Surrendering Your Results and Trusting God with Growth
We are returning to our series for the month of August on Marketing with Mission: Serving Without Striving, and I am excited to share with you week three, Surrendering Your Results and Trusting God with Growth. One of the reasons I’m so excited is I have notes that I made weeks ago about this topic, but I only wrote the first two blogs of this month. I was busy getting ready to attend the Advanced Writers and Speakers conference that I went to in Duluth, Georgia, and I’ve been home for a little over a week. I sat down to write this blog and I truly believe God did not want me to finish until now. Let me tell you why.
I was going over my notes and I happened to see a notebook that was lying on a shelf in my office. The notebook had written in bold letters on the front “Doing Business with God”. Doing Business with God was a class that I took with my friend Katie Horner in 2018. I actually took this class more than one time, but I believe this was the first time I took it. During that class we read a book called Bible-Based Businesses: Biblical Principles for Success in Business and Life by Jeff Testerman.
When I was in Duluth, I got to hug Katie’s neck again. I’ve seen her a couple of times in the last couple of years, and it’s been a wonderful experience to see her again because I have learned so much from her over the years. I was just flipping through this notebook and some of the things on the pages were the topic of today’s blog, so I will be referencing those.
The other reason is I noticed is that some of these were quotes from this Bible-based businesses book and I needed to have my book to make sure that I was quoting this book properly. When I opened up the page to where it says in my notes on page 39, chapter four of the book, I realized that the title of chapter four is “The Power of Contentment.”
God does not stop there. I attended Sunday school this week and do you know the topic of my Sunday school? Contentment. If God does not work in mysterious ways, I don’t know what to tell you. We are going to talk about success, but we are going to talk about it for this week’s Marketing with Mission from the perspective of how God sees success.
The Striving Trap
The truth is we often get into what we call a striving trap. This is why this topic matters. It’s easy for us to hustle hard and measure our worth by numbers. That might be the number of followers, the number of sales, or the number of downloads. If you’re like me and have a podcast, you might be thinking, “I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do, but I’m not seeing the results that I expected.” This burden can often create anxiety. It can create discouragement, comparison, or burnout. God doesn’t expect that for us. That’s not His purpose for us in a business.
He gives us reasons to do what He has called us to. 1 Corinthians 3:6-7 says, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So then neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who makes things grow.”
In many situations, we can only plant the seed. Someone else may water it and God has to make it grow. That’s not just planting a seed with someone about salvation. That’s in our businesses oftentimes. It takes time for it to grow. We have to wait on God. I know waiting on God sometimes is hard for us because His timing is not our timing. It is our responsibility to plant faithfully and show up with excellence and God’s responsibility is the increase. Think about how a farmer plants his seeds, but he can’t control the rain or the sun.
We have to remember how God measures success because we have to release the numbers. Don’t let the shares, the sales, or the sign-up define your success. Yes, measurements or metrics are helpful, but they’re not your identity or your mission. If you’ve listened to my podcast for any length of time, I’ve told you you need to track your numbers, and you do, but you don’t need to let that become what measures your success, your identity, or what you put your worth in.
Obedience vs. Outcome
Show up consistently with what God has placed in your hand. Obedience matters more than the outcome. Think about how God measures success. In the chapter on contentment in Bible-Based Businesses, Biblical Principles for Success in Business and Life by Jeff Testerman, it asks, “What is true success?” and has a quote by John Wooten. “Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of knowing you did your best to become the best you’re capable of becoming.”
What is Success?
The quote I wanted to share from the book, from the author himself, is on page 39. “What is success? We are more concerned about success than God is. Let me clarify. When we talk about success, we normally think in terms of how much money we’ve made, how much we’ve grown, or how many employees we have, and whether or not we’re still in business. God does not measure success in the same way the world normally measures success. Success is measured in our heart. Is it peaceful? Is there joy? Am I content? You can have nothing and still be a success with God.
More often than not God’s path to both kinds of success, that is, success in His eyes and success in the eyes of the world, is through failure. Success could be defined as achieving what you set out to achieve. You set a goal and you reach the goal, but is that true success? Success is not achieving something. We must also judge your success based on what you had to sacrifice to achieve your goal. Jesus said, ‘what does it profit a man if He gains the whole world and loses his soul?’
Success is not based on the amount of money you’re making. Success isn’t achieving a career goal that causes people to look up to you. Success is when you reach a level of contentment that puts you in a place of peace and quiet joy. It’s between you and God. It does not depend on things or people’s opinions. It’s accepting who I am in God and knowing that He accepted me.”
I want you to remember that because I know a lot of people struggle with the numbers. They struggle with, “Am I doing all that I can do?” We have to practice what you might call open-handedness. Sometimes He wants you to let go of whatever it is that you’re doing that’s not bearing fruit. Sometimes God redirects not to punish us, but to protect us or prepare us, and we have to stay encouraged.
In Galatians 6:9, Scripture says, “Let us not grow weary in doing good for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” Remember, your job is planting and watering. God’s job is the harvest. I want you to reflect upon the answer to this question for yourself. Where am I holding on too tightly to the outcomes in my business? Then pray this prayer before you post, you launch, or you pitch this week. Ask God to take the results and use them for His glory.
