Breaking the Mold Before it Breaks You - 7 Keys for Christians Called to Business - Key#1 - Identity
Breaking the Mold - Key #1 - IDENTITY
This key helps you become a difference maker with your life, the way God intended.
Deep down you have a desire to touch lives and reach your full potential in Christ. As God has placed certain gifts within you and opportunities around you, you want to be a good steward of those and bring a worthwhile return to Him.
Are we talking about earning your way into heaven with your performance? Absolutely not. On the contrary, we are talking about making a difference here on earth. You can’t earn salvation which has already been paid for.
Please don’t confuse being a good steward with your gifts and talents and working diligently and strategically to invest your life to bring a valuable return, with working to earn salvation or favor. God has wired you to enjoy the process of being productive. That is why he placed a desire in you to be the best, most effective you that you can be.
God is Looking for a Return from Your Life
If you don’t believe God is looking for a return, you haven’t really understood your Bible.
Try sitting around and doing nothing for a while, waiting for something to happen. Try simply existing and doing a half-baked job at whatever you do. See how you dreadful you feel in a short time. That’s because you were never designed to be unproductive or underachieving. God has programmed you to feel uncomfortable in places you don’t belong.
It is simply un-Biblical to be unproductive or an ‘under-producer’.
What’s Holding You Back?
Because He loves you and knows that you will be exhilarated by the journey of a life well lived, He doesn’t want you to be limited by fear, inferiority and underachievement. In order to fulfill your calling, you must develop a right view of yourself as a child of God or you will end up limiting yourself with your own thoughts, just like the children of Israel almost did. Thank God for Joshua and Caleb who knew how to observe things from God’s perspective. We need more people like that in the marketplace these days.
The Key of Identity is the key of knowing both who you are and who God is.
We briefly touched on this in the introduction, but it’s worth hearing again. As one of those precious ones that God has called into the marketplace (as opposed to full time church ministry), you are not a second class citizen in the Kingdom of God.
You are a called, gifted, significant, frontline worker whom God dearly loves.
No One Can Make You Feel Inferior Without Your Permission
Please allow this statement fill your heart. Otherwise, a sense of inferiority will subtly begin to attach itself to you and grow over time, eventually limiting your life. This could even be affecting you right now more than you realize. Remember this, no one can make you feel inferior without your permission, so please don’t give that permission to anyone.
Like the song says, in terms of being you, “nobody does it better”.
You are called and chosen of God to fulfill a divine purpose that is especially designed for you. For most of you reading this article that calling will only be fulfilled in the marketplace. There is not another human being who can do at better job at your calling than you.
Don’t allow others with a different calling (even if they are leaders you look up to) make you feel like a second class citizen, like you need to be just like them or do things exactly the way that they do.
It takes effort, prayer, life experience and study to gain a right view of yourself and of who God is. (For some it is much more difficult because they have been more exposed to forces consistently pointing them to wrong conclusions about themselves and God.)
But once you do, you start gaining momentum on the road of life.
God is a Builder and He’s Building Something Out of Your Life! (1 Cor. 3:9)
You begin to know things such as that God is a builder and He is a God of progress, and, created in His image, so should you be. Once you begin to have a right view of yourself and of God, you naturally and supernaturally gravitate toward the arena that He has designed you to operate in.
When you begin to operate in the right place, your effectiveness grows more quickly there, as well as your ability. That’s partly because As you continue to operate in obedience to the divine call, you will gain the right kind of confidence.
Scores of books have been written on the subject of building confidence through various techniques as opposed to knowing who God has made you, doing what He tells you and maintaining proper reliance on Him. Try obeying your calling instead. Godly confidence will grow and have a powerful effect in your life. But first you will need to obtain the Key of Identity and put it to work.
There is significantly more to this topic to share, but that’s a start For now- let’s move on.
Rick For Ti-MC
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Arguably Biblical concepts such as “subdue the earth,” the curse, the Great Commission, and the economic requirements of family suggest godly goals for our work and faith–like avoiding economic dependence on others.
However, nowhere that I can recall in the Bible do I see anything like Eleanor Roosevelt’s “No One Can Make You Feel Inferior Without Your Permission.”
