"Leveraging Business for Kingdom Advance - part 2" by Finny Kuruvilla

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Well, good afternoon, everybody. Welcome back to Strength to Strength, to our fourth special event on Strength to Strength. And this might be our last one for a while. We thought we would do four here at the beginning of the year. And maybe as we get into the fall, we'll kick off the special events again. Who knows?

Strength to Strength is something like an initiative that we feel like God has been just pouring His breath into, and the admin team. There's four of us here. We've said at times it's felt like we're kind of hanging out the back, just so keeping up with this initiative. And so it's been exciting to see what all God's been doing. And today we were blessed this morning with a talk here. Brother Finney, he laid the foundations for a kingdom business, what it looks like for us as Christians to really think well, to think holistically about work. That was a real blessing. He laid the foundations. And this afternoon, Brother Finney will be digging into some more of the practical parts of this.

Also, we plan to do about half an hour of Q&A or 40 minutes, depending on how much time we have. We want to wrap it up by 4:30. And we've had a lot of questions come in already. But if during this talk you have questions, feel free to chat those to us. Sam is going to be collecting those questions and submitting them to Brother Finney here at the end of the talk. So we'll do our best. But like I said, we've had a ton of questions. And that shows that this group of people is very interested in this, and rightly so. We all work. It's something that we do every day. And so it's close to our hearts.

So before we get started, let's just bow our heads for prayer. Father, thank You for this time. Thank You for all the many brothers and sisters that are pulled together on this call. Thank You for the body of Christ, Lord, around the world. And we thank You for Your kingdom. And Father, we ask that Your kingdom would come and that Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, and that today through this call, that it would be advanced a little bit farther. We pray a special blessing and anointing on Brother Finney. Thank You for his gifts, his talents, for his vision, and for how he works so hard for the kingdom. Father, I pray that You would bless he and his family in a special way for sacrificing for this call today.

So does God in direct this time, Lord, we look to You. We thank You for how You created us. We thank You for the beauty of Your creation, Lord. We want to see Your creation, the beauty of Your creation proclaimed to the world so that more people can come to follow You. So bless this call in a special way. And we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Blessings to Brother Finney for the talk. All right, great. So I'm going to be covering a lot of subjects here in fairly rapid manner. And I don't expect that during just this first pass-through, we'll be able to address all the matters in a lot of depth here. So I'm hoping that the Q&A time is our opportunity to do that well. So let me share my screen here. I realize that there are some who are just calling in. And so I'm going to try to read through my slides as well. But I do think the slides are helpful for communicating here what I hope to share with you all. So let me hit share. Here we go.

So we're going to be talking now that we've done the foundational talk this morning on how to leverage business for kingdom advance. And I want to do just a little bit of review, not a lot, from this morning. I mentioned to you Milton Friedman this morning, who is one of the dominant, is the source of one of the dominant schools of thought here, who is an economist to win the Nobel Prize. Here's a quote of what he said, "There is one and only one social responsibility of business to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud."

And I mentioned this morning that this view, this so-called Chicago view, Chicago school view of economics is very, very prominent in particularly large companies, multinational companies, and publicly traded companies. And the proponents of business justly point to some of the great accomplishments of capitalism. And they look at all the advances in farming here, look at all the advances in neonatal care. I'm sure all of us here on the call know people or maybe even have family members who have had premature babies born. Without all of the amazing innovations that have come from businesses, those children would have easily died. Think about all the advances in surgery, the advances in transportation. We can go halfway around the world in 12 hours, 13 hours.

It's pretty amazing. Clean water, clean energy. These are surely great advances that can be credited to the collective work of those who have worked on behalf of business over the decades here. And so many people who are diehard advocates of pure free market capitalism will point to this and say, "See, isn't there a lot to rejoice over?" And there are many good things, as I mentioned. However, there is an ugly side to that same free market capitalism, which produces this on the screen. So you can see here this individual who is, I assume this is tobacco, that this person's smoking. We see the addiction hall here of gambling. Here we see on the right a factory farm where they're stuffing animals into very crowded conditions.

