SPEAKER_00 0:02

The Bill of Rights, the official membership benefit list for America.

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Every issue that comes into my office actually boils down to expectation. When am I owed and when am I owe someone else?

SPEAKER_00 0:19

If it ought to happen, according to the Tenth Amendment, the people should do it or the state should do it. When a politician says we ought to provide dental care for kids or we ought to spend more money on education, what exactly is that ought standing on? And when they say that someone should pay their fair share, a share of what? Well, welcome to Abundant conversations about the life everyone's looking for and what's getting in the way. I'm Dan Jarvis, joined by my good friend Del Fasenfeld, and today we're pulling out a phrase that maybe you heard in civics class a long time ago, social contract. If America was a membership, what are the dues and what are the benefits? What's in that social contract? What do we actually owe each other as citizens or as neighbors or as people who happen to share this time and place in history? Because everybody in public life is telling you that someone else owes you something, very few are willing to talk about what you actually owe. So today, what do we still owe one another?

SPEAKER_01 1:27

So maybe what's mine's mine and what yours is mine.

SPEAKER_00 1:31

Something like that. Well, let's get into it. So, Dell, what do you expect from your American membership?

SPEAKER_01 1:38

Well, if America was a membership, I guess I ought to think about the cost and what do I get? So not 100% sure. I uh want life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

SPEAKER_00 1:49

That sounds sounds poetic. I think somebody used those words before to describe that very thing. It's interesting to consider that all of us have an expectation. We all, even if we haven't thought of this this way before, we all believe that other people do owe us something, either respect or help or whatever. And we also kind of intuitively know that we owe society something back. That, well, I'll give you a simple example. I was driving along the road today. There were some barrels that had fallen off of a farm truck just right in the middle of the road. So I thought, you know what, I'm the only car here. I should pull over and move those barrels so that the next guy doesn't run into them and cause an accident. I did that, right? So that was my gold star for the day. I moved the barrels and think, okay, that was just being a good Samaritan or being, you know, conscientious of others. But I do feel like I would expect someone else to make that same decision in front of me to help me not get into an accident, right? So where is that expectation coming from? Why would we assume that someone else would look out for our better interests? Maybe someone that doesn't even know our name, just somebody that is here in our own local community looking out for each other.

SPEAKER_01 3:01

I can tell you as a counselor, Dan, that every issue in that comes into my office actually boils down to some combination of expectation and kind of the questions that you're asking, like, what am I owed and what do I owe someone else? And when we don't get that matched up, you know, it does cause a lot of problems.

SPEAKER_00 3:20

So there are two sides to the membership equation, if you want to look at it that way. There are the things that we would call benefits, and that's what's essentially guaranteed to you as a part of our society, either in a good neighborhood or in America altogether. And then there would be the things that you owe. A lot of the political discussion these days is about who owes what. So you tend to think that the richer people owe more and the poorer people owe less. And whenever that discussion's happening, you kind of hope that you're among the poorer people that are not going to somehow owe more. It's interesting that people appeal to morality and compassion and love, even to make those arguments, but there's not a lot of clarity about the baseline for any of it. It's kind of like, do you feel good about it? Don't you feel like billionaires should pay more so that you can have free health care? Well, maybe I feel that way. That sounds like a great benefit to me, but I don't know if it's actually fair or right or helpful just by nature of its own dis there'd be a whole discussion to have about that, right? Think of how many politicians are offering something and they're using terminology that sounds like obligation, like this really should happen. It's not just that it could happen. So I I wanted to go through the official membership benefit list for America, the Bill of Rights. We'll just get the baseline there. And then I want to ask you, Dell, if you feel like that's enough or if you think you're entitled to more than this is offering you. Okay, so Constitution was written, it showed the pathway for how we're gonna operate the government, but then people said that's not enough. We don't want to go back to monarchy, and we don't want people trampling on our natural God-given rights. So we're gonna make a list of things that I have a right to, and you can't take it away, or you can't do certain things to me. So I won't read the amendments themselves, but let's just kind of do the there's ten parts to this. First of all, the most popular, the rights to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the press, assembly, and then the right to petition the government for the redress of grievances, which means that you can go and you can complain, and you actually have a right to complain. So obviously, that's complicated to live in a society where millions of people can say anything they want, but I think we're all glad we have that right.

