If you have place faith in Jesus, and accepted him as your Lord & savior:  Scripture says that God has adopted you and brought you into His family; so you are now His child.  He says that He chose you and that out of His overwhelming love for you He gave you a new spirit; the same spirit that raised Jesus from the dead, and lead Jesus in the Father's will while he walked on the earth.  He says He bought you with a tremendous price because you are amazingly valuable to Him and He wants you to be near to Him.  He says that because you have placed faith in Jesus there is no condemnation on you and that He has washed away your sins so you can spend eternity with Him.  

 

This isn't just warm fuzzy stuff to make you feel good; it is a super important part of your preparation to walk the path God has called you to walk; even if that path takes you into the marketplace.  This is the basis for our new identity, an identity that is built on the foundation of being loved by God, and being restored into the relationship He wanted to have with us from the beginning.  All of those things are work that He did, because we couldn't do it for ourselves. From that foundation we can build a life that honors God, lets us use our gifts & abilities, and plugs us into God as our source of provision, even while to do our best to be productive with the resources and opportunities He makes available.  

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Building on another foundation leaves us trying to find our value in our works and what we can produce.  This always leads to disappointment.  No matter how much you produce and how good you are at whatever you do, when you connect your identity and value to your works, each time your performance slips it means part of you is not good enough anymore.  That leads to self-condemnation even though God said you are no longer condemned.  If you want peace, trust that you are who Gods says you are and let Him show you how to live out of that and be productive with the things he calls you to.  

 

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 instead of finding our value in our relationship with Him, and doing our work as an expression of gratitude for what He has already done.  

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This is true for all believers, but for self employed people & business owners there can be another level of difficulty to navigate as we remind ourselves of our true identity.  Because of the way modern culture idolizes money and wealth, successful business owners who create great wealth, are also often idolized and lifted up as examples of what 'success' looks like.    

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This dichotomy between our completely new-selves in our spirit, and our lingering old-selves in our flesh (body + mind), sets up opportunities for us to draw near to God by faith, while also leaving opportunity for us to stick with our old thinking if we choose to.  Our old thinking feels familiar, but the longer we try to stick with it the more conflicted we feel and the less peace we have. 

 

As Christians we have all been given the mission of carrying the love that Jesus shared with us into the world around us, and share it with others.  To equip us for this mission, Jesus re-made us into completely new creations and gifted us with skills and abilities to use to advance His kingdom.  The old model wasn't built for the load, so He recreated us as sons & daughters who are capable of carrying His love and honoring the Father with the ways we live our lives.  The tricky part is, we still look the same on the outside and parts of our mind still think the same way until we transform our mind and learn to think about things like God thinks, as revealed in scripture.  This includes how we think about ourselves.  So many Christians think of themselves differently than God thinks about us, and it is the root of a ton of turmoil in our lives.  When we accept that God knows us better than we know ourselves, and that He is right about who we are, even if we see ourselves differently, we can find peace and we become more effective in our calling to carry His love to the world.  To continue to see ourselves as something other than what God says we are is to choose to disagree with God, and it places our opinion above His.  

 

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Our identity of who we are as believers in Jesus, as Christians, is supposed to take priority over every other aspect of who we are.  But it can be hard to walk out sometimes because we still carry with us the reminders of who we were, and the patterns and practices we developed along the way that worked for us, and may still work for us. 

 

Many times those practices and patterns of life guide & shape how we identify ourselves and think about ourselves. They may not be bad things, but if they don't reflect who we really are, we should limit the influence we let them have.

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This is true for all believers, but for self employed people & business owners there can be another level of difficulty to navigate as we remind ourselves of our true identity.  Because of the way modern culture idolizes money and wealth, successful business owners who create great wealth, are also often idolized and lifted up as examples of what 'success' looks like. 

 

Even though we may recognize the danger in caring what the world thinks, the repeated messages saying that in order to be successful we should be doing X, Y, & Z, can work it's way into our thinking and our self image.  For that reason, it is a good idea to remind ourselves periodically that we are more than just a person that creates wealth.  We are not an entrepreneur first, we are people who are loved by Jesus first; and we do entrepreneurial stuff as part of how we honor Him and use the gifts, abilities, and opportunities He has provided.