Episode 947: Faith is the Cornerstone of Business

[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: Thanks for joining me on episode 947 of the inspired stewardship podcast.

[00:00:07] Raven Harris: I'm Raven M Harris. I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent and your treasures to live out your call. Having the ability to lead yourself and others is key.

[00:00:25] And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this, the inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott Miller.

[00:00:34] Scott Maderer: and then thirdly, we need to remember that we're not doing all of this to become rich and successful and powerful in the eyes of the world. We're doing this to build something that gives glory to God. And if we do it with that mindset and that heart then out of that will come benefits, not necessarily money.

[00:00:56] Okay. Welcome and thank you for joining us on the [00:01:00] inspired stewardship podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling in the inspired stewardship podcast. Go learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that.

[00:01:20] Can impact the work

[00:01:23] in today's spiritual foundation episode about developing your influence. I talk with you about how faith is the cornerstone of business. I give you four ways that this could play out in business. And I also share why knowing this can help you be more effective in your business as James and I were talking yesterday, one of the things that he said was how he felt.

[00:01:45] Faith is a cornerstone of business and how he felt that business was a cornerstone in which all, so many other things in terms of influence would shift. And change. And I agree [00:02:00] with him in a lot of ways. I agree with him that faith is a cornerstone of business. And I wanted to talk a little bit more about that today because there's a couple of different levels.

[00:02:10] There's a couple of different ways you can look at this. First off. Faith is definitely a cornerstone in business in terms of the fact that if you are launching your own business, if you're doing something as a solopreneur or an entrepreneur, it takes just a certain amount of faith. Yourself and in others and in God to just be able to do that, it takes a certain amount of hope to continue to do that when times are hard, when times are good too, to work on the days that it's really just a struggle to do anything that takes hope and faith is one of the cornerstones of hope.

[00:02:49] So as you look at this in your business, what are some ways that this plays out? What are some ways that your faith influences your business? First off, if your [00:03:00] faith influences your business, you should be looking to the Bible as one of the tools that you use to learn and focus on leadership and growth and how to grow your business.

[00:03:13] There's a ton of business advice in the Bible. Giving to Caesar watch belongs to Caesar. In other words, don't lie on your and cheat and steal on your taxes and other things, but do what is right avoiding debt is in the Bible, looking at ways to serve others and be a kingdom based servant. Entrepreneur is in the book.

[00:03:38] Secondly, you have to remember at all moments that everything that you do, including your business is about God. And for God doing work is not for you. Doing business is not for you. Yes. You may get things from it, but it's not for you because we [00:04:00] need to depend upon God. We need to give other things over to him and recognize.

[00:04:06] It's for him. We aren't designed to walk on our own. We aren't designed to handle life on our own we're to commit our works to the Lord because those things belong to God doing business for him. Is the powerful way of doing business because God does not play games with us. God looks at us and says, I don't wanna deal with the false hoods.

[00:04:34] I don't want to deal with sin. I don't want to deal with confusion. I know you from beginning to end, I want you to give it all to me and recognize that it was all mine in the first place. And if you lead your life that way out of that, Will come many things for you because we have to trust in God.

[00:04:59] Jeremiah [00:05:00] says cursed is the man who trusted in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart departs from the Lord for. He shall be like a shrub in the desert and shall not see when good comes, but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness. In other words, if we don't depend on God and trust God, we're going to dry up shrivel up and blow.

[00:05:21] The problem is that when things go wrong and when things go right, one or the other of those tends to drive us away from trusting in God. Sometimes when things goes wrong, we say this is all God's fault. And we stopped trusting. And sometimes when things are going really well, we say, look at all that I have done.

[00:05:40] And we stop leaning on and trusting in God. And the truth is in both of those situations in good times. And in bad, we still. To trust in God, because we have to trust that the business practices that God has set out are the ones that we are called to do. We have to trust the [00:06:00] calling that is on our heart.

[00:06:01] We have to trust that we are there to sincerely serve others and to do it for the glory of God, not our own glory, because out of that comes an understanding that the truth is your business should grow itself. It shouldn't come out of debt. In fact, I would argue that most businesses. That opened with debt struggle in part, because of that, you should put your family first.

[00:06:26] We should not be neglecting our family for our business and pushing our family away to grow our business. We need to recognize that our family comes first. And if you aren't able to do that in your business, then there's something wrong with the business, not something wrong with the family and you should be able and can fix.

[00:06:48] And then thirdly, we need to remember that we're not doing all of this to become rich and successful and powerful in the eyes of the world. We're doing this to build something that [00:07:00] gives glory to God. And if we do it with that mindset and that heart then out of that will come benefits. Not necessarily.

[00:07:09] It's not about necessarily getting rich or having a big house or any of the other material, things that we tend to look at as examples of success, but out of that will come a feeling of success and a feeling of having touched other lives. We can develop other measures than just the bottom line and judge our business based off the ethics and the morals and the way it runs and the lives that touches instead of just whether or not it's made us rich and given us a new car and a new house and all of the other things that make come along with that.

[00:07:46] Thanks for calling.

[00:07:47] thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast as a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively listen, but act on what [00:08:00] you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you enjoy this episode, do me a favor. Go over to facebook.com/inspire.

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