SPEAKER_01 5:42

No doubt. Uh, I'm hanging on to my right to complain.

SPEAKER_00 5:45

Yeah. I mean, we're exercising it right here on abundant, right? Because we're not worried about some government bureaucrat coming and telling us, hey, you're not allowed to say that because we have these freedoms. So praise God for all that, and thank you, founding fathers, for writing that down. Second one is the right to bear arms, the right to protect yourself. That's probably worth another episode. That's a whole nother discussion, but we'll say there it is. They they enshrined that one in the in the Constitution. The right to no quartering of soldiers. So that was, you know, back in the day when the the British could force you to let soldiers stay in your home and you had to feed them and take care of them and say, no, no, we're not going to let that happen anymore. The right against unreasonable search is the Fourth Amendment. And, you know, we all cling to that one when the when we get pulled over, right? Can't search my car. The right to due process, you don't have to incriminate yourself, so you plead the fifth if you feel like you're in legal trouble and your own testimony could be used against you. The sixth in the Bill of Rights is the right to a speedy public trial and the right to counsel. The quality of that counsel is not defined, so that could be questionable at times, but you are going to have some sort of defense attorney standing there with you, even if you can't afford one. You have the right to a jury trial, not just a judge who would render a verdict against you, but you could have a trial of other people that are in your peer group looking at you and deciding that's that's important. These were all based on rules that the the early Americans had learned from the old world systems. And they were they said, we don't want to go back to what Europe was in those days. We want to be free citizens and feel like we can determine our own destiny here and that there won't be despotism, you know, like people that can just override our natural God-given rights. No cruel and unusual punishment was the eighth of the ninth rights that were not listed were still retained by the people. So they wanted to make sure that a future reader of this document would not come back and say, Well, you forgot to mention X and you don't have a right to it because it wasn't mentioned. They said, No, no, automatically you have the right to pretty much anything unless somebody passes a law against it. So I'm kind of glad for that too.

SPEAKER_01 8:04

Wow, I didn't even know about that one, but that seems important.

SPEAKER_00 8:07

Yeah. Now the Tenth Amendment, I think, is the definitely the most neglected of the of the Bill of Rights. And it's some legal speak, but here's the concept. And as soon as you catch what it's saying, you say, Wow, I am being denied this right in a major way. So powers not delegated to Washington, D.C. belong to the states or to the people, which basically means if the Constitution doesn't tell the federal government that it can do something, then it can't. The states can do it, the people can do it, the feds can't. And then you look at the federal government spending seven trillion dollars a year doing a whole bunch of things the Constitution says nothing about, and you go, wait a minute. I thought I had a right to a limited government based on the Tenth Amendment. And you do, but it's being totally denied.

SPEAKER_01 8:55

That is alarming, and also probably the biggest difference in what's happened versus what the constitutional founders had in mind.

SPEAKER_00 9:04

Yeah. Sometimes in the all these good things ought to happen discussions, the the education and the healthcare and the helping the owls and the trees or whatever we're going to do with federal money, you jump right to compassion and, like, hey, this ought to happen, this should happen, it would feel good for it to happen. Very few people ever stop to ask, is it actually the federal government's job to make that happen? If it ought to happen, according to the Tenth Amendment, the people should do it or the state should do it. And what that does is it protects you from a federal government that ends up being in charge of everything and then in essence becomes the same thing as the monarchy that the founding fathers were trying to escape. So here we are.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

Man, it feels like one-fifth of our economy might bis be that.

