How Christians Should Think About Economics
Dr. Brian Baugus joins Michael to discuss God’s view of our money and how Christians should approach politics in light of economics.
Jon Acuff is the New York Times Bestselling author of four books including his most recent, Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average & Do Work that Matters.
For 15 years he’s helped some of the biggest brands in the world tell their story, including The Home Depot, Bose, Staples, and the Dave Ramsey Team. Most recently he’s spoken to hundreds of thousands of people at conferences, colleges, companies and churches. A media feature, Jon has been seen on CNN, Fox News, Good Day LA and several other key outlets.
In addition, he’s become a social media expert with a blog read by 4 million people and close to 200k twitter followers. In 2010 he used his influence with his tribe to build two kindergartens in Vietnam. Jon lives with his wife Jenny and two daughters in Franklin, TN.
“It always weirded me out that we don’t use our best creativity to celebrate who we believe is the Creator of all creativity so we take popular secular ideas like got milk and put a little God flavor on Him and Got God and I just think that Christians in general are just lazy creatives. I thought why do we rip off popular culture so there’s a site called “Stuff White People like” which is a satire which is Caucasian if you will.
So I thought why don’t I talk about the problem by committing the problem? So post #1 was Stuff Christians Like ripping off popular secular culture. I thought I’d write about it for a week but day nine, four thousand people showed up and it went viral and it’s been something much more fun and much bigger than me ever since.”
“Well part of it, my mother in law said it best because people would say “how does he do it?” and she would say, “how did he not do it, is the question.” I was writing tweets before Twitter existed on posted notes and ideas and so. It’s the same thing I would say to you as a pastor. You’d share ideas whether you had a pulpit or not and so I feel like this is the briarpatch for me. I remember in college sitting there at Sanford University watching these popular basketball players and I did not have many friends in college.
I felt like there was a great weight in the sense of these basketball players what they are best at was seen and was visible and what I was best at writing ideas wasn’t visible and all of a sudden the internet came so I learned my entire skill set- I mean I learned how to write headlines at Home Depot. What a gift that was! So twitters a headline. People say When will you stop writing “Stuff Christians Like?” When Christians stop being idiots, so never.”
“The way I write is this: I”ll go first with my story. I give everyone in the room, everyone in the blog, in the church, the gift of going second. It’s hard to go first, but as a communicator I think that’s your job and unfortunately leaders right now, a lot of them only share two things: the times they won or a failure from thirty years ago that doesn’t hurt anymore and millennials can spot that fake-ness from a mile away. They grew up with marketing.
It’s the smartest marketing generation in the history of mankind and so the bar is really low in honesty. So when I go “my wife and I had a fight last week, and it wasn’t one of those fake Christian ones where the sun doesn’t go down. Like the sun went down, and so did you on the couch. It was a real one and here’s what we learned. They go, that’s so honest and I think that’s nothing; you should hear what I tell my counselor.”
“I think the first thing you have to do is not to buy the lie that the world tells you which is a job is just a job. Anything you do forty hours a week isn’t a job, that’s your life. Its the largest percent of your waking hours, so you want it to have purpose. I think it can have purpose. The way I look at it is it’s going deeper into who God made you to be. When he says he’ll renew your strength. It’s your strength, your unique strength, it’s not your mom’s strength.
He will satisfy your desires with good things. It’s not other peoples things, it’s your thing. So for me, it’s about figuring out what was I created to do and how do I do it, giving yourself permission to dream, permission for it not to be miserable. I know 70% statistically, 70 % of Americans hate their jobs right now. So seven of the ten people in this building, in the building next door don’t want to go there. That weighs down on family and the problem is as you know, we’re only one person.”
“You see we have, what I call the Tiger Woods mentality. It was very interesting when Tiger Woods had his affairs come out, people thought “ Why is he not a good golfer right now?” He’s not a good golfer because you don’t get to put an explosion in one part of your life and the rest of your life works. He’s not Tiger golfer, Tiger businessman, Tiger father, Tiger husband and so what happens is you have this infection of bitterness and hopelessness and defeat take root in a career and you better believe it comes home on the weekend.
You better believe it comes to the marriage. So that’s where I try to write to is that. It doesn’t have to be that way. And I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a perfect job. I always say every job has things that you have to do that you don’t like to do, so you earn the right to do the things you do love to do. But I think culturally we’ve lost the gift of apprenticeship, which has really hurt us.
We’ve lost of the hard work and hustle things because the iPhones taught us that life is instant. Anything you practice 10 hours a day, you believe will be like that the next day. So if my phone is instant, it goes you matter, you matter, build your own world. It’s instant, instant, instant. The minute I don’t get my dream job, it’s like where’s my dream job?”
