This must be one of the saddest of all situations; You have a business or a career for which God has great plans, but those plans are never realized because you limited God’s involvement in them. You end your career with just a fraction of the impact you could have had. I believe that situation is the rule, not the exception for most Christians in the marketplace. If we could change that, we could change the world in one generation. While God has great plans for our careers and our businesses, we all too often limit his intervention in our lives by the things that we do.
While there are lots of ways that we can limit God’s involvement with us, here are three of the most common.
Ignorance.
In this scenario, we just don’t know how intensely God is interested in our business and our marketplace lives. We are ignorant of it because we’ve never really looked into it. Our attention has been directed elsewhere. Typically, that is either the institutional church system or the worldly success culture.
The institutional church system (that is my term for the conglomerate of church buildings, pastors, workshop services, denominations, seminars, etc. that make up one of the largest industries in the world) promotes itself, and thereby denigrates other areas of Christian growth. For example, you may be encouraged to attend every function of the institutional church and find yourself busy several days and nights a week. Since this is promoted as the example of a ‘good’ Christian, everything else is therefore, ‘non-good.” So, you can be very involved in the institutional church system, and not have time to even consider that your career may be a ministry of its own.
In the introduction to The Good Book on Business. I observed that the reason why no one has discovered how big a role business plays in the Bible narrative is because no one looked for it. It had been there all along, but no one found it because no one was looking for it. We were content to believe the pronunciations of the Institutional church system that advocates for involvement in their programs as a way to get closer to God.
The other common reason for our ignorance of the role that God wants to play in our careers and businesses is our overreliance on the world’s success culture. There is a huge industry that promotes worldly success. Books, seminars, training programs webinars, blog posts, podcasts, etc. promote success by various strategies and tactics.
If we chose to, we could immerse ourselves in that culture and mindset to such a degree that there is no room in our psyche for anything else. We never realize that God wants to be a part of our careers and business because we are too busy pursuing worldly success. We, therefore, remain ignorant of his desires for our careers and our businesses.
Inertia
It may be that we have, intellectually, an understanding of our careers and businesses as ministries. We’ve read people like me who have presented that message. We’ve rubbed solders with other Christian businesspeople and absorbed some of their commitment to Christ in the marketplace.
But we haven’t translated those ideas into action. We just haven’t yet asked if we could pray for a troubled colleague. We haven’t yet given verbal credit to God for our successes. We haven’t yet acknowledged the opportunities and gifts He has given us.
We know that there are routines and disciplines in the life of a Christian, and there are routines and actions that invite God into our lives. But we don’t take the necessary steps to implement them.
So, our inertia holds us back. We understand that God wants to be a part of our lives and business, but our inertia prevents us from acting.
Comfort
Some of us have achieved a degree of success in our professions/businesses. We’re comfortable. We have become afraid to jeopardize that comfortable condition by doing something different. We don’t want to start a meeting with a prayer, for example, but that would be uncomfortable. We don’t want to ask a colleague if we can pray for him/her, because that would be uncomfortable. We don’t acknowledge our Christian commitment when an opportunity presents itself, because that would be uncomfortable. We don’t want to ask the Holy Spirit to influence our plans and open opportunities for us, because we’re afraid of what might happen.
Our attachment to our comfortable lives prevents God from entering into our careers and business in a bigger way.
If we could eliminate these three obstacles, we could change the world in a generation, create powerful businesses and live a more fulfilled and purposeful life.
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