Is God Calling Me to Start a Business?Sample

Knowing What's Next: The Potential

Welcome back to another edition of exciting words from Ecclesiastes! Okay, so this isn’t the most invigorating thing you’ll read this morning, but it matters. Here’s why…

Entrepreneurship is built on potential. Every start up in the history of the world happened when one person said, “What if....” What if. Those are two big words for dreamers and visionaries everywhere. And if you find yourself asking this question, if you spend your days dreaming about what would happen if you started your own company, then you’re not alone.

But here’s the sobering truth: we don’t know what will happen. Potential is just that. It’s the possibility of something happening in the future. And as The Teacher soberingly reminds us, only God knows what’s coming next. Or, as our friend Brian Mosley from RightNow Media says, “It’s not up to us to determine what God is going to do through us.”

Worried yet? That’s okay. While this is an alarming truth for the entrepreneur, it’s also an incredibly freeing one. Because when we realize that only God knows whether our startup will fail or succeed, then we can stop grasping for control and gripping the gears, hoping we can steer this thing where we want it to go.

Instead, we can work as hard as we can and then do everything we can to put our labor into the hands of the one who is actually in control. We can stop worrying about what might happen tomorrow and choose to be faithful today. 

Does your startup have potential? Are the potential growth metrics off the charts? Is the future as bright as the sun? Great! What can you do to be faithful today?

When we’re looking to start a business, it’s easy to spend all of our time dreaming about the future. We want to answer the “what if” question. But what if we accepted the fact that the answer to that question is out of our control? What if we gave our "what if" to God?

Instead of building our business on the potential of tomorrow, we can build it on the foundation of faithfulness we can create today. The future isn’t up to us...thank God.

Further Thought

• What’s the most frustrating part of today’s devotional? What about this verse or this lesson gets under your skin?
• Are you relieved to hear that only God is in control of the future, or does that frustrate you? Why?
• What does it look like for you to be faithful today? Is that a question you’re consistently asking God?