Devotional: Business Continuation

Your threshing will continue until grape harvest and the grape harvest will continue until planting. Leviticus 26:5

Even business leaders whose companies are doing well wonder whether their current business performance can be sustained. What if Scripture showed a possible way to avoid business downturns? The first thirteen verses of Leviticus 26 hold the conditions and the promises of sustained business performance. Our challenge is that we read it and think it is Old Testament mumbo jumbo and therefore miss the truth.

The conditions don’t seem that onerous: No idols of any sort, observe the Sabbath, reverence the sanctuary, follow God’s decrees, and obey his commands. What does this look like if we put that into New Testament speak—make that 21st Century language? 

• Idolatry for ancient Israel meant buying into the worldview and religious system that were not from God. In business this means basing our business practices on assumptions that are not Biblical.
• “Observe the Sabbath” means shutting down operations one day a week, not as a law, but as an act of faith, trusting that if you take special time for God, he will look after your work.
• “Reverence the sanctuary” – the physical sanctuary has gone. We are now carriers of God’s presence as his Spirit lives in us. Has your workplace become a sanctuary yet?
• Decrees – laws and Biblical principles for business. Follow them.
• Commands – the things God speaks to you every day, the law of the Spirit written on your heart, the sayings of God that come from daily relationship with him.

The promised outcome of following God in these ways is amazing.

I will send you rain in its season, and the ground will yield its crops and the trees of the field their fruit. Your threshing will continue until grape harvest and the grape harvest will continue until planting, and you will eat all the food you want and live in safety in your land. You will still be eating last year's harvest when you will have to move it out to make room for the new.

Opposition is normal when you first decide to align your business with God. Business growth is normal when our business is fully aligned with God. Between these two statements lies The University of the Desert. The desert is not God’s ultimate destination for us, however, and he longs that we be in a place where he can bless us and our work from one season to the next. By implication, he also wants our capital base to grow because that is what transpires when last season’s output is still in hand when the next season’s products fill the shelves. Wellbeing and supernatural sustenance is normal in God’s presence. Abiding fruit is the outcome of God’s abiding presence. This is the best business continuation strategy.

Reflections

• Have you been seeking sustained business before seeking the sustained, lingering presence of God?
  
  
• How can your mind be renewed, your faith level raised, your hope sustained to believe for God’s mark of business continuation?