Literary. And so the particular focus of this book is dealing with something called the framework theory.

And the framework hypothesis, it's called a framework hypothesis or the literary framework view, is a way, is a conceived middle way for evangelicals to read the early chapters of Genesis as something other than what they would appear to be by plain reading.

That when it comes to a six -day creation where morning and evening, as would be understood by Israel, would be an actual day and so on.

No, it's not at all that these were actual days or that Adam was actually made out of dust or that this, however it happened, that's not the point of these chapters.

The point of these chapters is that they were structured together in a literary fashion to communicate timeless truths.

So like the Jordan Peterson approach. Right, exactly. And so what Kenneth Gentry does is he doesn't directly write against the skeptic who says these statements in Genesis are manifestly contradictory, therefore it's wrong.

He does write about that. But what he's more writing about is against those who are holding to the framework hypothesis because, and why did they have the framework hypothesis?

Because they've responded to those critics. And they're like, oh no, you misunderstood the point of the text. The point of the text wasn't that it was history.

The point is that it's revealing mystery. Okay, so they tried to cut off the skeptics at the knees and say, this isn't about science and this isn't about history.

You've misunderstood the point of this religious text, right? And then Kenneth Gentry is saying, no.

The theory, the framework hypothesis is really bad and here's all the reasons why.

And in fact, you want a better answer to those skeptics? Well, here are the answers to those skeptics. Now, mostly what he does in this book that's helpful is that he collates all of the research papers, books, scholars that give those answers.

Okay, so it's not, he's kind of, this is his debate prep book.

Okay, so he has gathered all this information from all these different scholars to be ready to use it in debate against the framework hypothesis, folks.

Okay, so it's not like this is like, most of this is not his original approach. And so the value of the book is it'll put you into contact with a lot of other resources that you can use.

And I found it very helpful. Nice, and that's not huge. It doesn't look super intimidating.

It's not a huge book, but the subject index is great. Oh yeah. Bibliography is good.

And really the way that he does the chapters, you can tell this is just debate prep.

But where I was using it for the other day was answering an objection about how Genesis 2 has a different order of creation than Genesis 1.

Therefore, these are separate accounts, separate traditions laid side by side, proving that there's not one author, proving that this is an erroneous book, so on and so forth.

And anyway, so some of the questions and comments about it were interesting. And so I just referenced this and it pointed me to some scholarship that made some very plain observations of Hebrew grammar.

And it was like, oh, there we go. Very good. It was almost anticlimactic. Well, for this week, because I travel a lot and I'm doing workouts in every hotel

I'm in, I'm listening to a lot of audio books and podcasts and stuff like that. And over the summer, the

Kings Hall guys had done, they'd done a series of things and I'm not necessarily recommending everything that the

Kings Hall has produced. There's my disclaimer. But something I found that was really helpful, they started this series on finance in July, July, August, September, and it was a series of four.

The first one was with Jordan Bush talking about wealth, money, and the new Christendom, Bitcoin, with Jordan Bush.

And Jordan Bush, I think, does Bitcoin in the Bible podcast. And then Jace Revenant talks about gold.

And we have another guy that talks about real estate. And another guy talks about traditional finance, which talk about stocks and bonds and everything.

There's Joe Garrissey. And the reason I mention them is that these are four guys who are experts in their field who are

Christian. So if you reference the podcast, you wanna learn more about traditional finance, you wanna learn more about decentralized.

These are guys that I think you can learn a lot from. And they've all kind of come together in a four -part series at the

Kings Hall podcast. So they can, then you look at them and have other resources depending on what it is you wanna do if you wanna go into different cryptocurrencies, if you wanna go into precious metals, if you wanna do real estate, which you can be successful in any of those things, but I doubt there's someone who's an expert in all of them.

So you kind of do have to specialize. But their whole point is that you're building for the future.

They're planting trees that they don't see the fruit of. They are planning for their children's and their children's children legacy.

They're looking forward. And these guys in these areas are Christian dudes. So I think you would do well to learn more from them.

And one thing that I keyed in on Joe Garrissey, the final one talking about traditional finance, is that the tax code is really written for business owners.