Here we see this individual who is obese and is consuming some kind of hamburger. The tremendous epidemic that exists of pornography that is all around us. These are a product of very evil businesses here. And this scene is all too typical, probably even become the norm now where you walk into homes and that's what you see. You see people sitting right next to each other and yet not communicating with each other, all staring into their phones. So as much as we can celebrate the accomplishments on the previous slide, we can also bemoan and question, "Well, is this all good? How do we think of this?" I have a friend who has committed his life to bringing free market, fair market capitalism into various countries in the world, places like Africa and others.

And he very candidly shared with me that now he goes back and he visits those places that he has tried to lift out of poverty. And he sees them now sitting like this on the lower right-hand corner of the screen.

And he questions. He says, "What have I done with my life? I've been trying to use capitalism and mobile technology and all that to help people. And now they're just seemingly weaker than before with a breakdown of family structures and more addictions." So the critique of modern business practice is that this kind of Friedman-like ethic, which is all about maximizing profits, leads to all these things. And we have to acknowledge this as much as the former. And so broadly speaking, this is definitely a spectrum. But you have these two camps. You have the capitalists on the left, the socialists on the right. And on the left, you can see it's marked by private firms owning assets, market forces, supply and demand.

In general, it's about cutting costs, limited taxes, healthcare left to the free market. But of course, it leads to problems like monopolies, addictions, inequalities, clear advantages of dynamic economies, a lot of incentives for growth. And then over here on the right, you have government-owned assets, redistribution of income, price control, fewer incentives to be efficient. If everybody owns it, who cares? It's the phenomenon of the public restrooms that nobody wants to clean.

High taxes. Healthcare is usually government-provided, typically very inefficient states. And the supposed advantage is trying to promote equality. Now, many people have pointed out that countries that are socialist, usually people want to leave them and come to companies that are more capitalist.

The failures of states like Venezuela and many other countries are examples of this. So I generally think that we just have to listen to the critiques on both sides. And we, as kingdom Christians, need to not fall into one camp or another, but try to stand outside of these systems and ask, "Where does the Bible speak? And how can we advocate third-wave models that are sensitive to these critiques and offer a way forward?" I mentioned this morning that instead of the Greco-Roman view, the Pandora's box view, or the Friedman view of business with this now the counter-reaction, especially among young people, of a socialist espousal and central economy, that I think there is a third view.

I know there's a third view, which is a biblical vision of work and business that represents a third way of engaging here. So we're going to try to unpack that in this afternoon's session.

I mentioned as well from Jeff Van Duser this mission statement of business, which I like, which is, "Business exists to create opportunities to express aspects of our God-given identity or image in meaningful and creative work." And secondly, that business exists to produce goods and services that enable the community to flourish. And of course, flourishing here, we want to define that biblically, not as the world defines. So business, and I really hope everyone was here for this morning's session because I'm building on this. We don't want to fall into the constructs that I described this morning, but we want to move into a biblical paradigm of what business and work represent.

Okay. So now I want to introduce some new concepts and some new language here that was all review from this morning. And now we're going to cover some fresh territory here. There's a phrase that has become quite popular in the last, I would say, 20 years or so. It came from the phrase as business as mission or BAM.

And this expression was invented in 1999. So it's fairly recent at Oxford. However, this term is a very nebulous term and requires a lot of clarification in order to properly understand it. So how do we understand business as mission? And this is something where I want us to pay careful attention to because there's such fog and there's such confusion around this that we need to be clear on it. So one is business for mission. And I should say this comes partly from the work of Mark Russell, who has helped clarify these terms. So business for mission is really about funding missions. It's about funding evangelism through the profits of business.

Okay. So it's people who say, "I just want to give a lot. I want to be writing checks to churches, to nonprofits, and just really try to advance kingdom work through the profits of business." Then there's mission in business, which is quite different. This is about seeking to lead unbelieving employees to faith in Christ. So there are many people who will start a business and they'll say, "I specifically want to employ individuals who are from other faiths who may not have a particular faith." And through mentorship, through companionship, through all of the encounters that we gain in business to try to draw people into faith there.

