Biblical Business Bones - 11 Ways to Success

The Lord receives your generosity towards others as if you are being personally generous to Him. Throughout scripture we are reminded the importance of honoring God with the first of our resources. Tithing is an indispensable act of gratitude and generosity towards the church and Constantly find new ways to stretch and grow yourself, and you will find that your life is producing more results.

Without having any chief, officer, or ruler, she prepares her bread in summer and gathers her food in harvest. Ask yourself what is important to you and where you want to see yourself in the future. What would you like to change about your routine now? Write down these goals and focus on them. Take daily steps to work towards your dreams and ideals for yourself, no matter how big or small they Faith brings immeasurable joy because it brings us closer to God- the source of all good things James 1: If we count our blessings, we remember how full our lives are and it charges our batteries, giving us optimistic We like to think if we carry out certain steps, our plans will be fulfilled.

If we had a full understanding of this, we would let go of our anxious need to control. Although it may seem difficult at times of uncertainty, fully trust in the Lord, never doubting your security and wellbeing in the hands of your creator who knows and loves you more than anyone. In all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.

Our attention is constantly being pulled in different directions, splicing our time and energy—dividing However, preparation drastically lowers your chances of risk. Precise planning will help you overcome obstacles and reach greater excellence in your business or career endeavors. Not all opportunities are laid out in front of you. Sometimes you have to really search for them, or even create them yourself. The many different avenues you discover for yourself will surprise you. The term "winning conflict" does not mean winning every argument.

My answer surprised her. I learned the principle of due diligence through Talmudic study. For years, I studied debates among rabbinical scholars on various topics. Nothing was taken for granted — all arguments were considered and debated. I learned to ask why and to make sure I understood the issues. Studying alone was not enough. We were paired with other students and spent much of our time discussing the issues with the classmate we were paired with before the next class. We read every commentary on the topic we could find.

I approached business the same way. I did my homework. I researched the competition. I tested the market. I argued the other side. There is no shortcut for doing your homework in a business and understanding the competitive landscape. Major mistakes can often be avoided and opportunities found by speaking to experts and analysts, tearing apart business plans, doing market studies and focus groups, analyzing expenses and doing your homework — due diligence.

One of the most difficult parts of running a business is dealing with employee issues. Employees can be demanding: When confronted with these issues, I just thought about the principle of paying employees on time: The Torah also commands us not to take advantage of your employees: This taught me to always treat employees equally and fairly.

I applied an absolute level of fairness among all our employees when it came to pay and all other issues. Race, age, gender, religion, color — these had no bearing. It is always difficult to say no, but when you develop a reputation for fairness to your employees, they respect you more and know that they were treated properly. There is a high level of customer service issues in the travel business. Flight delays, lost luggage, noisy rooms, housekeeping issues and more.

There are also many that try to take advantage of the system. I employed a very simple standard for customer care: While many companies struggle with how to handle customer service, following this standard is the best way to build a long term loyal customer base.

We refer our friends there. When we launched getaroom. The high level of customer service has differentiated us in the marketplace and enabled us to build a loyal customer base.

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I was constantly confronted with dilemmas: How much do we disclose to customers? Do we deliver exactly what was ordered or something inferior to make a higher profit? Do we put in slightly less weight than the amount the customer believes they are paying for? Do we charge the customer more than we agreed to charge? Do we refund them less? Why not increase profits by using a cheaper material or a second hand product? Use lower cost components even though the customer believes you are using high end components. When confronted with these dilemmas, the answer is easy when following the biblical principle of not putting a stumbling block before the blind.

Your customer overpays you. You receive a refund twice. Do you keep the funds that were mistakenly given you or do you give it back? When you realize that someone above is always watching you, the answer is easy. You act differently and work under a higher standard. You run your business and personal life honestly all the time.

7 Biblical Secrets to Business Success

The first question asked is: Were you honest in your business dealings? There is no greater temptation to cheat than is a business setting where one can earn more profits. If you can overcome this great temptation, you will reach a high level of character that others esteem. Your customers, employees and those you do business with want to patronize your business. When you are honest, your business grows. You also have the right answer in the heavenly court.