Here’s how I look at it. Passion is nonsense. There’s people in Franklin, where we both live that will go, ‘I want to start a coffee shop. I’ve never done it. I’m going to mortgage my house. I’m going to do all these different things.’
Could you work at Starbucks for six months first and see if you hate coffee and humans? I mean, I have friends that’s a long term passion of theirs but you don’t see them selling their house to go all in. So I think that’s part of the mistake, is that you’re right, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. If you do 10% more on your dream this week, this year than you did last year, what an amazing thing. We get that with other parts of our life. if you said to me, “Hey, I’ve never run, I’m overweight but I want to do a marathon tomorrow.”
What happens, is people say, “ Ok I’m here. I have a guitar; I know three chords and like four Chris Tomlin songs and God called me. The worst things that Christians do is that they throw God under the bus and my friend says it this way, “Christians like to be on an airplane with God and He’s flying and we redbull Christianity and skydive out and He turns back and says, “Who told you to jump? I was going to land this in six months on a runway” and then it fails and we go, “Jesus, plan for my organic muffin shop didn’t work.”Then Jesus says, “no, no, no. I had nothing to do with this. Stop it.”
“Well the first thing I’d say is, to start to do it. Find some margin. I would dare you to rescue 30 min of your day. If I say to you hey, get up 30 min early and write or job search or work on a business plan. And you say, “Oh, I can’t do that.” If you can’t pay the price of 30 min for your dream, you don’t have the right dream. You’re going to hate the rest of it. So I’d say the first thing that every dream costs, Michael, is time. It doesn’t cost money, it doesn’t cost education, it costs hustle and time.
So what I’d’ say to you is, lets find some time. The average American watches over 35 hours of TV a week. So let’s be radical and say you watched 10 hours last, you only watched 25 hours a week. There’s 10 hours on your dream. So I’d find time and I’d find a small way to start. it’s all about small starts. So if you wanted to write a book, I’d say read a book about writing a book or if you wanted to be a blogger, I’d say start a blog and write once a week. The reason we get overwhelmed is that we go so far in so quickly.”
“I see that they care about their parents in a unique way. I think there’s a strong desire to try to change the world. That can be really well used or really poorly used, depending on how it’s applied. I think there’s natural sense of that. I don’t think they love money like the previous generations that love money. It’s not the only score they care about. The other thing is, I’ve met a lot of them that want to hustle. I talked to a guy yesterday that was from Australia. When he was twenty-one, he heard a story of someone who had sold pieces of the Brooklyn Bridge in the 1920’s and framed them and they were tearing down the G which is the Australian version of Yankee Stadium-biggest stadium in Australia.
So he called the demolition crew because they were going to build a new one and said, “Can I buy some timber?” and they said, “Well we’ve got the rug and it’s the rug from the members room.” The members room is a forty-five year long wait to become an elite member. He bought the entire rug that day for five grand. He sold one thousand pieces of it and made millions. He’s twenty-one. So I keep running into these twenty one year olds that are realizing: the old rules don’t apply.”
“Well I grew up in the church but that’s not an instant. I became a Christian in the fourth grade and my Dad baptized me on Father’s Day. He always tell the story that two people showed up that day, me and a drunk guy with no shirt on and a leather jacket. He did not baptize him. That was kind of the genesis, but for me it was really about eight years ago, I was able to get away with most of my life. I could put it together with charisma or talent or whatever.
I just was at a job I hated. My marriage was not in a good place. It was the first time, I really felt that sense of I can’t fix me with me. I was just broken. There was a group of guys in Atlanta that befriended me that really taught me how to be a man, how to have friendships. I meet so many men that say, “yeah, my wife’s my accountability partner.” That’s garbage.
She can’t be your warden. She can’t be the one who check your safe eyes record. Way to ruin a marriage. Like shortcut. There a sponsor, they’re great. That is not a good thing and I was just in a terrible place. I really got loved by this Church, Woodstock Baptist, in Woodstock, Ga. It was kind of one of those big churches that you would think would have big Church stuff, but they have a real heart for the broken and I definitely was. So that was about eight years ago is really where I started to kind of understand.”
“Well one of the things that I talk about often, is that people are tired of words, they love actions. Jenny and my marriage changed when I finally started doing action. When she could see as a wife, Jon just didn’t say, “I’m gonna write and I’m going to do stuff.” I got up an hour early. I sacrificed TV. What I’d say to you, whether it’s an inlaw or whether it’s each other, actions matter. So start to build up a long action list. The other thing I’d say is give other people the grace to not understand your dream.
