A few years back, I was a general manager of a store for a Fortune 15 company. The company had hundreds of stores across the U.S. and almost 100,000 employees. To give you an idea of the size of this company, every quarter they had revenues in the billions of dollars. They were so concerned about how the little things affected the company as a whole, that they sent me and other general managers to a business acumen class. They wanted us to understand how the CEO and other C level employees thought as well as how our decisions affected the bottom line.
Until then, I had mainly thought of my store as a silo. I had never really considered the role I played in how profitable the company was. The conglomerate of stores like mine were what was driving the billions in revenue. If I made poor decisions each day, the company as a whole took a hit. Suddenly, I quit making decisions based on the temporary circumstance of my store and started making them based on how it affected the company as a whole. I quit comparing my store versus other stores around me and started comparing to the company average. Either I was helping the company or I was hurting it.
The same can be said of our Christian life. There are decisions you and I make each day that are based on our temporary circumstances and not on our eternal goals. We look at how things will affect our near future instead of our eternal future. When we do that, we slow our growth down and affect our life as a whole. We create problems in the future that can be life altering because we don’t have the spiritual acumen to see how our decisions affect everything in our life.
Zig Ziglar once said, “If you take care of the little things, the big things will take care of themselves.” He understood acumen. He understood how each decision that is made sends a wave that gets bigger into our future. If each of us could grasp that, we’d have a lot fewer issues and more spiritual growth. Hebrews 12:1 says, “Let us strip off and throw aside every encumbrance (unnecessary weight) and the sun that so readily clings to and entangles us.” We can strip those off by making better decisions regarding our spirit man based on our whole life.
What decisions have you made lately based on convenience instead of eternity? What can you do to help you remember that the decisions you make today will echo throughout eternity? When we change to an eternal perspective on how we look at our decisions, we begin to make better ones. We will begin to realize what really matters and what doesn’t. Those weights will begin to fall off and we will be free to run the race we were made to run without any self placed obstacles.
Devotions by Chris Hendrix 