Judaism teaches us to be humble. Pride gets in the way of success. We all make mistakes. Never think you are always right. Accept and encourage criticism, especially from your employees that understand the business better than anyone. My best ideas came from customers and employees. We read every customer and employee suggestion carefully.

Bible Wisdom Advice For Life & Happiness Based Relationship - S Scott

This is a big mistake. By creating an environment that allows suggestions and criticism, you can greatly improve your business and allow employees and customers to feel more part of the business. The Torah teaches us not only how to build a successful business , but also what to do once it is successful. We have a social responsibility to our communities. We are obligated to donate a portion of our profits to the needy. Encourage your employees, partners and customers to also be charitable through incentive, matching and other programs. Donate a portion of your profits to charity. Run promotions that contribute a portion of every sale to charity.

Match your employee charitable giving to encourage them to be charitable. Encourage your employees to do community service. To put it in a contemporary context, the work of farmers, scientists, midwives, parents, leaders, and everyone in creative enterprises is still needed. But so is the work of exterminators, doctors, funeral directors, corrections officers, forensic auditors, and everyone in professions that restrain evil, forestall disaster, repair damage, and restore health.

Roughly speaking, there is twice as much work to do now than there was in the garden. Genesis 4 details the first murder when Cain kills his brother Abel in a fit of angry jealousy. Both brothers bring the fruit of their work as offerings to God.

Cain is a farmer, and he brings some of the fruit of the ground, with no indication in the biblical text that this is the first or the best of his produce Gen. Although both are producing food, they are neither working nor worshiping together. God looks with favor on the offering of Abel but not on that of Cain. In this first mention of anger in the Bible, God warns Cain not to give into despair, but to master his resentment and work for a better result in the future. But Cain gives way to his anger instead and kills his brother Gen.

God responds to the deed in these words: And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you its strength; you will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth. He can no longer till the ground, and Cain the farmer becomes a wanderer, finally settling in the land of Nod, east of Eden, where he builds the first city mentioned in the Bible Gen.

The remainder of chapter 4 follows Cain's descendants for seven generations to Lamech, whose tyrannical deeds make his ancestor Cain seem tame. Lamech shows us a progressive hardening in sin. First comes polygamy Gen. Yet in Lamech we also see the beginnings of civilization. Division of labor —which spelled trouble between Cain and Abel—brings a specialization here that makes certain advances possible.

1. Do your homework.

The ability to create music, to craft the instruments for playing it, and to develop technological advances in metallurgy are all within the scope of the creators we are created to be in God's image. The arts and sciences are a worthy outworking of the creation mandate, but Lamech's crowing about his vicious deeds points to the dangers that accompany technology in a depraved culture bent on violence. The first human poet after the Fall celebrates human pride and abuse of power. Yet the harp and the flute can be redeemed and used in the praise of God 1 Sam. As people multiply, they diverge.

Through Seth, Adam had hope of a godly seed, which includes Enoch and Noah. When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair, and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose The Nephilim [giants, heroes, fierce warriors—the meaning is unclear] were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them.

These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown. The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. What could the godly line of Seth—narrowed eventually to only Noah and his family—do against a culture so depraved that God would eventually decide to destroy it utterly?

Scripture Prayer for Success and Provision

Some situations may be redeemable. Others may be beyond redemption. The Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, "I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.

From Adam to us, God looks for persons who can stand against the culture of sin when needed. Adam failed the test but sired the line of Noah, "a righteous man, blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God" Gen. Noah is the first person whose work is primarily redemptive. Unlike others, who are busy wringing a living from the ground, Noah is called to save humanity and nature from destruction. In him we see the progenitor of priests, prophets, and apostles, who are called to the work of reconciliation with God, and those who care for the environment, who are called to the work of redeeming nature.

To greater or lesser degrees, all workers since Noah are called to the work of redemption and reconciliation. Despite the hardship, the text assures us that "Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him" Gen. In the business world, entrepreneurs are used to taking risks, working against conventional wisdom in order to come up with new products or processes. A long-term view is required, rather than attention to short-term results. Noah faces what must at times have seemed to be an impossible task, and some biblical scholars suggest that the actual building of the ark took a hundred years.

