(The following was originally published at CareyGreen.com)
What would you say is the most important thing you do in business?
- Customer relations?
- Prospecting?
- Sales?
- Systems management?
- Procedures?
Really, what is the best thing an entrepreneur or business owner can put at the top of their “must do” list?
You may find the answer surprising. Today’s video comes from one of my favorite authors of all time, Oswald Chambers. Listen to find out how you as a business owner can put your day in order the RIGHT way, God’s way, so that everything else falls into place.
In Oswald Chambers’ acclaimed book My Utmost for His Highest, he quotes Matthew 6:33 in his entry titled “Having God’s Unreasonable Faith”:
Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added to you.
Oswald then goes on to say:
“When we look at these words of Jesus, we immediately find them to be the most revolutionary that human ears have ever heard: Seek FIRST the kingdom of God.
Even though the spiritually minded of us argue the opposite saying, ‘But I must live. I must make a certain amount of money. I must be clothed. I must be fed.’
The great concern of our lives is not the kingdom of God, but how we are going to take care of ourselves to live.”
Doesn’t that resonate with you, as an entrepreneur? That’s why we work so hard, right? To make a living?
Chambers continues:
“Jesus reversed the order by telling us to get the right relationship with God first – maintaining IT as the primary concern for our lives, and never to place our concern on taking care of the other things of life.”
What a challenge: to NEVER make those things our primary concern! How can we do that while we are working every day to grow our businesses?
Chambers goes on to quote Matthew 6:25,
Do not worry about your life.
Oswald then says:
“Our Lord pointed out that, from His standpoint, it is absolutely unreasonable for us to be anxious, worrying about how we will live. Jesus did not say that the person who takes no thought for anything in his life is blessed.
No – that person is a fool!
But, Jesus DID teach that His disciple must make his relationship with God the dominating focus of his life and to be cautiously carefree about everything else in comparison to that.
In essence, Jesus was saying, “Don’t make food and drink the controlling factors of your life, but be focused absolutely on God.”
I could substitute in there, “Don’t make revenue, a new client, good employees, or a hefty workload the controlling factors of your life – but instead be focused absolutely on God.”
“Some people are careless about what they eat and drink, and they suffer for it. They are careless about what they wear, having no business looking the way that they do. They are careless with their earthly matters, and God holds them responsible.
Jesus is saying that the greatest concern in life is to place our relationship with God first and EVERYTHING ELSE second. It is one of the most difficult, yet most critical, disciplines of the Christian life – to allow the Holy Spirit to bring us into absolute harmony with the teaching of Jesus in these verses”
Now, think about that: Our first order of business every day has got to be seeking the kingdom of God. Doing this is a priority issue. I mean, we are entrepreneurs – we know what it is like to carry a heavy load, to wear a lot of hats, and to understand the responsibilities of earning money, taking care of employees and clients. But, if we don’t first – and it is counterintuitive, as Oswald says – get our relationship with God on track and in focus, those other things are going to consume us. And God is going to fall by the wayside in our minds and priorities. We won’t be focused on Him and His purposes for our lives… and THAT is really what we need first and foremost!
We need God’s purposes to be fulfilled in our businesses and our lives.