In this Bible and Business video series on the eight “A’s” that kill healthy, business partnerships, Bill English, Publisher of Bible and Business, explores the sixth “A”: Arrogance This content comes from Bill’s books, “A Christian Theology of Business Ownership,” and the abridged version, “What the Bible Says About Owning and Business.” You can watch the companion video on the Bible and Business channel. Download the series slides.
[00:00:25.210] – Bill English
And welcome back. I’m Bill English, the publisher here at Bible and Business. I want to thank you for joining me today. This video is part of an eight part series that talks about the eight as that kill healthy partnerships. And as you can see on the slide, those A’s are anger, apathy, affairs, abuse, addictions, arrogance, ambiguity, and being an autocrat or autocratic mess.
[00:00:52.470] – Bill English
And so this content comes from my book, a Christian Theology of Business Ownership an Introduction for Christian Entrepreneurs and what the Bible says about owning a business. The condensed or the abridged version is now published under the title what the Bible Says About Owning a Business. You can get both of these books@amazon.com or any other online retailer of your choice, but these are the things, these are the elements that kill healthy partnerships. So in the last series out of chapter four in this book, I did the ten Elements that Build Healthy Partnerships, remaining in chapter four of this book. I’m not going over the eight as or the eight elements that can kill Healthy Business Partnerships.
[00:01:41.140] – Bill English
Just a note on this. If you have one A, probably it’s going to be okay. It’ll take some extra cycles to keep your business partnership going, but it really should be okay. Two A’s. It gets difficult.
[00:01:54.120] – Bill English
And any three of these characteristics and your partnership is not going to work well, you might as well just call it a day. The partnership will eventually implode. And if they exist and you’re trying to put together a partnership, I would say don’t even try. Just walk away from it and try to have a happy life. So before we get started, though, on Arrogance Today, which is our topic, I want to invite you to head over to Bibleandbusiness.com and check out the articles and the podcasts.
[00:02:25.300] – Bill English
You can download the slides for this series in PDF format, and I’ll ask that you take a moment and subscribe to this YouTube channel as well. So let’s get going. Our topic today is arrogance. Got kind of a couple of different slides here than what I normally have when I’m teaching. Take a look at this slide for just a moment.
[00:02:48.180] – Bill English
Who do you notice on here?
[00:02:52.940] – Bill English
Well, you notice a number of men, and it’s really not about their race. There’s only one AfricanAmerican man. All of these men are disgraced, either through sexual immorality, or through power and abuse or through money. All of these are ministers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. All of them.
[00:03:18.490] – Bill English
And all of them have fallen. The one commonality that they all have is arrogance. These are all arrogant men, and their arrogance is the reason that they fell. None of them should be in leadership right now. One of them is Mark Driscoll, but none of them should be in the pulpit right now.
[00:03:43.700] – Bill English
I think James McDonald has also started another church, but he shouldn’t be in ministry either. But it doesn’t just happen to Christian leaders, right? It also happens to other leaders in our culture. And you can look here and see a number of people that you might recognize either from the entertainment industry or from politics or just from life in general. But all of these are disgraced leaders.
[00:04:11.150] – Bill English
And the one thing they all have in common is that they thought they wouldn’t get caught. They were all arrogant. And that really kind of forms a context or a backdrop for my lesson today on arrogance. Arrogance is a core characteristic of a wicked person. Arrogance is hated by God.
[00:04:32.450] – Bill English
You can read that in James four, six and one Peter five five. And it is a killer to any ministry effort, and it is often a killer to for profit business partnerships. It is rebellion against God. Just read Nehemiah 916 and 17. And rebellion and divination are directly associated with arrogance.
[00:04:55.720] – Bill English
In one Samuel 1523, arrogance is not something that you want in your partnership. You do not want it in your partners, and your partners are not going to want it in you. And so to the extent that arrogance exists in your partnership, your partnership is going to have a difficult time. So let’s read Psalm 73, verses three through twelve. For I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
[00:05:25.690] – Bill English
They have no struggles. Their bodies are healthy and strong. They are free from common human burdens. They are not plagued by human ills. Therefore pride is their necklace.
[00:05:38.240] – Bill English
They clothe themselves with violence. From their callous heart comes iniquity and their evil imaginations have no limits. They scoff and speak with malice, with arrogance they threaten opposition. Their mouths lay claim to heaven and their tongues take possession of the earth. Therefore their people turn to them and drink up waters in abundance.
[00:06:03.830] – Bill English
They say, how would God know? Does the Most High know anything? This is what the wicked are like, always free of care. And they go on amassing wealth. Now, let’s take a few notes about this passage.
[00:06:20.630] – Bill English
First of all, in human terms, these people are described in Psalm 73 as strong. They look good and they’re prosperous, and they seemingly have no struggles. But because of their pride and superiority, they are violent, without limits to their evil. They oppress others and act as if God is stupid, if he even exists at all. I mean, look at this thing down here.
[00:06:49.040] – Bill English
They say, how would God know? Does the Most High know anything? That’s a pretty arrogant statement when you stop to think about it. They are wealthy and they hoard it. So these people look good, they sound good, they act good.
[00:07:05.800] – Bill English
They seem to have no problems. They will tend to oppress others because they’re powerful. They’ll tend to oppress others because they are wealthy and they hoard their wealth. They’re not generous, and they really think God is kind of a stupid concept. They don’t need God.
