Is there more spiritual potential in your business/career? What if we spent our lives working and in the end realized we missed our purpose?

Almost every Christian business owner, salesperson, and executive has a firm grasp on the idea of stewardship – that everything in this world including our businesses, belongs to God, and we are just temporary managers of it.

“Everything,” of course, means everything – our families, our gifts and abilities, the position or job that we hold, the influence that we have, the people in our lives – just to name a few.

Once we get that, we are just naturally led to this question:

If that’s the case, am I making everything of this business (or my career) that God wants? What exactly does stewardship mean? Is there a greater good, a bigger impact for His kingdom that I’m not seeing, or not yet realizing?

That’s a pretty important question.

What if we spent the rest of our working life in this business, and in the end realized that we had missed it?

That there was a larger dimension to the business — a bigger purpose — and we missed it? That would not be a good day.

For almost all of my adult life, I have had a sense, at a very deep level, that the Lord had something larger in store for me. I never quite understood what it was, and rarely got a glimpse of it beyond the deeply embedded idea that I was meant for something else. At times, that idea raised to the surface and was a part of career decisions. At other times, it receded into the depths from which it came.

But, it has been there for decades. It was one of the things that sustained me and gave me hope in some pretty desperate circumstances. It is only in recent years that I feel like I am seeing a clearer and more detailed picture of what that larger and deeper purpose is.

I don’t think I’m unique. In other words, while the Lord may have something larger and see more spiritual potential in my business/career, He probably works that way with everyone – including you! You are, of course, His child. Could it be that He has something larger, deeper, and more spiritual potential in your business/career?

There is this verse:

For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.  Ephesians 2:10

Could it be that God has prepared a ‘good work’ for each of us — uniquely and personally — to do?

If so, then could it be that there is a deeper, larger purpose for your career and your business than that which you currently see?

Instead of just a means of making an income so that you can support your family and make money, could it be that your career and your business is a spiritual entity, with a significant role to play in God’s ultimate plan?

I have seen God unfold this spiritual potential in businesses/careers in two different ways:

1.  He moves you to a place where there is the greater work that He has prepared for you to do. This occurs when you find yourself in a new job, a new business, a new location, or a new situation. While it may not seem like it at the time, when you look back at the change of situation, you almost always see God’s hand in it, moving you to a place of greater significance.

In my own life, I saw this when He transitioned me out of my position as a divisional manager to my new career as a sales authority/speaker/author. Other than keeping ourselves open to His leading, there is little that we do to participate in this. He has something in mind for us and moves us to the place He determines. We understand it primarily in retrospect.

2. He changes us, so that we have a new perspective about the situation we are in, and see it in terms of a larger, more spiritual challenge. We all know people who have had a spiritual transformation which has resulted in them seeing their surroundings, their businesses, and their relationships differently. They realize the spiritual significance of the place they are in. God changed them in order for them to see the “good work” from a new perspective.

We can be actively involved in this effort. It may be that we are in the “deeper” place where God wants us and that the “work that He prepared in advance for us to do” is directly before us. And it may be that we just don’t see it.

What prevents us from seeing that is often the blinders that we have put on ourselves – the ideas and paradigms that tell us that our business and careers are purely secular, and have no spiritual impact. As long as we believe that, we will be oblivious to the greater spiritual potential the lies in that which we do for a living.

As Mordecai said to Queen Ester,
“Who knows perhaps you have come to your position for such a time as this.”  Ester 4:14

What about you?

Is there a greater, deeper purpose to what you do for a living?

The starting point is simply to ask that question of God and expect an answer.