BOB BARNEY ASKS THE QUESTION: HOW HONEST WOULD
AMERICANS BE IF HELD TO AN HONORS SYSTEM?
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2000 years ago, a newscaster that we know of as Jesus Christ warned us about false Christianity. The warning was not against the devil but against false Christianity…about people who come in His name and deceive many.
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO BOB BARNEY’S 7:11 AM SPECIAL BROADCAST: Honesty and God
Today I want to talk about the United States, our future, and a topic called, basic honesty.
This is Bob Barney with The Plain Truth Today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com, and yesterday I was thumbing through some Instagram content at work. We have a company, TAMCO PAINT that has an Instagram account that the family business uses, and I use it as well and I saw a post on Instagram about a toll booth in Japan where some 40,000 cars go through a day. What caught my attention initially was the headline stating that for 38 hours, the automatic electronic toll was not working. So, what they asked of all the people going through the toll that they happened to open up to let everybody pass through, was to please send tin the toll money having given an address, and lo and behold by the end of the week they had 24,000 people who actually paid their toll!
I wonder if something like that would happen in America if they were asked to be on an honors system like that.
I wonder where our morality is at here in America if one of our tolls were broken.
Would Americans justify not sending in the toll because they hate the government and hate tolls anyway and decide they are not going to pay it?
I wonder if that many people or if the greater percentage of Americans would pay the toll…and it may require to know what city in America would choose to be honest and pay it and even what city would because I think parts of the country may be more honest than other towns or cities in our country.
When I was a young man and I was putting myself through college, I ran a vegetable farm market in Connecticut. Ten years after I had moved to Florida, my wife and I actually moved back up to Connecticut to re-run the farm again for a year…as a result, because of that income, that’s how our paint company was able to get its start…believe it or not in 1988. In farming on the east coast there is a 16-week season of running the farm market and we depended upon the New York City tourists that lived around Lake Candlewood. They had money and they would pay good prices for good produce, and we sold corn and tomatoes and squash and green beans and some other fruits and vegetables that I would get at a market, but most of the stuff is what we ourselves had grown.
Consequently, we did not open up with a person manning that little farm stand until we had corn, and in Connecticut everyone growing tried to get corn by July 4th because you could get a good premium. I only remember two or three years of my entire career of ever having corn by July 4th. We tried hard, but it never happened very often. We usually got it around July 15th, July 16th, when the corn started coming in, and then we would man the stand.
Anybody who knows anything about farming knows that you start getting your string beans and your squash and certain garden vegetables long before the corn is ready and we would go to the stand, and we would open it up every morning at nine o’clock, and we put a cash box there. This is the 1970s by the way when I first started running this stand, first in high school to save money for college, and then during my college years, and then afterwards for another five years.
We put a cash box accessible with a little bit of money in it for people to make change and we had signs that said, you know, ‘three squashes for a dollar’, and ‘a basket of string beans for a dollar’, and to leave it in the box. Of course, in how we set this up, we would know exactly how many dollars we should get based on how many squashes, how many stringbeans, and how many cucumbers we sold on a given day. at the end of the day we would count how much of each item was left and then we’d look in the money box and believe it or not, we always had more money in the box than we had to sell. That means that people gave us either tips, or they didn’t even try to make change, or they were just generous! Maybe in some way they wanted to make sure, because we trusted these people with our produce, that they honored that trust by leaving even more money than was actually called for.
That was 45 years ago and more, and I just wonder how many people today in this country would end up stealing that box full of money! Back then, at the end of our day being open…there would be 60, 70, maybe 80 dollars in the box! In the 1970s someone could just take that money and be gone but it just never happened. Not one time in the eight years that I ran the farm stand on my own did I see that happen. A little back story: there also was a woman that ran it for 50 years before and they sold the farm to Kimberly Clark, and Kimberly Clark is the woman who let me continue to run the farm stand and plant corn there and stuff like that, and it did put me through college.
When I saw that post about what happened in Japan at that toll booth, I had to ask the question.
How honest would America be, or Americans be, if they were on an honor system at a toll road?
Which leads me to some verses in the Bible which I am not going to necessarily read to you, but anybody that wants to read the Bible can find these kinds of verses very easily…but what scripture says is that God judges a nation’s character by its honesty.
Throughout the Old Testament especially, you see Proverbs and Psalms and many instances where God requires the Israelites to use accurate weights and measures and to not cheat anybody. At the same time, that would apply for the buyer to not cheat the person selling to them. It was used as a measure of how sick or healthy a civilization was. God started having problems with Israel and then Judah in the Old Testament when these people found themselves to be kind of crooked in dealing with God.
As a matter of fact, in Micah, the minor prophet, God actually complains about how people were robbing HIM. When the question to God was, how are we robbing YOU? And he said, ‘in your tithes and offerings, do this…give Me this test, said the Lord…give Me my tithes and offerings and see if your crops don’t come in more abundantly and that you are blessed more abundantly…be honest’. Unfortunately, the people back then started to not be honest as well.
Well, that’s a 7-11 short show today about honesty and God and what He expects from us all.
Are we honest? That’s the question.
This is Bob Barney with The Plain Truth Today, saying thank you for listening. I appreciate you, and bye-bye.