It also takes faith, tenacity, and careful planning in the face of skeptics and critics. Today innovators, entrepreneurs, and those who challenge the prevailing opinions and systems in our places of work still need a source of inner strength and conviction. The answer is not to talk ourselves into taking foolish risks, of course, but to turn to prayer and the counsel of those wise in God when we are confronted with opposition and discouragement. Perhaps we need a flowering of Christians gifted and trained for the work of encouraging and helping refine the creativity of innovators in business, science, academia, arts, government, and the other spheres of work.

For more than half a year Noah, his family, and all of the animals bounce around inside the ark as the floods rage, swirling the ark in water covering the mountaintops. When at last the flood subsides, the ground is dry and new vegetation is springing up. The occupants of the ark once again step on dry land.

The text echoes Genesis 1, emphasizing the continuity of creation. Yet it is, in a sense, a new world, reshaped by the force of the flood. God was giving human culture a new opportunity to start from scratch and get it right. Once again on dry land with this new beginning, Noah's first act is to build an altar to the Lord Gen. Here he offers sacrifices that please God, who resolves never again to destroy humanity "as long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease" Gen. God binds himself to a covenant with Noah and his descendants, promising never to destroy the earth by flood Gen.

God gives the rainbow as a sign of his promise. He affirms his promise of provision of food through their work Gen. In return he sets requirements for justice among humans and for the protection of all creatures Gen. An instrument of war has become a symbol of peace through God's covenant with Noah. After his heroic work on behalf of humanity, Noah falls into a troubling domestic incident. It begins—as so many domestic and workplace tragedies do—with substance abuse, in this case alcohol.

His son Ham bursts in and sees him in this state, but his other sons—alerted by Ham—circumspectly enter the tent backwards and cover up their father without looking upon him in the raw. Exactly what is so shameful or immoral about this situation is hard for most modern readers to understand, but he and his sons clearly understand it to be a family disaster. Noah may be the first person of great stature to come crashing down into disgrace, but he was not the last.

Something about greatness seems to make people vulnerable to moral failure—especially, it seems, in our personal and family lives. In an instant, all of us could name a dozen examples on the world stage. Noah is undoubtedly one of the great figures of the Bible Heb. If we have fallen, similarly to Noah, let us confess swiftly and ask those around us to prevent us from turning a fall into a disaster through our self-justifying responses. Nimrod founds an empire of naked aggression based in Babylon.

With Nimrod, the tyrannical city-builder, fresh in our memory, we come to the building of the tower of Babel Gen. Babel, like many cities in the ancient Near East is designed as a walled enclosure of a great temple or ziggurat, a mud-brick stair tower designed to reach to the realm of the gods. With such a tower, people could ascend to the gods, and the gods could descend to earth. Although God does not condemn this drive to reach the heavens, we see in it the self-aggrandizing ambition and escalating sin of pride that drives these people to begin building such a mighty tower.

What did they want? What did they fear? Being scattered without the security of numbers. In this case, they plan to do the opposite of what God commanded in the cultural mandate. Instead of filling the earth, they intend to concentrate themselves here in one location. These people were originally of one blood, all descended from Noah through his three sons. But after God destroyed the Tower of Babel, the descendants of these sons migrated to different parts of the Middle East: Japheth's descendants moved west into Anatolia Turkey and Greece; Ham's descendants went south into Arabia and Egypt; and Shem's descendants remained in the east in what we know today as Iraq.

From these three genealogies in Genesis 10, we discover where the tribal and national divisions of the ancient Near East developed. We might be tempted to conclude from this study that cities are inherently bad, but this is not so. The concept of "city" is not evil, but the pride that we may come to attach to cities is what displeases God Gen.

We sin when we look to civic triumph and culture, in place of God, as our source of meaning and direction. Bruce Waltke concludes his analysis of Genesis 11 in these words: Society apart from God is totally unstable. On the one hand, people earnestly seek existential meaning and security in their collective unity. On the other hand, they have an insatiable appetite to consume what others possess At the heart of the city of man is love for self and hatred for God.