SPEAKER_00 9:48

Absolutely. Well, you think even retirement security. I mean, some of the big ticket items in the government, according to the 10th Amendment, should be state-run programs, not federally run programs. But there again, we're kind of playing with the cards we've been dealt, right? So maybe someday there'll be a revival of the 10th Amendment. It's still there, it's still part of the Constitution. I've always wondered, as an aside, why has the Supreme Court not ever flagged that? I think they probably do at different times, but it just seems like in the big picture, somebody would say, hold on, none of this is constitutional, even if it's the right thing to do. If you want the government to do more than the Constitution says, then you should pass a constitutional amendment and add it to the list. But you shouldn't just do it and ignore what the document says.

SPEAKER_01 10:32

Yeah, I think I'm like reading back over this list, and I'm really stunned by this Ninth Amendment. That there basically was this idea that they were trying to limit the government to such an extent that they were almost protecting people from things more than they were trying to establish like a comprehensive plan to uh meet all of our sort of needs.

SPEAKER_00 10:54

Yes. So think of this. When the government gives a right to someone or recognizes a right, and that's an important distinction, right? Because the where do the rights come from? Not from government, but actually from God. They're intrinsic in who you are as a human being. Your choice is not because the government says you have a choice, it's because God gave you a choice. The government is just there to protect the structure through which you get to make those choices. So we're grateful for that. In the ideal world, that's primarily the government's main job is to make sure that you don't lose your freedom. Now, what will happen is people will start adding to that equation and they'll say, Yeah, yeah, you have all these rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, but you also have a right to affordable housing. Now, that's a very different category than all these things. Would you agree with that? It might be true in the way that the person's saying it, but it's not legally the same thing as the rights in the Constitution.

SPEAKER_01 11:47

Really different.

SPEAKER_00 11:48

Yeah. So now all of a sudden you're saying, well, you've got a right to a great education. You've got a right to quality medical care, you've got a right to nutritious food. All those things are really wonderful causes, and we all want everyone to have all those things. But you should pause and say, are you using the word right the right way? Because if somebody has a right to that, it also means that on the other side of this whole membership equation, now there's an obligation. Somebody has to pay for that. So I can have a right to free speech, and on the other side of the membership equation, it means I have to be willing to put up with people saying things I don't like. So there's a benefit to America, but there's also a price I pay. Well, if you start giving tangible rights to things that have a physical value, like a right to medical care, for example, would mean that now a doctor has to provide that for me not because I'm paying him for it, but because I have a right to it. So it gets complicated and it gets expensive to start talking like that. I would argue that the constitutional rights we have are limitations on the scope of government to protect our ability to keep making choices and not have a monarchy.

SPEAKER_01 13:04

So what you're what you're talking about here is really like a social contract. Like what is the nature of the actual social contract that I have as an American? What is the contract? Right. And you're What does it include? That's right. And I think it gets even more confusing because you know I was in a conversation very recently about healthcare, which I, you know, I think we all wish that everyone had access to great healthcare. But the person said the fact that America does not have a guarantee for all of our citizens is immoral. It's absolutely a crime against humanity itself. And I I think that reflected maybe that person's social contract.

SPEAKER_00 13:49

Like, yeah, and well, I'll ask you, do you think that that's immoral? Somebody doesn't have access to quality.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

I think it's unspeakably sad when you when they don't.

SPEAKER_00 13:57

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 13:58

But I had never thought about it in terms of like moral and immoral. I don't know. It does pull at my heartstrings.

SPEAKER_00 14:05

Absolutely. Compared to some of these other rights, like so take the right to self-defense in the Second Amendment. If I have the right to self-defense, does society have to provide me with the means for self-defense? Or do I just have the right to go do it if I can, if I want to? I think we'd all agree we don't want the government buying guns for people and handing it out, you know, like we say, no, no, you you have the right to that, but you we're not going to provide it for you. There's a difference there. When it comes to health care, I think you could look at the Tenth Amendment and say, if the government should guarantee health care, first of all, it might be better to not use morality and rights language to describe that, but to say if that really should happen, then the states should take it up. If that's a problem that people can't come up with an answer personally for, that's a fair assessment. I think that is true. So you generate a state program, but when you kick it up to the federal level, again, you you risk giving too much power to too few people who all live in Washington, D.C., and all of a sudden there's one central government that's commanding and controlling vast swaths of the economy. That's exactly what America was founded to prevent from happening. That's why it was set up as a federalist system and not just another kind of mirror image of what the governments of Europe were back in the day.

