The Alex McFarland Show-123-Understanding Biblical Principles About Money with guest Kaelin Coe

The spiritual condition of America, politics, culture, and current events, analyzed through the lens of scripture. Welcome to the Alex McFarland Show. It's been said that if Christ has your heart, He also should have your checkbook.

Hi, Alex McFarland here. Welcome to the program. And today on the program, we're going to talk about the Christian and finances. And, you know, as I travel and speak, I often preach about tithing. I believe in tithing. You know, in verses like Malachi 3.10, it talks about obeying God in our giving, and He will open the windows of heaven and pour out a blessing such that we could not be able to receive it. And sometimes I get a little bit of pushback from fellow believers, and they'll say, well, you know, a Christian should not desire money or wealth. Now to be clear, Matthew 6.33 says, Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these other things will be added unto you. And obviously, you know, our first love is the Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior, and growing in the Lord. But the Bible, you know, the Bible is very clear, like Matthew 6.21, where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Our heart should not be wedded to the things of this world.

1 John 2, 15-17 says the same thing, Love not the world. But I will say this, that if we honor the Lord with our substance, as the Bible says, He does bless us, and God entrusts us with things, and those things can include money. Well, on this program, we're going to talk with Kaelin Coe of the Digital Asset Sisters. I met them several months ago. They help people understand biblical principles of handling money. I feel like the Coe sisters are very knowledgeable about some of the investment opportunities in the world today. And I want to be clear as we get into this. You know, whenever I have, you know, we do shows that touch on health and what's going on in the pharmacy industry, and in this case about the financial industry and the stock market and investments. We're not giving financial advice, we're not giving legal or medical advice, but we are talking, I believe talking from some very informed people about just what's going on in the world. And I can say, as a pastor and theologian, that I really do believe that the way we look at money, wealth, and economics, the way that a born-again believer handles the finances entrusted to them by God, it really is indicative of their spiritual condition.

You know, there's an old saying, it's okay to have things, but don't let things have you. And I think one of the unspoken sins of the Western church very well may be materialism. But that being said, before we bring our guest on, I want Christians to have money. I believe God knows what our needs are.

In fact, Matthew 6-8 says He knows our need even before we ask. And sure, I believe Christians should be persons of influence and affluence, because money can be used for great purposes. The gospel is free, but it takes money to deliver that free message around the world. It takes money for you and the entirety of the Western hemisphere to hear this radio program.

Producers recording air time, radio stations, and recording devices. It takes finances to deliver the great, free, and freeing message of the gospel. Well, to weigh in with us on this is Kaelin Coe.

The website of digitalassetsisters.com talks about a lot of things, not the least of which is a subject that I want to learn more on, cryptocurrency and other things. But first of all, Kaelin, thank you for making time to be with us on the program, and thank you for what you're doing to help Christians and all people better understand responsible investments. But welcome, Kaelin. Thank you, Alex. Yes, thank you for having me on the program. It's an honor to be on here. And you've already hit so many great points that me and my sister, she's usually here alongside me.

Her name is Kenley, and we are the Digital Asset Sisters, so we're usually together. But you hit so many great points, Alex. And one of them that I kind of want to start with is, first of all, money is just a tool. And that's really how we look at it. Assets are just a tool. Really, anything materialistic is a tool, and it can be either used for good or bad. And that's why it's really important to get it into the Christian's hands so that it can be used for good. Because whatever you have is going to be magnified from your heart. And so if you have a little bit, and then you receive a lot, whatever that is, let's say, maybe a lot of money or a lot of exposure online, your heart is going to magnify what's in your heart.

So that's one of the first things we kind of talk about, because it is important when you're first investing within anything and utilizing your mind to understand the position of where your heart is, and where your heart is on a stance on how you believe in what money can do and what other things can do as well. In the Christian life, whether it be finances or relationships or opportunities, God entrusts us with things. And if we're faithful with A, He may entrust us with B. And if we're obedient and faithful with B, He takes us to C. It's incremental. Is that how you see stewardship? Yes, exactly. And you can really see that within, He says, you have to be faithful within the least of things. And honestly, the least of things is money when it comes to the Bible in the terms of what Jesus is talking about.

