Learn The Golden Rule of Goals as a Christian Business
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This episode covers how the concepts of goals, spiritual remembrance, prayer, and team planning are all linked together.
Episode Transcription
Hello again, thank you for joining us for lunch break.
I am Pierce Brantley co-host of the Eternal Entrepreneur.
Today we are talking about goals — setting goals, creating new goals, and what it means specifically as a Christian business owner: how to think about goals and the way you operate your business, especially in the new year.
Okay. So it’s January now.
Most Christian business owners, really any business owner, is thinking about how to establish a strong Q1 and thinking about how the goals they set for their company are going to impact the long-term vision that they have set in order for the business to grow, to operate successfully, to, bring the kingdom effectively into everything that they do.
And that’s fantastic.
Goals are good KPIs, new revenue, new customers, get them, grow them, acquire them. It’s what it’s all about. But if you are kingdom entrepreneur, if you have a faith based business, then goals can actually get in the way of what God might be doing through your company.
And if you never considered this idea before, you know, that’s okay, but I want to give you a new mindset. I want to open to your mind to what goes on behind. The scenes in the spirit, because there is a higher way, a more God oriented relationship driven way to lead your business as it pertains to goal setting.
And especially if you feel stuck, if you think 2020, or if 2020 was a hard year for your business, or if you don’t really know how to realign, then this episode is really going to be good news for you. So goals. All right, we set goals. We meet them, we move on, we set them, we meet them, we move on, but all goals, whether we realize it, some are not, or within the confines or within the confines of a season, the goal exists within some matter of time.
Most of us just focus simply on a goal’s metrics. It’s binary.
Do we meet the goal or not?
Yes or no, one or zero.
Here’s what is important:
Every goal has a point of transition, a point where the goal is finally sunsetted. At some point, there is a point of transition either to greater things or to re-establishing an old vision.
Okay.
So let’s come back to this idea about goals operating within seasons. Let’s talk about a couple of practicals. So if you think about an actual season, there are things that highlight what is going on within that season, that point you to the reality of the season at large. So my wife and I over the fall did a lot of leave raking.
We had piles and piles and piles of leaves falling up on our back porch. Up until the point you couldn’t even see the porch. It was inches high. Our dog was scared to go outside. It was a chaos, it was pandemonium, but we got it all cleaned up. And we had a goal of keeping that yard clean. And we also had a goal that whenever we raked the yard, we wanted to keep it underneath a an hour.
Now once the winter hit, that goal was sun-set — we’d met the goal. We kept the yard clean and now there was no more relieves to rake. And so we completed our goal within the context of the larger season. Businesses have a type of season as well, that we don’t normally typically think of it this way. If you think about financial seasons, you know, your business may hit at 2 million, a 5 million, $10 million Mark.
And that means something organizationally. It changes the way you operate. It changes the way you think about how you go about and sell something. It changes the type of people you hire each marker in a business’s growth means something internally about how you operate and the types of goals you set.
But those things all exist within kind of the business roadmap or different things that the businesses doing. And so those are types of seasons and well as well. So in the kingdom, however, seasons are sovereign and seasons aren’t necessarily bound to our way of working seasons are tied to what God is doing within us and within the things that we do.
So you might be asking me a here, why is this important? This sounds like a bunch of theory. Don’t mix a church and Matt dude, but this is why it’s important. If you want to transition your life. Or your business into the next thing, then you will need more than just a new metric to move you forward. Why because you’re not moving forward without the father, God plays a primary role in what comes next.
What is a cross the river for you and for your business. And if you want to work in a deeper relationship with God, if you want to understand the season that you’re in, then you need to take on a new principle. And that is the principle of remembrance. So I love remembrance. We’re going to get into this, the best example of the practice of remembrance and what it means for the impact of a people of an organization is in the Bible.
It’s actually in Joshua chapter three and chapter four, we’re going to take a look at it. So context, the Israelites are about to cross the Jordan river, not the red sea, the Jordan river. And Joshua has been tasked my God himself to move them across the river bed and something important happens. It’s actually super important that Joshua is the one leading the people at this point.
And the reason is because probably at this point, he is one of the few people who actually remembers. The red sea saga moving across the red sea the first time or moving across a body of water. The first time he has it in his short term memory that God did this for people, and it gives him confidence to lead a bunch of people across this new embankment.
Good stuff. So here’s, what’s interesting. He says this in chapter three, he says, in regard to the Ark of the covenant, do not come near it in order that you may know that the way you shall go for you have not passed this way before. You have not passed this way before is speaking to the people. Why is that important?
Well, if you’re going to move seasonally into something new, if you’re going to cross a river, you are going to need faith. If God is the one. Leading you that direction. And if God is leading you that direction, then it helps to have some short-term memory about God’s capacity to move you in that direction.
We don’t want to be like the people that James mentions in the new Testament, where he talks about people basically being unsure, faith, having faith for a little bit in the backing, out, having faith for a little bit in the backing out. We want to be sure footed as we transcend, as we cross different moments of time, that God is bringing us to different banks of his fulfillment in our lives and our companies and whatever it is we are doing in life.
So remembrance. Gives us confidence. It gave Joshua confidence, AK faith to cross rivers that hadn’t yet been crossed, even though the mandate and even the promise to do so was already present. So if you’re familiar with the story, you know what happens next? They crossed just fine. And they are on the other side of the bank.
Fantastic. But Joshua does something different. At the bank of the Jordan river that did not happen at the red sea. He wants people to remember what God has done for them now. And more importantly, he wants it to be remembered by other people in the future. That way it is not just him carrying this reality of who God is.
