By Geoffrey Ladell, Op-ed contributor
I want to talk to the man who is already doing it right.
You pray over your business. You give, and not the minimum. You treat your people well. Ask where Christ sits in your working life, and you’d answer without hesitation: at the center. I believe you. I would have said the same thing, and I would have meant it.
That’s what makes this hard to say.
Quietly, over about 20 years, I let a piece of my heart worship the business. The title. The money. Not instead of God. Alongside Him. And I never caught it, because it never announced itself as greed.
It was hidden within my diligence. I had convinced myself I was safe.
Here’s the arithmetic I was running, though I’d never have said it out loud.
I knew the warnings. I knew what Paul wrote about the love of money being a root of all kinds of evil. I have read it many times. And somewhere along the way, I decided that as long as I held Jesus in higher regard than I held the business, I was fine.
That is not a category God recognizes.
Idolatry in Scripture is almost never a man who abandons God. It’s a man who adds. Israel never stopped sacrificing at the temple. They simply kept a few other altars in reserve, the way a prudent man diversifies. The Philistines set the captured ark of God inside Dagon’s temple, right next to their god, and assumed the arrangement would hold.
It didn’t. They came in the next morning and found Dagon face down. They stood him back up. The morning after that, his head and hands were broken off, lying on the threshold (1 Samuel 5:4).
God does not share our hearts. He is not interested in being first among several. That isn’t divine insecurity. It’s mercy, because the second thing in your heart will eventually ask you for everything, and unlike Him, it cannot love you back.
What my numbers were actually doing
The tell was never in my giving or my praying. Both were real.
The tell was in what happened to me when the numbers moved.
When the business was thriving, money stopped being provision and became proof. Every good year confirmed the story I wanted to believe about myself: that I was capable, that I was wise, that I was favored. The numbers weren’t recording performance anymore. They were reporting identity. If they looked good, I did too.
I had let my business card answer the question “who am I?”
I want you to see how respectable that looks from the inside. It doesn’t feel like worship. It feels like responsibility. Providing for my family. Stewarding what God entrusted to me. Working with excellence, because sloppy work is a poor witness. Every sentence true. Every sentence a place for the idol to hide.
The love of money almost never announces itself as the love of money. It hides behind the language of duty.
Jesus handed us an instrument for this, and notice that it doesn’t measure intentions. “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). He doesn’t say to examine your motives. He says follow the treasure, and you will find your heart — wherever it has gone.
Mine had gone somewhere I never authorized and didn’t know about.
The collapse was not the punishment
When COVID hit, I lost an entire business I had spent two decades building. My income and net worth both became zero.
For a long time, I read that as judgment. It took a while to see it the other way around. The loss didn’t create the problem. It exposed one that had been running for years, invisible and load-bearing. The same money that had been confirming my worth now revealed the pride that had been hiding underneath it.
It wasn’t rebellion. It was misplaced devotion. And it was the discipline of a father unwilling to leave me attached to something that could never love me back.
I would rather you find yours some other way.
Two economies
Here is what I could not see until it was gone.
I had been running my business, and my soul, inside a transactional economy. Its logic is simple, and it is everywhere. Your worth is a function of your output. You earn your standing. You are what you produce, and you are only as good as the last quarter.
You can run that operating system while praying every single morning. That’s the part nobody warns you about. You can tithe faithfully on income you are quietly using to purchase a verdict on yourself.
The Kingdom runs on something else entirely. In God’s economy, your worth was settled before you produced anything, at a cost you did not pay and could not have paid. You don’t earn your standing. You inherit it. Which means the business is no longer answering the question of who you are, and it was never qualified to.
That yoke isn’t lighter because it asks less of you. It’s lighter because it stops charging you for something you already own.
Love is the currency there. Not sentiment. The kind of love that gives without calculating the return, because it isn’t buying anything. It already has everything.
Go look
You won’t find this by examining your intentions. Yours are excellent. So were mine.
Look somewhere else.
What happens in your chest when the number comes in bad? Not what you say in the meeting. What happens at five in the morning.
When you introduce yourself, what do you lead with — and why does it matter to you that they hear it?
Whose approval are you actually working for?
And the one that finally got me. If the business went away tomorrow, who would you be?
If that question makes you flinch, you have found the altar. It has probably been standing a while.
Now hear me clearly, because this is the part most likely to be misread. The diligence was never the problem. Diligence is a gift, commended in Scripture and good in the sight of God. Work heartily. Build well. The problem was never the work. It was the thing I had quietly hidden inside it, using something good as cover for something that was slowly taking God’s place.
You don’t need to work less. You need to know who you’re working for. Stop earning your worth. Start inheriting it.
Geoffrey Ladell is a writer and the author of The Kingdom Economy: Build a Legacy of Love in a Transactional World and coaches Christian leaders on making the shift that lets the Kingdom lead the way they build. He and his wife, Nicole, live in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He writes at mycurrencyislove.com.