I’ve facilitated a few strategic planning sessions for Christian ministries. Also, I’ve spoken to business groups about scriptural paradigms for strategic planning. One of the rock-the-boat questions is: Are we really listening to God and His desires for our business?
You might be familiar with the different levels of listening, and here’s how they relate to our relationship with God:
- Ignoring: we’re not even listening to that conversation at the other table in the coffee shop or by the others in the same living room. Another way to ignore the other person’s “speech” is to talk all the time ourselves and not give the other person a chance to talk. Sounds like 99.9% of our prayers, and then we say “Amen” and leave His presence. We tell Him what we want to happen in our business, our plans and prospects, and ask His blessing. We never ask a question or wait to listen for the answer.
- Pretending: we are distracted and only act like we’re listening. Our minds however are elsewhere and we quickly forget what the other person just said. We might read “love your enemies” in our devotional but then we get to work. When our proposal is rejected by the customer, a colleague sabotages our project, or a staff member’s performance is a big disappointment, we forget about love. Our minds weren’t on loving our enemies during the devotional or at work.
- Selective: we hear what we want to hear. Or we hear just enough to start formulating a response. (More on this below.)
- Attentive: we hear every word. We understand it. We can repeat it back to God. We might even be able to paraphrase it in our own words to show we understand. For example, James 5.4 paraphrased: if you cheat workers of their wages, there’s a special place in Hell for you.
- Empathetic: we not only understand the text, but we understand the feelings behind them. Is God pleased, disappointed, frustrated, hopeful…? We might read Christ’s words to His disciples as frustration because that’s how we’d say these words: “Do you still not understand? Don’t you remember the five loaves and how we fed the five thousand?” (Matt. 16.9) If we first read 1 Cor. 13–the love chapter—or Gal. 5.23–fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness…self-control—we might put a different tone to Christ’s words. It wouldn’t be our frustration that’s expressed but His tender teaching.
Many business leaders like to pull out Proverbs 16.3 “Commit your works to the Lord and your plans will succeed.” Many business leaders focus on honoring the Sabbath day, like Chick-Fil-A. And it has worked for them. (It’s not a guarantee—just ask LifeWay bookstores.) But many business leaders have ignored these verses also related to business:
- The Sabbath year: every seven years, our productive resources are supposed to be idled so they can rest. We’re to trust the Lord will provide a double portion of revenue in the sixth year we’ll have assets to carry us through the seventh. Also, we’re to forgive our debtors (an echo is found in the prayer Christ taught His disciples, commonly called the Lord’s Prayer). This means cancelling all outstanding loans and accounts receivable. I have yet to find a business (and especially a bank) honoring the Sabbath year. Lev. 25.4; Deut. 15.1, 9
- Using dishonest or inaccurate scales: I’ve written about this with regard to performance appraisals and how they do not reflect a person’s performance and so are inaccurate. But we might also “cheat” with regard to how we value property, inventory and other assets on our books; we’ll find the most favorable “measuring stick” to create an assessed value. We also might use biased salary surveys to pay ourselves more and our employees less (see Cheating workers of wages below). Various places in Proverbs, Deuteronomy and Micah. Clearly something the Lord abhors, detests, hates, finds abominable.
- Cheating workers of wages: paying employees less than their value/contribution to the company’s success; using industry benchmarks—created by ungodly methods, i.e. not taking into account God’s desires; whittling down our suppliers’ contracts so they have to scrimp on paying their employees; leveraging any advantage we have over customer contracts so that they may not be as generous with their employees as they could be. James 5.4
- Allowing for gleaning: leaving edges of fields for the disadvantaged to “rake” in the revenues, not going back to pick up business we forgot or missed, and also not passing over every sales opportunity multiple times till we captured all the business we could from that account. Not sure how some of this looks for the modern business. I’ve written about this too and have only come close in a small way. Lev. 23.22 etc.
There are many more. But it’s enough to know we “like” certain verses and are willing to comply with them and then the ones above are not as “likable” and therefore we have some reluctance.
Here’s another very popular example of selective listening, especially when we find ourselves in difficult circumstances, such as labor shortage, pandemic, supply chain disruptions, government interference, etc. Jer. 29.11–“For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans to prosper you and not harm…” You see this verse almost everywhere. It’s thought to be our ticket out of danger, out of the valley, back into the light and back into prosperity. We take this verse like the cancer patient who hears the doctor say, “We got the tumor. You’re going to live…” and then stops listening, missing “…for only six months because it has spread to your other organs..” In Jeremiah 29, God tells the Israelites something like this: as a US citizen, you’re stranded in communist-run Nicaragua. You want to take Jer. 29.11 to the ticket counter for the flight home. The ticket agent says, “Senor, turn the paper over.” You read: “You’re going to be here for quite a while. So get married. Have kids. Help your kids get married so you can have grandkids, and great-grandchildren. I have plans for you to prosper and not harm. Hunker down. Build a house. Plant a garden. Join the Chamber of Commerce. Run for the local school board. Donate to the food shelf. As you help your communist neighbors have peace and prosperity, you too will have peace and prosperity for this duration.”
Our circumstances may not change. It doesn’t mean God is displeased enough to abandon us. He’s also with us in the “busts” of business as well as the booms. In fact, He may be to mature our faith faster if we don’t have so easy. “Count it all joy, my brothers and sisters, when you face trials…” James 1
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