Transcript

Welcome to the 100-Fold Business Podcast, where Christian men learn the principles, strategies, and tactics to grow their businesses, top line, bottom line, and finish line. I want you to discover the secret to applying Biblical truth to business growth for the greatest kingdom impact, so in the end you hear from your Heavenly Father, well done. Welcome to the 100-Fold Business Podcast, where Christian men learn how to grow their businesses, top line, their bottom line, and the finish line, and I'm your host, Josh Fonger, founder of Four Soil Ventures, and today I'm excited to be bringing you the third of 12 essentials to growing your 100-Fold Business, a business that honors God as it grows.

During these 12 essentials, we'll be looking at God's Word first and having it inform us of how to grow our business, and then of course we can praise God for all the growth, all the multiplying fruit that comes from it, and as always, if you need help along the way, you can always reach out directly to me at 4thsoilventures.com , and there you can schedule a call. Now, as I was praying and reflecting about all my past clients, the ones that were really successful and had great businesses that were growing, and the clients that struggled, they had a hard time growing the companies, and maybe they never grew them at all, what kept coming to the forefront as an important issue was this idea of self-mastery, or as the Bible says, self-control, and so hence it's one of the 12 essentials, and the Bible says a man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls. So basically, if you struggle with self-control, and all of us do to some degree, you're going to have problems in your business, and what I'd like to do is take a few moments and share why these problems keep coming up by going through a story, an example of Priya's client that struggled, and I think through this story, you're going to see how impactful self-control can be on your business.

Many years ago, I had a business coaching client, and we'll just call him Joe, and Joe had a home services business with about 15 employees, had a fleet of vehicles, they were located in a large city, great marketing, great branding, and he was positioning it, and it was set up to grow, to scale, and there was a problem, though, and the problem was not their advertising, or the software, or their operations, really the problem was, well, it was Joe, and the issue for Joe was that no matter what he did, he could not keep good employees, and he could not keep good customers. Obviously, that's a big problem for a small business owner, and as I was working with him, it became apparent early on that no matter what business technique, strategy, plans that we came up with, none of them are really going to matter unless we tackled this issue of self-control, and the three big areas he could not keep control of were, one, his time. He was constantly late, constantly missing appointments, rescheduling, rushing through meetings, taking meetings too long.

He had no control over his schedule and his time. Obviously, that's a problem. Secondly, he was not in control of his tongue.

He would say things he shouldn't be saying, you know, gossip, slander, berating his employees, telling them things about the financial troubles of the company. He couldn't keep his mouth shut, and when he did open it, sometimes the emotional things that came out weren't the right things to say, and the last thing, also starting with a T, is his temple, his body, right? He did not take good care of his body, eating fast food, staying up too late, addicted to caffeine, also drinking. There's a lot of things he was not managing with his body well, and of course, that leads into his emotional state, his hormones, his energy, his ability to make decisions.

Basically, he was sabotaging his success by the way he was taking care of his body. Now, Joe is an extreme example, but I think if each one of us, including me, look in the mirror, we realize that the battle for self-control is a real thing, and that if we're losing that battle, we're having a very hard time leading our business, and we're going to be self-sabotaging as we're trying to grow our company. Our own ability to master ourselves is going to hold us back.

Now, the world, of course, has thousands of podcasts and websites and YouTube videos and books all about tips, tricks, strategies, hacks, different ways that you're going to go about managing and improving the way you manage your time and your tongue and your temple, your body. What we're going to find is the Bible actually has a lot to say about it, and its approach is very different, and also its approach that really works. So, now let's go discover what the Bible says about self-control so that we can go and master ourselves and, therefore, go and grow our hundredfold business.

The text we're reading from today comes from the letter Paul wrote to the Corinthian church. This is 1 Corinthians 9 24-27. Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it.

Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly.

I do not box as one beating the air, but I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself be disqualified. All right, so Paul is talking to the Corinthian church. He's telling them how to run the race of faith, how to win, and we're going to unpack this and then work on applying this to you and your business and to self-control or self-mastery.

So let me read that first section just for a moment and then we'll unpack it a bit. Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Now in this first section Paul is giving us a question that should make us pause and consider.

And considering is that most people are not winning the race. Most people are going the wrong direction. Most people with regards to their time and their tongue and their temple, they're doing it all wrong.

And so for you as you are looking to improve in these areas, first off, don't look to the world. Don't look to whatever else is doing. They're doing it wrong.

