While studying the previous lesson, you may have gained the impression that friendship should not be brought into business relationships and that undertaking joint ventures with friends is very dangerous. This raises the question: What are friends for? And how can I come to know a person better, discover his business qualities, and also see what I myself am made of?
When I ask God to teach me love and friendship, He gladly answers such prayers. He places the right spirit within me and writes His laws upon my heart. Then comes the testing of my new character.
Love needs to become firmly established. The spirit of friendliness must be passed through the fire. But fires differ. They may consist of my familiar ambitions and arrogance, my spiritual ignorance and lack of foresight, or the purposeful actions of God, Who brings difficult people into my friendships because He desires, through my love, to help them resolve the difficult questions of their lives. The important consideration is Who my Teacher is and whether I am a disciple of Jesus in this process.
God knows what to do with clay that can still be reshaped. He takes me like a piece of incomprehensible, shapeless material and crumbles me into a vessel filled with the water of the Holy Spirit. Then He removes His shoes and begins treading me with His bare feet. Many parts of my soul immediately soften and yield to His influence, while others remain hard and hurt the feet of the Heavenly Craftsman. But the Lord has dealt with worse material than this. Although my hardness and stubbornness cause Him pain, they present no problem for Him. Sometimes He plunges His loving hands into the slurry of softened material and removes the hard pieces of my stubbornness to determine whether they are my stony heart. If so, the Lord replaces it with a heart of flesh. Then He returns everything to the common mass. When the mixture is ready, I am placed upon the potter’s wheel, and through the hands of Jesus, God’s creative thought begins bringing the greatest and most unattainable ideas to life within me. My character assumes the particular form into which the Lord plans to pour His water of life each day.
But while the vessel is still unbaked, there can be no question of holding any water.
And now I have been formed. I like the prospect of my future responsibilities and begin dreaming of wonderful fellowship among the rest of God’s vessels. I am placed beneath the Sun of righteousness so that I may grow strong and become established in His rays. I feel ready for any victory or heroic deed for Christ. I long to receive anything into myself. But the Wise Craftsman shows me a blazing furnace and informs me that this is the next stage of my development.
Fear of the pain of trial paralyzes me, but the Lord assures me that He is with me and will not leave me. He therefore places me gently into the burning furnace. The flames heat me all the way through, removing foreign impurities and drying everything within me. I see nothing but intense fire, yet it does not harm me or destroy the shape of my character. It makes my character strong.
The fiery furnace is left behind, and I joyfully remember the experience and tell other people about it. They look at me, examine me with their eyes, and glorify God for such a work of art.
Then the Lord begins filling me with various substances that He periodically desires to cook, boil, melt down, or roast in a hot furnace. Sometimes I recognize among these ingredients the expectations of my friends, who entrust me with their secrets and make use of my talents. Although the fire of God’s trials does not harm me and the flame will not scorch me with fatal consequences, I do not always enter the fiery furnace willingly. Sometimes the Lord allows wicked people to bind me and cast me into it by order of the rulers of this world. These kings command that the furnace be heated seven times hotter than usual, and I have nowhere to escape. I understand that this world is incapable of acting differently.
We have been given to one another so that we may find one another and gain one another for life. I will never discover a person as though he were a new planet if I keep him at a distance and do not allow him to participate in my ventures. Every undertaking passes through the fire of trials, and God does not even need to invent them. They surround us and need only be permitted. Every relationship with friends will inevitably enter the purifying flame. If I do not allow this fire to pass through our fellowship, the relationship will remain superficial and become soft like an unbaked clay pitcher into which water is poured.
Gaining friends in business creates the strongest kind of structure. Together we pass through every kind of trial. Together we discover new possibilities within one another and begin trusting each other more and more. We meet each new difficulty with the joy of victors, knowing that it will not break our relationship but only strengthen it.
Building a business with those who do not share your faith in Jesus is like trying to mix clay with iron and fashion something worthwhile from it. Such a structure will not withstand the fire or pass the test. The iron will always pull me toward the magnets of temptation, and I will continually have to explain and prove to it that we must obey God’s law and not defile our vessel with anything unclean. But iron cannot understand this. It feels the pull of the magnets and cannot resist them. Woe is me if I become so thoroughly mixed with this iron that I refuse to reject its invitations to have fun or become involved in yet another reckless venture. The fire of trial will burn out all foreign impurities and render me unfit for any good purpose. My life may be hopelessly shattered.
It is also worth noting that starting a family is a business venture of its own. Yet you should not drag an appealing friend into this undertaking. It is better to find that person within an existing endeavor and, after testing his or her true feelings and thoughts, build something together.
The family is the most important enterprise ever entrusted to a human being. If I desire to build something beautiful and strong, I must approach it seriously. I can part with a business partner, change occupations, or bring everything to a halt, but I cannot run away from my spouse. My spouse is my own flesh. Whether this becomes something of one substance or something mixed with another is for me to decide, seeing with my own eyes and understanding with my heart. If my candidate for this family enterprise professes the same faith but carries foreign impurities within his or her vessel, they will become part of our shared home and destroy us from within. The Lord is able to correct even this, but it is better for both people to address it before marriage than within marriage; otherwise, this union may be rejected forever.
I know of cases in which my friends worked together in medical missionary enterprises, observed one another, and allowed God to temper them through various trials. After passing through many difficulties, they decided to establish a shared enterprise, knowing what kind of person the other was. The result is something strong.
I also know people who saw each other for the first time, smiled, and decided to begin a shared enterprise without ever understanding who the other person truly was. They later experienced bitter disappointment and shattered their lives. A definite pattern can be seen in all this.
But agape love can correct everything.
Bible Verses for Reflection
Proverbs 15:22; 16:3; 20:18; 1 Corinthians 3:13–15; Ezekiel 36:25–28; 1 Peter 1:6–9; 4:12; Job 10:8–12; Isaiah 29:15–16; 45:9–12; 64:8; Jeremiah 18:2–10; Daniel 2:33–34, 41–43; 3:19–20; Romans 9:20–21; 2 Timothy 2:19–21; 2 Corinthians 6:14–18; Amos 3:3; Colossians 3:18; Deuteronomy 7:3–4; Ezra 9:12; Ecclesiastes 5:5.