That if you have a business, there's a lot of things in there that you can take advantage of because it's written for that.

And so I was like, huh. So I may wanna start an LLC of some kind. But it opened up a world for me, exposed me some things that I hadn't learned about in the past, and gave me some resources and some experts from a

Christian perspective that I could learn a little bit more about. So there you go. Awesome, very good.

My recommendation is a book called Eight Errors Parents Make and How to Avoid Them by Michael Brock.

The subtitle is A Practical Guide to Biblical Parenting. And I found it very practical and very encouraging.

Some of the errors, shifting the blame, low expectations, child -centered home, failing to discipline.

And then it has like an interlude where it talks about it isn't too late. My kids range in age from three to 13.

And so in parenting my younger ones now, I'm picking up things that I wished

I had done with my older ones. I wish I had done this or put this in place.

But even then, it's all God's grace in growing those relationships. So I found this one very helpful.

If you have Canon, it's also on there for sure. They have it on there. So that's an additional resource.

Let's move on to what we are thankful for. I am thankful for the volunteer fire departments of Jacktown, Wellston, and Chandler for the two pumpers and six, or six pumpers and two tankers that arrived at my property today to help me put out a fire that was way out of hand.

Very thankful for all those gentlemen who came out and the long -known lady and thankful that God answered many prayers to keep the fire from spreading into the neighbor's property, which would have been really bad.

Yeah, that would have been real bad. That's a good way to meet your neighbors, right? Yeah, I met my neighbors, which is great. Brought them all together for story time and exchanging of phone numbers and so on.

So anyway, just thankful. I will be chewing on the lessons of today for many years to come.

So it may even show up as a sermon illustration sometime. Actually, just today, there's a family in our church that was traveling and they got stuck outside of Dallas.

And I'm often there and I wasn't able to help. They would have been,

I don't know, 40 minutes away from my usually work. And so I would have definitely just dropped everything and did to go help this family because they've meant so much to my own.

And I really wasn't needed. You know, they were completely taken care of. Grandpa also was able to swoop in and help with that.

And the family is just together and they're safe. And they're just trying to kind of get the last piece.

You know, their vacation has been ruined and it's terrible. But we're so thankful that they're okay. We're so thankful that they're together.

And we're thankful that we just have resources as a church to be able to help them and bring them back up here.

And so I can't say you're thankful that this happened in this way, but you know that God's in control and you can be thankful for these kinds of trials because they show the provision of God.

They teach you to trust. And Brother Brian reminded me of that,

Mr. B, that those kinds of trials just engender faith, strengthens faith.

And we can be thankful for that. So, and we will be even more thankful when they're home safe. Yes. That's right.

I am thankful for good reports from the mission field. We had a friend over recently from the

Middle East. And so we got to hear stories of kind of firsthand stories of things that have been taking place.

Hear it from a different perspective rather than from our own media. Things that are going on and relationships between different countries and things that have happened.

But out of that, this person was very optimistic. Obviously there's a lot of tragedy and horrific things that have happened, but they were telling us of many people coming to Christ because of it.

The involvement of the church at the local level, how they've mobilized and just continued to worship

God through this. Their sound theology. We got to talking about hymns and worship because that's what

I do. And so I asked, you know, obviously it's a different style and things like that. And then we got to talking about kind of the emotional kind of happy music that we have here.

And she's like, you don't have any of that because it doesn't do anything for them. That's not what their lives are about.

That doesn't really encourage them in anything. It's the deep truths of the Bible. And so they're singing scripture or they're singing things that go very deep that talk about suffering, that talk about God's sovereignty and things like that.

But just to hear about the refugees that are fleeing all these different countries and how the churches are helping these refugees and then the stories that are coming out of that.

It was very encouraging. Just as, you know, we're here in our country and America's, you know, America first.

And we get American news and everything through an American lens. But just to hear from a different point of view, things are happening and God is doing stuff.

That's not gonna be on American news, you know, what God is doing. And so it was just good to hear that.

So that's one thing that I'm very thankful for. And that wraps it up for today. We are very thankful for our listeners and hope you will join us again as we meet to answer common questions and objections with Have You Not Read.