How to Trust God with Your Business
How to Trust God with Your Business
Are you running your business on your own strength or on God's?
Are you following His will for your business or pushing for your own?
How do you even know?!
MOTIVATION
Why did you start your business?
Did you want to make millions of dollars, retire early, and travel for the rest of your life?
I'm not going to say those are bad things (because they're not, in and of themselves), but they're not the epitome of a great life. We were created for more!
Nobody is attracted to someone who's running a business solely for profit. Everyone wants to know what they get out of the deal, how their lives will be transformed.
If we set out to create businesses that will just make money for us, we're in it for the wrong reason.
OPEN HANDS
We have to trust God's plan AND His timing.
This can be incredibly difficult in business, as in life.
We get this great idea that we think is God's will for us. We pray about it. We ask other people for their wisdom. It all seems to be falling into place.
But then we get thrown a curve ball.
Things don't pan out like we'd thought. Sales plummet (or never go up to begin with). We get terrible reviews. We get no followers, no engagement, no viewers on our live videos.
We begin to wonder if we got it wrong, if we misunderstood.
Maybe not. Maybe the thing we were pursuing was setting us up for something else, and we're being redirected to something even BETTER.
If we're going to truly trust God with our businesses, we need to surrender to His will and His timing.
This requires holding our dreams and plans for our businesses with open hands.
That means making the most of what we have, right where we are, for as long as we're here.
But it also means allowing God to give and take as He sees fit, trusting that His plan is infinitely greater than we could ever ask or imagine.
CONTINUALLY IN PRAYER
Praying about our businesses isn't a one-and-done thing that we check off when we initially talk to God about whether our business idea is something He wants us to pursue (though doing that is a great part of the process!).
As life changes with seasons, so does business.
While this is clearly an imperfect analogy because our businesses are not nearly as precious, consider for a moment what it would be like to only pray about a child when you're pregnant or when your child is an infant. In the early stages, you're concerned about all the possibilities for good and bad, worried about every little thing, asking all sorts of questions.
Later on, as your child grows, you become more confident in caring for him or her. You worry a little less, but you do worry, just about different things. It's no longer about whether little Johnny will stick his finger in the outlet, but whether he will try to sneak in past curfew. It's not about whether Jenny will swallow that penny on the ground, but whether she'll make good enough grades to get into college next year.
You don't stop praying for your kids just because they stopped being babies. You still seek God's wisdom as they grow older and mature through different stages.
It's the same with our businesses (again, an imperfect comparison, and coming from someone without kids, but it was the closest thing I could come up with).
We need to be praying for them, lifting them up to God, in every season and every stage.
We ought to be checking back in with Him, asking Him what He wants to accomplish in and through us and our businesses today, this week, this month, this season.
We can ask Him to guide our interactions, to shape our attitudes and messages, to lead us to the people who need the message and skills He has so graciously given us to share.
SERVING
Are we still serving?
If our initial motivation was to serve God with our businesses, to use the gifts He has so abundantly blessed us with, that's great!
But is that still our motivation? We might need to check back in (I do that quite frequently to make sure my heart hasn't strayed).
Our purposes will be different, yours and mine. That is, our specific, small-scale purposes will vary. But our big-picture purpose is the same: to love God and love others. And we do that by acknowledging all the abundant gifts and talents God has so richly blessed us with and turning around to use them to serve those around us in whatever way we can (which often doesn't even mean a job!).
It all comes down to service. If we're serving others with love, using the talents and skills God has given us to serve others and point them to Him, we're doing what we're supposed to be doing.
PEOPLE > PROFIT
And last but certainly not least, what's our focus?
I've been repeating three things to myself in that area lately.
CONNECTION above all else.
People over profit.
Relationships over revenue.
It all comes down to how we interact with people. After all, we can't take anything with us; everything else here on earth will fade away.
Trying to interact with the goal of generating sales comes across as cheap and fake. It's not attractive to those we're attempting to engage with.
On the flip side, if we choose to value the people and the interactions themselves, we're setting ourselves up for much greater success.
We'll build richer relationships. Whether these people become partners, clients, or just acquaintances, we can't lose by engaging in relationship.
And when we engage authentically, we pave the way for those relationships and interactions to turn into partnerships and paid services. But we have to lead with connection, or we lose that opportunity.
That's it! Those are the top tips for how to trust God with your business! I hope you found them helpful! I'd love to hear what your favorite tip was in the comments!
And if you'd like to chat more about how YOU personally can trust God more (or incorporate more faith into your business), we can set up a call! I'd LOVE to talk to you about that, friend!
