Transcription
Let me ask you an uncomfortable question. If someone watched how you work, your discipline, your risk tolerance, your urgency, your followthrough, could they tell that you have the Holy Spirit? Could they tell that you're backed not by a great venture capitalist or by an Ivy League academic institution, but by the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, the uncreated creator, the unmoved mover, the Lord of all creation and all earth, the creator of the universe.
Would they get that intention or would they just assume that you're like the rest of them hoping that things work out? Because right now, if we're being completely honest, the people who don't believe in God are outworking, outrisking, and out persevering those of us who claim we do. And that should disturb you.
You see, look at the names. We see Elon Musk. We see Jeff Bezos. We see Bill Gates. We see Alex Ramoszi. seen, you know, literally Mark Zuckerberg and like so many of the people who are titans in their domains, who are the empire builders, who are the ones who bent industries to their will through sheer force, discipline, risk, and relentless execution. Overwhelmingly, they are not Christians. They don't pray before they make decisions. They don't wait on the Lord. They're not asking for confirmation from heaven before they act. They just move.
And then you look at the Christian entrepreneurial space. You look at the conferences, the podcasts, the masterminds. Where are those Bezos level outcomes? Where are the world-shaping empires? Where is the fruit that should be dripping from the tree if we actually claim to have what we have and who we have on our side?
And I'm not saying that there are not successful Christian entrepreneurs. There are. What I'm saying is the ratio is off. What I'm saying is if our theology is true, which we certainly believe that it is, if we have access to divine wisdom, supernatural empowerment, and the promise that all things that we do will work for our good, the secular world should be looking at us and wondering, "What do they have going on over there?" like, oh my gosh, every time I turn around and see somebody with excellent service, every time I turn around and see somebody who is going above and beyond, every time I see somebody who is relentless and who is disciplined and who is diligent, it turns out that they're a Christian. That's crazy.
But the only thing that we can guarantee as Christians that our name is attached to is because somebody put John 3:16 on the bottom of whatever product that they're selling. And instead, we're looking at them, learning from them, wondering what they are doing. And I've talked to several many successful Christian entrepreneurs and almost all of them learned [clears throat] from secular sources because that is who was doing well.
You see, there's a huge paradox in the midst of all of this. And there's a book which if you haven't read it and you feel stuck I highly recommend it. It's a sliver of a book that will change your life and it is by Kevin D. Young and it is called Just Do Something. And the thesis is very simple, which is just do something. But beyond that, one of the points he makes in the book is that Christians should be the biggest risktakers on the planet. Now, why you might ask? Because we're the only ones playing with a guaranteed safety net.
Think about it. The secularist believes that this is all there is. There's one life, no do-overs, no sovereign hand guiding outcomes, no promise that the story ends well. If he fails catastrophically, that's it. There's no Romans 8:28 for him. There's no "God will provide." There's just loss. And yet, he still bets. He still risks. He still goes all in on himself with nothing but his own tiny brain and finite ability to fall back on. Like, do you guys realize how absurd that is for someone to trust that deeply in themselves?
Yet, consider your position. You serve the God who parted the seas. The God who raised the dead, who tells you explicitly that he is working all things for your good. You have your eternity secured. You have a father who owns a thousand cattle on the hill and the Holy Spirit that raised Jesus Christ from the dead, quite literally living inside of you. We should be dangerous, okay? You should be the one making bets that make the world nervous. The one whose risk tolerance looks so high that it looks reckless to people who don't understand what faith in action looks like and who don't understand who you have backing you. Like the confidence that people go into rooms when they know the guy who's in charge or when their friend has connections or when they know somebody in high places because you're in good with the president or a congressman. How should we be moving as Christians when our father owns the whole joint, the whole thing?
But instead, we're paralyzed. We're waiting for a sign. And we're asking for confirmation. We're praying for clarity. That's really more so evident of our lack of faith than our existence of it. And while we're doing that on our knees, the atheist is walking right past us, throwing his chips on the table and building an empire in its wake, relying on nothing but his own small, tiny, finite ability.
You see, I think the Lord has led me to what has happened here, and that is we have used faith as a shelter when it was meant to be used as a springboard. We turned our faith into a coping mechanism instead of a catalyst. And it was supposed to be a launching pad, something that flings us into the arena with holy ambition because we know who has us. Instead, it became a shelter, a place to hide from the terror of action, a spiritual excuse for passivity. Like I want you guys to really imagine this. The Lord gives us a trampoline to spring off of and instead we are hiding underneath it from the sun and the rain and the elements hoping to not be disturbed too much from our discomfort.