Then there is business as a platform for mission. And here, it's where someone will sit around and say, "I want to go to pick the country. It may be a difficult country to enter into." And they say, "How do I get into this country in a way that I can be there for the long haul? Well, I want to do that through business." And they are using business as this platform to get into the country and ultimately do missions work, do evangelism work. Very common. A lot of people have sought to do this.

And I would say typically in this one, the business is and may not be something that's their dream or their passion because they're using the business really as a way to get into the country for the purpose of this loftier goal of church planting and evangelism.

Number four is business as a cover for missions. This is the only one that I'll say I think is explicitly wrong. This is business as a means simply to obtain a visa. There's no real business. I mean, it's very shadowy. I mean, it's a very weak form of number three where someone is using business simply as a means of trying to gain access to a country, but it's really a sham or a fraud. So I hope that those on this call would not seriously embark on this, but it has happened many, many times that people have tried to get into countries using business really as a sham, as a cover for business.

And then finally, there is business as mission. So business as mission is quite different from the other ones above. It is seeing the business itself as the vehicle of the mission of God in the world, which is larger than simply evangelism and church planting. And we'll talk about this. Now, it's very important that we have clarity on this. So again, business for mission, it's using the profits to fund other work. Evangelism, say, mission in business, trying to lead unbelievers to faith. Business as platform, trying to gain access to other countries through business. I'm going to skip number four as a cover for missions because it's clearly unbiblical. And then the fifth one is business as mission, which is seeing what the business is truly worthwhile for its own merits.

Now, one can combine these. This is not an exclusive where you just have to do one or two or three or five. One can certainly bring in multiple of these aspects here. But I think it's very useful to clarify this as we think about, "Why am I doing this? What is this about? Do I care intrinsically about the business that I am doing? And do I really believe that this is a part of what God is doing in the world?" And I think this is useful for me to illustrate by example. Some of this can be somewhat abstract. And so I'll use my own history here as a way to illustrate this. As I mentioned in the morning call, I'm trained as a physician.

I worked for about five years as a doctor in several different hospitals here in Boston. And one of the questions that comes up, particularly among the more thoughtful, is when you think about medicine, when you think about disease. And here I'm showing on the screen a picture on the left of cholera.

Cholera is a disease that causes diarrhea and has killed many, many people over the centuries. On the right is a picture of a man who is suffering from cholera. And there's a very interesting thought experiment that you can ask yourself, which is when God created the world in Genesis 1 and he made that proclamation, "It's good. It's good. It's good. It's good," was there cholera in the world? And was God pronouncing, "It's good," over diseases like cholera and Ebola and coronavirus and HIV? Was that a part of his plan from the beginning? And I actually think that this is a very fundamental question for us to wrestle with here. It's very fundamental because many people struggle with faith in God because they look at disease, at suffering, at pain, and they wonder, "Is this something that I can attribute to God?

Is this something that is a part of God's creative plan?" And I would submit to you here that one of the problems of how we think about intelligent design, and I definitely would consider myself a person who believes in intelligent design, who believes that God created life and the world and all those things. But I would submit to you that for most of us, we have a deficient understanding, or at least a potentially deficient understanding, in that we only invoke one intelligent designer there. But I think to have a full picture, we should advocate biblically that there's actually a second designer as well at work who is Satan.

And that Satan has taken the good creation that God has made. And around the time of the fall, that he corrupted the creation to make all kinds of agents and beings that are antithetical to what God actually wants. And that it's very difficult to understand or process the world as we see it now without invoking a robust understanding of Satan as the corrupt designer who has twisted what God has done in the world. And I'll give you biblical support for this.

