But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Matthew 6:33 NIV
There are diverse interpretations as to what it means to “seek first the kingdom of God” as well as what the kingdom of God actually is. As business people, we have a unique role in expanding the kingdom on earth. We need to broaden our thinking of how we can bring heaven to earth through our business.
I reflect on Eden as our original outpost, that corner of the kingdom brought to earth, to be expanded upon until the whole world was colonized as the kingdom of God. We know how that went, and we are now in the do-over process, only with a lot more people and millennia of brokenness and destruction. We have work to do.
In John 18:36, Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” He also said, “If I cast out demons with the finger of God, surely the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Luke 11:20 NKJV). If we need to understand what the kingdom is, we can look to the works of Jesus and heaven as our model of what should and should not be happening here.
So here we are, caught in this space between sacred and secular though that is a completely man-made construct. Our role doesn’t change just because we go to work. But how we operate as a business should.
Earlier, Alice and I shared some examples of the kingdom of God breaking through in our businesses on our customers’ behalf. What we’ll do now is help you think about how the kingdom of God can be brought into this realm through the vehicle of your business and help you develop a plan to be more intentional about it.
We get stuck in the mode of praying for what we and our business needs, and everybody else is a second thought. But that’s not actually how it’s supposed to work. Every successful business, whether Christian or not, is based on serving others and meeting needs. The opening verse suggests that you put the kingdom first in order to get what you need. So how can you be intentional about that from here on out? What does the kingdom look like in your situation?
Secular sources offer this marketing advice: Find your niche, your audience, your ideal customer, or customer avatar. In other words, figure out who your product or service is for. What is your main demographic? They want you to find the person’s so-called pain points or the problem they have and will pay money to resolve. If you’ve already done that, great. We will use that information but a bit differently than you’ve seen. We won’t trigger them or rub salt in their wounds so that they buy our product or service; we will use that as our marker so we can bring about a kingdom shift.
We can look at our products and services, what motivates people when they make a purchase, and how we can address the issue from a kingdom perspective. For example, my best-selling product is an anti-procrastination aid. People buy it once and buy it again and again because they want to accomplish more. The easy way out is to pray for them to accomplish all that they set out to do. But is that really the highest and best?
Now, I’m not saying I know the highest and best, but I do know that empowering someone to run around like a chicken with their head cut off is not as great as motivating someone to discern the right things and do them at the right time in tune with flow. What I can do is pray over my products and the people who use them. I can pray for their discernment about projects and God-ideas so that they can get off the hamster wheel. Through prayer, I can release resources, blessings, and God’s revelations to them. I can release forgiveness to them for times when they’ve shrunk back from their true calling, saying, “That’s too much. I can’t do it.” This, in turn, releases them from the repercussions and vicious of that belief and frees them to see things differently. I can pray they now have courage to take on that thing. I can command their freedom from captivity and a release of their gifts, talents, generational blessings, and provision. And I can pray they have wisdom to instantly see how to defeat obstacles, know their purpose, and discard the busy work. I don’t pray for individual people, but I can pray over a formula. Tangible products can be a carrier, just like Paul’s handkerchief was in Acts.
"In Jesus' name"
Let’s address praying in Jesus’s name since it goes along with what we’re talking about in terms of a higher perspective when praying. John 14:13 says that whatever we ask in his name, he’ll do. And we’re all about asking big in this book.
People ask me all the time if I pray in Jesus’s name. (I really scare a lot of people, so they have to ask.) My answer to that is probably just as off-putting. I say, “If you mean, do I tack ‘In Jesus’s name’ onto the end of a prayer like an incantation, then no. If you mean do I operate in his nature—in his faith; his love for Father, us, and creation; his passion, compassion, and outward expressions that he has gifted us through the indwelling of Holy Spirit—then I certainly aspire to.”
In Hebrew culture, “name” is synonymous with nature or character. That’s why God changed the name of so many Old Testament people after they had an encounter with him. If you reduce praying in Jesus’s name to the string of words that you tack on to the end of a prayer to make it work, then that is an incantation or witchcraft.
I imagine praying in Jesus’s name to be a matter of having the mind of Christ, stepping into him, taking on his nature and character, and praying from that position. It’s praying kingdom prayers. No wonder we get whatever we want when we ask in Jesus’s name!
Your Homework:
For your challenge homework today we have a worksheet below with a couple questions to get you thinking, and some space to draft a big (Big as in thinking big, not long and wordy) kingdom prayer.
Important! We've all been praying for our businesses. This is not more of that. This is you going after kingdom on behalf of your customers, while considering your products and services a vehicle for it. Please look at the example provided in the downloads, and watch the above video if you skipped it.
You can do bullet points or completely script it out. You can think in terms of your overall business, you can choose at least one product, or do your service. If you want to get gung ho and do a bunch of products, you can print as many sheets as you need. I'm including a filled in example using the product I was talking about above so you can see how it looks. Like I said in the video, I just do bullet points and pray it over every item of that product in existance and apply it to all going forward.
When you get done, upload your worksheets below. Next, we get to those other “things” referred to in our opening verse.
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