SPEAKER_01 15:23

Okay, let me just process this with you to make sure I'm getting it. The Bill of Rights seems to have set up a system where it protected us from the federal government, infringing on the rights of the states and of people. And basically anything that we're gonna say needs to be added to that social contract, the means through which that is supposed to be done is either the people or the states.

SPEAKER_00 15:47

Yes. And then there's one other way that you could add something to the contract, and that's the amendment process to the Constitution. But when you look at how you pass an amendment, okay, the Congress is supposed to agree to it, but they can't amend the Constitution. Who has to amend it? The states. Three-fourths of the states, if I'm not mistaken. So you have to have the vast majority of the states agreeing that, you know what, everybody, we agree we're going to give up the right to control this part of our lives that was reserved for the states and the people, because we can't do it on our own. So we're going to say it's just like the common defense. We're giving up our right to all have our own militaries and we're going to have a U.S. military. Well, why? Well, because that for very obvious reasons, we have to work together. So there could be things that would rise up to that level. Maybe you could argue healthcare should rise to that level. You say, well, okay, if you believe that, then the next step in your process should be to pass a constitutional amendment and get the states to agree that instead of state level and people level solutions to that problem, we're going to add that to the federal contract that we all share in the Constitution and go from there. And you could do that. It wouldn't be immoral to do that, but I do think it's at least procedurally incorrect to add that onto the federal budget without any reference to the fact that it's completely unconstitutional.

SPEAKER_01 17:08

So when I throw out a word like what's my fair share, or I use a phrase like I have a right to, you're just suggesting that all of that has to reference some sort of agreed upon social contract, and that we actually do have one in the United States. It's called the Bill of Rights.

SPEAKER_00 17:29

Yeah, you just have to define what the share of what thing. So here's what's interesting about state government programs. For example, if they're going to give you more benefits, they'll have to take more in taxes, right? So you could go to a high-tax state where theoretically they're giving more benefits to more people, or you could go to a low-tax state where they kind of leave you alone. Well, you get to pick. You as a free citizen can select the state you want to live in. If the federal government grabs an issue and runs with it, you don't get to pick anymore. Uh now it's just you're stuck with whatever they've decided. And it forces you outside of just the compassion language, which there's nothing wrong with starting with that, of the heartstrings are being pulled, somebody's suffering out there, and you go, okay, we've got to find a solution to this. But maybe the best solution isn't federalizing it. Maybe the best solution is somehow local or state level. One thing I think is interesting in the social contract discussion is that we all automatically have one, not just at this political level like we're talking now, but on a real on a really personal level, I think we all have a sense of what our neighbors should be doing for us or not doing for us. If somebody's playing loud music in the house next door, you might think, based on this unwritten social contract, you realize they're having a party and you say, well, that's okay for one night. But what if they do it every night? What if the music never stops? Would you eventually feel like they're violating something, some unwritten rule that says, I deserve some peace and quiet around here? Actually, I read this article about why people are really upset at a data center that got put in in a city near here because the the data center is generating all this noise, like the fan noise or the generators that it takes to run the thing. And so the people that live near it, they they walk outside on their back porch and they're like, I can't have any peace. There's constant ringing and all this generator sound going on, so they're really upset about that because the data center has violated this social contract we all have, but it wasn't exactly written down. That's the problem. They didn't think to write it down because nobody had that problem 10 years ago.

SPEAKER_01 19:29

Now, according to the larger social contract, there is a process where that could be worked out. It would just happen at the state or local level, not at the federal level. So, you know, it's just interesting to be kind of like putting these things into categories so that we actually even know what we're talking about when we talk about fair or what's right.

