September 2024

When you read your Bible and meditate on God’s Word, you hear from God. When you pray, He hears from you. Doing both brings God into your business in a way similar to how you would with a trusted human advisor.

Our prayers do not change God or His plans, but they can change us and our plans. There are four important aspects of prayer that make an impact on our work and that bring glory to God.

First, prayer acknowledges our standing before God. It is an admission of our failures and a recognition of God’s perfection. It is also an acknowledgement that everything we have is a gift from God for which we should be thankful.

Second, prayer asks God for help. It is a surrendering of our control over our life and business and putting it in God’s hands. It is turning from “trusting in our own understanding” to “trusting in the Lord.”

Third, when we rightly pray, our perspective changes. If we understand that God has saved us to serve Him, then our primary focus is to bring Him glory and we will naturally strive to align our prayers with His will. God cares about even our tiniest challenges and concerns and He delights when we bring them to Him. He wants what’s truly best for us and we honor Him when we turn to Him in trust and dependence.

Finally, God uses our prayers to shape us more and more into the image of Christ. 

Read the full article here about prayer, why it matters, and how to pray.

The Business Transition Handbook by Laurie Barkman shares lessons learned by the author in selling her own business, helping others transition theirs, and hosting many others on her podcast, Succession Stories. These lessons include identifying the most common mistakes and the best practices of business owners when seeking to exit their businesses.

The book shares many valuable insights and asks the business-owner/reader to consider many important questions. It provides helpful guidance on many topics critical to exiting your business. But in the end, the process is complex, and each company is unique, so that no book could possibly provide all the answers to perfectly guide every business owner through the exit journey. That’s why there’s a need for advisors like the author and myself. 

I do recommend the book to help business owners become aware of the questions and decisions they will face along the way, but I even more strongly recommend surrounding yourself with advisors (financial advisor, CPA, lawyer, value catalyst) who can help guide you at each turn and fork in the road.

Read the full review here.

Regularly reading your Bible is an essential discipline if you want to consistently glorify God with your business. But we are bombarded with so much information throughout the day that the nuggets of eternal truth that could have a positive impact on our lives and our work can easily get washed away and replaced in our minds with the urgent and important details of day-to-day life. This is especially true for business leaders.

Thankfully, God has given us some additional disciplines to help us implant the truths in His Word into our minds, hearts, and lives so that they can bear fruit in our walk, our work, and our businesses. In the article linked below I focus specifically on meditating on what you’ve read, scripture memorization, and applying God’s Word.

All of these disciplines are aimed at the same goal — making the scripture that we read fully available to us in our daily lives. This happens because:

– We haven’t forgotten the words and concepts

– We more deeply understand what they say and mean

– We recognize how they apply to our world today

– We signal to our brains that this is important to us

Some of this will naturally happen if we are diligent about reading the Word, and especially if we are reading thoughtfully and attentively (and not just checking “Bible reading” off our daily to-do list). But spending a few more minutes each day going deeper with these additional disciplines will multiply the impact that our daily reading can have on how we think, speak, and act.

Read the full article here to learn more about these disciplines and how to build them into your regular routine.

What does Bible reading have to do with running a business?

God is the Creator. He made man in His image, so we are also creative. God put man to work from the very beginning and gave him dominion over creation. We were designed from the beginning to create, build, and manage. Business leaders reflect this in our work creating, building, growing, and managing businesses. 

Much of the Bible is focused on helping us see how to live all aspects of our lives in a way that pleases Him and glorifies Him, including through our work. In his teaching, Jesus often used parables, telling stories of businessmen acting in ways that reflected God’s ways and glorified Him, or of other businessmen acting in ways that conflicted with God’s ways and dishonored Him. Throughout the Bible, God makes clear that the righteous (those that live according to His ways) will be blessed both in this life and in the eternal life to come.

The Bible is the only authoritative and infallible source for knowing God and what He desires from us. Anything we can learn about pleasing and glorifying God will come from the Bible, either directly or indirectly. We can learn much from listening to preachers and teachers and authors, but if we really want to know what God says, we must read the Word He has given us, the Bible.

God’s Word is also the source of all wisdom. All of it is profitable for training in righteousness that we may be equipped for every good work. Reading the Bible can give us encouragement and hope, even when going through challenges, as it reminds us of God’s great power and promises. It also reminds us of what truly matters, so that we can focus on the most important things.

Read the full article here, including some tips for how to make Bible reading a regular discipline in your life.

Dictionary.com lists three definitions for the verb “discipline”, all of which are important in growing spiritual fruit in our lives:

1. “to train by instruction and exercise; drill.”
2. “to bring to a state of order and obedience by training and control.”
3. “to punish or penalize in order to train and control; correct; chastise.”

As Christians seeking to honor God with our lives and our businesses, spiritual disciplines are activities we regularly undertake to develop spiritual knowledge, order and obedience in our lives. We should welcome correction as we seek spiritual maturity.

In his book Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, Donald Whitney defines spiritual disciplines as “those practices found in Scripture that promote spiritual growth among believers in the gospel of Jesus Christ. They are the habits of devotion and experiential Christianity that have been practiced by the people of God since biblical times.”

Read the full article about spiritual disciplines and the seven specific behaviors we will be writing about in the coming weeks here.