And I think this is very, very important from an evangelism and apologetics perspective and my framework from a business perspective. I want to come to that in a sec. Just to show you as well, these are diseases. I happen to work on this disease a lot in my career. This is a disease called hereditary angioedema. It's the same woman here over a very short period of time, only over a couple of hours. This is what she looks like normally.

And the disease triggers, and she looks like the bottom right. I won't get into the pathophysiology of this disease, but this is a very—you can imagine a very traumatic and difficult disease to deal with. It strikes you out of the blue when you get these attacks.

And again, how do we think about this? Is this something that God created in humans, or is this, in fact, a corruption of how we're supposed to be? One final disease here, another one that I've put a lot of time in over the years, muscular dystrophy.

This is a disease that is X-linked. So it affects boys. These boys are not usually known to have muscular dystrophy until age four or five or so when they start missing some of the normal developmental milestones. They are missing a key protein in their body called the strophin, and it leads to all kinds of problems. They're usually wheelchair-bound by around age 10 to 12. They usually die in their 20s as a result of this defect in their genes. So again, how do we think about this? Do we think about this as something that God has created, that God has intended along with cholera and HIV and many other diseases, or is it something different? And I think this verse is absolutely fascinating.

This is Luke 10:19 where Jesus is speaking. He's commissioning the 70 here. And he says, "Behold, I give you the authority to trample on serpents and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy." And I hope you caught this because I think it's very, very interesting because he is saying here that serpents and scorpions are on the same level as the power of the enemy, the power of the devil. And so I take from this that Jesus himself is saying that serpents and scorpions are part of some form of creation that is damaged and corrupted and ultimately demonic, that they're not in league with other agents of creation there.

Another place where he illustrates this—and this is Jesus again speaking in Luke 13—there's a woman who has a spinal deformity. She's hunched over. Jesus heals her. He's criticized for that. But then he comes back and says, "So ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has bound—think of it—for 18 years been loosed from this bond on the Sabbath?" And I hope you caught that here. He's saying that this woman who was deformed in some way with this spinal deformity was actually bound by Satan. Very interesting.

And Jesus here, I think, clearly says that this disease was as the result of satanic activity. And thus, he has no regrets about delivering her on the Sabbath. And in fact, when the apostles reflect back on Jesus's ministry, they say that God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, who went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. So notice again, what did they believe was the fundamental problem of those who were in bondage to these various sicknesses? It was that they were oppressed by the devil.

And so Jesus's healing ministry thus was attacking satanic activity. And in fact, John, when he summarizes Jesus's appearance on the earth, he says, "The Son of God appeared to destroy the works of the devil." Okay. So why did I talk about all this on this message on business? So I wrestled with this particularly when I was in medical school. And I came to the conviction—I still have this conviction—that to go and deliver someone from a disease, cholera, muscular dystrophy, you name the disease, is actually an intrinsic good in its own right. And it is a manner of delivering people from the bondage of the devil.

And apart from whether or not that person will convert, apart from a church plant or anything like that, that you are doing an intrinsically good activity through this work. And I told you this morning my story about why I ended up working in healthcare and in biotech because I want to use whatever talents God has given me to destroy the works of the devil, to participate in what Jesus already began, and to bring hopefully even cures to diseases where there were previously not cures. Okay. So this is a very, very important thought because now I'm going to go back and look here at this description here of business as mission. And I will say, speaking of my own business that I started in 2008, that I view my business that I began as doing, number one, funding missions through the profits of the business.

It's very important to what we do. Number two, seeking to lead unbelieving employees to faith in Christ. We have many non-Christians at my company. And then also, number five, we work only in the US, so we don't go abroad, at least thus far. But number five is business as a vehicle of the mission of God in the world. It is a real business that stands on its own merits that I strongly believe is doing good in the world. And I have noticed very consistently that unless someone has a deep and abiding conviction that what one is doing with one's business, apart from a secondary benefit, which is a very important benefit of evangelism and church planting, that one needs to have a conviction about the business and its validity in serving the world and in advancing the mission of God.

