You and I are here on Planet Earth to carry out business for the King. He has given us kingdom resources—influence, money, creativity, and vision. He has privileged us with opportunities to leverage every fiber of what we are and every last ounce of all that we have in a way that will produce in time the stuff of eternity: Fame for the King, souls for his kingdom, and a foretaste of the abundant life (even if it is imperfectly and temporally expressed). That’s our business—nothing more than that; nothing less will do. So that begs the question: How’s business?
The Journey: Luke 19:13
“Invest this for me while I am gone.”
This is the simplest explanation of what Christians are supposed to be doing between their salvation and their entry into the eternal kingdom, either by death or by virtue of Christ’s return: Investing!
The old King James Version says it like this: “Occupy till I come.” The New King James Version translates it: “Do business till I come.” Invest, occupy, do business—I like all of those. That is what Christians are supposed to be doing with their time, energy and treasures—investing and producing an eternal profit in the business of the kingdom. There is nothing more important—and more pleasurable—than that.
The problem is, we Christians tend to forget that we are not here on Planet Earth for our own benefit. Along the way, we lose sight of the fact that the perfectly good oxygen we are taking in is not simply for our own pleasure. The time and space we are occupying is not merely for our own temporal purposes—that would be a cosmic waste!
No, you and I are here on assignment for the King. He has given us kingdom resources—influence, money, creativity, and vision. He has privileged us with opportunities to leverage every fiber of what we are and every last ounce of all that we have in a way that will produce now the stuff of eternity: Fame for the King, souls for his kingdom, and a foretaste of the abundant life (even if it is imperfectly and temporally expressed).
That is our business—nothing more than that; nothing less will do.
So that begs the question: How’s business?
For too many Christians, their kingdom business is in a recession. Not because the economy is bad, but because they have lost sight of the core purpose of their business and the irresistibility of their Product. Rather, they have retreated to a preserve-what-we-have mode and are not expanding into a market of unlimited potential. In an era long ago, the reformer Martin Luther soberly described it this way,
“The idea that the service to God should have only to do with a church altar, singing, reading, sacrifice, and the like is without doubt but the worst trick of the devil. How could the devil have led us more effectively astray than by the narrow conception that service to God takes place only in a church and by the works done therein…The whole world could abound with the services to the Lord; services – not only in churches but also in the home, kitchen, workshop, field.”
The world is still our market, and we’ve got an unstoppable, irresistible business with unlimited potential to change the world. And the time has never been better to expand it.
So again, here is the question: How’s business?
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