You know if they understood it 100%, it wouldn’t be yours, it’d be theirs. So I think even in the best of circumstances, there’s going to be a gap because, you know the shows like Bridezilla where a bride, just flips out and she throws a table and she hits the caterer. That happens because that little girl dreamed about that day since she was six.
What happens is, that you’ve had a dream in your heart for something for twenty years and then you tell your spouse or your in law “ You should understand how I feel.” It took me two decades to get here, you’ve got two hours, go! Part of it is on us being willing for somebody to not understand.”
“A big part of it is, I feel called to talk to the business community. I’m in a position where I get invited places where pastors can’t get invited. Some power company, the HR person, can invite me. They can’t invite the pastor even if they wanted to because of rules. So I feel what I’m uniquely positioned to do is go speak to the market place. I’ve got sixteen years of marketing experience for secular companies and I’ve got a blog a lot of people read.
I really feel like that’s where I’m supposed to be so I think that’s how my faith will impact that. I’m supposed to go there and be honest and use humor. I think we forgot God is fun. You know I learned a few years ago that I was really good at crying with God, and really bad at celebrating with Him. I made Him into a Nemo? God and so I think a lot, of people ….Christians have the hardest time with the Prodigal Son story, with that party sense. We have such a hard time understanding and believing that concept. I love that story.
It’s my favorite story and I love it that the Father never talks to the son. If you read it, he doesn’t say a single word to him. We read it as if he does, but he doesn’t. He gives him the money without a word and then he talks to the servants so I love to tell people, “ You know when God’s quiet, we think it’s because He’s mad, but what if He’s hugging you and He’s too busy planning your party?” Imagine that God? That’s just fun.”
“My daughter saw a starving child in a book and said, “what is that?” and I told her and she said, “Is that pretend? That’s not real, right?” It’s one of those kids punch in the stomach moments. And I felt like she was saying, “Are you doing anything?” and I wasn’t. The blog was about me. I think the worst drug in Christianity today is celebrity. I’ve seen celebrity and success ruin more Christian leaders then failure. So I started to do something.
I asked Samaritan’s Purse to partner with me and we raised thirty-thousand dollars in eighteen hours to build a Kindergarten. It was one of those moments where you undersize God and you say, “You’re huge, you made the universe, you’re just not as big as my divorce.” We realize we had made him a twenty-nine thousand dollar God and didn’t think He’d show up and He did and so we doubled down and built the second one. Jenny and I got to go over to Vietnam and see these two Kindergartens.
What it taught me is that, there’s no better example of the mustard seed power of God than the internet. There are people that gave to that project that will never go to Vietnam, that will never meet any of those people. This show will be heard by people you can’t fathom. So when you get God and technology, it’s just the sky’s the limit. So that was one of the things we really learned about.”
“I regret not trying more things probably. I’m sure I regret the things, the amount of time and energy I gave to worry. I’m glad that I taught my kids how to write a good story. We’ve talked before about what it would like for us to move our family to New York for a year? Just to try it. We moved into a neighborhood in Franklin where the houses are kind of small and they’re a little older.
We maybe could have had a newer house or slightly bigger house, but our kids can walk to school and we knew when they’re thirty-five, they wouldn’t look back and say, “I had such ample closet space. Growing up, I could walk to school.” So my hope is what we’ll look back on is the time we made story decisions. We chose the opposite of the money, the opposite of the easy thing.
Most radio interviews I do right now say, “You had it all. You were five months into a New York times bestseller and then you ruined it. Talk to me about that.” So that will do those things to the outside world, might seem crazy or opposite of what you should do, if that’s what we’re supposed to do. So I hope I have a life characterized by not letting the popular decision dictate what I do.”
“I think I’m writing. A lot of times when I’m writing I’m just like a little kid, and I’m snapping my fingers and I’m just animated. I like too, being exhausted, being spent. I feel that way when I come home from a speech that I got to try to hopefully give my all.
Things happened in the moment and it was fun and I felt like ok I’m not a….it used to be when I first started speaking it was an affirmation kind of warm glow of I’m a good guy and now I don’t feel that anymore. I’d say for me it’s 6:15 in the morning and I got up before everybody else and I’m writing, and the best part of writing is when you don’t remember writing up and it’s like God showing up, and says, Here’s an idea.
I was writing the other day and wrote that “unfulfilled passion creates pressure” because I know so many husbands take out their anger, if they know they are not doing what they’re supposed to be, on a spouse. That’s what I like to do is show up, and let God show up. So those will be some peaceful moments.”
Dr. Brian Baugus joins Michael to discuss God’s view of our money and how Christians should approach politics in light of economics.
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