And then He will give us much more. What you're saying goes from A to B, or A to C. And so really, one of the main things me and my sister do is help people understand that fact of what is your purpose? What is your purpose in the long run? Because a lot of people want to get rich quick. And we all know that tends to lead towards destruction. And so really, you have to have a purpose behind why you're really doing anything. And especially when you're going to invest your hard-earned money, you have to have a purpose behind why do you want this? And what is the outcome you're wanting to see from this? And then really, what you're doing is just using cryptocurrency and money as a tool to fulfill that purpose in your life.

We've got a break coming up. But briefly, I want to ask two things. We'll certainly unpack this in much more depth. What is cryptocurrency? Yes, great question. So cryptocurrency, people think it is a currency, but it's not. It's more of a technology. So it's a technology that can be used in many different sectors within the economy and within these different industries. But what it is, is a technology that allows our systems within money to move a lot quicker. So right now, our systems are so slow within our monetary system, we're so outdated that the government and banks and institutions and even retail sectors, they are not allowed to move money at the pace of where our technology is at right now.

And so that's what cryptocurrency is introducing. We've got to take a brief break. Stay tuned, folks. A brief break and we'll come back and talk more about God's money and our stewardship. Don't go away. Fox News and CNN call Alex McFarland a religion and culture expert. Stay tuned for more of his teaching and commentary after this. You know, Mark Twain said, the man that won't read is no better off than the man who can't read.

Hi, Alex McFarland. When it comes to voting, I think voting is like that. The person who won't vote is really in no different position than the person who can't vote.

And here in the United States of America, we can vote. And I urge you to do so. Now to help you in your decision making process about the persons with whom you should cast your vote, on my website, alexmcfarland.com slash vote, I urge you to go to that. We've created a first time voter's guide, alexmcfarland.com slash vote. We talk about the issues, really what the constitutional position is and even the biblical position.

So please pray for the country. And I beg of you, don't passively opt out, but actively be informed, influence others, and to vote. Download our free voter's guide, alexmcfarland.com slash vote.

He's been called trusted, truthful and timely. Welcome back to the Alex McFarland show. Welcome back to the program. Alex McFarland here. We're talking about something that is relevant to every single life.

It doesn't matter who you are, where you are, all of us throughout the course of our lives will interact with money. I remember growing up on a farm in rural North Carolina and I wanted a bike. I was, I don't know, 10 years old. We were at a department store and there was a bike.

It was $48, which I guess in the early seventies, that was a lot of money. And I wanted my dad to buy me this bike. And he said, son, here's what you do.

True story folks, I promise you. You know, I grew up on a chicken farm. He said, if you will earn half of the money, I'll meet you halfway.

Half of 48 is 24. I said, how can I earn $24? And he gave me some chores, one of which was removing chicken manure from our chicken house. We had an egg farm. We had about 30,000 hens. And he said, son, I will pay you 10 cents for every wheelbarrow load of chicken manure you take out of the barn.

Seriously. And it didn't take my little 10 year old brain long to calculate that I needed to take 240 wheelbarrow loads of chicken manure. Believe me, there was that much and more. Didn't take me long. And I had my $24. True to his word, dad met me halfway and might've been, I don't know, six or seven weeks, but I had my shiny green Columbia bicycle. And I learned as a kid that you can trade time for money.

You know, welcome back to the program. We're talking with Kaylin Coe of the Digital Asset Sisters, their website, digitalassetsisters.com. It's a great website, but you know, Kaylin, my little story of earning money as a kid, I mean, everybody, doesn't matter who you are. Money is a part of everybody's life. And Kaylin, am I being fair to say, really more so than economic, money is a spiritual issue, isn't it?

Yes, definitely. I would say money is a huge spiritual issue dealing with, first of all, what you put in and invest in yourself. And I always like to say it starts with how you invest in yourself. So is that reading the word?

