This content is taken from Chapter 5, Advice and Wisdom, from A Christian Theology of Business Ownership. In this episode, Bill English discusses four cautions that every Christian Business Owner should consider when receiving advice.
Here is the transcript:
And welcome back. I’m Bill English, the publisher here. Bye. One business. My throat is a little raspy today, but that’s okay.
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We’re in the second of eight-part series on giving and receiving advice, advisors, and wisdom. All of that is from chapter five of my book a Christian Theology of Business Ownership. Today I’m just going to briefly go over four different cautions that I have for you and I as Christian business owners to consider when it comes to giving or receiving advice. But before we get going, I’d like to just invite you to go get a copy of my book biblical Wisdom for Business Leaders. 30 sayings from Proverbs where I take the 30 sayings of the sage and I apply them to business leadership in today’s marketplace.
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And then also if you’d like to read the abridged version of my Christian Theology of business ownership, you can do so. The book is titled what the Bible Says About Owning a Business. It’s much shorter than the other book and maybe that would be the version that you would read. All the content is there. What I did was I stripped out all the Greek and Hebrew and a lot of the quotes that just embellished the points that I was trying to make.
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I’ll also invite you to head over to Bibleandbusiness.com, download the slides and PDF format for this episode and also take a look at some of the articles and the podcasts and other things that I have. My whole site is written for Christians who own businesses. We’re not prosperity gospel. We’re not going to share any secrets of the Bible with you because the Bible doesn’t have any secrets. The Bible is very plain.
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Anybody can read it and understand what it says if they choose to. And so what we’re going to do over at Bible and Business is just encourage you to become the steward that God wants you to be as you steward the entrustment that God has for you, which is your business. So let’s hit these four cautions real quickly here. First of all, caution number one, when it comes to giving and receiving advice, especially receiving advice, you want to choose your advisors carefully. Who your advisors are is highly important.
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But not only should they be competent individuals, but they need to have the character to help you understand maybe some of the ethical decisions that you need to make as well as, as a Christian, they really should be Christians, people who know how to connect with God and understand the spiritual aspects of what you’re trying to accomplish. So I would encourage you to use when you’re looking for characteristics in these in your advisors is to use the tenses from the previous chapter in the book or the previous playlist that I’ve already completed at Bible and Business at the YouTube channel. Go ahead and listen to those or take a look at those. Those characteristics can be used to give you guidance on who you select as an advisor. I also just want to say it’s okay to try them out.
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It’s okay to have them come in and give you advice for six months or a year and then maybe move away from them if they’re not really giving you kind of the sage advice that you need. And by the way, sage advice doesn’t mean that they’ll always agree with you, and it doesn’t mean that they won’t kind of challenge you at some points either to be better than you are as a person or to reconsider some of what you do or how you go about doing things in your business. Caution number two not all advice should be followed. And really the big point here is that God is going to hold you responsible for your actions and your words and the decisions that you make. Just because somebody else gives you advice doesn’t mean that God lets you off the hook in terms of choosing whether or not you’re going to follow their advice.
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So just remember that ultimately God will hold you accountable for your words and actions, for your decisions. So not all advice should be followed. Some of it should be listened and considered, but then not followed. These last two are really for advice givers. If you’re giving advice, remember that an opinion is not advice.
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An opinion about what to do doesn’t always take into consideration the moral implications or even the what I call the appropriateness of an opinion. Some opinions can be quite strong and quite extreme. And so you just want to make sure that when you’re giving advice, you’re giving it within the context of serving your friend and within the moral framework that he or she works within. And then it points them in a particular direction that they need to go or that you think they need to go. That is not always an opinion.
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And so you just need to remember that. Number four, an idea is not an advice. You guys may come up with a great idea, but that doesn’t mean you should pursue it. So advice means, like I said before, here’s the direction you should go. And it’s given within the moral framework that you have a great idea, maybe worth several billion dollars once it’s implemented.
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That doesn’t mean it’s advice. So talk it through and let them percolate these ideas. Let them mature, and probably out of that will come some sage advice and kind of directions that people should go. Now, these are the stages of information maturity. If you’ve ever looked at how to organize information, this matrix here or this hierarchy here is very common in the record keeping in the information organization world.
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Just understand that your advice is not going to sit, or at least good advice does not sit at the first three levels data, information, and knowledge. Really good advice is going to sit at the understanding in the wisdom layer. When you’re seeking advice, you’re seeking wisdom. And wisdom is knowing all that you can about your situation and then applying all that God has in the Bible to your situation so that you have an understanding of what God would have you to do within the moral framework that he has. And that here’s the direction that you should go.
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So really, when you’re seeking advice, you’re seeking wisdom, you’re seeking insight, you’re seeking understanding. You’re not looking for just raw data or just maybe how the data relates to itself. So just understand that you are looking for wisdom and guidance, and that really should come from a person of maturity and a person of competence. So in the next episode, we’re going to look at a biblical example of a leader who ignored good advice and the really terrible outcomes that came from that. In the meantime, I want to thank you for joining me today.
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I’m Bill English, the publisher here at Bible and Business. And if I can do anything for you, please feel free just to reach out to me. Bill@bibleandbusiness.com just send me an email and I’d love to chat with you. So until we see each other again, I hope you go out and make it a great day. Take care.
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Bye.
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Thank you.