The city reveals that the human spirit will not stop at anything short of usurping God's throne in heaven. From the beginning, God intended people to disperse across the world. By scattering people after the fall of the tower, God put people back on the path of filling the earth, ultimately resulting in the beautiful array of peoples and cultures that populate it today.

What can we learn from the incident of the Tower of Babel for our work today? They centralized not only their geographical dwellings, but also their culture, language, and institutions. Although God wants people to work together for the common good Gen. He warned the people of Israel against the dangers of concentrating power in a king 1 Sam. So, then, we could expect Christian leaders and institutions to be careful to disperse authority and to favor coordination, common goals and values, and democratic decision-making instead of concentration of power.

But in many cases Christians have sought something different, the same kind of concentration of power that tyrants and authoritarians seek, though with more benevolent goals. In this mode, Christian legislators seek just as much control over the populace, though with the object of enforcing piety or morality. In this mode, Christian business people seek as much oligopoly as others, though for the purpose of enhancing quality, customer service, or ethical behavior.

In this mode, Christian educators seek as little freedom of thought as authoritarian educators do, though with the intent of enforcing moral expression, kindness, and sound doctrine. Of course, some situations demand decisive exercise of power by one person or a small group. But could it be that more often than we realize, when we are in positions of power, God is calling us to disperse, delegate, authorize, and train others, rather than exercising it all ourselves? Doing so is messy, inefficient, hard to measure, risky, and anxiety-inducing. But it may be exactly what God calls Christian leaders to do in many situations.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov , trans. In the opening chapters of the Bible, God creates the world and brings us forth to join him in further creativity. He creates us in his image to exercise dominion, to be fruitful and multiply, to receive his provision, to work in relationship with him and with other people, and to observe the limits of his creation.

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He gives us the freedom to do these things out of love for him and his creation, which also gives us the freedom to not do the things for which he created us. As a result, our work has become less productive, more toilsome, and less satisfying, and our relationships and work are diminished and at times even destructive.

And many people have the opportunity to do good, creative, fulfilling work that provides for their needs and contributes to a thriving community. The Fall has made the work that began in the Garden of Eden more necessary, not less. At the same time, God is always at work to redeem his creation from the effects of the Fall. Genesis begins the story of how God's power is working to order and reorder the world and its inhabitants. God is sovereign over the created world and over every living creature, human and otherwise.

He continues to tend to his own image in humanity. But he does not tolerate human efforts to "be like God" Gen. Those, like Noah, who receive work as a gift from God and do their best to work according to his direction, find blessing and fruitfulness in their work. Like all the characters in these chapters of Genesis, we face the choice of whether to work with God or in opposition to him.

Mark Biddle, Missing the Mark: Thomas Keiser, Genesis Broadman and Holman, We're grateful to God that we've accomplished many of our objectives to help people engage with the Bible's wisdom for their work. Help us finish the year strong.

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3. Kummer ade!: Roman über einen humoristischen Kriminalfall (German Edition).

We ask that you prayerfully consider joining us in this work! This commentary on Genesis explores work through the stories of Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, Joseph, and more. Every resource on our site was made possible through the financial support of people like you. While every book of the Bible will contribute something to our understanding of work, Genesis proves to be the fountain from which the Bible's theology of work flows. Great for group or individual use, at home or at work on your lunch break, this study delves into what the story of Creation has to say about faith and work.

If you like reading the Theology of Work Bible Commentary free online, you can enjoy it in print! Business, education, law, service industries, medicine, government--wherever you work, in whatever capacity, the Scriptures have something to say about it. This edition is a one-volume hardcover version. Based on a work at www. God Creates the World Genesis 1: God Works to Create the World Genesis 1: God Works Relationally Genesis 1: A Commentary , Grand Rapids: Passage click to go to passage Category click to go to category Cycle Genesis 1: God Sets Limits Genesis 2: The gift of Limits Click to read How do you avoid failure?