Is that, what do you do with that? Do you get up in the morning? Are you able to push yourself in different areas and make that change in your life so that you can invest in yourself? And yes, it is a spiritual issue when it comes to money, for sure. Why do you think so many Christians never find the financial freedom that I really do think is possible for all believers? You know, we serve a God. John 10, 10, the Lord Jesus said, he's come to give us life and life more abundantly. And I know life is not about, you know, getting things. Life for the Christian is about the glory of God and growing in righteousness and being used by Jesus.

But it does concern me, Kaylin, that I, as I travel, I'm in a different city virtually every weekend of the year. So many countless Christians seem to be in financial bondage, and I know God has better for them. Why does financial peace and financial stability for a lot of Christians seem so elusive? Yes, that's a great question.

So this is something that my sister and I are very passionate about with what we do and getting Christians and being able to empower them to invest in themselves to go further and to get that financial freedom. So one of the main things that I think it is, is the lack of knowledge. And we've grown up in a fallen world, as we all know. But the thing is, is that we're fed misinformation daily. And that's from the government, that's from VANES, that's from institutions. Unfortunately, sometimes, which isn't their fault, but even our parents can sometimes not have that financial knowledge, and people can start out in different places. But we all do serve the same God.

And so he does not favor one over the other. And really, that's what we want to bring is just a wealth of knowledge to these people. And that's why we're an educational program, because that's the main inhibiting factor. And I can get so far deep into why we believe certain things about money and why most people don't invest and they don't diversify. But I won't go too far deep into that. But the main thing is just being willing and to feel uncomfortable and gathering knowledge and growing yourself to learn about a new subject.

You know, this might sound like an unusual question, Caitlin, but here goes. What is money? Well, like I said earlier in the program, money is just a tool. But really, what most people think money is, is let's say the dollar. When really, that's just an agreement that really isn't backed by anything now, because we went off the gold standard. But what the dollar is, is just an agreement and kind of just trust in our government, which shouldn't be the case. But true money is value. So true money is value. And in God's terms, when you look at the word and you look at the Bible, really what that came in was gold and silver and real estate. Those were some of the most valuable things tangibly that people could acquire and be able to trade.

And there's a long story, but we've driven far away from that mainly due to the government. And cryptocurrency is actually allowing us to go back to that more value-based system, decentralized and giving the power back to the people. Before the break, you were beginning to describe what cryptocurrency is and pick up on that again, because in a way, speaking about like transfer of funds more quickly, it sounds almost like a software. Let's revisit what is cryptocurrency and is it indeed currency?

Yes. So there are some cryptocurrencies that can be used as a currency. What it will mainly be used as is a software. So it's really the utility on how you use it, on how fast it is, how efficient it is.

So it's kind of like Google or an email. You don't really think of communication as black, but that's because we have what we're doing now. We have radio, we have a phone, we have email, and that's what we don't have with money.

We can transfer, but it's very slow. And so cryptocurrency just brings that new technology and new innovation in order to exponentially change our monetary system. And there are a lot of benefits that we can acquire from this change within our monetary system. How is cryptocurrency parceled out? I mean, you know, a dollar represents 100 pennies, you know, a 20 dollar bill represents, you know, 21 dollar units. What are the units or the delineation of measurement regarding cryptocurrency? Yeah, so they can kind of be classified as coins or tokens.

There's different ways many people like to call that. But if you're talking within terms of the dollar, not trying to get too complicated, but value is going to change. So we won't look at the dollar as it is anymore. It's just the dollar because there's other value that's coming back.

We're going to start looking more as gold and silver. But to get to your question of the units, there are over 25,000 different cryptocurrencies. So there are a lot of cryptocurrencies out there. It's not just Bitcoin or Ethereum. And what we truly invest in is a specific sector. And so each cryptocurrency works differently and can run on a different what's called blockchain.

And so it's kind of a loaded question when you have 25,000 different cryptocurrencies that are all segmented differently. Bitcoin is the most famous, right? Yes, that was the first cryptocurrency that was implemented within our monetary or within our system in our economy.