Next is an opportunity to look in the mirror and to reflect and consider, are you winning the race? Not compared to others, but you individually. Are you winning the race with regards to how you're managing your time and your tongue and your temple? This is not always easy to do, but if we stop looking at others, look in the mirror and reflect, we're going to make a lot more progress with the steps to come. Because I know it's easy.

It's easy to find someone who is more dysfunctional, who is just terrible at time management, who's having major issues with how they manage their tongue, and whose body is a wreck. That's easy to find. But Jesus calls us to perfection.

He says, be perfect as my heavenly Father is perfect. So we have a very high standard, perfection, and that's what we're talking about today. All right, now continuing on for the next part of this passage.

Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly.

I do not box as one beating the air. Now we're given some instructions about how to win the race. And of course, Paul is talking about your whole life, but you as a business owner, about half of your waking hours are probably being spent on your business.

So of course, your business matters in this context. The first point I want to bring up about this section is that instead of being called to look horizontally, it's asking the question about winning an imperishable wreath, a wreath that lasts forever. And the only way to do that is to be looking up, to be looking vertically.

And so this has to do with faith, faith in God and running the race with God. And we're going to find that actually growing in self-control has a lot to do with faith. And the next thing to consider in this passage is aiming for the right target, not running aimlessly, but having the right target.

And of course, for the Christian, that is going to be Jesus Christ, our Lord. And so him being the perfect imprint of God, God himself, he did a really good job with self-control. I would say perfectly, right? With the way he managed his time, the way he managed his tongue and the way he managed his temple, it was perfect.

And so that's our example. That's who we follow. And of course, Jesus commands us again and again to follow me, right? He wants us to follow him.

And so with regards to self-control, it's the same thing. Now for the last part, I'll read this out loud. But I disciple my body and keep it under control.

Last, after preaching to others, I myself should be disqualified. Now we need to go about and we need to discipline ourselves so that we're not disqualified. And this is specific to our time, our tongue, and our temple.

So with regards to time, I think it's important that we pull out a passage specific to time. And so we'll be reading from Ephesians. Let me find it.

Ephesians 5, 15 through 16, which says, look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise, but as wise, making the best use of time, because the days are evil. So if we look at that section with regards to time, and we analyze a bit, we're going to see there's actually three things to be thinking of. First is to be careful with the time, not careless.

So this might require us to be intentional, to slow down, to be organized, to be focused. But ultimately, the first secret to being successful with your time is to be careful. The second aspect of time to be aware of is, are we being wise with our time? In Ecclesiastes, it says that there is a time for every matter under heaven.

So there is time to do everything that you actually need to do. But there's no extra time. There's just enough time to do the right things.

And Jesus is a perfect example of this because He used all of His time wisely, and was able to accomplish all of the work that the Father had for Him to do. So that's for us, is to be wise and not foolish and waste any of our time. And lastly, we need to make the best use of the time that we have, or be as effective or as impactful as possible.

So as a leader, if we're going about carefully using our time and we're wise using our time, we also need to make sure that the time we're using is creating the biggest impact, it's the best use of time, and that we're actually getting the results that we intended. I hope what you're starting to see is this business concept of time management is actually not separate from this concept of self-mastery and self-control. And so if you can master yourself and you can have self-control, instead of being disorganized and ADD and unfocused, and really having difficulty managing your time, if you have self-control, you can really manage your time well.

And if you can manage your time well, that's going to help you a lot as a leader in managing your business. Now we're on to the next element, which has to do with the tongue. And I'm going to be reading a number of Proverbs that I think will really solidify this point.

Here we go. Whoever keeps his mouth and his tongue keeps himself out of trouble. And when words are many, transgression is not lacking, but whoever restrains his lips is prudent.

And here's another one. Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits. And lastly, there's one whose rash words are like sword thrusts, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.

Now, I could go on all day talking about the tongue and speech and how important is what we say. And we're gonna be talking a lot about the positive aspects of what to say with regards to company culture and leadership and managing your team and sales. And that's gonna be great.

But before we get there, we're gonna be talking about self-control. And that has a lot to do with what not to say, what to avoid, and how to hold your tongue and to prevent yourself from saying what you're probably gonna regret later. So, of course, there's a number of ways you can hurt your business with the way you manage your tongue.

And I'm gonna just go through a couple of them real quick. First being anger. If you are very emotional and you have lots of anger, you're going to speak and say things you're probably gonna regret and end up hurting relationships.

