Devotions for a Busy Business Person, no. 311 – Being Radical

Oswald Chambers is characteristically direct when he writes that surrender is not primarily about giving up the external things of life, but about surrendering the will. In My Utmost for His Highest, he says that once the will is surrendered, “all is done,” and the rest of life becomes living out that surrender. He also warns us not to mistake surrender for a religious mood. It is not a passing moment of devotion, but the settled yielding of the self to Jesus Christ.

“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” – Luke 9:23

That is hard work for business people, because so much of business life trains us to exercise the will: to decide, direct, initiate, hire, fire, negotiate, strategize, build and protect. None of these things is wrong. In fact, they may be part of our calling. But Chambers presses us to ask a deeper question: whose Will is directing my will?

“I want to know Christ — yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings…” Philippians 3:10-11

This is where my friend and spiritual director Archbishop Sylvain Lavoie’s language of radical discipleship helps. He connects genuine discipleship with taking up the cross and following Jesus through the Paschal, or Easter Mystery: passion, death and resurrection. Sylvain speaks of following Jesus as losing our lives, embracing His and living Calvary “in slow motion.” Chambers says that true surrender is not motivated by what we get from God, but by a “personal sovereign preference for Jesus Christ Himself.” 

Not an easy task.

For the business person, radical discipleship may look less like leaving everything behind and more like refusing to separate faith from the practical decisions of the day. It may mean surrendering the right to always be seen as correct. It may mean refusing a profitable opportunity because it would harm people or creation. It may mean absorbing a cost rather than passing harm downstream. It may mean treating an employee, supplier, competitor or client as someone Christ loves, rather than as an obstacle to the quarterly plan.

But Jesus does not leave us in suffering. The Paschal Mystery moves through suffering toward resurrection. Christ addresses wounds, heals them, and walks with people through their own experience of death and loss into new life.

Blessed are they who trust in the Lord and whose hope is the Lord. For they shall be like a tree planted by the waters, which spreads out its roots by the river, and will not fear when heat comes; but its leaf will be green and will not be anxious in the year of drought, nor will cease from yielding fruit. Jeremiah 17: 7-8

Leadership includes some form of suffering. There is the suffering of responsibility, the burden of decisions, the loneliness of carrying what others do not see, the grief of failure, the discipline of patience, and the cost of doing what is right when doing wrong would be easier. As we walk through those decisions in the Will of Christ, we step into the resurrected flourishing of a stronger business, a deeper character, and a more faithful witness.

Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ,
Give us courage to take up the daily cross, not as a burden without hope, but as the path that leads through death into flourishing life. Shape our work, our leadership and our decisions until they bear the marks of Your love. Amen.

Amen