SPEAKER_00 19:47

Yeah, well, and that's what the First Amendment, the that you have the right to petition the government for the redress of grievances. So if you have a grievance, you're allowed to be upset about it and you're allowed to ask for the rules to change. So let's talk a little bit about how as American citizens, in our context, Dell, we work here at a church, so we're also trying to work not just as Americans, but also as people that live with Christian values and we're pursuing the virtues of Jesus. So we definitely want to pull all that together into one story. I enjoy hearing libertarian philosophy, I guess. And that's really like leave us alone on all category. I don't want anybody to do anything. I I kind of enjoy that, but I don't know if I totally buy it. You know, I do think that we owe each other a little bit more than that. It's not just that you owe me privacy, period. I think that we should be helping each other and that the structures of government can help us do that. Um, but I wanted to work through with you a few different tensions that we have to manage. Um, so one would be the tension of liberty versus responsibility, which is most of what we've talked about so far. When Ben Franklin came out of the Constitutional Convention, it was in the midst of the discussion. It was like a hot summer day, and somebody walked up to him and asked him, Hey, what kind of government are we going to have? And he said, A republic, ma'am, if you can keep it. Supposedly that's what he said. I don't know if that's totally a true story or not, but I like it. He was kind of giving this idea that, you know, right now we have this republic that guarantees your rights and allows you to be free, but it's not going to function on autopilot. It would be really easy to lose this thing. So be careful that you don't lose it. Yeah, so you're liberty, but you need responsibility to go next to it.

SPEAKER_01 21:42

So part of what you had referenced before is that in the Bill of Rights there was this uh equation where on one side there was the the inalienable right that was being granted, but the other side of it was this responsibility that there was this expectation that there was going to be some sort of cost on On the other side in order to like actually preserve it. And so liberty does require a tremendous amount of responsibility for the people who want to actually keep it.

SPEAKER_00 22:10

Yeah. Well, you have to govern yourself. If you're not going to have other people governing you, then you have to you have to do the right thing without the law telling you to do the right thing. And if you're not willing to do the right thing, we've got to make more laws to try to control you. So the more virtue you're willing to cultivate in your heart, the more free you and your neighbors and your society can be.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

Sort of like the law of the subdivision, uh, in a way, like I was told by an older man in our subdivision that before you bring anything complaint to the board, the understood rule of thumb was that you're supposed to go first talk and see if you could work it out directly with your neighbor. And so the uh old school way of running a subdivision was the first question was have you taken responsibility to try to work it out on your own? If you don't, you're gonna end up with an HOA that has so many rules that it becomes non-functional.

SPEAKER_00 23:03

I remember when I joined a team years ago and they handed me a rule book, and then they said, Yeah, some of these rules have names on them. Not in the book, but we know who made that rule. There was one we we had this little shared truck, and uh there was a rule that said you can't bring fireworks on the truck. Well, I wouldn't have thought of that. Why would I bring fireworks on the truck? But apparently somebody did, and so they had to make a rule against that exact thing. So you're right, yeah, right. So if you want liberty, you have to be willing to walk in wisdom. Another tension you have to manage would be protection versus contribution. So you want to be protected by the society around you, you want your work to be protected, your property, but you also have to contribute something back to that. Or else it doesn't work. So you're gonna contribute through taxes, through goodwill, through community participation. Think even the right to a jury trial in the Seventh Amendment. Well, where is the jury coming from? Well, it's from us, so that we're there's a responsibility. Like if we want the benefit of that, we also have to help out sometimes and provide a contribution back.

SPEAKER_01 24:10

So the next time you get called for jury duty and it's on it's always in the worst possible week, right? The the reason that you should probably try to show up instead of making an excuse is that that's part of living in a society that can give you a f a jury trial when you need it.

SPEAKER_00 24:25

Yeah, exactly. I think about World War II, there was obviously we wanted our military to win the war. So back at home there were all sorts of contributions people had to make, not just higher taxes, but also they they couldn't use certain materials. People were growing gardens to try to save on food costs so that we could send. I mean, there all sorts of things were happening that changed the nature of American life temporarily because everybody recognized in a moment of war that social contract shifts a little bit and suddenly it's not just what do you want? We all have to throw in our lot together for self-protection. So it's just interesting to wrestle with and think through some of these principles that they're not really written down. And unless you study government theory, you might never make a list, but they're out there. We're all operating with these assumptions that we are owed something by the people around us and we owe them something too.

