And welcome back. I’m Bill English, the publisher here at Bible and Business. I want to thank you for joining me today. This is part five of a 30 part series that’s coming from my book Biblical Wisdom for Business Leaders, 30 sayings from prophet Proverbs. And the title of this particular lesson comes from Proverbs chapter 22, verse 29 competence wins every time.
But before we get started, I just want to let you know that these are the ways that you can get a hold of me or to follow the content that I’m generating. You’re always welcome to email me at bill@bibleindbusiness.com. I also invite you to head over to my website where I have well over 200 podcasts and over 200 articles written specifically for Christian business owners and Christian business leaders who want to integrate their faith with their role as an owner or as a leader in business. So let’s go ahead and get started. Proverbs 22 29 and the Niv reads like this do you see someone skilled in their work?
They will serve before kings. They will not serve before officials of low rank professional athletes and musicians. Those who make their money playing sports or playing music usually have considerable raw talents. But their success isn’t just because they’re talented. Their success really comes from devoting their lives to developing their talents.
Their abilities on the field, their abilities on the court, their abilities on the stage or in the studio really take years to develop. And so while some of what they do might come naturally, much of what we see results really from a considerable amount of work and dedication to improving their skills. Not just physically, but the mental toughness that goes with it, the emotional capacities, all those things. These are people who end up serving before kings. They really don’t perform those of how the verse terms it low rank.
The way that we get ahead in business based on this, the way that we get ahead in business is not by crushing the poor in court. We’ve already seen that in one of the previous lessons. And we don’t steal from others. We don’t get ahead by stealing. Instead, we get ahead by developing our skills to the point where we have an excellent work product.
In other words, when potential customers come and take a look at our work product and they compare our product with that of our competitors, they’re going to choose to buy from us because we are more competent, and that is shown in our work product. Those who try to gain customers through nefarious means they’re not going to be successful. Their work product is going to be inferior. And what this proverb teaches us is that we need to keep going. We need to not stop.
It just good enough. We need to keep developing ourselves, both our professional skills as well as our interpersonal and personal skills so that we can present an excellent work product.
I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but the people who are the most competent, they usually end up working with other people who are really competent in other areas. That’s why I wrote this here on the slide. Those with significant wealth and power are typically drawn to work with really highly qualified professionals. The phrase that they will serve before kings shows that the best in their fields serve the best and the highest in other fields. That’s why you’ll find people who are really at the top of their fields.
They tend to know people who are at the top of other fields. Your top accountants know the top lawyers. The top lawyers know the top athletes. The top athletes know the top actors. The top actors know the top agents.
The top agents know the top lawyers.
That’s really how this works. You’ll find that those who are really highly competent will tend to have influential people as their clients. Now a lot of times depends on the vertical. They don’t want people to know who their client base is or the clients don’t want to be known as being a client of a particular type of person. But you will find if you ever dig in behind the scenes and can learn about some of the customer lists of some of these really high profile and highly competent professionals, they’ve got a lot of well known people on their list.
So I’m going to shift for a moment based on this competence, what’s our role here? I’m going to start working with what our takeaways are here. Well, first of all, I just want to ask really a challenging question. We need to define our role primarily as stewards. And I’m going to connect that back to competence in just a moment, okay?
But if I were to strip away your title and all of your wealth, what would be your identity? And I think this is an important question because if you view yourself primarily as a steward of that which God has given to you, then your wealth and your title can go away and your identity and your role in life doesn’t change. But if you have tied much of your identity and maybe even all of your identity to your role as an owner or to your role as a successful businessman or business woman or maybe you’ve tied your role to all of your wealth and your identity is tied there, then if we take that away, you’re really just an empty vacuous person, right? There’s really nothing there. I have met more business owners in their 70s who have nothing to retire to because their identity is completely 100% wrapped up into their role as a business owner and as a wealthy person.
That’s not what God desires from us. He wants something very different for us. So I’m going to suggest that our stewardship includes working on who we are, not just our professional development here and here’s an interesting quote from Henry Cloud in his book Integrity. He says, while you don’t need all the gifts that exist in the world parenthesis, in order to be successful and parenthesis, you do need all the aspects of character while you’re putting your gifts to work. And if your character and your identity are wrapped up in your title and in your wealth, you’re never going to develop the character necessary to put a bunch of different gifts to work and be effective at it.
You might be good at a few professional skills, but your interpersonal or your personal character deficiencies will actually create more problems for you down the road. Every time you try to exert energy in an area that you’re not good at, you just make things worse. And when that happens, it’s really difficult for you to fulfill your stewardship role before the Lord. So what this means is that you may need to hire a coach or you may need to go see some counseling to overcome some private sin. Whatever the situation is, you need to be working on yourself so that your primary role, how you view yourself becomes that of a steward before the Lord Jesus Christ.
You’re a steward before you’re an owner, and you can be a steward with $10 as well as 10 million. And the amount of money doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter to God. I’ll tell you that. What matters to God is where your heart is.
And so I’m emphasizing stewardship for a reason. America says, develop yourself so that you can achieve more and be more wealthy. But God says, let me transform you from the inside out, and I’ll make you more competent at stewarding. My entrustments that I have given to you than you ever thought possible. Here’s what I want to suggest is that life isn’t about money, it’s about stewardship.
And the way that we steward the gifts and the talents that he has given to us is by working on our competence, to increase our competence, so that we become the best that we can be, so that we don’t steal, we don’t crush the needy in court. And we have a lot of influence for the Lord and the highest levels of whatever profession it is that we choose. But on top of that, you have to work on who you are as a person. Because if who you are as a person is really deficient, you might become pretty competent at what you do, but you won’t be able to be effective for Jesus Christ in the marketplace. So our main lesson here today, professional development is a stewardship issue, but so is personal development.
Let’s not be lazy in developing ourselves into all we can be so that we can steward well what God has entrusted to us. In our next episode, we’re going to be looking at Proverbs 23, verses one through three, and the topic there is going to be on controlling your desires. So thank you for joining me today. I’m Bill English, the publisher here at Bible and Business. If you do want to get a hold of me, just go ahead and email me at bill@bibleandbusiness.com.
I’d love to kind of think through some of your most difficult situations that you’re facing and maybe pay it forward with you a little bit and see how I can be of help to you. So until we see each other again, thanks for joining me, and I hope you go out and have a very blessed day. Take care.