It's not used for monetary reasons necessarily right now, because it is a little bit older than some of the other cryptocurrencies that are going to be the forefront of our monetary system. Now, we've got to take a brief break. We're going to come back, Kaelyn Coe of Digital Asset Sisters. What is cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, money in the electronic 21st century world? What does it mean to you and I?

And what is the truly biblical perspective? We'll talk further about this after this brief break. Fox News and CNN call Alex McFarland a religion and culture expert. Stay tuned for more of his teaching and commentary after this. Christian author and speaker Alex McFarland is an advocate for Christian apologetics. Teaching in more than 2200 churches around the world, schools and college campuses, Alex is driven by a desire to help people grow in relationship with God. He arms his audiences with the tools they need to defend their faith, while also empowering the unchurched to find out the truth for themselves. In the midst of a culture obsessed with relativism, Alex is a sound voice who speaks timeless truths of Christianity in a timely way. With 18 published books to his name, it's no surprise that CNN, Fox, the Wall Street Journal and other media outlets have described Alex as a religion and culture expert. To learn more about Alex and to book him as a speaker at your next event, visit alexmcfarland.com or you can contact us directly by emailing booking at alexmcfarland.com.

He's been called trusted, truthful and timely. Welcome back to The Alex McFarland Show. Welcome back to the program. We're going to resume our conversation with Kaelin Koh about cryptocurrency and digital investments. But I want to remind everybody on the website alexmcfarland.com, the newly redesigned, completely searchable. Every word on every page is searchable now, whether it be apologetics issues, biblical worldview issues, a lot of exciting things on my speaking tour.

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Box 10231, Greensboro, North Carolina 27404. And I thank you. Well, welcoming back Kaylin Koh of the Digital Asset Sisters. Before the break, you were talking about kind of what cryptocurrency is. You know, the word currency, I'm old school. I think about dollars and cents, but it's not exactly that, is it, Kaylin?

No, it's not. But the cool thing is that most people see value as the dollar. Most people see value as, let's say, I give you one dollar, you give me 100 pennies, as you were referring to earlier. And so that is our current system and other governments, other places have different systems as well. But it's not very efficient to transfer, let's say, $100 or even a million when you're getting up to institutional investing over the cross seas.

And so we need a system that's going to allow us to do that with our where we're at in new technology today. Also have value behind it, because unfortunately, the dollar has gone away from value. It used to be backed by gold and silver, and we went off the gold standard back in 1971. And so it actually devalued our dollar. And unfortunately, with inflation, our dollar is actually being devalued every single day. So if you just hold your money in the dollar, it can be really detrimental because the hard earned wealth and money you've earned is actually being deteriorated every single day. And that's very, that's why it's very important to get into other assets and diversify with things that are going to retain, hold your wealth and build your wealth. So how does a person, Christian or anybody, how do you invest in cryptocurrency?

Yes, that's a great question. And that's one of the main reasons most individuals don't get into cryptocurrency is because there is a lack of knowledge there. And it's scary. And it is even when I started, I was like, What am I doing? What? What does this mean?

What does that mean? The more you learn, the more you understand, the more you can take advantage of this opportunity, right in front of you. And so how you get in is, there's some simple steps that you can take.

First, you need to get onto an exchange. Second, you need to buy. And third, you need to secure your arms. And that's very simplified.

Yes. But as you go through our program, or if you go through even any other learning program, the main things you want to understand is, you need to have that safety and security in order to invest in this and understand and have that knowledge within that safety and security so that you can secure those assets. And that's probably the main thing that most people do. The biggest problem within the industry is most people just invest in their phone on some random cryptocurrency. And what we really promote is to know what you're investing in, first of all, and then secure your investment.

So those are the two most important things. Or are there any investment portals? And again, folks, you know, in talking about products or services, we're not necessarily endorsing anything and everything they might stand for. But are there any websites, you know, like Fidelity.com or Acorn? I mean, what apps or websites do you recommend where people can invest with relative safety, I guess you might say, responsible investing? Yeah, the biggest website we go on and invest on is called Uphold and that's Uphold.com.

