It’s Rainforest Friday, where we use God’s creation as a text book for business. One of the most fascinating things to observe in the rainforest is the practice of marketing. It’s what the flowers and orchids do every day. They combine three factors of design, color and scent to transmit a message to a niche market with the purpose of attracting customers to pollinate.

Last week, I spoke of color and how expensive it is for a plant to create, but that it must expend the resources to create color and market its product or it will perish. Without color, we could not see or perhaps only barely see (as in glass) any physical object. In effect, color announces the presence of something, in this case a flower. For all practical purposes, color is to the flower what headlines are to an ad. If the headline grabs your attention, you are much more likely to read the article. Headlines are the ad for the ad!

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As I mentioned in Monday’s blog, I have asked John Muratori, author of the ground breaking book, Rich Church Poor Church, to guest host my blog for a few sessions. His insights are valuable and come from a deep understanding of Scripture and practical, experiential wealth creation. Now, here’s John…

The Consequences of a Poverty Mentality

From a business perspective, a Poverty Mentality presents a major stumbling block. No business can grow without generating sufficient profits. But from a spiritual perspective, this problem is much more profound.

Whether people believe it or not, there is a battle raging between good and evil. If we as Christians do not prosper financially, who do you think will prosper in our place? When Jesus was tempted in the wilderness for the third time, satan’s offer was for all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. What could possibly be the glory satan spoke of other than the prosperity and financial riches under his dominion? Do you think he was concerned about aesthetics or power?

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Recently I read an outstanding book by John Muratori called Rich Church Poor Church addressing the issue of money and Christianity, why the wicked prosper (and so many Christians don’t) along with twelve laws of wealth building that will help anyone get ahead in this world. (We will be offering a FREE copy of that book to our subscribers shortly in a special Christmas offer so be watching for details in early December.) I was so moved by what I read and thought it would be so helpful to our community of Christians in the business arena that I asked John to write our blogs for the next few sessions so you could get a taste of what I have partaken. Drink deeply and please pass on your comments…

What Does the Bible Teach Us About Wealth?

This question recently appeared on a popular Internet forum. The answers, apparently from Christians, reveal a somewhat limited and perhaps skewed picture of how some believers view earthly prosperity.

Here are a few of those answers:

“Jesus wants us to store our treasure in heaven.”

“The blessings of God come with great wealth, but not money. It comes with the power of eternal life, peace and serenity and most of all love.”

“Jesus said, it is easier for a camel to fit through a pinhole than for a rich man to get into heaven.”

Most of these positions were birthed during the Puritan movement, where financial prosperity was viewed as a hindrance to spirituality. However, proper biblical interpretation reveals that there are two sides of the same coin. For years the church has been unable to reconcile spirituality with prosperity. How does one run after God, yet still be wealthy?

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“Thus says the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have held, to subdue nations before him; and I will (1) loose the armor of kings,(2) to open before him the two-leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut; (3) I will go before you, and (4) make the crooked places straight: (Isa 45:1-3)

When we have walked the bended path with God and found Him in the struggle, we are ready to straighten out the bended paths within us: those ways that were once pure before sin came into the world, now corrupted by the lusts of the flesh, the lust of the eye and the pride of life. Straightening out the bended paths in us is really the process of choosing the straight path before us when our inner nature would prefer the detour, avoiding the construction site designed to perfect us yet even more.

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 “Thus says the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have held, to subdue nations before him; and I will (1) loose the armor of kings,(2) to open before him the two-leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut; (3) I will go before you, and (4) make the crooked places straight:  (Isa 45:1-3)

I mentioned in my last email on this subject that sometimes God makes the path crooked. He often puts the bends and twists and turns in the path to work things out in our lives. It is futile to fight against the bends that He puts in the road. If you do find a way around the trial, you are actually worse off. It would be like helping a butterfly emerge from its cocoon. Butterflies develop the strength they need to fly by struggling to get out of the cocoon. If they get out of the cocoon without the struggle, they will never be able to fly and will soon die, falling short of what they were created to do. (N’est pas?)