So in my case, this is how I do this. I believe this can be extended into many, many other domains and fields here. But this is a very, very important concept. Okay. So for that reason, I feel that, and I strongly believe that those of us on the call need to, as we think about our businesses, as we think about the direction that we're going here, ask the question, "Can we align our activity, align what we're doing on a nine-to-five basis, Monday through Friday, with these larger purposes of what God is wanting to do in the world? What he asked us to do in Genesis 1 and what he wants us to do till the very end before the second coming?"

If we can't, it's going to be very difficult to get that motivation to be excellent at what we do. And many, many Christian businesses suffer from weak excellence, from shoddy practices, from sloppiness because there's not that deep and abiding conviction of what they're doing being a business unto the Lord, a business that is advancing his mission.

Okay. So I'm going to talk now about investing and the practice of investing. And the Sermon on the Mount here should loom large as we think about investing. Jesus says in Matthew 6, "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

And so I want to make a few comments here because this is something that we need to understand and we need to really have confidence in what Jesus is saying here. So first, I think it's very interesting that what Jesus is saying here is he's saying, "Don't put your treasures on earth because there are these four categories of what—or sorry, these three categories of what can destroy our treasures." So moth, the loss that comes from nature; rust, the loss that comes from time; and thieves, the loss that comes from people. So basically, he's saying, "Hey, you want to put your treasures here on earth, there are forces, these three forces, moth, rust, and thieves that stand for loss from nature, loss from time, loss from people that are going to destroy and undermine your wealth here."

And instead, he says—and I hope you caught this—he says, "Lay up for yourselves." Did you notice that? "For yourselves, treasures in heaven." And some people don't even quite know what to do with that. They almost feel guilty when they think about rewards.

But if you look in Matthew 6, that whole section before this, it's all about those Pharisees, they already have their rewards and they got what they wanted. But if you want rewards in heaven, then you need to follow my ways here. And so rewards are very much a kingdom mindset if you understand Jesus correctly. We are supposed to do it. He doesn't chide people for that. And in its proper perspective, seeking these eternal rewards is good. And basically, Jesus is saying here, he's saying, "If you are a smart person, if you are intelligent, you will not put your treasures on earth. You will put them into places where they are going to yield a much better enduring eternal reward."

And I like the way that Dale Bruner puts it. He says, "Jesus does not quash ambition. He elevates it. The Christian is to be ambitious, passionate, acquisitive, enterprising for the Father's approval for the well-done of God's final judgment." Thus, Jesus's ethic is not so much ascetic as it is athletic.

And I think that's right, that Jesus is not embracing here asceticism. He's teaching us that there is an arbitrage opportunity. Now, not everyone is familiar with that term arbitrage. So I'll just quickly explain it. Arbitrage is a fancy word that they use in finance, but it's very simple.

It's basically where you have something that sells for one price in one location and another price for another location, and that difference can be exploited. So for example, let's say that sugar costs 50 cents a pound in New York. I'm making up these numbers. I have no idea what it costs. But let's say sugar costs 50 cents a pound in New York.

From the store, you can buy it there for 50 cents. But then here in Boston, you can sell sugar for a dollar a pound. Well, what you should do if you're exploiting the arbitrage there is you should buy the sugar in New York and sell it in Boston. And you can make money on that spread, on that 50-cent spread there.

And so in the world of finance, arbitrage is considered almost the ultimate because all you got to do is just buy and sell, and you can exploit that difference there. And what Jesus is basically saying here is giving us the ultimate arbitrage opportunity. He is saying that wealth here on earth is not worth very much. It's going to corrode. It's going to be destroyed.

Why not arbitrage it? Why not convert it into something that is eternal? And he appeals, as I said, to our own interest here. He's saying, "Store it up for yourselves in that better place." Many examples we could give of this there, but I think the most elegant restatement of this principle comes from Jim Elliott. A lot of you know this quote where he says, "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose." It's basically what Jesus is saying here in the Sermon on the Mount. And so when we think about that, clearly here, I think anything like an aimless savings or piling up funds is clearly prohibited. There are so many people who just save and save and save, and you think, "What are you doing?"

