[laughs]

Yeah.

I'm guilty of that too.

Uh, let's just see what's happening with, um, with Moses here because maybe he's been having some hard days to get through, um, so far in our journey through Exodus and we have got in chapter seven, uh, God has previously told Moses that, and, and Aaron that Pharaoh's heart would be stubborn and it would take many signs to convince him.

Now, they were given clear instructions.

They were warned that Pharaoh would not easily let the people go, but they are still going ahead.

They're following God's, uh, purpose or His, His instructions for them and this is where we start to see God performing signs that are extraordinary.

Hebrews 4:15, I think

They had become too discouraged by the brutality of their slavery.

Thanks, Jared, for reading.

And I might just do a little recap just to remind us of where we've been here in this passage.

Moses goes to the right place, I think.

He goes to the Lord and he says, God, where are you? Why have you put me in this place? And the Lord responds.

God responds and says, you will see what I will do.

And then he goes on to say, I am Yahweh the Lord.

That is the thing that actually kept me going through the darkest times in my life, that God has something on the other side even though I couldn't see it.

But Ben, why don't you characterise it? No, I

don't think it is actually.

I have kind of two issues with MMT.

predominantly.

The first one is just the mechanics.

And the second, they tend to get very unpleasant when you point out the problems with their theory.

So if I was trying to be polite about them, it's a little like a bunch of people have discovered a jet engine and they worked out what the jet engines made out of and air goes in one end of it, but they have no understanding about everything else it does.

Mr. Musk is certainly one example of that.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So a bit of reframing has changed things.

And I wonder whether that's what we're going to see with Moses because he's on this mission for God.

He's gone back to Egypt.

And one of the things that we didn't get to in our last episode, but God actually sends Moses' brother Aaron to be beside Moses as he's going to speak in the court of Pharaoh.

And they gather together.

Yeah.

So I think, you know, the he- hegemony and the importance of, of these US assets, um, even if the rate of change is now becoming a bit more dubious, you know, it, it does underpin the financial system, doesn't it, Ben?

Yeah, it does.

Uh, so to your point, look, most, most listeners will understand it when they think about their personal finances.

The, the cheapest loan you can get is a mortgage.

Why is it cheapest? Because they've got the house, and the more equity you have in your house, the safer it's seen and the lower your interest rate is.

What's the riskiest, uh, or the highest form of, uh, debt that you're likely to get would be a credit card.

So why is it a credit card? Because bank doesn't really know what you're spending the money on, but it's probably not a, a, um, a car or something a bit more tangible, and they don't know when you wanna borrow the money, so, and that has a much higher default rate because obviously people that tend to spend on credit cards tend to more likely, um, have a higher default rate.

That matters in terms of their attractiveness or otherwise, doesn't it, Ben?

Yeah.

Oh, smart.

See, when I was doing it, it was just all procrastination for me.

It was all like, yeah, I'll get to it.

I've just got to do this first.

I've just got to do this first.

I've just got to do this first.

Thank you, Jason, for

Beautiful voices.

Well, let's get into what happened to Moses, what was ordinary and became extraordinary.

Just to give us a bit of context, so we're going to go to Exodus chapter 3, and the Moses, you might recall, has run away from Egypt because he was trying to defend a Hebrew slave and he killed an Egyptian.

He's gone to Midian with a distant relative he's living.

He's gotten married.

He's working as a shepherd.

and he's been living there for many years.

Thanks,

God saw the people of Israel, and God knew.

Thank you, Noah.

Right at the end there, we see this constant calling back to the God who made the covenant promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

And this promise, this covenant has not been forgotten.

And Moses is about to... start this rescue mission that God has allocated him and is going to support him.

But we're not there yet.

So let me go back over what we have read today.

No. That's leaving Egypt because

Mm.

... who has done something terrible.

He has brought about the death of, uh, well, and we're not told, but it could be hundreds, I don't know, maybe thousands, I don't know, uh, of, of, of baby boys that he oversees the killing of, and that's something to keep in mind for later in the Exodus story because there's, there's a link there between what Pharaoh does and what actually happens, um, in Pharaoh's life.

Uh, and the midwives that we, we spoke about last time have done a really good d- job of choosing not to obey the earthly god, so the Pharaoh, and they've obeyed the Almighty God and said, "No, we fear him and we will do what we believe is right." And it's in the middle of this kind of chaotic time, there's a man and a woman who have gotten married and they have become pregnant, and this is the start of the Moses story.

I don't know, I'm g- I'm giving away spoilers here.

Yeah.

And even, and even the siblings You know, h-h-his sister and brother Yeah.

Like, it's not even an uplifting of the family It's like, yeah.

He intervened to keep me safe.

I'll have to give him a high five next time.

When I think about a story, I'm finding it very hard to think of a personal one because it was only, I think last week I was talking to a friend of mine and I'm going to put a little trigger warning in here.

I'm not going to give the details too much, but I'm trying to give enough that, but I just want to give a trigger warning just in case.

He was at school and he was a senior student and they were at the train station and And he could see that something really bad was going to happen at the train station because someone was going to make a bad choice.

And there were two Year 7 students who were right beside him and he just grabbed them and covered their eyes.

Oh.

Yeah, and I just want to acknowledge the pain that that involves.

Mm-hmm

... and they handle a lot of the heavy lifting day-to-day on the equity portfolio.

So my side would be more, um, perhaps asset allocation, um, macro allocation, which, which is sort of fine because, again, if you've got a lot of fixed income background, you tend to have a macro view of the world.