Not all paths were made crooked by God. When sin came into the world, a lot of things became crooked that were originally made straight. The most obvious things that have been made crooked by sin have to do with our old flesh nature: Crooked desires, crooked dispositions, crooked words, crooked thoughts, etc. That which has been made crooked by sin, God has made straight by the blood of Jesus Christ. That is to say, there is now a straight path we can follow, the path of straight words, straight thinking, godly desires and dispositions, etc. Before Christ, sin had dominion over us, (Rom 6:14) but now we have been freed from the law of sin and death (Rom 8:2) and thus freed from sin (Rom 6:14).

As Christians, we are called to make our path straight. To walk the straight and narrow. No more speaking with forked tongue. Our words to be words of iron. Thinking on things that are true, honest, just, pure, lovely and of good report. The straight path can be very difficult as we straighten out by the grace of God those things that are crooked in us, but it is the path that leads to life and few there be that find it. (Matt 7:14)

 This is “Rainforest Friday”. As you may have noticed, once a week I use God’s creation for a text book. Romans 1 says that “the hidden things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and divine nature.” The kings of the earth came to hear Solomon’s wisdom, much of which he gleaned from the created order. 1 Kings speaks of Solomon saying that “he spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springs out of the wall: he spoke also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes.”

On Friday’s, I take you to the rainforest and share with you the wealth building secrets built into the most fruitful, abundant ecosystem on the planet. Today, I want to begin a series that has to do with marketing principles gleaned from the orchid. Walking through the Panamanian rainforest with our guide from the Smithsonian, I was struck by something she said… “In the rainforest, color is very expensive.”

I thought it was very unusual language for a scientist, so I inquired further. She went on to explain that it costs more energy for a plant to produce color than it does to produce the green you see in leaves. I learned that some trees go so far as to shed all their leaves to preserve energy so they have enough energy to produce colorful flowers. The reason, I was told, was marketing. The trees had to attract customers. They used flowers to do this. Without the birds or the bees or the monkeys checking out their flowers, they would never pollinate and thus not be fruitful. So they spend a significant amount of resources to generate new business. You might call that - advertising.

So the question I leave you with today is: If God thinks it wise to spend resources on marketing, do you think we might be wise to do the same?

Until next time, be fruitful, then multiply!

“Thus says the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have held, to subdue nations before him; and I will (1) loose the armor of kings,(2) to open before him the two-leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut; (3) I will go before you, and (4) make the crooked places straight: (Isa 45:1-3)

So I ask you, what makes a crooked path? I believe there are two causes of the crooked path and they both serve a purpose. The first cause of the crooked path is God Himself. It is on the crooked path that we learn to rely on Him. It is on the crooked path that we come to the end of ourselves. It is on the crooked path that we behold the beauty of the Lord and His glory. It is on the crooked path, that we must bend our will to His way. It is on the crooked path that we become entwined with Him. We injure ourselves when we try to straighten what God has made crooked. We must learn to bend with the Father and conform to His “way”. He is taking us to school along the crooked path. Learn to enjoy the scenery.

Charles Kuralt of CBS fame once said, “Interstate highways allow you to drive coast to coast, without seeing anything”. It’s the curse of the straight path. While it’s true that the shortest path between any two points is a straight line, the straight line is not always best. The devil always tells us, we deserve it now. Get rich quick. Take the shortest path. Don’t wait. Time’s a wasting! If you get on the straight path, (the interstate highway), before you have the Father’s heart built in and the old nature brought under, you may find yourself broadsided by a fast moving 18 wheeler, you didn’t see coming!

Give a young man his inheritance before he has the wisdom to steward it and you will lose both the inheritance and quite possibly your son. Before you give your child any inheritance, make sure you have passed on the inheritance of your heart. A great way to do that is on the difficult path. The crooked path. The inheritance of your heart is more “caught than taught” and the trials of life provide the perfect context to pass on the wealth of understanding God has deposited in your heart as you learned to bend to His will and His ways along the winding path.