Secondly, gossip, talking behind your staff's back, saying negative things about people when they're not there, that's gonna destroy trust and relationships. Crude joking, anything that's frivolous, disparaging, inappropriate, that's going to undermine your authority there. And lying, any form of deceit.

This could be flattery, this could be anything that is exaggeration, things that are deceiving people. Of course, you're gonna cut that out of your speech. Needless to say, if you can't control your tongue and your emotions and what you speak, it's going to be hurting relationships, it's going to be hurting your authority as a leader, and it's not gonna make you a good witness for Christ.

And so you're disqualifying yourself because of your lack of self-control. And the people in your company are likely not gonna put up with it and they're gonna leave. And now we're gonna quickly highlight the last of the three areas, and that's gonna be your temple or your body.

I think it's important that we go back to Scripture and read a quick passage about that. That's gonna be from 1 Corinthians. Here we go.

Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. This one topic, the body, really could be discussed for dozens of episodes.

So what we'll be doing is just dipping our toe into the subject today. And really all these topics, you know, time and what we speak with our tongue, all of them are really broad topics. But I think that this is important to dive into just for a minute because I've seen it hijack the success of so many business owners.

So let me just share a brief story that I think will explain the importance. Imagine that there is a factory and a factory is given to a manager to manage and the factory is supposed to last for 40 years and it's supposed to produce a million widgets a year. And what we find out is that that manager managing that factory is only producing a half million widgets a year, 500,000 widgets a year.

And after 30 years, the factory shuts down. It's inoperable. At that point, it can't run anymore.

Now, what do you think? You'd think, oh, gosh, that manager didn't do a very good job, right? It had to shut down 10 years early. And during the whole time, it was only producing 50% of the results it should have been. Now look at your body, the temple of the Holy Spirit, the gift that God has given you to do all the work that he has laid out for you to do from eternity past, good work that you get to do for the King of Kings.

And then reflect on what you've done with regards to self-control, self-mastery. Have you cut out 5, 10, 20% of your production because of how you've treated your body and how you've mastered it? And maybe you've cut some years out as well. Could it be 5, 10, 20, 30 years of the usefulness of your body also being cut out and this having to do with self-control to master yourself? That's why it's so important to have self-control.

And that's why we're talking about that today, because it affects you and it affects your business and affects the work you can do for God's glory. Not managing your body is a silent killer to business success. And so what I want to do is go through four areas that I think you really need to master.

And of course, they're all obvious, but just because they're obvious doesn't mean that they're easy to master. All right, the first one, food and drink, pretty obvious. What you're putting into your body, the quantity, how often, what it is, the quality of it.

This includes addictions. You need to make sure you have control over what you're putting into your body. The next one, also obvious, sleep.

You make sure you're getting proper rest at the right time, the right quantity, the right quality. If you're missing out on rest, you have a hard time thinking clearly, making wise choices just doesn't work. And then last one, exercise.

If you're not taking the time to work out your body and to make it strong, nothing works right. Again, it's going to give you issues with decision-making, hormones, your ability to regulate. If you don't take care of your body and exercise it, you're going to lose capacity of it.

Now, the fourth area with regards to the body is going to be screens. And I'm talking about TV screens, computer screens, cell phones, tablets, all those things that you're interacting with, with your body, your eyes. And the reason being is that they are so addictive and they're so ubiquitous that they're everywhere and they're affecting you and they're affecting your body and affecting your mind.

And it's so important to have self-control and have control over your use of screens. And there's really two areas to think about with regards to screens. The first area being things you should never do on a screen, right? Those are pretty obvious things like pornography, gambling, any outright sin that's going to destroy you.

You should have self-control and not destroy yourself, avoid that. And then there's also going to be things that you should also have control over that have some benefit. Hopefully this podcast has some benefit for you.

There may be some training, some YouTube videos that are specifically training and helpful for you, maybe news, maybe shopping. So there is some value in some good things that could be done with the screen, but just like food, you can consume too much at the wrong time, the wrong quantity. And so it's important to have self-control over screens.

I've seen business owners really destroy their futures and destroy their businesses because of their inability to stop checking their emails, stop watching training videos, stop checking YouTube, stop social media. They've been so addicted that they have hampered their future. And that's why it's so important to get control over this particular area that's highly addictive right now.