On the contrary, Paul, for example, finds it necessary to exhort the Christians in Rome not think more highly of themselves than they ought. Even the much-cited “Love thy neighbor” merely assumes self-love (”as thyself”) rather than encourages it. Further, when the psalmist is attacked and mocked by evil men, the Roosevelt concept is nowhere proposed as far as I can recall.
We may assume one can underestimate one’s God-given abilities and potential, but there are times when one ought to feel inferior to some on a particular parameter because one is in fact inferior (and humility would suggest we ought to regard others as better than ourselves anyway). The text of Scripture seems far more interested in confidence in God rather than in self. And those confident in God always seem to get the job done and done right.
I also agree that in some circles the clergy/laity distinction sometimes leads to pride among the “in” clergy and leader-worship (or leader-exaltation) among the laity. This is a problem. In some ways, this can be like the “I am of Paul, I am of Apollos” division in Corinth. And for what it is worth in Corinth, Paul’s solution seems to exclude anything like “No One Can Make You Feel Inferior Without Your Permission.”
All this is not to say that I want to be a wet blanket for acts of faith in business building and entrepreneurship. Rather, I hope to caution the reader … and solicit gentle Bible-based correction to my caveats where appropriate. I certainly have not offered anything like the last word, but hope to have contributed something of worth.
May God move His people to be productive and to recognize our callings as you have encouraged us.
Perhaps our deep-down beliefs about the God we worship have an effect on our productivity too.
Peter Rubel
@Peter
The point made is a very good one; and hopefully readers will consider and even offer further comment. Such a purposely thought out and well crafted response doesn’t appear without effort.
Thanks for investing time rather than slapping together what dominates much of the net - groundless chatter.
Purposeful insight; corrective or confirming - and anything in between - based on one’s own best understanding of Biblical concepts, especially with a motivation to help guard and encourage without stifling, is welcome here. Bravo!
Let’s discuss the post.
While some truths may seem so clear, application of those truths can be a little tricky. One person needs more humility (probably most of us) - one needs more courage; one needs to stand up, another sit down. One is waiting on the Lord while one has a command to advance. Yet truth is truth no matter.
For what it’s worth, from my experiences as a full-time Pastor and businessman, here is something I have observed: I have seen dramatically more Christians struggling with a sense of Godly identity than who have one. I have seen this struggle over and over produce self-imposed limitations that God never intended. I have seen those outcomes consistently called spiritual.
While my experience hardly trumps the Bible, allow me to carry the discussion into a slightly different light. Regarding counting others as better than ourselves, phil 2:3, taken as an individual Scripture seems pretty clear. However, in the context of the verses that surround it, 1-7, and the original language, the ideas being conveyed here may be a little different than taught conventionally.
Paul is speaking to believers. So first of all he is not actually saying that if we walk around in front of the whole world as if we were nobody’s - that’s humility and spirituality. (That’s an exaggerated point, but hopefully clear…) In fact, this is directly in reference to believers with one another. Where Christians most often struggle with forced inferiority is not from other believer’s, but from the rest of the world.
The overall concept in the passage in Philippians 2:1-7, is about being like minded and unified as believers, not allowing individual agendas (selfish ambitions) or self absorption to rule the day. That as we all keep the big picture in mind and serve God and one another, obeying Him, rather than being at odds with each other - we are on the right track. This is the context of deferring to one another.
While that makes interesting theological discussion,here is perhaps a more important point. Paul is directing believers to choose or ‘put on’ this attitude toward other believers, a voluntary internal act; not a forced external one. In other words, Paul is not saying “deal with it; everyone is superior to you”.
How could we defeat any “giants in the land” if our attitude is to serve those giants. He is saying, instead “consider the interests of God and other believers very highly, CHOOSE to put their interests in front of your own. This is a personal decision, not forced on us, not made without ‘giving permission’ or choosing to take on the attitude.
Choosing to serve somebody, rather than being forced to be their slave, might look positionally similar - but is quite different.
The quote, no one can make you feel inferior without your permission, although not a direct Biblical quote and often attributed to Roosevelt, still holds weight - perhaps. The Bible also says that “the people who know their God shall be strong and carry out great exploits” in Dan 11:32 and is full of stories where men and women of God led victorious armies and accomplished great things in society, fully serving God yet not being forced to bow to wrong things.
Balancing the truth can be a challenge.
The point submitted, nonetheless, is a very good one. Thanks for challenging and sharpening us, truly. We look forward to your next post.