Quick note: For an excellent teaching on what it means to pass on your wealth to the next generation, I suggest you get your hands on this. You won’t be disappointed.

Creating Wealth: Training Families to Build Dynasties
Eight Part Series. This Strategic Christian Services seminar focuses on the ultimate challenge we all face, in terms of making our lives truly count for God’s purposes in history-how, in our personal lives, families, careers, and even our nation, we pass on the inheritance of our hearts so that our values, vision, and wealth are not wasted by the next generation. For the first time, the entire Peacocke family (Dennis, Jan, Adam, Rachel, and Katherine) shares together in a conference, both individually and in a panel discussion. God is beginning to restore an understanding of generational transfer to us as a people and as a nation. Our intention is to provide you with practical tools to break the curse of single-generational living.

Here are links to the downloadable version and to the Audio CD version.

“Thus says the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have held, to subdue nations before him; and I will (1) loose the armor of kings,(2) to open before him the two-leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut; (3) I will go before you, and (4) make the crooked places straight: (Isa 45:1-3)

When I was a young man selling life insurance in the fishing villages of British Columbia, I sometimes had to travel by mountainous logging roads to get from one village to the next. On one particularly memorable trip, it took me three hours of zig zagging up and down a washed out gravel mountain road just to get to my first prospect. Thirty years later, I returned with my wife to show her that same rustic fishing village. To my delight, the government had come in and made a straight path, a paved highway, and the travel time between the two towns was now only twenty minutes.

What a difference a straight path can make! That is precisely what God did for Cyrus. He made the crooked places straight. When everyone else had to fight the terrain, God promised Cyrus He would make his path straight. Would that all our paths be straight; but not all crooked paths are bad. There is much to learn in the struggle that can’t be learned on the paved highway. Think of the crooked path as training. It’s where things get worked out in you to prepare you for the responsibility of the straight path, when things can accelerate.

Jesus knew all about straight paths. He could (and did) walk through walls. I believe as we mature into sonship (not a gender statement), we will also do the seemingly impossible. We will walk through walls of resistance that were built to keep us out. Some of you reading this are running into those walls right now and Jesus stands ready to lead you right through that wall. You will find yourself on the other side and not quite know how you got there, but there you will be. Do you think Peter understood how he was able to walk on water? It was only when he began to reason, that he began to sink. Selah.

 They say the most successful sales people not only do a good job selling out in the field, but they also do a lot of internal selling. Most companies with multiple departments have difficulty communicating and/or cooperating with each other. Top sales reps understand this and go out of their way to build relationships within the organization because they know that someday, they may well need the extra effort from Bob in shipping or Melissa in accounting.

They take care of the relationships that most sales reps ignore because they don’t see Melissa or Bob’s role as significant, when it is. Yet, if those folks didn’t serve the organization overall and aid the sales team directly, the sales team would not perform as well. In our organizations and in our sales efforts, we must cultivate a spirit of cooperation between team members, even if they seem unrelated.

In the rainforest, plants compete for light and nutrients. The soil is poor, so in order to get nutrients they depend on a symbiotic relationship with fungi.  Symbiotic relations between plants and fungi are very common. The fungus invades and lives in or among the cells of the secondary roots. The fungus helps the host plant absorb inorganic nitrogen and phosphorus from the soil and thus feed it the life giving nutrients. What if the fungus didn’t feel like cooperating? What would happen to the rest of the team? If you want to succeed in sales, make sure you take care of Melissa in accounting or Bob in shipping. The next time you need an invoice straightened out for a client or a product shipped out for rush delivery, you will have a willing ally instead of a resistant coworker.

“Thus says the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have held, to subdue nations before him; and I will (1) loose the armor of kings,(2) to open before him the two-leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut; (3) I will go before you…

A father’s promise to his son is that he will go before him and make a way. That’s how God led Cyrus and that’s how He wants to lead us today. A good father wants to give good gifts to his children and one of those gifts is to make his child’s path easier than his own. The father wants to open doors for his child, but there’s a catch. As genuinely as the father wants to go before the child, the son or daughter must be willing to follow the father.

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