Doing Business with the Help of God

Most of business people ground their business on what they have learned, experienced, or was told by others. I want to incite some of you (hopefully all) to consider involving God in your business.God is omniscient and omnipresent. 

Therefore He knows everything about your business and He is everywhere in in it. Involving Him in your business will certainly bring you a huge competitive advantage but it will “cost you something”. On the costs I will come later in this motivational.

God gave us the Bible as a User Manual for the human being. This is also a “Best Practices” manual that shows many stories with victories and defeats.  I will refer to several places in the Bible to enrich this message. I give my thanks to Kris Vallotton who inspired me through his teaching “Multi-Generational Vision”

Plans / Mission / Vision

Plans are ways we achieve the goals of our mission which derives from our vision. Let us put a fundament for planning considering following truths:

1. Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed . Prov. 15:22 NIV
2. To humans belong the plans of the heart, but from the LORD comes the proper answer of the tongue. Prov. 16:1 NIV
3. In their hearts humans plan their course, but the LORD establishes their steps. Prov. 16:9 NIV

First, God expects that we do the plans because we are called to solve the problems to achieve our goals and the LORD’s part is to give us wisdom, guidance and resources.

God encourages us to collect the advices from many advisers because everyone has a different perspective, which enables us to succeed. We are also advised to accept people around us as counselors that might show us things we do not like.

It is important to notice that although planning implies to define actions as steps, their timing, the direction is established by GOD. This implies to step back from our experience and skills and let the LORD directs us. If we come with a proud heart and expect that God will help us than we have to remember that He hates the proud hearts.

Coming back to colleagues and co-laborers, we have to seek people to have the focus on the things are going wrong, where we have loses and defeats in the marketplace and/or inside the company. That does not mean that we do not want to celebrate what works excellent but mostly the bad things require taking action. So ask for the worse news inside your business in order to fix the things. In other words you should have a SWOT cockpit which is permanently fed with real time information. And if Key Performance Indicator (KPI) was a trend we must grab also the Worse Performance Indicator (WPI) to diligently fix problems we are not aware of.

Confidence

Confidence is needed in the business. It can be the fruit of arrogance or the fruit of faith .  John Maxwell says if leaders lack confidence people lack commitment.

But you do not have to be overconfident.  James says in chapter 4:13-15 “’Today or tomorrow we will travel to such and such city and spend a year there and do business and make a profit.’ You don’t even know what tomorrow will bring – what your life will be! […]. You should say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”.

James emphasizes that the LORD has the last word in our plans and He should have it into our business. It might be that for a while you have some success and profit, but the question is, whom Kingdom you serve? To the Kingdom of GOD? Or to the kingdom of satan?

Half-built Tower / Planning

 Related to big projects Jesus asked the wise question: “For which of you, wanting to build a tower, doesn’t first sit down and calculate the cost to see if he has enough to complete it?” (Luke 14:28). And He set his thought forth and that in case we do not count the cost the onlookers will start to make fun of us. So Jesus too advises us to plan, calculate the cost (time, money, materials, etc.) And this is the first thing before we start to build!

In these environments of big projects we need to be surrounded by positive people who have the faith and the courage to say no or make us attentive to the bad news.

So having excellent advisers is one thing. The next is to have good administrators of all your resources. I recommend seeking for the people to have the redemptive gift (RGI) of administration from God.

Administrators / Managers

In case you are not familiar with the redemptive gifts, here is a short introduction. Then I will enumerate the way a person with the primary RGI of administration (or ruler) behave and act.

Redemptive gifts are given by God in our design and determine what motivate us the most in our actions (Romans 12:6-8).

The Ruler is a natural leader and likes to be in charge. These people are good administrators, implementers and can break down a vision into incremental steps. The rulers thrive under pressure, crave pressure. They like people around them to be under pressure and skilled at time management. They are extremely concerned about loyalty and do not like to be micromanaged. The rulers do not need affirmation to do their jobs and is not manipulated by flattery and favor of men. Rulers would rather fix things than worry about blaming or finding a scape-goat.  They can employ and work with imperfect people and are not generally spontaneous. These people have high standards in all that they do and have trouble recognizing when they are wrong and does not believe they are.

Having said that, if we take a look to the previous description of the Ruler/Administrator we see a concise job description: they can break down a vision into incremental steps.

Setting Goals

Goals are things to achieve to a certain date. If a goal, an objective does not have a date, than it is only a wish, a dream.

Apostle Paul speaks about goal and reward: “I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus” Philippians 3:14. So we must press toward the goal in order to win the prize. Even if he speaks here about the personal calling of every believer and follower of Jesus Christ, if we apply this recommendation to my everyday tasks, duties and goals we can be sure that we achieve our goals and will win a prize, we will get rewards.

Goals must be reasonable to achieve “in time and budget”. They have to be set for individuals so that they stretch the people but not to break them down.

A goal can be achieved by implementing one or more steps or tasks. Although steps set our focus on now and here, they have to be put in relationship to the vision. If we do not know what for this step is in order to see the vision becoming reality, than we do not have the right motivation to fulfill that step.

In order to have a Kingdom of God working climate I encourage everyone to celebrate the successes, the accomplishments of the steps, tasks and finally of goals. It glues the people together and the goals and the mission and vision to the people and the other resources as time, money, materials, favor, etc.

Rewards

Celebrating the successes and achievements is one thing. A better way to motivate people is having the right rewards for them.

Let us consider following verses:

•  “For the Scripture says: ‘Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain’ and ‘The worker deserves his wages’ ” 1 Timothy 4:18
• “And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to Him must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him.” Hebrew 11:6

So the first verse advises us to allow and enable a timely reward. The picture with the ox is quit penetrant. Then the Scripture says that the worker deserves his wages, his rewards. 

And these rewards shall be timely after the goal was achieved in order to increase the motivation of the workers. I remember working in projects in UK where the paying was done on weekly base. I had a boost on my motivation. Not the same thing happened as I have similar projects in Germany, where I had to wait in worse case 60 days until I had the wages on my account.

The message of Hebrew 11:6 states clear how we will get a reward from God. Every follower of Jesus has to focus in his business in pleasing God in everything he is doing. The first thing is to have faith in God. Than He will give us everything we need, often more than we expect and ask.  The word “earnestly” describes the attitude of the heart in seeking God even in the business. I like to suggest you that in this case “earnestly” can be equivalent to being humble in our dialogues to Him.

 Doing Business with the help God will cost you

We come to the end of this pleading. Some of the costs were mentioned already. Let us resume what will cost you to do business with the help of God.

• We have to take a step back from our experience, skills and let God be first. Ask Him for advice, wisdom and from time to time for the impossible.
• We have to let God to have the control over the most important things in your business. Does this cause you to have fear? Does this challenge your arrogance?
• Acknowledge and act as a steward, than everything belongs to Jesus, even our business… of course if you decided to be a citizen of His Kingdom. This mean, you are the boss, the leader but not the ultimate one!
• To do business with the help of God and being a leader means that you are not over the people but rather as Jesus did you have to serve everyone. This is quit contrary to the way leadership is understood and practiced in the world.
• As we succeed we have to give the “applauses” the congratulations further to the Author to God. To Him belongs the glory!