Ultimately, we know that a man without self-control is going to get ransacked by the because the devil is pulling around and he's seeking someone to devour. So now that we have a list of all these areas we're supposed to have self-mastery or self-control over, it's time to build the battle plan. How do we go and take territory in the promised land? How do we take God's promises? Because he does promise to give us self-control as a fruit of the spirit.

And he commands us to walk in self-control. He doesn't just leave us alone. He actually is going to provide the strength, the power, and the ability to walk us out.

And so what we need is a plan so we can do just that. Of course, we're going to make mistakes as we're pursuing perfection daily. But victory is ours, right? God has told us to walk in this.

He's not holding out on us. He's giving us what we need. We just need to stay engaged in the battle.

And it's an epic daily battle. And I hope me sharing all these things today is not demoralizing you and you just thinking, well, I'm not going to make it. But instead, hopefully it's invigorating you and getting you excited about being engaged in this battle.

And this battle is going to be a battle that's going to require faith, it's going to require prayer, and it's going to require the work of the Holy Spirit. While the world has self-pride and worldly success as their motivation, as they're trying to grow in self-control, we have a different motivation, right? We have God's glory as our motivation, and we have God's strength in the form of His mercy and faithfulness, and His wisdom, and His ability to work in us, His grace, which is going to give us the power to succeed in this area. So with that in mind, I want to talk about the application and the actions related to this episode so that you can go and grow your 100-fold business.

And as always, prayer is going to precede any progress on any of these steps. Okay, so the first action step has to do with taking ownership. Before you can have self-control, we need to be self-aware.

And so we need to do a self-assessment. And the simplest way is to get out a journal and to start recording how you're spending your time. And I would recommend doing it for at least three days.

So from the second you wake up till the second you go to sleep, tracking your time and writing activities of what you're doing both at home and at work, personal life and business, and writing what you're doing, and then thinking about whether you're being wise, if you're being careful, if you are making the best use of time, and then making notes about what you should do differently, how you should change, how you should adjust what you're doing now. So it's a reflection on what's happening now. And then it's also going to be taking some notes about what changes you can make with your time.

Now, in the same journal where you have written out what you're doing with your time, you can also do that with your tongue. So keeping track of all those things you said that you wish you didn't say. So all of those jokes, the sarcasm, the things that you say, you know what, I shouldn't have said that.

Or also, I should have said something differently. I missed my opportunity. This is a place for you to reflect and to write out specifically how you manage yourself, how you manage your tongue, and do that for three days as well.

And lastly, you want to overlay on your journal how you took care of your temple. So what were you eating, what were you drinking, and how much exercise. All of those things, as honestly as possible, you want to write down exactly what's currently happening, and then what adjustments do you want to make for the future.

So you can analyze, you can see it, you can be objective, and then you can make the plan right there in the journal. Now, I need to pause for a second and just add in a caveat, because having a great plan for how to use your time, and how to use your tongue, and how to use your temple is very helpful. Following that plan is going to lead to a healthy life.

It's going to lead to great results. But your goal is not to follow a system and just follow a set of rules. Your goal is actually to commune, to be in union with God, the Holy Spirit, and hear His voice, and to be led by Him, which is going to make you do potentially some peculiar or unusual things from time to time.

For instance, you might have five back-to-back meetings, be very efficient with your time, but there might be one of those meetings that's incredibly important, and you might just need to cancel the other ones, and really dig in into that one important meeting, and have a breakthrough with a person or a project that will drive your business forward. And that's not something you should do every day, probably not even every month, maybe more rare than that. But when you hear from God, and you are led to do something that's peculiar or different, you need to go with that and be willing to break your schedule.

Obviously, the same could be said with your tongue, right? You could have self-control with that, and you could keep your emotions in, but there's going to be times when you actually do need to speak forth hard truth, emotional truth, that's very direct, that's honest, and maybe the person hearing it doesn't want to hear it, but it's going to create a breakthrough, it's going to create a transformation, it's going to be important that it's said. Same with the body, right? You might have a great diet plan, but then you decide that you need to hear from God, you need to pray and seek his will, and you fast. And so you are not eating for a while, this could be days.

And that's not according to your plan, right? But it's something that you need to change. And so you have always be willing to not just live by a plan, a set of rules, but instead realize this is a guide for you, right? To make healthy choices, to prevent yourself from being led astray from temptations, but it should never prevent you from making those important decisions that have to be made in the moment as a Christian. Now for the next step.

