Faithfulness without guarantees

I've been following a few faith and business accounts online lately. The kind that put entrepreneurship and manifestation in the same sentence. Declare your breakthrough. Claim your abundance. Align your mindset with your destiny.

I believe God is involved in what we build. I believe prayer matters. The abilities and relationships I work with were entrusted to me, and I think running a business can be faithful work. That's where I'm starting from. It's also why this stuff bothers me.

Somewhere along the way, trust in God becomes a promise that you can secure the outcome you want. And I understand the appeal more than I'd like to.

I've run my own business long enough to know how frightening the quiet months are. You want someone to tell you it's going to be all right. A theology that offers certainty finds an audience because uncertainty is hard to carry.

That doesn't make the certainty true.

When faith becomes a formula

The message goes roughly like this: your words have creative power, your mindset shapes your reality, and if you declare what you want with enough belief, it will happen. The explicitly Christian version adds that God has promised you abundance, poverty is a mindset, and business success is evidence of your faith.

There are ordinary truths mixed into it. The way you think affects the decisions you make. Confidence can help you have a difficult conversation or put a proposal in front of someone. But none of that gives your words authority over the future, or turns God's promises into a guarantee about your business.

Once it does, prayer becomes a technique for getting a result. God becomes someone expected to comply with the plan.

The cruelty becomes visible when a business fails. If the formula works, the person whose venture collapsed must have failed to apply it. Not enough faith. The wrong mindset. Somewhere, a doubt they shouldn't have entertained.

I've watched that logic applied to people already grieving the loss of something they poured everything into. On top of the financial loss and the exhaustion, they're handed a spiritual accusation. You didn't believe hard enough.

I hear an echo of Job's friends in that. They kept trying to explain his suffering by locating the fault in him. At the end of the book, God rebukes them for speaking wrongly about him (Job 42:7). Their confidence in the explanation hadn't made it true.

We should be much slower to tell someone what their suffering proves.

The plans I make

There's a verse I keep returning to: “The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps.” Proverbs 16:9.

I used to read that as reassurance that God would get behind whatever I'd decided. The more I sit with it, the less it sounds like an endorsement of my business plan. I can make the plan. I can't establish the outcome, and God's purposes are wider than mine.

James is fairly withering about merchants announcing where they'll go, how long they'll trade and how much money they'll make, as though tomorrow is theirs to arrange. He tells them to acknowledge that even their continued life depends on God's will (James 4:13–15).

I still need to send the proposal, price the work properly and think about next year. Holding those plans provisionally is an honest account of how much I know and how little I control.

The uncertainty remains. Faith gives me someone to trust within it.

The prayer that didn't remove the problem

Paul's thorn is the passage I find hardest to square with the promise that sufficient faith produces the outcome you're asking for.

He asked three times for it to be taken away. The answer he records is: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” That's 2 Corinthians 12:9.

Paul received sustaining grace while the thing he wanted removed remained. His weakness became a place where he experienced Christ's power. Whatever else we make of that passage, it rules out a simple equation between faithful prayer and relief on our terms.

I need to be careful here too. It would be easy to replace one neat explanation with another and tell every person whose business closed that God must have had a better lesson waiting in the loss. I don't know that. I don't get to explain someone else's grief just because my explanation sounds more theologically respectable.

What I do believe is that a venture can close while the work was honest and God was present. Failure alone can't tell us whether someone was faithful. And I don't have to identify the purpose of a loss before I can trust that God hasn't abandoned the person carrying it.

What I'm responsible for

If the revenue figure can't tell me whether I've been faithful, I need to pay attention to how I'm doing the work.

Tell the truth. Keep my promises. Treat the people I work with justly. Accept correction before it gets expensive. Use what I've been given responsibly, including the money. Be willing to change course.

That's demanding enough without adding a requirement to make every venture succeed.

Revenue matters. A business needs to pay its bills, and people can be hurt by poor decisions. Trusting God doesn't excuse me from learning how to run the business, looking honestly at the numbers or taking responsibility when I've got something wrong.

But landing a particular client involves another person's choice. A sound decision can meet terrible timing. I can be responsible for my decisions and the harm they cause without pretending I control every consequence.

Success brings its own test. When work comes in and things go well, I want to receive that gratefully. It gives me more to be responsible for. The instruction to the wealthy in 1 Timothy 6:17–19 is to avoid arrogance, put their hope in God and be generous. There's very little room there for treating the bank balance as a certificate of spiritual achievement.

Holding the results loosely

I still pray about work. I still want the business to do well. There are clients I'd love to work with and things I'd love to build. I don't think I need to stop wanting those things to hold them honestly before God.

What I need to give up is the demand for a guarantee. The idea that enough prayer, the right words or a sufficiently disciplined mindset will make the future safe.

I can see why I want that. In a quiet month, I'd much rather have certainty than another opportunity to practise trust. Writing about this doesn't put me beyond the temptation.

But the work in front of me is to be honest, keep my word and use what I've been given well. To remain trustworthy when the outcome disappoints me. To receive success with gratitude and face failure without deciding that God has left.

Holding the results loosely is easier to write than to do. I'm still figuring it out.