Welcome to the Conversations That Matter Podcast. My name is John Harris. We are going to do a short Bible study today and if you're in a place where you can grab a Bible, this might be a good time to do it because we're going back and forth between a couple of different passages and it's it's

short it's simple it's something that I kind of thought should be obvious to those

reading the book of James but what I'm finding is there are a number of

verses that social justice advocates like to use to further their case.

And if you haven't noticed, equality or equity

is the term that's being used now.

Inclusion and diversity are some of the main words.

Those are probably the three main ones

that you hear all the time.

And Christian social justice advocates

like to find verses that parallel did social justice concept they are trying to promote.

So there's a number of verses that obviously we could talk about and I plan to talk about

a lot more. I have talked about many but you

know if you're trying to for instance forward the idea that we need to redistribute

wealth and that's part of equality then you might go to the book of acts and

you might try to use the early church as an example of that of unfortunately that's

completely out of context because that's just about the church that's not about the civil

realm and it's very clear that this is something that's as voluntary this is

not something that is universal it's not a universal cry to abandon private property.

In fact, private property rights are explicitly defended in a sense, Anandias and Safira.

I mean, right after the early church is sharing all things in common,

what are they told?

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