So you have an assessment of what's currently happening and a plan for what you want to do. But you want this to be different than other times, you want to actually succeed in following through on your plan. And the first step is going to be you need to study the scriptures and humbly pray to God that he gives you a new heart, a new heart, new desires, desires that actually love his ways and despise the ways that are contrary or crooked or that are sinful or wasteful, right? So that's going to be the shift is you can't just have an action plan and think you'll just follow it.

Because as we all know, that doesn't really work. What you want instead is the heart change. And God will give this.

And my recommendation would be you start each morning and you humbly go to God and say, God, I desire to honor you to have a new heart to actually, you know, with my time and with my tongue and with my temple, not to sin against you, but to use all of those for your glory. So give me self-control, prevent me from being tempted, but instead deliver me and help me to honor you in all these ways. And I know God will do that.

Now the next step is a step of belief, a step of faith, a step of trusting that God's actually going to do this work. And as you're meditating and praying that you are getting emotionally involved where instead of being okay with, or being numb to the way you've always been, you need to look at your list of things that you want to change, things that you are off the mark, you're missing the mark, they're sins, time wasting, temple, tongue. And you need to start to hate those things, despise them.

You need to lower them and just realize that this is not who you are. You get to the point where you, it's no fun anymore to say those kinds of jokes. It's no fun anymore to be late.

It's no fun anymore to live that kind of way. You don't, you don't like evil, you like good. And you have to get connected emotionally to both what you were doing before and what you want to do so that your heart will change and naturally out of your heart, the actions will come.

And I've seen this actually happen with one of my clients with regards to being late, you know, habitually late about 25 minutes with his, he was a dentist, with virtually all of his clients. And once he emotionally got involved to realize that he was dishonoring his clients and that he hated that, he really loathed that. And he made an immediate change after decades of living a certain way to being within five minutes, always being on time, seeing his patients.

And so there is an aspect of knowing there's an aspect of going a layer deeper and knowing at a heart level, which can produce the change and produce the self-control. And now you get to follow your action plan. You get to walk out your faith, knowing that God's going to always provide a way of escape from any temptation.

And that as you walk in righteousness and self-control, he's going to be blessing that. And if you ever stray, he's going to be lovingly correcting you and helping you get back in the right path. And that's all part of the sanctification process.

And this is going to impact your business. And as you grow in self-control, you're going to have more and more reasons to praise God, which is great because God cares more about your relationship with him. Then he cares about whether or not you turned off YouTube, or you didn't have that extra slice of pizza, right? God wants to walk this road, this life directly with you, because if you're trying to grow in self-control without him, it's only going to lead to pride when you have that temporary success or shame when you have those temporary failures. Now, at this point, you might be thinking, Josh, I'm really busy.

I don't have time to do those things you mentioned doing today. They sound nice, but I shouldn't have time. And what I would actually say is you don't have time to deal with the consequences of not doing what I talked about today.

So not actually dealing with the issues that are going on with your time, your tongue, your temple, not dealing with those is going to cost you a lot, a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of resources. And it's important, right, there's going to be a final evaluation. So I would say more important than what you're doing right now would be taking the time making the time to really go deep in this area of self-control.

And there's always a way to do it. You can set your alarm 30 minutes early, skip breakfast, skip lunch, maybe for a while, maybe you could fast from media, all of your devices, all of those screens. You know, there is ways to get that time back so that you can make a thoughtful, careful, wise, and best use of time plan that's going to help you with your self-control.

And if you're still feeling overwhelmed about this right now, of course, you can get help, right? The Christian life is not designed to be lived alone, right? We need each other. And so when I'm working with a client, and they are shipwrecking their business, their future, because of things related to what we talked about today. And of course, we we handle it, we deal with it head on, we're going to be doing assessments, we're going to be building a plan, I'm going to be holding them accountable as a prayer, there's going to be encouragement.

And we're going to focus and work until we have a breakthrough until a change is made until the old pattern is left behind, and a new pattern is built. So whatever you do, don't self sabotage your future by not getting a handle over self mastery or self control, because without it, you're not going to be able to grow that 100 fold business. So stay tuned for the next episode, which is going to be the fourth of 12 in a series all about how you can grow a hundred fold business.

This is going to be all about how you can execute your plan. This is where the rubber meets the road, and where business theory becomes business reality, it's going to be a good one. Finally, if you like this episode, make sure to like subscribe, leave a review.

And if you believe that other Christian business owners need to hear this message as well, so they can be encouraged and equipped and released and trained, then make sure to share with them. And as always, I appreciate you brothers. And until next time, grace be with you.