SPEAKER_01 25:24

There was sort of this built-in assumption that nothing was free. So it's interesting to even think about how a lot of our roads were built, or maybe even our territory settled. There was always this kind of mixture of the desire to expand and help, but always paired with some sort of work or responsibility. So whether it was the work programs that built the roads, or even how territory was settled with exchanging land for work agreements. We have this history of even when we extend a helping hand, we want to create the dignity of like a shared contribution.

SPEAKER_00 26:00

Private property is something we all expect. We expect that privacy, I mean now it's even like in digital property. I expect some level of privacy and certainly physical property. Like stay off my lawn. If if I want if I want to have that attitude, I can. But part of that would be we can't all be grouchy and angry about our private property. We do have to share and play well with others and be hospitable. And so there again, you'd say, well, there's some sort of a line there where you yeah, you can protect what's yours, but not in a selfish, greedy, hoarding and angry way. So here again, I'm I'm surfacing it because I think that the social contract we all share is actually animating the political discussion. But here's where it's complicated. If you've grown up in a in a worldview that values, say, the constitution or private property or things like that, you're going to have a certain social contract that you assume everybody else shares. But then you could walk in the room with other people who grew up differently than you did, or even more so, people that came from another country and they didn't grow up here at all. And their understanding of what neighbors do for each other or what governments do for the citizens is completely different. If we don't talk about it, we won't realize we're operating from a different premise. And so a politician says, you ought to pay your fair share. Well, a fair share of what really does need to be defined so that at least we understand what it is we're paying for. And in this membership to America that we all get to have, which I'm super grateful for mine, I understand here's what I'm obligated to do, and here's what I can expect in return.

SPEAKER_01 27:34

The stakes are raised even higher in our era because we're actually balancing literally the um well-being of this generation versus the generations that are going to come because of this of the level of spending and the size of the some of the social programs. So I think one of the biggest debates about our current fiscal mess is that we've actually made social contracts with entire generations, maybe at the expense of future ones. It's just an interesting tension to hold, right? That yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:04

Well, I mean, that quite literally is what Social Security is. It was that current payees are obligated to pay for the current retirees. People have misconceptions about how that works. Like they think they're paying into an account and then their money gets spent on them, but their money is actually spent the month that they send it in on whoever had already retired. The people getting checks today are getting the checks that the workers today are providing. And the whole system is premised on the idea that someday there'll be other future workers who will pay me back. Say, well, that is a I mean, it's a contract for sure. Whether it's a wise one or a sustainable one, I don't know. That's a different topic, isn't it? Whether we all should believe in pyramid schemes or not. But let's go on. We've got a couple other things to cover before we wrap up today. A couple episodes ago, one of our listeners asked me specifically, he said, Hey, you guys didn't talk about the DSA. We were talking about socialism, um, which certainly is connected to all these questions that we're talking about today. And he said, You didn't address specifically, like the rise of the Democrat Socialists of America as a part of the Democratic Party. Why didn't you address that? I said, Well, we we weren't our aim in this podcast isn't to be specifically political like that. But I was thinking, why is that suddenly so alluring to people? And I don't necessarily know that the political philosophy of socialism is all that exciting. I think there's a lot of reasons to resist it. It could just be that when people hear that friends are suffering or people can't pay their bills or the grocery bill is high, and then you have a politician saying, We will help those people, just that in itself feels really attractive. You want to be on the side that helps people, even if maybe you're not reading the fine print.

SPEAKER_01 29:49

Yeah, it it it just appeals at an emotional level that there's a need and we can help meet it. And it sounds really good.

