This must be one of
the saddest of all situations; You have a business or a career for which God has great plans, but those plans are never realized because you limited God’s involvement in them. You end your career with just a fraction of the impact you could have had.
I believe that situation is the rule, not
the exception for most Christians in the marketplace. If we could change that, we could change the world in one generation. While God has great plans for our careers and our businesses, we all too often limit his intervention in our lives by the things that we do. While there are lots of ways that we can limit God’s involvement with us, here are three of the most common.
Ignorance.
In this scenario, we just don’t know how intensely God is interested in our business and our marketplace lives. We are ignorant of it because we’ve never really looked into it. Our attention has been directed elsewhere. Typically, that is either the institutional church system or the worldly success
culture.
The institutional church system (that is my term for the conglomerate of church buildings, pastors, workshop services, denominations, seminars, etc. that make up one of the largest industries in the world) promotes itself, and thereby denigrates other areas of Christian growth. For
example, you may be encouraged to attend every function of the institutional church and find yourself busy several days and nights a week. Since this is promoted as the example of a ‘good’ Christian, everything else is therefore, ‘non-good.” So, you can be very involved in the institutional church system, and not have time to even consider that your career may be a ministry of its own.
