In this Bible and Business episode, Bill English discusses why perseverance is so important for us as we live out our covenant relationship with God in our role as business owners. This is the third episode in a seven part series on the Theological Context for Business Owners. The slides can be downloaded in PDF format from bibleandbusiness.com. The companion video is here. The companion blog post is here. The slides can be downloaded in PDF format from the downloads section of this web site.
[00:00:04.960] – Bill English
And welcome back. I’m Bill English. Here the publisher at Bible and Business. I want to thank you for joining me today. We’re in the fourth episode of a sevenpart series on the theological context of business owners worship.
[00:00:19.650] – Bill English
The first three topics have been reigning with Christ, the Divine Counsel, and covenants. Today we’re going to talk about perseverance. Perseverance being our response to God’s faithfulness in our covenant relationship with Him. All of this is covered in chapter one of my book, a Christian Theology of Business Ownership.
[00:00:46.010] – Bill English
Before we dive into the topic of perseverance today, I’d like to invite you to visit my website@bibleandbusiness.com, where you will find articles and podcasts, some downloadable tools. You’ll also be able to sign up for my online CEO and owners group for Christians who own businesses, and you’ll also be able to participate in our surveys. So I invite you to go to Bibleandbusiness.com, where we’re connecting faith to business. I’ll also ask that you take a moment and just subscribe to this YouTube channel. I’ll express the theology of perseverance here in basically one sentence.
[00:01:23.920] – Bill English
While God’s redemptive faithfulness is expressed through his covenants, our response of faithfulness is expressed in the Scriptures through perseverance. So in this first part, I’m going to talk about God’s power in us. And really, this is taken from two Peter, chapter one, verses three through nine. Here are the verses. His Divine power has given us everything we need for a Godly life through our knowledge of Him who called us by his own glory and goodness.
[00:01:56.140] – Bill English
Through these, he has given us his very great and precious promises so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world that is caused by evil desires. For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness and to goodness, knowledge and to knowledge, selfcontrol and to selfcontrol, perseverance and to perseverance Godliness, and to Godliness mutual affection and to mutual affection love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But whoever does not have them is nearsighted and blind, forgetting that they have been cleansed from their past sins. God’s Divine power, Peter says, is at work within us.
[00:02:51.900] – Bill English
And this power gives us all we need for a Godly life. And you know what? Without this power, we cannot be faithful to God. We cannot hold up our end of the covenant relationship with Him. This power is given to us through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and it enables us to persevere during significant trials or opposition.
[00:03:14.800] – Bill English
Let’s go back for just a moment. Look in the middle part. For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith. So we start with faith. We’re going to add goodness and knowledge and self control.
[00:03:28.760] – Bill English
And then perseverance. We’re going to add perseverance. And as a result, if we don’t do that. We’re kind of near sighted and blind. Because we have been forgiven of our sins and because God’s power is at work within us, we ought to be able to persevere.
[00:03:49.010] – Bill English
So God preserves as we persevere. That’s really one of the takeaways here. I grew up in a pretty fundamental Baptist environment, and they taught us that once a person accepts Jesus Christ as their Savior, that that person is eternally secure. That was the phrase, eternally secure. That that person could never, ever lose their salvation, no matter what that person did or how they live their life afterward, they were eternally secure.
[00:04:21.860] – Bill English
I have since come to reject that notion. And instead, what I accept and what I think the Scriptures teach is that God preserves as we persevere. God preserves our salvation as we persevere in our pursuit of Him and in our covenant relationship with Him. So let’s read colossians one, verses 23 22 and you who once were alienated and hostile in mind doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before Him. If indeed you continue in the faith stable, instead fast, not shifting from the hope of the Gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister, do you see the connection?
[00:05:18.860] – Bill English
He will present us holy and blameless and above reproach if we continue in our faith stable and steadfast. When we accept Jesus Christ as our Savior and Lord and enter into that covenant relationship with Him, there is a condition there, and the condition is that we persevere until the end. We continue in the faith, we are stable, we are steadfast, we are not shifting, and only then can he present us holy and blameless and above reproach to God. So perseverance is the persistence to endure suffering. It is associated with victory, and eternal life is promised to those who persevere.
[00:06:06.790] – Bill English
Now, what about this suffering? This isn’t a very popular topic, is it? You’ll notice here at Bible in Business, I’m not a prosperity gospel guy. I don’t teach that God always wants you to be rich or always wants you to be happy. I do teach that he always wants you to be faithful, and through your faithfulness and your covenant relationship with Him, find your joy and satisfaction in that.
[00:06:31.660] – Bill English
But there are going to be times when no matter how much money you have or how positive of an attitude you have, or how much you think God is going to do great things for you, that he’s going to allow suffering to come into your life. So how do we look at perseverance and suffering? Well, let’s look at James, chapter one, verses two through four. Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. It’s another word for perseverance.
[00:07:04.020] – Bill English
And let steadfastness or perseverance have its full effect that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. What does James say here that we need in order to be mature and complete? We need perseverance. And how are we going to get that perseverance? By enduring the trials of many kinds that come our ways.
