Senator John Crane shares 3 ways faith transforms your everyday work.
At our most recent Christian business breakfast hosted here at The Stone Table, my friend Senator John Crane gave a great talk about how we as Christians should engage well in the marketplace and really in every sphere of this life. And so we’ve got a little clip of that talk that we want to show you today. I think it’ll encourage you. Marketplace skills are missionary skills. Christianity impacts every single aspect of our life. Everything, there is nothing over which God doesn’t have something to say. Now we might need to do some biblical study and application to begin to connect biblical principles with real world contexts, but there is nothing that God has nothing to say about. I mean politics we make that separation but you’re telling me that God has nothing to say about government? Yeah, he does. He has nothing to say about business? Yes, he does. God has something to say about everything and so the challenge for us is what does it mean to be a missionary in our particular context? Three things I would tell you right out of the gate. Number one, it impacts how we think it impacts our world view. The ideas that shape the framework of our lives. What do I believe, what are the ideas, the deeply held belief systems that shape the decisions that I make in my life. People often ask me in politics man, there’s all those decisions all those laws all those bills that you have to study and to make decisions on how do you do it? And I would challenge each one of us if we’re struggling to try to understand what’s the right thing here follow the Berean principle. This is right out of Acts 17. It says and the people of Berea were more open-minded than those in Thessalonica. They listened eagerly to Paul’s message and they searched the scriptures day after day to see if Paul and Silas were teaching the truth. Now keep in mind it’s easy for us to forget in the 21st century that by searching the scriptures they were they only had the Old Testament. They didn’t even have the New Testament, but every day they’re searching the scriptures to marry up what Paul is saying. With God’s word now imagine if I weren’t speaking and it was actually the Apostle Paul. Would any of us question what he had to say? If we’re going to be honest probably not, but they did. They said well okay we’ll see and went to the scriptures to see where the truth was and so what we believe has to be lined up with what we know to be true. So the first thing is our thinking secondly is how we Act and that is personal behavior and conduct. If people see me do they see me modeling what it means to be a Christian leader professionally and personally is there consistency between my public life and my private life? And that is something that only each one of us can answer for ourselves because there’s only one person on the planet that I spend 24 hours a day with and that is me and I struggle with that inconsistency sometimes. We all do. The goal is to keep working towards consistency. But how we act sets a model for people are we modeling Christ-like behavior and the last is how we interact, which is essentially how do we interact with people. How do we treat people? As you can imagine in my world I get a lot of people who get pretty frustrated about politics in general and sometimes with me in particular because they didn’t understand what I did what I why I did what I did or they thought I should have done something differently. Okay I will tell you candidly I’ve had people blow me up on on social media, on the radio I’ve had people yell at me I’ve had people spit at me cuss at me grab me all in professional public context. Right. This wasn’t some back alley thing. What happens if I blinked even once just once if I let my guard down and just reacted the way I feel internally sometimes that I want to react? That would undo all the effort that I’ve been trying to make to model what it means to be a Christian leader in the political space because the caricature of politics is exactly that. That there are too many blood-sucking creatures out there that are corrupt. They’re out for themselves. They say they’re public servants but they’re not really all these things. And to be fair some of that is true. There are always bad apples just like there are bad apples in business, but that doesn’t mean that every leader in business is a bad apple. And so we’ve got to wrestle with those who are making it difficult for us to be who we want to be in this space. Hey thanks for watching if you like this video maybe give us a like, a comment, share it with some friends. If you’re interested in more resources from The Stone Table you can find those at thestonetable.org/start. Before you go, hey check out this other video. We’ll see you next time, thank you.
