Business Bondage
Business Bondage comes in many forms, from preoccupation with debt-related problems to overdedication to work. It can be best defined as anything that interferes with your relationship with God and your family and is out of balance with God’s Word. Bondage can be charactirized by a lack of realistic guidelines that help balance our lives.
As humans we usually precondition any commitment to follow God. Does this sound familiar: “I would like to serve God in any way He chooses, God, I’ll serve you but …” or “God I’ll serve you if …”
Jesus was confronted when He was leaving Capernaum. A man wanted to go with him but said: “Permit me first to go and bury my father.” (Luke 9:59)
Jesus’ comment was an obvious one: ” Follow Me. Allow the dead to bury their own dead” (Luke 9:60)
You have the choice today to follow God or follow the world. Most Christians are more than content to live according to the world than living as a radical Christian for Jesus, one who puts God first in all decisions even if putting God first is costly.
How can you identify Business Bondage?
Symptoms: (If you suffer from one of these, you caught the disease and need deliverance from it.)
- An Air of Superiority
- Overwork
- Excessive Use of Credit
- Disorganization
- A Get Rich Quick Mentality
An Air of Superiority
Nothing epitomizes the sad state of society more than an egotistical attitude of many if not most self-made businesspeople. No one is self-made! Only the combined efforts of many people make one person a success and is furthermore the direct result of God’s blessings.
Remember the book of James: James 2:9 - “But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors.”
Some Christians attempt to elevate themselves by spending time or working with succesful Christians beacause it implies sprituality by association. This in itself is not wrong unless the motivation is to show noff a so-called “Christian Celebrity”. God does not need Celebrities. People guilty of this live on past experiences.
Overwork
Our lifestyle today demand more and more indulgences to keep us satisfied. It is not unusual for a business person building a business to work eighty hour weeks regularly and in some case hundred hours or more. Many people caught in this snare expect the same from those working with them.
Yes it is true a forty hour week will rarely allow you to build a successful business but a hundred hour week is a gross imbalance of priorities. This is no dedication to being a good leader. There is no way that any person can maintain a balance between work, family and God with more than a sixty hour work week.
Psalm 127:2 – “It is vain for you to rise up early, to retire late, to eat bread of painful labors for He gives to His beloved even his sleep.”
God does not need us to burn out for Him, He would much rather prefer as wearing out gracefully.
Excessive Use of Credit
No other financial principal dominates business more than credit. Millions of people get displaced when business fail and banks close down as is the case with the current world-wide credit crisis. The fact is that all the previous credit crunches, such as the Great Depression, did apparently not make a difference as people today are even more in debt than ever before.
People are risking their homes and security by by heavily indebting themselves. One would think that businesses would be desperately paying off debts in an attempt to avoid the inevitable collapse, instead most of them are borrowing like there is no tomorrow. Just look at the newspapers and see how many reports there are on mergers and take overs all done on heavily leveraged buy-outs.
When you depend on credit to run a business and never have a plan to become debt-free, you violate the common-sense principal taught in Proverbs 27:12 – “A prudent man sees evil and hides himself, The naive proceed and pay the penalty.”
Disorganization
In scripture this term refers to slothfulness.
Proverbs 10:4 – “Poor is he who works with a negligent hand, But the hand of the diligent makes rich.”
This in no ways justifies overworking but clearly states yet another biblical principal – laziness is sin. We are all disorganized to some extent. Organization is an absolute necessity, not an alternative, in business. This could be a problem for entrepreneurs who are free thinkers and who like to do a variety of things and do not enjoy routine tasks.
A smart entrepreneur will eventually learn that while ideas start businesses, organization makes them successful. That means a bsuiness owner must either develop the necessary discipline or hire someone else to keep the business organized.
A Get-Rich-Quick Mentality
Some people view a business as a vehicle to make some quick money with a minimum amount of effort and then get out. The people who holds true to this philosophy leave broken lives behind them and a distinct distaste for Christianity in the mouths of their employees, customers and suppliers. This get-rich-quick mentality can be seen in business today through the thousands of take-overs and sell-offs happening all over the world.
There is nothing unscriptural about becoming wealthy through the application of your God-given talents in business. But the point where business does become unscriptural is where the lust for rich becomes the overriding drive behind virtually every decision.
True Christian Business people are separated from the unsaved or “carnal” Christians Business people by the way they value the people with whom they interact.
Phillipians 2:3 – “Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind let each of you regard one another as more important than himself.”
What are your real motives? Is it “me first” or others first?
All get-rich-quick schemes are based on greed, and all greed has “me first” at its core. Get-rich-quick thinking leads to 3 basic errors:
- Getting involved with things you do not understand,
- Risking funds you cannot afford to lose and
- Making haste decisions.
Each of these actions violates one or more biblical principals. Together they constitude a sin called greed.
Proverbs 28: 20 – “A faithful man will abound with blessings, But he who makes haste to be rich will not go unpunished.”