Um, but I've been fortunate on that, that they handle the really, I would say, complex stuff of looking at some of these companies in enormous detail and particularly towards, say, growth-based strategies or markets I don't understand.

But it's having that working knowledge, I would say, is probably the biggest single difference.

The other thing is, uh, which another CIO said to me once, um, as I was just stepping up, but remember, a CIO has three jobs.

Uh, possibly the least important thing is actually managing money.

Hmm.

So my father's side, I believe there's some other European input from Dutch and other heritage, but I haven't really traced the family tree very much in that side.

Yeah, cool.

As we delve into Exodus chapter 1, you might have been with us for our last episode where we tried to give you a bit of a picture into where Exodus fits in God's story and how that helps us understand what's going on in the Bible.

So where we are right now in Exodus 1, it begins by explaining that the Israelites, and these are the descendants of Jacob and Isaac, And Abraham, who got that promise, they've settled in Egypt.

And during Joseph's time, so Joseph was a descendant of Abraham who rescued the family, really.

Now, after many years, a new Pharaoh came to power who didn't know the good work that Joseph had done.

And he noticed how numerous and strong the Israelites had become.

They built a lot of our infrastructure here.

It feels like that

in a way.

Yeah, let's get into Exodus.

What I want to do today is just remind you that we've been on these faith conversations, we've been doing episode on episode, and most recently we've been going through the book of Acts.

And we've finished that journey, and we have decided to go through to the biblical book of Exodus, which is in a totally different part of the Bible.

And I want to just share and have a little bit of a conversation about how Exodus fits into the grand story of God and how he interacts with humanity.

And as we do this, I'm going to lean on the scholarly work of Christopher Wright because I don't want to claim his work for my own.

here.

There's got to be reason to it because I'm not going to believe in something that I can't reconcile within my head as being logical and sensible.

So what we're going to dive into is Acts 28.

And we're going to start off in verse 17.

And what we've been doing is we've been going through the book of Acts.

We've been tracing the growth of the early church from Jerusalem to the edges of the Roman Empire.

So Jesus ascended.

The Holy Spirit has empowered the disciples at Pentecost.

Some were persuaded by things he said, but others did not believe.

And you can then ultimately... still come back to a kind of a new settlement once the old parties have heard that message you know tell them again but but you have to listen to people first because the more you won't listen to them the more they'll go to the extremes

I kind of agree with you on that.

The only thing I would point out with Greece, though, is the economy is only broadly, from memory, about 80% of the size it was before the crisis.

I mean, it has been a big, long recession for them.

Just before we move on, so we can talk about the UK.

But I went to a hedge fund conference in May 2016, and they had a guy on stage called Neil Howe, and he's an American financial historian.

He and another guy called Strauss wrote a book in 91, I think it was published in 92, 93, something like that.

But what do you think about the idea in theory of, you know, reducing the power of the Treasury?

And yeah, it was amazing.

Well done.

Well done.

Oh, it gets me excited.

I'm going to get us straight into the text this morning.

We are going into Acts chapter 20, and we're going to start verse 20.

Now, just to give a little bit of context before I hand over to Levi to read, Paul is nearing the end of his third missionary journey.

Mm-hmm.

Thank you,

Jason.

as I like to do when we read scripture, I like to be able to go back and just recap what we've read.

And Levi and Sia, you can point out anything that I miss in my little retell because I don't want to miss anything.

Well, I can't read it completely, but if there's something important, make sure you tell me.

So it starts out, Paul is visiting Israel.

Athens, and he starts to talk to people.

You have to be pretty close friends with them to start actually having conversations about it.

Keeping my faith strong, like not going to, oh, God, why are you doing this? Yeah.

Thank you.

You've been, as I said, I checked with Levi before I asked today because it's a really tough thing to be dealing with.

And I think what we read in the Bible is there's a number of people who have... really had hard times.

And I think some of the things that are recorded in there are to help people in the future to see and read about how God's worked.

Sometimes we don't hear about how God works, but definitely in the Bible, we definitely hear these stories.

And today, as we delve into Acts chapter 16, we pick up here with...

but they didn't.

It was me and my sister in the car.

I think the feeling of having God... guides or protects you can sometimes come from the left field or in retrospect it comes from the left field.

I guess in my life recently there's been a fair bit of upheaval, I would say, and it's been through this time that there's different friends or something like that that have just come spoken wisdom into me and they've called at the right time or sent a message at the right time.

And I think sometimes, especially when things are challenging in your life, it seems like a reaction to blame God or where are you, God? You know, what's going on? And for me in this time of upheaval for me to go, actually, God's with me.

Like, he hasn't taken the problem away or whatever, but he's with me and he's providing support around me.

And so I'm really grateful, really grateful for that.

And it just makes a difference when you can get a sense that God is there.

to for him to just like snap his fingers and just boom all the wars and everyone's best friends of each other and like looking back upon that that would be such a cool thing that would happen

No, neither do

I. I think for me, because I didn't like pumpkin as a kid, but what shifted was I had some amazing pumpkin soup and that just, like, transformed my world.

The same thing happened with mushrooms, actually.

Someone gave me some mushroom stroganoff, like on rice, would have never touched it, but after that it was, I don't know, it changed my mindset.

So this might sound a bit weird that we're talking about food today, but in the passage that we're going to read, I think that will become a bit clearer.

And today we are going into Acts chapter 10.

And I just want to give you a little bit of context around where we're headed here, because since the beginning of Acts, we get that kind of summary that Jesus has risen from the dead and he's appeared to his followers.

I can now associate with people outside of my little group or whatever, small group, big group, whatever it was, outside of my group because God is actually calling us to welcome everyone into his kingdom.