[00:07:23.990] – Bill English
In fact, God probably needs them is probably how they look at it, right? But in God’s economy these arrogant people are weak. They are lost. They are haters of God and they are lovers of evil. They fancy themselves as living the dream or being on top when really in reality one day God is going to bring them low.
[00:07:46.490] – Bill English
And like everybody else and this comes from Colossians they too, like everyone else, will bow their knee to Jesus Christ. They will submit themselves to Jesus Christ. Now, how does arrogance harm partnerships? Well, first of all they are difficult to coach and they’re difficult to work with, okay? They are just difficult people really to be around.
[00:08:14.910] – Bill English
Secondly, they have a strong need to be right all of the time. These are people who will argue till the end just because they know they’re right and they won’t let anybody else win the argument. They will have the last word and they will always be right. Even if they’re wrong. Even if they’re wrong, they’re going to be right.
[00:08:37.410] – Bill English
They are not emotionally vulnerable and you’ll find that at times their ethics are kind of slippery. They kind of live on the edge. Maybe they’re a little bit shady in some of their business dealings. Arrogant people really do not like to submit to authority and they often don’t respect many who are in authority. They’re going to lack gratitude for what other people do for them.
[00:09:00.290] – Bill English
You’ll find that they rarely say thank you and they rarely will admit that they are wrong. Arrogant people tend to be stubborn and they tend to rarely admit that they are wrong. They often lack genuine concern for others. They’ll have an appropriate social concern for other people. But when it comes to them having a real concern for others more than likely they reserve that just for maybe their spouse and their kids and maybe one or two others.
[00:09:32.530] – Bill English
But beyond that they really won’t care much for other people. They’re often preoccupied with themselves. In other words, they interpret the world in terms of how things around them affect them. And while they might get how one part A affects part B or person one affects person two, their primary concern will be how person one and person two affected them. So they will be egocentric in how they view the world and they will often be demeaning of others.
[00:10:08.090] – Bill English
They will discount others ideas. They will put others down. They will have to have the preeminent idea. They will have to be the person who wins. And that will mean sometimes demeaning other people.
[00:10:24.360] – Bill English
Arrogance is really difficult to heal from or to fix. Again, there’s no easy button like the last slide there or like the last episode that I talked about on addictions. There is no easy button here. Usually in order to reach them. If they are highly arrogant by the time they’re adults that means that they’ve been pretty successful and they’ve gotten through life with their arrogance and they’ve had people around them who have accommodated their arrogance and have made excuses for them.
[00:10:57.830] – Bill English
More than likely in order to reach these kind of people, god usually has to break them financially and probably socially before they will humble themselves before the Lord. These people just rarely, rarely come to Christ as adults. You just don’t see it happening very often. And there are many pastors we see who have had private sin revealed because they were too arrogant to repent of their sin privately before God. And that first Montage slide, that collage of pictures, that first slide of all of those pastors illustrates this very well.
[00:11:37.790] – Bill English
It can take years of God grinding them down before he’s able to really use them and build them up.
[00:11:46.340] – Bill English
They will need to repent and find ways to serve others. They’ll need to learn to take one down positions in relationships and in business. These people are going to go through business and go through life always like a salmon. They’re always swimming upstream and it’s always somebody else’s fault and they are just really difficult people to be around.
[00:12:14.840] – Bill English
I just want to advise you that if you’re in a partnership with a really highly arrogant partner, you’ve probably already thought about exiting the partnership, quite frankly. And if you haven’t, maybe you should consider doing so. They’re time suckers, they’re energy suckers and they will drain the emotions out of you because they are really high maintenance people to be around. So in a quick review, arrogance in terms of a business partnership I don’t like it and I don’t think that partnerships do well when there are arrogant partners in the partnership. Remember that a core characteristic of a wicked person is arrogance.
[00:13:01.510] – Bill English
It’s hated by God, it’s a killer to any ministry effort and it’s often a killer to business partnerships. And in order for arrogance to be resolved or healed within a person, god usually has to break them financially or through some other type of personal collapse. So my advice if you’re in a business partnership again with an arrogant person, you may just want to take a look at how you can get out of that partnership and move on. If you’re looking at getting into a partnership and you’re looking at doing that and you know one of the partners is highly arrogant, you really got to consider whether that’s a good move for you or not, whether God really wants you to do that or not. Our next episode is ambiguity.
[00:13:50.290] – Bill English
How do we deal with partners who are ambiguous in their communications, ambiguous in their values, ambiguous in what they really want out of the business? Those can be very, very difficult partners to deal with. So until we meet again in the next episode, I want to thank you for joining me here today. I’m Bill English, the publisher at Bible and Business. If you ever want to get a hold of me, you can you can just drop me an email.
[00:14:19.760] – Bill English
Bill@bibleandandbusiness.com, bill@bibleandbusiness.com, I’d love to hear from you. I’d love to find out what kind of a business you’re in. I’d love to find out how it could be of help to you. And I’m not thinking, like, paid help here. I’m just thinking let’s talk for a little bit about a problem that you’re having and see if I can add value in some way.
[00:14:41.500] – Bill English
I always enjoy doing that with business owners. So, again, thank you for coming today, and I hope to see you at the next episode on Ambiguity. So until then, go out and make it a great day. Take care.
[00:15:09.890] – Bill English
Thank you.