More Paradoxes in Michigan
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To present Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord to business and professional men and to develop Christian business and professional men to carry out the Great Commission.
Ephesians 3.18 records God’s desire for us to have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is. Our fundamental need and problem is the lack of love we feel from God, others and ourselves. The Bible is actually a love story.
It is God’s story of love that caused Him to create. It is God’s story of love to try and recapture that which He made like Himself, with the ability to do as it will, after rebelling against Him Who gave us life and can alone sustain our lives both now and forevermore. It is God’s story of love demonstrated by personal sacrifice on behalf of all humanity for all time. It is God’s story of love promising an eternity with Him and all those who love Him that will never see tears, suffering or shame.
The Bible is a love story; God’s love for humanity revealed through His engagement with humanity over our first 5000 or so years. Within the story is the explanation for our poverty of feeling love and experiencing love. It describes us as having a brokenness only God can heal and only then to be fully experienced when we leave this world to permanently enter His world.
In the meantime, God promises to fill us with Himself by way of His Spirit to comfort us in our suffering and to encourage us in our living for Him expressed by living sacrificially toward others. His promise is that as we give our lives away we find them, particularly when we give them away for His purposes. This explains why the happiest people are the most generous people. They experience the reality of this truth. The most needy among us express our poverty through stealing, violence and oppression demanding love from things and others in such a way that it harms the one or the thing from which we seek to be loved.
Of course, things can never love people. We pursue things in order to express love for ourselves but this expression of love never lasts. Real love is experienced by giving not by taking, buying or demanding. We can feel love if we will receive it freely, if we can let another love us for who we are, but that is hard. This is why the most popular love is a mother’s love. It is the best known type of unconditional love most of us have experienced, most of us but not all of us. Yet mom too has failed us and neither can even her love reach the great depth of our soul.
Only God can plunge that deep with His infinite love. He wants us to know that love. His love that is immeasurable, immovable and immutable. His love for us expands heaven and earth bridged by the outstretched arms of His Son longing to be poured into our hearts by His Spirit. He stands at the door of our soul and knocks, open wide if you will receive the love of God.
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Feed a family of ten for part of the year! Do you have land that needs to have a few deer removed from it? Contact Mike and he will bring his bow or his gun, your choice, and help you solve that problem while working to put meat on his table!
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MONDAY MANNA
A service to the business community
A Publication of CBMC International
October 10, 2016
More Paradoxes in Michigan
by Rick Boxx
In September I wrote about paradoxes in business, how commonly held and widely accepted views about how to conduct business often run counter to a biblical worldview of the same practices. Here are two others we should consider, both involving money management:
Financial Stewardship. When I was a commercial lender, a young man excitedly began telling me that Steinway Piano, a well-known company with a storied history, was for sale and he wanted our bank to loan him the money to purchase the company.
I admired this individual’s ambition, but was stunned when I asked how much money he needed to borrow. Without hesitation, he replied, “I think they will probably want $200 million, and I will need to borrow all of it. I’m only 25 and I don’t have any money.” Apparently he expected me to walk out to the bank’s “money tree” and get him the amount he needed without any questions, not to mention collateral.
As you might guess, we did not loan this big-idea young man the money, but this experience has always stuck with me as a reminder of how casually people consider the use of debt in business. This illustrates a paradox we find in the business world about the use of money: The world often says use all the debt you can borrow, whether it is for a business, buying a house or even going to college, but God says we are to trust in Him, not the bank.
Proverbs 3:5 teaches, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding.” We are tempted to wonder whether God truly has our best interests at heart, especially when a seemingly good opportunity presents itself and we think we must act quickly to capitalize on it. However, the Bible teaches we are stewards or managers of financial resources God has entrusted to us, not the owners.
We see this declared in 1 Chronicles 29:11, “Yours, O LORD, is the greatness, the power, the glory, the victory, and the majesty. Everything in the heavens and on earth is yours, O LORD, and this is your kingdom. We adore you as the one who is over all things.” God entrusts much to our care, but expects us to use it with wisdom – and by seeking His guidance – rather than acting by impulse.
Generosity. Here is another area where we see a great paradox between common practice and a biblical worldview. When I was in banking, one of my largest accounts was a construction-oriented business led by Sean. He squeezed his vendors for all he could get out of them, rarely providing anything in return.
Sean’s business was profitable because he drove his people hard and pressured his suppliers to minimize the expense side of the ledger. But few people enjoyed doing business with him. He was operating according to a philosophy we often hear in the business world, that we should hoard our wealth. God, however, says we are to be generous, willing to freely give as He directs.
Then Sean had a dramatic spiritual conversion. He went from being a “taker” to becoming an extremely generous “giver.” In fact, over the years since he has given away millions of dollars to many worthy charitable causes. A changed man, he is doing what the apostle Paul said in 1 Timothy 6:18 when he admonished, “Instruct them to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share.”
Copyright 2016, Integrity Resource Center, Inc. Adapted with permission from “Integrity Moments with Rick Boxx,” a commentary on issues of integrity in the workplace from a Christian perspective. To learn more about Integrity Resource Center or to sign up for Rick’s daily Integrity Moments, visit www.integrityresource.org.
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