[00:07:28.690] – Bill English
You see, trials of various kinds mean that some trials will be incredibly short, and some will be long. Some will be difficult, some will not. Some may last even for months or even years. There’s different kinds of trials, and they will reveal the true character and depth of our faith. All of these trials will give us the chance to increase our faith and our holiness, because our faith is tested when our experiences in the trial don’t match what we believe in God.
[00:08:01.230] – Bill English
This is one of the core issues that is discussed in the Book of Job. Job believed in a very simple proposition that many Christians believe today that when we are good and we are righteous before God, that blessings follow, and that when we are evil and we sin before God, that curses and bad things happen to us. But the Book of Job shows that bad things can happen to those who are faithful and that God really doesn’t need to explain Himself. He allows those trials to come into our lives, to test our faith and to develop our faith and our dependence on Him. Some of these long term trials are going to have a grinding effect and that they will consume us.
[00:08:48.390] – Bill English
They’ll just overtake our lives, and we either become more like Christ in those grinding trials or will rebuff God’s attempt to perfect us and will reveal that we don’t have the faith that we thought we had. Here’s hebrews, chapter two, verses nine and ten. But we do see Him who is made for little while lower than the angels, namely Jesus, because of the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. For it was fitting for Him for whom are all things and through whom are all things in bringing many sons to glory, to perfect the author of their salvation through sufferings. People who believe in the prosperity Gospel aren’t going to like this verse because Jesus Christ Himself suffered and he was completed.
[00:09:42.330] – Bill English
He was perfected in a way that I can’t understand, because he was perfect before he came to Earth, and he was perfect while he was on Earth. But there was a sense in which he was matured and completed through sufferings. So, you know, what if God needed to put Jesus Christ through suffering in order to complete Him? Why would we think that he would not need to do the same thing with us? Why would we think that we would escape sufferings?
[00:10:13.240] – Bill English
Philippians 129 for it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ, not only to believe in Him, but also to suffer for Him. The very fact that we have been granted belief in Christ means we have also been granted the responsibility to suffer for his name. Perseverance is needed during suffering. Perseverance is needed to keep going when the trials are difficult. And if we persevere in our covenant relationship with God, then he will be able to present us holy and blameless and above reproach.
[00:10:50.640] – Bill English
And all the things that he has promised to give us in Revelation, he will be able to give us if we overcome, if we conquer, if we persevere in our faith with Jesus Christ. So let me make two other points here. First of all, if you don’t know your Bible well, then you’re going to be easily misled into false beliefs by your trials. And the reason for that is because your trials are going to have experiences within them that may contradict or at least not be totally in alignment with what you say you believe. People who are lazy and studying the Bible are going to be easily misled.
[00:11:31.500] – Bill English
And one of the things that God uses trials to do is to say, I need to adjust what you believe so that what you believe is more biblical. And the only way that you can know that is by knowing your Bible well. So I’m going to encourage you to really get to know your Bible well, and as you do, you’ll find that the trials will make more and more sense. Secondly, on top of that, you need to know God well, because if you don’t, you’ll have a strong tendency to develop wrong beliefs about Him which are contradictory to who he really is. There are trials that will tempt you to believe that God doesn’t like you, or that God doesn’t love you, or that God just doesn’t care.
[00:12:15.570] – Bill English
Maybe he’s not strong enough. That was what Rabbi Kushner concluded at the end of his book, when Bad Things Happen to Good People. He said basically he said that God just isn’t big enough to handle all of the evil that happens in the world. He’s just not big enough to stop it, which is an incredibly wrong belief about God. So if you don’t know God well, you’re going to have a strong tendency to develop wrong beliefs about Him.
[00:12:44.890] – Bill English
Persevering means drawing closer to God and knowing your Bible better and better so that your beliefs match more and more what is in the Scripture and match more and more, really with God’s character. That’s what perseverance is. It is believing loyalty to God, and it is believing loyalty to the God of the Bible. Now, how does this all apply if you’re a business owner? Well, pretty straightforward.
[00:13:15.790] – Bill English
God is going to allow trials to come into your life as a business owner through your business activities. Maybe a key employee resigns. Maybe a new technology threatens one of your core products. Maybe your investors have a change of heart and they want out of your business and they want you to buy them out. Or maybe a key customer decides to go to one of your competitors.
[00:13:38.140] – Bill English
Maybe your bank makes a capital call on your loan and you’re not able to fund that capital call. And now you’re really, really short on cash. All of these situations and more will require your endurance and persistence as God uses the business that he has entrusted to you to complete you. The business owner. He will be working on you through your business.
[00:14:04.510] – Bill English
And so you need to see that all of these various issues in your business are really as much about you as they are about the business, and that God is trying to perfect and complete you as well. In the last episode, we learned that we serve God within a covenantal relationship. And today we have learned that our response to God’s faithfulness within that covenantal relationship is to persevere in our faith and to not give up. In our next episode, part five of the theological context for Business ownership, we’re going to look at the concept of presence being present with God, learning to practice his presence. I’m Bill English, publisher here at Bible and Business.
[00:14:51.400] – Bill English
I want to thank you for joining me today. It’s a pleasure to speak with you every week. I hope you go out and make it a great day. Take care.
[00:15:14.060] – Bill English
Thank you.