SPEAKER_00 29:56

Yeah. Well, it definitely would require a massive modification of our main contract, our constitution, to do it legally and throw a huge red flag on the whole thing, but recognize that the what what's driving it is people's lived experience of struggle, but also compassion. And and maybe the better question would be say, what's the best way to maintain liberty and deliver compassion at the same time?

SPEAKER_01 30:19

And just remembering that any and any inalienable right is gonna always be has to be married to a realistic responsibility, and really thinking that through is gonna be required in any kind of new amendment to the social contract that we endeavor.

SPEAKER_00 30:35

If you if you downloaded your uh American membership update and the the list of benefits is way, way longer, and then you turn the page and now here's the responsibility list, that's gotta be way, way longer too, somehow, because all of those things have to be paid for, right? So all right. I believe we can start our own journey of thinking on this and maybe being more intentional with just committing to be faithful with what's right in front of us. Each of us is living ostensibly in a household in a neighborhood surrounded by people. A lot of us are going to work every day, we're part of a community, and then of course we're all part of this country. And so at every concentric circle, we could ask what does it look like for me to be faithful so that I'm doing what I'm supposed to do? What do I really owe the people around me? And we don't have to wait for government to tell us the answer to that question. We could go ahead by nature the fact that we're free citizens, and also for those of us who believe in Jesus, we'd say we have responsibility to God as well to be faithful with our lives. We could say, I want to do the right thing in every circle I'm a part of. And so how do I do that? So to wrap up, Dell, I wanted to ask you how would we approach faithfulness in five specific areas? One would be self-governance, because as we've said, you really can't have liberty if you're not willing to govern your own self. So how could you become more faithful, more intentional about that aspect of control and governing your own heart, your own direction?

SPEAKER_01 32:09

Yeah. I mean, I think first of all, just I'm sitting here thinking every time that I don't step up to the plate to think about what my responsibility is to myself and to others, I'm basically passing the buck to you and I'm living off of the cost that's being paid by someone. And that really gives me pause right now when I'm sitting here thinking, wow, I've I this is really not just a it's not just a private decision. Every single matter of self-leadership actually is a communal decision, like this social contract that I'm in to God and to this country and to other people. I mean, it's a it's a living reality, isn't it? I'm making a decision every single day to either do my part or to pass that cost to somebody else.

SPEAKER_00 33:00

I want to add more value to others than I'm requiring from them. I don't know if I always hit that target, but that's my goal. All right, second concentric circle is family. In the Bibles, 1 Timothy 5, it says, Those who won't care for their relatives, especially those in their own household, have denied the true faith. Your first responsibility is to provide for, protect, care for your own household. And if you don't do that, you're missing something really intrinsic to what it means to be a Christian, if you're a Christian, um, and just to be faithful with what God has clearly put in your hands.

SPEAKER_01 33:36

It's super strong language, and I'm looking at at that verse that you just read, and I'm looking for the loophole, and I don't see one. It really seems to indicate that the scope of my personal responsibility extends immediately and at a at a pretty deep level to my children for sure, my spouse, parents. It's a tough one.

SPEAKER_00 33:57

Yeah. And you know, I think we could probably do a better job celebrating that in one another when we recognize some of those commitments are difficult through the life stages we all go through. And when we recognize that somebody is really giving their all to try to be there for their family, to care for their family, that could be an opportunity for us to step up and help them. Right? It's their responsibility. For us, it would be more of a good Samaritan thing, recognizing like we could help. For them, that that weight is on them.

SPEAKER_01 34:26

I'm also thinking about just how profound this is from a social standpoint. Like theoretically, if every person took responsibility like this for their immediate family, wouldn't that cover just about everybody in the world?

SPEAKER_00 34:41

Just about. Yeah. The third circle is neighborhood, and that would be the people that live near you in your local area. I mean, you could say literally, like the houses or apartments that adjoin your address, like those are your neighbors directly. But then we'd also say we could extend the concept of neighborhood a little bit beyond that, say our local community that we're part of, schools that we go to, teams we're on, people that we rub shoulders with. Remember when somebody asked Jesus, Jesus said you're supposed to love your neighbor, and the guy was like, Well, who is my neighbor? He was he was looking for the loophole, what right? Like, I don't like everybody, so do I really have to care for everybody? So, what would it look like to be faithful in your neighborhood?