As I understand the Sermon on the Mount, based on what I just said, if one is going to take what you're doing for a particular goal, say one wants to purchase a house or start a business or fund some Christian enterprise, I believe that would be okay because you are trying to take your money here and focus it on some clear goal, some clear objective, and turn that into something that is going to be useful. Owning a house, hopefully, you're going to use that to do what Jesus said in Luke 14. You're going to have people over and have feasts with the poor and the lame and the blind. Starting a business, hopefully, you're going to do that to accomplish some of these businesses' mission purposes, funding some Christian enterprise.

So we have to be mindful of this principle. It's very dangerous to fool ourselves in this and to accumulate for accumulation's sake. But I think the spirit of what Jesus speaks about here in the Sermon on the Mount, and especially in Luke, we as a family just went through the whole book of Luke very slowly and very carefully. And I was impressed again at Jesus's charge for us to be wise with how we use our money and to use it strategically for advancing the kingdom here. So I say this because a lot of people ask me about this because I do work in the field, as I mentioned before, where we put in money to get a business going.

We run those companies, and hopefully, somebody will buy them, and we make our living on that spread here. I want to illustrate now the dangers of investing, and I want to illustrate why we have to be very, very careful about this. This is a true story. This is a case from several years ago, a company called High Class New York. They held themselves out. They advertised themselves as a business that would be an escort service. Basically, you wanted to go to a party, and you wanted some beautiful woman to be there with you.

Then you could pay them a fee, and they would send you this woman or a birthday party, something like that. Obviously, not a good business. Well, lo and behold, it was a front for a prostitution ring. And so the police discovered this. They busted the ring, and here's the mugshots of the individuals that they indicted.

And here now are the owners and the relatives of the owners. And it makes sense that, hey, this is why they're going to indict them and cause them to go to jail, etc. And then these individuals here were the managers and supervisors. So they said, "Hey, you were knowingly supporting an illegal business. You are running an illegal business of prostitution. You need to stand trial here for that activity." Now, you notice there's two faces here that don't have any kind of subtitle there. Interesting if you want to guess who they are and what their role is. Well, the answer is they were the investors.

Two individuals funded this business. They each put in $700,000, and they were being repaid with interest. And the government indicted them too and said, "You were investing in this." And by the way, they were indicted alongside owners and operators. And some people say, "Hey, is this legitimate? They weren't involved in the business. They weren't involved in managing it. They were pure financiers here."

Well, the government's logic was very clear that, "Hey, if you're knowingly aiding and investing in an illegal business, that is wrong, and you should be held accountable for that." And so now we turn to a true case of a publicly traded company that sells more than $25 billion a year with a B annually in cigarettes. It pays a 5.1% dividend. And of course, this is perfectly legal. But if we ask before the highest court, before the tribunal that we will all stand before one day, the judge of all the earth, will it be legitimate? Is it legitimate to invest in such a company and reap such profits? I hope you can see the analogy here.

The US government will say, "You can't participate in activities that are illegal here." And I think we would all agree that cigarettes are not lawful in God's economy. And I would make the strenuous case that this is something that Christians should never be connected to. This should be something that we absolutely stand in opposition to. Why is that? It's because investing is ownership, and it thus confers an ethical responsibility to the investor for the activities of the company. And here's an example of this from the Old Testament in Deuteronomy 23, where this is God speaking who says, "You must not bring the earnings of a female prostitute or of a male prostitute into the house of the Lord your God to pay any vow because the Lord your God tests them both."

We cannot say, "Oh, I'm just going to tithe it, or I'm going to give that money away so it's okay." No. God says here, if it comes from a source that is sinful, that is violating his laws, he doesn't want it. He doesn't want it in his house. And he says that he detests it. Some translations say it's an abomination before God. And so again, I hope the logic is clear here that we, as hopefully conscientious Christians, would never want to be profiting from or benefiting from the activities of things, not just that are merely illegal, but things that would go against God's ways.