And these are the symptoms and you know comment if you know that you've been struggling with one of these. We can hold each other accountable. Waiting on the Lord. This is the most abused phrase that I hear. I've worked with hundreds, maybe even now thousands of Christian entrepreneurs and so many of them when I ask them what's going on, why aren't you making progress, why aren't you moving forward? I'm waiting on the Lord. And yes, there are times to wait, but for most of us, this isn't patient obedience, this is procrastination that you've dressed in a prayer shawl. Or maybe it's that you're not waiting on God, you're waiting for fear to go away, and it won't, and it never will, so you just wait some more. Or maybe you're looking for permission that's never going to come. You want a sign. You want confirmation. You want a fleece, a liver shiver. You want writing on the wall or a burning bush. You want an unmistakable signal from heaven that you're supposed to do this thing. But God already gave you a brain, a Bible, and Holy Spirit. And he's not going to send a sky rider. He gave you agency and discernment. And he expects you to use it.
And then people say, one of my favorites, 'cause I'm, we're all going to eat it together right now, okay? They say, "If God wanted it to happen, then he would do it." What? This is theological poison dressed up as humility. It sounds like surrender, but what it actually is, is abdication. God works through human action. He told Adam to cultivate the garden. He told Noah to build the ark. He told Nehemiah to rebuild the wall. And he didn't do it for them, though. He did it with them as they moved.
And I know that y'all don't believe this. Y'all saying y'all do. You know why? 'Cause we all be eating. Okay? If you telling me that you need to wait on the Lord and that if God wanted it to happen, he would happen, then how did you end up eating every day? Because if God wanted you to have food, then certainly he would hand deliver the food directly to you. But he doesn't do that. Instead, John from DoorDash is hand-delivering food directly to you, right? Because you ordered it on the app, or you're hand-delivering it to yourself with them groceries you went and got and the meal you went in the kitchen and made to make sure that you're eating every night. You. We're not waiting on the Lord to do that, right?
Are we waiting on the Lord to sin? Are we waiting on the Lord to have sex outside of marriage? Are we waiting on the Lord to do all of these other things, to steal, to murder, to like, to to to have abortion? Are we waiting on the Lord in our sin? How is it that the same people we're so confused about when to go and when to stop, but the things the Lord has written clearly and plainly in scripture, we don't even stop doing? So don't tell me that we are waiting on the Lord to act when it's only in this area that we desire to be so submissive and so surrendered that we would dare not even take action until getting a clear word from him.
You see, your job is to act. His job is to direct your steps. But if you're not stepping, there's nothing to direct. You see, this is the next problem, is risk aversion that's disguised as stewardship. And see, I just want to be wise with what God has given me. And which is a translation is, I'm terrified of loss, so I'm going to dress my fear up as faithfulness. The parable of the talents wasn't a suggestion. The master was furious at the servant who buried his talent out of fear. He didn't call him cautious. He called him wicked and lazy. Your wisdom is actually wickedness. And it's not true wisdom at all.
But what do we see faith actually looking like in scripture? One of my favorite examples is David because he didn't sit in a cave waiting for God to hand-deliver Goliath's head. He picked up stones. He prayed and ran toward the giant. Okay? And then look at what David says about the effects of his faith. This is one of my favorite scriptures. Um, and this is not about his afterlife. This is on his actual life and actual competence and what he experienced being a child of the king. He said, "Your commandments make me wiser than my enemies. I have more insight than all my teachers. I have more understanding than the elders." That's Psalm 119:98-100. So, this is a man whose faith didn't make him passive, but it made him sharper, more capable, more dangerous. You see, that faith was fuel and not a sedative. You see, it didn't make him sit and wait. It made him get up and run and fight.
Look at Nehemiah. He didn't just pray about the broken wall. He grieved. He fasted. He prayed. And then he asked the king for resources, organized a team, and got to work while enemies threatened to kill him. Paul didn't wait for God to spread the gospel. Imagine if Paul would have said that. You know what, Lord? If you wanted it to go out, I guess you're going to figure out how to do it. If it's not in your will, then I guess it just won't go out. But Paul was a part of one of my pastors said the best thing he said, God gives us the privilege of partnering with him in what he's doing here on earth and in this world. And so Paul partnered with God and God used him in such a mighty way. But he didn't do it by sitting there being passive. He walked thousands of miles. He was shipwrecked. He was beaten. He was imprisoned. And he kept moving and he worked with his hands making tents so he wouldn't be a burden. He strategized. He executed.
The faith that you see in scripture is kinetic. It's forward motion. It's people who trusted God so much that they moved boldly into uncertainty, not people who trusted God so much that they sat down. You see, Hebrews 11 isn't a list of people who waited for confirmation. It's a list of people who acted on incomplete information because they trusted the one who called them.