It’s something that organizationally corporately they can experience as a people. So, when he tells them to do is to go back to the river and grab 12 stones and to stack them as a Memorial. And he says, when your children ask their fathers and times to come, what do these stones mean? Then you shall let your children know.
Israel passed over the Jordan on dry ground. For the Lord, your God dried up the waters of the Jordan for you until you passed over as the Lord, your God did to the red sea, which he dried up for us until we passed over so that all the peoples of the earth might know that the hand of the Lord is mighty.
And that you might fear the Lord, your God forever powerful stuff. So my question for you, kingdom, entrepreneur, business, woman, business, man of God, is this, what are your stones of remembrance? What are the things in the last year in 2020 that God has done, that you can call back to you that give you confidence about where you should go and what rivers you will be crossing in the next year.
You need these things in your short term memory, in order to have faith in whatever direction God brings, you leads you in the next year. And this has to be the undercurrent. So to speak of what we were lie on, when we make decisions going into the unknown, pursuing the promises of God in the future. And so my admonishment to you would be to build a type of Memorial.
Now remembrance is standard operating procedure in the Brantley household. My wife and I just had a great time about a week ago, thanking the Lord for all of the specific things he did for us in the last year. Things in our jobs, things with our families, things, in new ways, we got to experience each other and life together, and we both wrote separate lists and we brought them together.
Just spend a sweet time, thanking the Lord for what he’d done in our lives in order to have a foundation of remembrance, of gratitude of remembrance moving into the new year so that we weren’t postured in a perspective of unknowns or lack of faith, or even fear about the challenges and even the opportunities that we have.
In front of us. So how do you build a Memorial of remembrance in the new year for your business and for yourself as a business leader? So there are two types of stones I want you to consider, and I want you to take action upon they are wilderness stones and they are seasonal stones. Let’s talk about both real quick.
Wilderness stones that you’re going to stack are things that God did to move you, or part of your business out of a wilderness situation, out chaos and into clarity. And he did so with the promises that he gave you himself. So, what are those things? What are the ways in which God gave you clarity or moved you or your business out of chaos and into some kind of stability into some kind of promise.
You need to go back over the last 12 months and write them all down, do it prayerfully, do it considerably. Listen to even the things that maybe you didn’t recognize that God was a behind the scenes working to the good that he lets you experience. The second are the seasonal stones and seasonal stones are shifts.
They are big things, breakthroughs in your personal life. New ways of thinking that God has given you types of revelation. They are river crossing moments where you are now on another bank, and you’re never going back to the other side of that bank. So one is wilderness. Going from chaos to clarity. The other is new embankments.
You are now in a new place and both of those things need to be written down and considered in light of what God has done in the last year. There are other stones of remembrance that you might want to consider as well. These are more kind of centered on your personal life. If you’re interested, you can check out the book calling awakened to the purpose of your work.
And it goes into those specifically for you as a person in a lot more detail, but wilderness and season are the ones that I want you to focus on today. So action items write down every time of transition in the last year for you and your company. Every time the Lord has moved you out of chaos. And every time he’s provided some kind of breakthrough.
Spend some time, write these things down, get them on paper and then go and spend some time with the Lord and just thank him for his consistency in these things for the last year. Now, if you have an executive team or some kind of inner circle that you do business and life with, I really think it’s a good idea to actually go get your executive team.
Go get your leadership board, whoever that is. And they actually do these things together because the reality is, especially if your business has grown to a certain size that these things are going to be different for different departments. And these people are going to have experienced the Lord’s goodness in different ways.
And it’s really good as a corporate body, no pun intended, but as the body of Christ operating in a corporation, it’s really good to have cross-functional testimony as it were that you can reflect on as an organization and understand how God has been faithful in different parts of the business that you may not even be aware of.
So as much as you can, yes. Do it for yourself, but do it corporately in order that the organization cross-functionally connect. Can be encouraged by each other’s testimony. So when you do this, I promise you one thing, you’re going to notice a shift in sign of you first. Your posture about what you do next will be a little bit lower, meaning you’re going to be a little bit more humble and a little bit more aware of the undercurrent, one of the Lord working on your behalf.
And that’s a good thing because it makes you more considerate about the new things that you approach makes you more cognitive. I’m more cognizant of what he’s doing with you and through you and around you, you realize that that after taking inventory of a year, that God was intentionally behind the scenes of some of the biggest things in your life.
I think. So second, you’re going to have an increase in faith for things in the future, because you have a pile of stones, markers, remembrance that give you confidence about moving forward. That’s a great thing. I have a stack of mile high. I actually go back a little over a decade now, when I’ve really big seasonal shifts, because I like to see that pile kind of stack up.
And so that I don’t forget kind of the first things that he did that led me to where I am. Now with him. So then lastly, thirdly, you have better sense of freedom about which goals matter and which do not, because you’re going to have a little bit more perspective about how God has been in play and surrounding all the things that you have done.
This is great because sometimes we have goals. I think that we believe should be there. You know what I mean? They are outside pressure goals or goals. You think you should hit simply because you’re in the CEO seat or otherwise. And the Lord may have a different perspective on that. And remembrance of what Lord the Lord has done in the past is going to give you freedom about what to pursue.
In the future. Okay guys, this is the end of our lunch break together. And thank you so much for spending some time with me. I really encourage you to get before the Lord on these things this week. And I’d love to hear about how this perspective has, you know, helped you, your team and your business at large as you pursue the new year in 2021.
God bless you guys.
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