So we can talk more about this in the Q&A, but I think this is a very important concept that we can spend a lot of time talking about here. Again, I personally don't have a problem if someone says, "I need to save to put a down payment on the house, to start a business, to do some kingdom enterprise." I'll say, "Okay, but be very, very careful about how you're going to do that." And most of the world's structures are quite twisted here. And this is why, when I was still in the evangelical world in 2008, why I started the company that I did to steer clear of these things and to put basically a lot of filters and avoid this kind of activity.

This is described as well in Proverbs chapter 1. I'll read you this proverb where it's a son. It's a father speaking to his son. He says, "My son, if sinful men entice you, do not give in to them. If they say, 'Come along with us, let's lie in wait for innocent blood. Let's ambush some harmless soul. Let's swallow them alive like they're grave and whole like those who go down to the pit. We will get all sorts of valuable things and fill our houses with plunder. Cast lots with us. We will all share in the purse. My son, do not go along with them. Do not set foot on their paths, for their feet rush into evil.

They are swift to shed blood. How useless to spread a net where every bird can see it. These men lie in wait for their own blood. They ambush only themselves. Such are the paths of all who go after ill-gotten gain. It takes away the life of those who get it." And notice what I put in bold here and also this expression, "ill-gotten gain." So notice here in Proverbs that culpability is contemplated even for scenarios of mere financial participation.

It says, "Cast lots with us. We will all share the purse." And thus, I think we can say confidently from Proverbs that there is such a thing as bad profit, which is made at the expense of others, as opposed to good profit, which is derived as a byproduct of serving well the needs of others.

And the wise son, the godly son, seeks to avoid these schemes of bad profit and instead is adjured to look for opportunities for good profit of serving. And this is a major theme of Proverbs. One of my heroes in the realm of finances and money is John Wesley, who wrote extensively about this, who lived a life of, in my opinion, great respect and honor with how he handled money. And he was very, very strong on this notion as well, that Christians need to be very, very careful about getting entangled with things that are ungodly in our businesses here. And I'll just read you this quote here. He says, "We are thoroughly to gain all we can without hurting our neighbor.

But this we may not, cannot do if we love our neighbor as ourselves. We cannot, if we love everyone as ourselves, hurt anyone in his substance. Hereby, all pawnbroking is excluded. We are not allowed to do evil that good may come.

Neither may we gain by hurting our neighbor in his body. Therefore, we may not sell anything which tends to impair health. Such is eminently all that liquid fire, commonly called drams or spiritous liquors. And what is the seller's gain? Is it not the blood of these men? A curse is in the midst of them. The curse of God cleaves to the stones, the timber, the furniture of them. The curse of God is in their gardens, their walks, their groves. A fire that burns to the nethermost hell. Blood, blood is there. The foundation, the floor, the walls, the roof are stained with blood. This is dear bought gain. And so is whatever is procured by hurting our neighbor and his soul.

By ministering, suppose either directly or indirectly to his unchastity or intemperance, or certainly none can do who has any fear of God or any real desire of pleasing him. It concerns all those who consider this who have anything to do with taverns, victualing houses, opera houses, playhouses, or any other places of public fashionable diversion. If these profit the souls of men, you are clear. Your employment is good and your gain innocent. But if they are either sinful in themselves or natural inlets to sin of various kinds, then it is to be feared you have a sad account to make. Oh, beware unless God say in that day, "These have perished in their iniquity, but their blood do I require at thy hands."

Okay. So now that was a very intense sermon that Wesley gives here and a very good caution for us to be wary of getting entangled in the wrong businesses here. I want to give some positive examples now, and I want to end on a positive note. And I've got just a couple more slides, and then we'll stop for questions here. So positive examples are there, and they are ones that I believe we need now more than ever. So I'll give you three examples here. So the first is William Carey. William Carey, many of you know, was called the father of modern missions. In the 1700s, he caught a burden for bringing the gospel to the lost.

