Seeking God’s Will – Developing A Process For Making Biblically-Based Business Decisions.
One might think that it is not highly possible to develop a structured biblically-based process to make major decisions in business. Many Christians would take the stance that you “cannot put these kinds of things in a box- that each time it will be different.”
That is true at times- but God has given us a number of tools at our disposal when it comes to making key decisions both in business and in life. Let’s start off by seeking God’s will. It is not always so easy to know the answer to “WWJD?”
It would seem logical that we as Christian business leaders should make decisions the same way that any Christian should make any of life’s decisions: seek God’s will and then “just do it.” After all, God is sovereign. God reveals His will to us, and all we have to do is to follow Him in humility. Therefore, arguably, “What is God’s will?” is the only question we need to ask when making decisions. Sounds simple enough, right? It would be except for a few major complications.
First, sometimes, though our spirit is willing, our ears are weak. We think we hear God and know His will in a given situation, and we act on this confidence. But quite often what we are really hearing is not God at all. Rather, it is our own selfish desires and wishes that are shaped by years of our own personal experience, secular management training, bad habits, and blending in with the world’s business and corporate culture. Because we’re so sure that we are godly people doing God’s will, we don’t critically analyze the process by which we reach decisions – a misstep that culminates in decision-making that largely is independent of God’s counsel. Ironically, this haphazard approach to “hearing” God ultimately renders us deaf. Our overconfidence leads us to oversight.
Second, sometimes, yes our spirit is willing, but our hearts have become hardened. That is, there are times when we are truly in touch with God’s will, but we simply choose not to obey Him when He speaks to us. This is what might be called “the knowing-doing gap.” In the Garden of Eden it was simply called “pride,” and it is something we must all battle daily. This too culminates in decision-making devoid of divine direction. This quite often is a result of our living “in fear” of truly being obedient to the Lord in a given situation. For example, you are in the midst of negotiating a big deal with a prospective client, when during the conversation, your customer shares some personal challenge they are struggling with in their life. Rather than inquiring about it, or seeing if there is some way you can “minister” to them (i.e. often to pray for them, etc.), you simply glaze over the statement as if it were never made because you don’t want to risk “offending” them by taking the chance of instigating a spiritual conversation. In other words, you don’t want to address the condition of their soul at the potential risk of losing their business. Because we are finite human beings with a VERY limited perspective, most of the time we simply are incapable of knowing what God is truly up to. More often than not, we only see how a given situation or decision impacts us (remember we are selfish) but we don’t have a clue of just how God is looking at things from an OVERALL perspective- he is taking everything into account at all times. He sees how a decision we make not only impacts us, but all those around us, and all those around those people, etc. So to think that we can ever truly know God’s COMPLETE will, is not going to happen- at least not until we see Him face to face remember The Bema!
In our next article we will look at 4 tools we can use to determine God’s will.
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