- Genesis 4:7b (NIV) [God speaking to Cain] "But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it."
- John 15:9 (NLT) The world would love you if you belonged to it, but you don't. I chose you to come out of the world, and so it hates you.
- 2 Corinthians 6:14-18 (NIV) 14 Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? 15 What harmony is there between Christ and Belial ? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? 16 What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said: "I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people." 17 "Therefore come out from them and be separate, says the Lord. Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you." 18 "I will be a Father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty."
- Eph 5:10 -11 (AMP) 10And try to learn [in your experience] what is pleasing to the Lord [let your lives be constant proofs of what is most acceptable to Him]. 11Take no part in and have no fellowship with the fruitless deeds and enterprises of darkness, but instead [let your lives be so in contrast as to] expose and reprove and convict them.
Who do you listen to? What kinds of books make up your library? At whose feet do you "sit" as it were? This verse tells us that the answers are important. There is a danger that we might not see at first glance.
Who is this fool? In Proverbs it is a person who lives life as if God were irrelevant - not important for all of life: certainly not for business. A fool lives as if there is no God.
These prideful people prove they are fools by what they say. Colleges and Universities are populated with fools. Fools write most of the business, organizational development and marketing books we study. Harsh assessment? Yes. But an accurate one, from a Biblical perspective.
Does not mean we throw out the material that accurately observes the world and interactions between supply and demand, want and need, innovation and complacency? NO. It does mean that we become very cautious when those texts reach beyond the observable and begin talking about desires, values, attitudes and the human condition. We must ask ourselves, "Is their approach to life based on an evolutionary assumption (matter is eternal) or a Biblical assumption (Spirit [God} is eternal)?" If the answer is “Yes,” to the materialistic assumption, than that author is a fool and this verse tells us to "stay away." Run. Flee. Avoid those who cannot teach us truth (remember our instruction is to be in their world, not of their world).
Not the easiest thing to do in today's workplace. There are many around us whose advice we seek about business, who are in fact, fools. There are times when their advice is not consistent with Scripture and we are called to be discerning. Learning to be discerning is a work of the Holy Spirit and does not just "happen." It involves work and "doing what is right" as God instructed Cain. God's "way" seemed "foolish" to Cain. That's sin.
God said sin "desires" us. It's the same word used to describe intense sexual desire in its only other uses in scripture. Sin is that way. It wants to devour us and we have minimized its impact and it's power.
Foolish words have power. Textbooks are important: but discernment more so. God's way is not negotiable, as Cain discovered. Business can be run in a way to be pleasing to God and so can your life.
It depends on where you find your knowledge.
Copyright (c) 2006 by P. Griffith Lindell
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