God’s Plan for Your Success

As a business leader, you’re accustomed to making decisions and setting direction, even without all the information that you wish you had. It’s part of what makes you a leader.

As a Christian business leader, however, there sometimes seems an extra layer of missing data and uncertainty: knowing what God wants.

Your calling is not only to lead well, but also to lead in the direction God has planned for you and your team, company, or organization.

Big responsibilities with many unknowns.

On top of that, knowing God’s will often seems difficult, takes time, and may not even offer conclusive insights within the timeframe in which you need an answer. After all, you have a business to run and customers to serve.

And so, seeking God and His will is easier to relegate to personal life, Sunday worship, and church activities. In any case, how can you figure out God’s will for you and your business, and even if you could, how would you fit that back into your company?

And so, if you’re like most Christian business leaders, you look to God for the big things, the decisions with longer term impact, and take care of the day-to-day issues yourself. A nice balance between “getting things done” and “waiting on the Lord”…

Besides, God already equipped you for the work at hand, and so, as long as you stay in touch at the higher, directional level, everything’s good, right?

Not quite.

God actually wants to be involved in all aspects of your life, and yes, this includes your business—not in a way of telling you exactly what to do, but in a way that pervades all you do so that His touch and His presence impacts every decision and every action—each and every day, all day long.

Walking in relationship with God—making a difference in all that you do—helping build His Kingdom, one day at a time—all nice words, but still the question remains: how do you know God’s will for your particular situation?

• How do you know whether to hire or fire?
• How do you know the right strategy to follow?
• Can you know when to cut off investment in some programs and continue others?
• How can you know what God really wants?
• And, even if you did know, how would you explain that to your board, your shareholders, or your staff?

To top it all off, even when you share your concerns with fellow Christians at church or your small group, you might only get back some vague reassurances and a Bible verse or two like this:

"For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." —Jeremiah29:11

That’s not very helpful, is it?

Ultimately, God wants you to draw close to Him, seeking Him for wisdom, for insights, for guidance. An alternative to the above promise from Jeremiah, a Bible verse taken from the book of James, the brother of Jesus, might be more helpful:

If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. —James1:5

Besides such a request for wisdom, the Bible is chock-full of practical insights with plenty of detail as to how you might know God’s will in a way that can help you each and every day, in all aspects of your leadership role.

In this section, we distill the key teachings of the Bible into a practical five-step process to help you discern God’s will for you and your business.

Of course, your walk with God is much more than a five-step process, but, even so, these simple steps can help bring clarity when it otherwise seems unclear.

May you be blessed as you discover His will as a Christian Business Leader!

Knowing God’s will is the second precursor to success.