He worked as a shoe cobbler in England, and he ultimately moved from there to India, where he was for six years the manager of an indigo plant farm. And he's a great example of not merely using business to gain access to a country, but really deeply caring about the business, the people, the ends.

He is a real marvel of seeking blessing for a people and seeing that as a worthy end, apart from church planning and evangelism. Of course, he wanted to see that. No one wanted to see that more than he did. But he truly invested in the people, the language. I mean, he developed the first grammar of the Bengali language. He lifted up the standards of work ethic. Many historians will say that William Carey changed the work ethic in India because of his attention to detail, because of how he operated in that country, and had a very successful ministry of church planting and evangelism that was born out of his excellence that he brought to bear in his business.

I think it's safe to say that there were few, if any, businesses that were run with the kind of excellence and integrity that William Carey brought there to India. The Moravians. The Moravians are a very interesting example. They had a different model than William Carey, but still a very interesting model where Nicholas Zinzendorf was very mindful of how powerful business could be. And I want to touch on this on the next slide as well, to either bind people together or pull them apart. And this is something where I still think we have a huge need for people who can help us with this problem today. If we have time in the Q&A, I would love to go deeper in this, where the standard model that people adopt in most of America today, where you go and get a job and you work for a huge amount of time in that job, you're very tired by the time you're done.

You come back and you have very little time left over for fellowship, for strengthening one another in the faith. And we have these meetings on Sundays and Wednesdays, and we kind of have these leftover scraps that get tossed God's way.

And we hope that discipleship will happen in that setting. Well, Zinzendorf correctly understood that if you want to have real discipleship, if you really want to keep the flame burning brightly, you need to ask people to sacrifice and ask people to labor together in tightly run Christian businesses where they're going to be tested, they're going to be pushed, they're going to take whatever profits they have to fund the next Moravian outpost in another location there. And they really did a great job of using business as a way to bind people together and being able to keep zeal hot for the things of God. I think that, generally speaking, we have neglected this model in favor of a more distributed, spread-apart model.

I know it's not always the case, and I know many of you are in businesses that would be different from that. But even in Anabaptist settings, certainly in Protestant settings, I see often that people's affections for God are detracted because they simply are so consumed with the cares of this world. And so the Moravians had really great models and patterns here of using business as mission for strengthening one another, for enlarging the faith in very creative and exciting ways. The third example here I'll put is one that may surprise you. It's the Puritans. So I'm here in Boston where the Puritans were headquartered, and America was founded not by the Pilgrims or by the Puritans.

It's a common misunderstanding. The Puritans and the Pilgrims were rival groups. They had very different visions for what life looked like. And the Puritans definitely dominated and took over here. And Max Weber and others, when they came to study the phenomenon of America, they correctly noted that so much of the success of America was based on at least early Puritan model of integration of business and faith. And they were some of the best craftsmen, scholars, diligent workers, also very diligent Sabbatarians. They believed strongly in the notion of work, but also robust individuals who wanted to see the gospel go into the Native Americans, people like Elliott and others who were and David Brainard, who were very famous for their enterprising there.

The Puritans correctly understood the value and how significant business could be, like the Moravians, in taking people away from God or bringing people towards God. And even though in many ways the Puritans, we would object to, they had Calvinist leanings, they certainly did not believe in non-resistance. But nonetheless, I think they had some things very right that we can learn from. And their influence was remarkable. I mean, the reason that, and we could talk about this a while, but the reason that the Puritans were able to have the kind of influence that they did was largely because of their industry and their bringing their faith to their work and their work to their faith. And this kind of vision that animated them was very, very powerful and ultimately became something that drew many people and made New England and ultimately America very successful.

Business, we see, I think, from the Bible as very tightly bound to Christianity. I think this might be my last slide, or I might have one more. It is very, very tightly bound to Christianity, and it's hard to deny that. So I think most of us would agree with this, that typically you will learn more about a person if you work with them side by side on the job over six months than you will in six years of attending church meetings together.