So recently, armed with my gospel artillery fit to advance the common good through my digital advertising content work; enabling brands and causes to communicate better in the internet age, I stepped into the foray of entrepreneurship and boy hasn’t it been a rollercoaster! 

One of the things that hit me starting out was the procrastination many enterpreneurs are prone to, Ecclesiastes 11:4 , however, seemed to heal that quickly with the balming reminder, “whoever observes the wind will not sow,” but there was one more I wasn’t quite prepared for. 

And Tim Keller’s landmark book “Every Good endeavour” seemed to succinctly wake me up to it, he wrote, speaking of believers aquiescing to worldliness at work. 

“…Their Christian life is what they do on Sundays and weeknights, when they engage in spiritual activities. The rest of the week they have no ability to think circumspectly about the underlying values they are consuming and living out. In their life and work “out in the world,” they uncritically accept and reenact all of their culture’s underlying values and idolatries of self, surface appearances, technique, personal freedom, materialism, and other features of expressive individualism.”

Look, I wanted to give him a high five!

But I also knew who he was referring to, I had seen him in my mirror that morning, my digital marketing field is literally founded on technique, you win more in online marketing if your bag of tricks is always beaming, there is always room for “7 ways to make something work” online.

Yet what I have experienced in my own heart and observed in this technique-driven Industry is that we Christians are often the most likely to underestimate workplace values and how they pollute biblical conviction. 

It’s easy for Christians at work to chorus along with the world in tricks and techniques, human strategies to “make business work”, push self-fulfillment agendas in boardroom meetings, on grounds of skill aquisition or competence for example, but are those motivations ultimate? 

Because competence can become an idol too, we can forget in starting a business that it is the Lord that builds the house, (Ps 127:1) in spite of the labourers. We can wax so eloquent about dreaming big and forget the lord determines our steps, in spite of the plans in our hearts. (Prov 16:9)

We can buy into the social media “image drive” and posturing and forget to be motivated by real love for the people our work serves. How we think and speak of our expertise can reveal whether we see it as a gift from God. 

I found it remarkable that subtle idols are always waylaying Christians as soon as they walk out of the temple on Sunday, into what they call a “weekly job” – yet in essence, (atleast practically speaking) it’s always a temple of technique: where grace earlier acknowledged on Sunday is easily undermined on Wednesday at work, if not forgotten altogether. 

Lord help!