Unpredictability Tests Our Faithfulness to God
Yogi Berra once said that if the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be. When a business is running at full capacity, it feels perfect, and it is an exhilarating experience. When things go wrong, it reminds us, Christian business owners, that perfection isn’t the norm in life or business. Berra’s line captures the inevitable unpredictability that every owner lives with.
Unpredictability is something every business leader lives with. Important meetings go badly. The financial numbers are going down. Perhaps tempers flare up. According to Ecclesiastes 7:14, when there’s adversity, that is the time to consider one’s walk before God. I have been there, and my guess is you have too.
Scripture consistently calls God’s people to live attentively before Him in every season, not merely when life becomes difficult. The call to consider in Ecclesiastes 7:14, therefore, is not an invitation to neglect God during prosperity and then turn to Him only when trouble comes. Rather, it recognizes that adversity has a particular way of exposing what prosperity can conceal. Adversity becomes an occasion for spiritual examination because it reminds us of our limits.
We cannot control every market shift, employee conflict, economic downturn, customer decision, or outcome. That realization can be painful, but it can also be deeply formative. It calls us back to the truth that we are stewards, not sovereigns. That is when, in the quiet, a question often rises in the heart: “Lord, what do You want from me? More hours? More giving? Some grand sacrifice to make this right?” That is what we tend to do when pressure mounts. We instinctively reach for a “bigger offering” instead of refocusing on deeper intimacy with God. We instinctively ask God what else we can do instead of refocusing on faithfulness, which Scripture defines as success.
Micah lived in a world like our own, with more religious activity but less righteousness in the marketplace. In Micah 6, after rehearsing the Lord’s saving acts, the prophet gives voice to the question that every serious believer has at one time or another:
With what shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? (Micah 6:6)
Would God be pleased with the very best year-old calves, the costliest sacrifices? What about thousands of rams, ten thousand rivers of oil, or even the firstborn son? Micah piles up the extremes to expose the futility of trying to “pay God back” through religious or philanthropic excess. The issue is not the quality or quantity of the gift, but the giver’s posture. God is not looking for a spiritual “buyout”; He is calling for our love, faithfulness, and intimacy with Him, which are the essence of a transformed covenantal faith.
Then comes the Lord’s gracious answer: “He has shown you, O man, what is truly good.” God’s will is not hidden or mystical. It is truth already revealed to His people. For us in the marketplace, the question is seldom, “What is God’s will?” and more often, “Will I submit to what He has already shown me?”
What does the Lord require? Micah distills it into three interwoven strands:
Act justly
Love mercy
Walk humbly with your God.
Justice speaks to our external practices of contracts, compensation, hiring and firing, and how we treat vendors and customers when no one is watching.
Mercy presses deeper into our affections, going beyond doing the least you can do to be decent. It is a heart-level disposition that takes pleasure in showing kindness, extending patience, and seeking another person’s good. And walking humbly gets to the root: an ongoing, modest, dependent life before God that refuses the illusion of self-sufficiency. Interestingly, Micah’s list moves from the outward to the inward, but in practice, we must start with the inward.
As Christian business owners, if we try to act justly without walking humbly, we either burn out under the weight of our standards or become proud of our ethics. Humble dependence is the well from which both justice and mercy flow. As we deliberately walk with the Lord, consult his word, confess our pride, and yield decisions to his authority, he supplies the grace and power we lack to be both fair and kind in a broken system.
Mercy is what love requires; humility is what faith requires. Together, they form God’s description of a real spiritual life of faithfulness rather than a merely religious one of going through the motions.
Where do you need to make something right? Where can you show unexpected kindness? Where are you trusting your wisdom instead of walking with God? Those are Micah’s questions for us today. In your next decision, what would it look like to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?