And you know, this is what stings more than anything is that the man with no God has something that we often lack, and it's urgency. He knows no one's coming to save him. There's no backup plan. There's no divine intervention. There's no promise that it'll all work out. It's just him. And that belief, as terrifying as it is, it produces something for him, which is motion. He can't afford to wait. He can't afford to ask for signs. He has no one to outsource responsibility to. So he works. He bets on himself, his finite, mortal, small, limited self. And he still summons the courage to go all-in. There's just something so tragically noble about it. It's something so deeply convicting because you have, I have, we have infinitely more backing than he does. We serve an infinite God with no beginning and no end. Who is outside of time, outside of creation. The creator of the universe is in our corner. We have a promise that our labor is not in vain. And we have eternity. This isn't our only life. We're not YOLOing. We don't only live once. We live now and then in the forevermore with God. Which means that even if we totally failed all of our aims here on earth, that failure would never ultimately harm us.
And yet, he outworks us. He takes bigger risks. She stays more focused. She's more diligent. She's more faithful to her craft, more serious about her mission. When I tell her that was one thing that had me lock in, this happened years ago. I remember I was struggling with posting on TikTok regularly. And I remember seeing this woman and she was not a Christian. In fact, she was an adamant God-hater. Like she was very anti-Christianity, very anti-Jesus. And she was getting up every day, day in and day out, posting, growing her business, serving her clients, getting great testimonials. And I remember thinking, how does the man betting on himself have more courage than the man betting on God?
And there's only one answer. It's that we don't actually believe what we say we believe. Because if you did, you'd be the most dangerous person in the room. And so I'm not here to heap coals on your head. I am going to tell it to you real. I'm always going to do that. But the question is, what now? So what would change if you actually operated like you believed it? Not recklessness, not stupidity, not presumption, but holy ambition. A sacred intention and aggression. The kind of faith that moves because it trusts, not waits because it's scared.
Would it look like you stop asking for permission? God gave you scripture and wisdom in the Spirit. And he's not hiding his will in a puzzle. You're not going to get it wrong if you don't figure out the right answer. But if something aligns with his word and his character, it aligns with the opportunities and the gifting you've been given, you move. And if you're wrong or if it doesn't work out the way you expected, he redirects, but you have to be in motion first.
Or what if you redefine risk? What if instead you understood that the servant who buried his talent thought he was playing it safe, but the master called it wicked? And what if you understood that the real risk is the fact that you don't take action? That the real danger is going to the grave with a grain of potential still inside of you with an ounce of it being left in your fingertips. That your unlived calling and who you could have helped and what you could have done won't be fulfilled. The real loss is standing before God and one day realizing that you buried everything he gave you because you were afraid.
What if you let your faith be fuel? Not a place to hide from the world, but that the very thing that sends you into it is that source. The assurance of eternity should make you bolder in time, not more passive. If it's producing or not producing motion, it means something's wrong.
And what if you worked like the secularists, but for a different reason? And I want you to hear me so closely when I say this. You see, the secularist, the pagan, the atheist, the ungodly work hard because no one is coming to save them. But you work hard because someone already did. Hallelujah. You work hard because someone already came to save you. And so now we're not doing this to earn salvation, to earn right relationship with God, to earn something from Jesus Christ. We're doing this out of the overflow. He we love because he first loved us. We can give and we can share and we can impact the world with the gifts he's given us because God did it first. And so we can work hard because Christ already did the work on the cross and he deserves a return on his investment. We were bought with a price and that should produce not just the same level of intensity, but even more a fuel source that is far more powerful, that is far more infinite, and that should be able to take us to far greater heights. Right?
And so the watching world should see your output, your risk, your relentless execution and wonder what you have that they don't. But right now, it's the other way around and that's the scandal and it's on us to fix it. So, here's a question you have to answer. Have you used your faith as a springboard or a shelter? Is it launching you into arenas or are you hiding from it? Because the man with no God is already in the ring and frankly, they're winning. And what does that say about what we actually believe?
Now, if you enjoyed this, please subscribe and give the video a thumbs up. And if you're looking for a tangible way to start, and you're saying, "Do I hear all of this, but I have no idea where to begin?" I'm not saying that my path is your path, but what the Lord was able to do with me is show me a way to use my gifts and talents and the things and experiences that he has shown me and use that to impact other people by creating a simple product that teaches other people things that I had already learned from resume and interview skills to dog training to social media to losing weight. So many things people have been able to do this with. And our students are making $10, $20, $30, even upwards of $50,000 a month, working 5 to 10 hours a week through this business model. And I explain exactly what I do and how you can get started as well in the free training below that is in the description that explains exactly how I was able to replace my income, quit my job, and now be able to work from anywhere in the world, just a few hours a week, and I can give like I've never been able to before, and live like that, too. So, if you're interested in getting started, please um check out that training below.
And I want you to comment honestly. Have you been using your faith as fuel or have you been using it as a reason for passivity? And let's talk about why. I'll see you in the comment section.