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Lesson 1

But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Matthew 6:33 NIV


There are diverse interpretations as to what it means to seek first the kingdom of God. All of them seem to be a bit one dimensional to me, and I suppose this one will be as well. But we are going to look at it in the context of doing business.

I believe that we as business people have a unique role in expanding the kingdom on earth. It seems that there are a lot of diverse ideas about what the kingdom of God actually is. If you ask 50 people, you’ll get 50 answers, and that’s not to say many of them will be wrong. 

For me, I look back to Eden as our original outpost, that corner of the kingdom brought to earth, to be expanded upon until the whole world was colonized as the kingdom of God. We know how that went, and we are now in the do-over process, only with a lot more people and millennia of brokenness and destruction. We have work to do. Jesus said “My kingdom is not of this world.” He also said things like “If I cast out demons with the finger of God, surely the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Luke 11:20) If we need to understand what the kingdom is, we can look to the works of Jesus, and heaven as our model of what should and should not be happening here.

So here we are, caught in this space between sacred and secular though that is a completely man-made construct. Our role doesn’t change just because we go to work. But how we operate as a business should.

If you watched our little video above, we were sharing some examples of the kingdom of God breaking through in our business, on our customers behalf. What we’re going to do today is help you to think about how the kingdom of God can be brought into this realm with your business as a vehicle for it, and get you to develop a plan to be more intentional about it.

We get stuck in the mode of praying for what we need, what our business needs, and everybody else is a second thought. But that's not actually how it's supposed to work. Every successful business whether Christian or not is based upon serving and meeting needs. What the opening verse suggests is that you put kingdom first in order to get the stuff you need. So how are you going to be intentional about that from here on out? What does Kingdom look like in your situation? 

If you’ve learned much about marketing from secular sources, there’s always the advice to find your niche, your audience, your ideal customer, or customer avatar. In other words, they want you to figure out who is the type of person that your product or service is for. What is your main demographic? They want you to find the persons “pain points” or the problem they have and will pay money to get resolved. If you’ve done that exercise already, that’s great, we will use that information but we’re going to use it a bit differently. We’re not going to rub salt in their wounds and get them triggered enough that they buy our thing, we are going to use that as our marker of where we can bring about a kingdom shift.

We can look at our products and services and what motivation people have when they purchase and how we can address the issue from a more “kingdom” perspective. For example, my best selling product is an anti-procrastination aid. People buy and repeat buy because they want to get more stuff done. The easy way out is to pray for them to be able to accomplish all that they set out to do. But is that really the highest and best?

Now, I’m not saying I know the highest and best, but I do know that empowering someone to run around like a chicken with their head cut off, doing lots of things is not as great as someone who discerns the right things, and does them at the right times, and is in tune with flow. Someone who has resources, blessings, revelations released to them as they are needed, and that the person is released from any repercussions where they’ve shrank back from their true calling saying “that’s too much, I can’t do it.” That they now have courage to take that thing on. That their gifts, talents, generational blessings, and provision are released from captivity. That they instantly see how to defeat obstacles. That they clearly see their purpose and discard the busy work.

I don’t pray for individual people, but I can pray over a formula. You might be more individual-oriented, especially if you’re service-based.

"In Jesus' name"

Let’s talk about praying in Jesus' name since it goes along with what we’re talking about in terms of getting a higher perspective for prayers. The word says whatever we ask in his name, he’ll do. And we’re all about asking big in this challenge.

People ask me all the time if I pray in Jesus' name. (I really scare a lot of people so they have to ask.) My answer to that is probably just as off putting. I say "If you mean do I tack 'In Jesus’ name' on to the end of a prayer like an incantation then no. If you mean to operate in His nature, in other words his faith, his love for Father, us, creation; his passion, compassion and outward expressions of those which he has gifted us through the indwelling of Holy Spirit, then I certainly hope so.

In Hebrew culture, name is synonymous with nature, or character. If you reduce praying in Jesus' name to the string of words that you tack on to the end of a prayer to make the thing work, that is an incantation. (Witchcraft)

I imagine praying in Jesus' name to be a matter of having the mind of Christ, stepping into him, taking on his nature, his character and praying from that position. It’s praying kingdom prayers. No wonder we get whatever we want when we ask in Jesus' name!

Your Homework:

For your challenge homework today we have a worksheet below with a couple questions to get you thinking, and some space to draft a big (Big as in thinking big, not long and wordy) kingdom prayer. 

Important! We've all been praying for our businesses. This is not more of that. This is you going after kingdom on behalf of your customers, while considering your products and services a vehicle for it. Please look at the example provided in the downloads, and watch the above video if you skipped it.

You can do bullet points or completely script it out. You can think in terms of your overall business, you can choose at least one product, or do your service. If you want to get gung ho and do a bunch of products, you can print as many sheets as you need. I'm including a filled in example using the product I was talking about above so you can see how it looks. Like I said in the video, I just do bullet points and pray it over every item of that product in existance and apply it to all going forward.

When you get done, comment below how you’re going to seek first the kingdom through your business offering. You might give others some creative ideas! (We also like testimonies of how you’ve already done this.) Next, we get to those other “things” referred to in our opening verse.

Resources

Resource 1

Seneca's filled out Kingdom First example worksheet

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Resource 2

Seneca's filled out prayer example worksheet

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Download
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Resource 3

Blank Kingdom First Worksheet

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Download
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Resource 4

Blank Prayer Template Worksheet

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