SPEAKER_01 35:19

I think Jesus is radical on this for those of us who follow him. You know, he did dramatically and revolutionarily spam the definition of neighbor to where I'm actually saying I need to um basically treat the golden rule. It's like what, you know, I I need to do to others as I would want done to me. And that really does change everything about the way I would live my life and think about, you know, my rights and also what I want to contribute when it comes to adding kindness, love, and support to the people around me. And I I can't imagine, I mean, I think everybody wants to live in a world where they live side by side with people who think of them like this. I mean, it's the world that we all want, right? But the cost of this responsibility is also really high. I gotta admit it, I'm like kind of stunned when I uh when I think about how radical this this teaching of Jesus is.

SPEAKER_00 36:10

Kind of inspiring to think about the Bill of Rights and all the freedoms we have, but then together with the statements of Jesus about actually loving our neighbor as ourselves and doing to others what we would have them do to us, that would make for an amazing society where people have maximum freedom, but they're genuinely cared for personally.

SPEAKER_01 36:31

Yeah, it feels like a society like this would be the ultimate uh place you'd want to be. Feels like Jesus thought we could create that here to some degree on earth. And that it's a that it's a possibility for any culture, any place.

SPEAKER_00 36:44

Right. And it really doesn't start from the top with the government mandating something, it just starts with you in your own circle doing your best. So the fourth concentric circle out would be workplace, and that would be interesting to give some extra thought to in life, right? Of how could I not just be trying to extract value from my boss, how much can I get for how little work can I do? But to say, though, this is my primary pathway of contributing value to my community, not necessarily charity, just using my skills and putting those to good use so that whatever it is I'm good at, the economy has more of that. That's kind of a neat way to think about it.

SPEAKER_01 37:18

It is, and I I think one of the cool things about living in America where a lot of people uh have at least a stint in their career where they're able to own maybe a little bit of their own business, is you realize uh when you own something, uh how you want the employees that work for you uh to treat your business. I mean, you'd really love it if they would treat it like it was their business. That gives us that perspective to think when I'm working for somebody else, man, what would it be like to show up to work and actually run this thing like it was like my, you know, like my livelihood depended on it or like it was mine. Those are the kind of the people that I think everybody dreams to employ and also make the kind of companies that we love to be served by and support.

SPEAKER_00 37:57

Amen to that. The fifth circle, and the last one we'll cover today, is government or you know, nationwide, that as citizens, we have the opportunity to be faithful with the opportunities provided to us by virtue of the fact that here we are in America. And so Jesus said we should pay our taxes, right? Because you it's the membership, you do have to pay your dues in the membership. If you want the benefits, you need to be faithful to pay what you owe. There's other ways that you can add value to the whole story by being involved, by being a by praying for your leaders, by potentially becoming one of those leaders if God was to lead you to do that. I look at all this and think there there is a path to a shared future that I could be excited about here in America.

SPEAKER_01 38:40

I was thinking of one more, Dan, that's probably fits somewhere on the list, but I just I it just popped in my head is when I actually just pay my bills, I mean, it really helps society work. Uh you know what I mean? Like, I think if you've ever been on either side of that equation, like, am I am I gonna get paid for the word that was given to me, you know, or the services rendered? I mean, so I think even there's a certain dignity in just living within your means, paying your bills, realizing that you're kind of treating your neighbor as yourself.

SPEAKER_00 39:09

Well, this has been abundant, sponsored by Barion.life and originating from Barion Center Bible Church in southwest Michigan. Special production thanks to Ben Sanders, Trevor Jones, and the whole BCBC team. Scripture quotations are from the New Living Translation. Help share abundance. Subscribe wherever you listen, and pass this episode on to one person who needs it. Share what you're carrying at share atabundant.show. Until next time, live abundantly.