And that's where you can have it local here in the United States. And you can be able to invest in cryptocurrency and then be able to take it off that exchange or that website and self custody your assets. It's one of the most important things because you never want to keep your cryptocurrency on an exchange. You want to buy it and transfer it as quick as possible. And so we teach on a lot of understanding how to do that and strategy within that.

But Uphold.com is our main exchange that we use. We're almost out of time, but I do have another question. So what do you say to the Christian who, you know, they work, they earn money, they tithe, they give to their church as we all should, and they maybe keep their money in the bank. Kaitlin, what do you say to the Christian who says, well, the stock market is evil.

It's like gambling. I had a pastor say this to me one time. And, you know, there are a number of financial experts that we've interfaced with who've given us recommendations for good, godly, wholesome investing. But this pastor said to me, he said, well, you may as well go to Las Vegas and waste God's money at the poker table because the stock market is a gamble. Investments are worldly. Just put it in the bank and sit on it. You know, when I read the parable of the talents and you know, one man buried one talent in a field and he said, Lord, I didn't lose it, but I didn't improve it. Here's your thing back.

But the man with five talents, the man with ten talents who did steward those talents into increase, God bless them. What do you say to the Christian who says, look, it's too much. I'm just, I opt out.

I'm not going to invest or anything. Well, what do you say to that, Kaitlin? This is the heart behind our whole business and why we do what we do, because we want to empower those Christians that kind of want to sit on the sidelines or people that want to just opt out and say, you know, it's not for me. I don't, I don't understand it. Or I think it's evil or this, this and that. You know, there can be multiple things, but every single investment you invest in, it has risks.

Every single one. It's just the amount of knowledge you have on that. Can you mitigate your risk? And I actually tell people the most risky investment you can actually have. One of the most risky is keeping your money in the dollar because it is deteriorating over time. The government completely controls it and you're not, you don't have any real value. So those that have all their money in the dollar are actually in a very risky position when it comes to wealth and financial security.

And when you look at the wealthier people in the world, wealthier Christians, wealthier companies, they invest their money and the dollar is just a tool in order to build that. And so it's not evil by any means. It's how you use it.

So everything is just a tool and it's how you use it. And we want to empower individuals to be the forefront in innovation, to be able to gain the wealth off of, let's say these different companies. Most people thought that Apple was evil and they didn't want to touch it, utilize it at all. But now every single person uses Apple products, MacBooks, all these different things, but they weren't able to gain the wealth off of it from the forefront because they were too scared at the forefront. And so that's what we want to do is just show people that this is not evil.

It's how you use it. And there's actually a ton of money stored up for the branches. Alex McFarland here, and we're talking with Kaylin Koh of the Digital Asset Sisters, their website.

It's a great website, by the way, digitalassetsisters.com. If you hear some background noise, I'm on the road as I always seem to be, and there's people here in the building. But we're almost out of time. I want to say this, that Angie and I, my wife and I are the beneficiaries about 15 years ago, a financial analyst that actually worked for Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway, a Christian friend. He's in heaven now. But he said to me, he said, Alex, you know, what do you have in terms of retirement, things like that. And 15 years ago, this dear brother, he said, Alex, I'm going to get in your business. At that time, we had no savings, no investments. And with $100, $100 and the stewardship of the late, great Dan Celia.

Dan Celia. Sometime when we have more time, I will tell you what God has done that's enabled us with a $100 investment that's enabled my wife and myself not only to grow this ministry, but to give, I believe, very substantially to many missionaries and Christian works. But we're almost out of time. Kaylin Koh of Digital Asset Sisters, thank you. This is very informative. We'll have to talk again. But folks, let me encourage you. Life is stewardship. There's the stewardship of your time, your influence, your testimony, your abilities and skills. And yes, the stewardship of your resources, money, finances. So pray, be obedient in your giving, be wise in your investments and grow your resources that you can be a blessing and you can make a tangible impact in Christ's great commission. That's our challenge to you. May God bless you and may God use you. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you again on the next edition of the Alex McFarland Show.