— by FDE Team

Faith Driven Entrepreneur has been blessed by the wisdom, encouragement, and stories of the faith driven community. We’ve compiled a list of 10 of our favorite, most challenging and encouraging podcasts from the FDE community. You can find the full podcasts, and over 100 more, on our site.  

1. Lecrae and Ben Washer, FDE Episode 127, “The Reach Records Origin Story”
   “If God came to Earth as Bill Gates, he still would have been taking a step down. You know what I mean? And he goes below that. And that just blows my mind. And then at the same time reminds me when he says the first shall be last and I shall be first. He really exemplified that like he really laid out as an example of saying, “listen, I'm first.” There's no one more first than me. And I'm coming in. Born into an impoverished situation in a Palestinian barn. And that just reminds me to stay low, to stay humble, to stay. Trying to serve and to try to remember that the first will be last and last will be first.”
   

2. Peter Irvine, FDE Episode 121, “Global Franchising Redemptive Culture”
   “God doesn't wake up in the morning and say ‘I've run out of money.’ But the world thinks he has. And Christians often think that he has. He hasn't run out of resources or money. What he births, he's got to make happen. But the thing is, He's saying to me, ‘it's not always your interpretation of what I'm going to do. So you're going to have to wait for me. And when you step out of the boat, you've got to keep walking.’”
   

3. Jena Nardella, FDE Episode 81, “The Redemptive Nonprofit”
   “I think that founders of nonprofits, especially those who feel like they have a line to their calling to their work, have the greatest challenge around the nobility trap and start to believe that the organization is theirs, start to believe that they are indispensable to the organization. And the encouragement we are making is really to have our leaders surrender their identity and really their organizations to God and to be able to practice. The mindsets and habits of stewardship, which is really to hold the organization open handedly and very difficult to do.”
   

4. Rob Thomas and Jeff Parker, FDE Episode 103, “99% Confession Equals 0% Freedom”
   Jeff Parker, “Conflict is a constant opportunity. Right. I think God's glorified when we preserve the unity of the spirit or the unity of a company…I just really want to just push in and go, man, if you've got breath in your lungs, you're not irredeemable. Your sin is not have to be what defines you. And so get it in the light. Confess one hundred percent of it. And if even if it's because you've wounded your business partner, confess it and trust God.”
   

5. Pat Lencioni, FDE Episode 100, “The motivation of Faith Driven Entrepreneurs”
   “It's a different calling. And if you're not doing it with the cost in mind and feeling like you're called to that, then you shouldn't do it. And it's just too easy for people to slide into that thinking, well, this is the next step of my career…sometimes in discernment, we get caught up in trying to understand exactly what God wants us to do. And maybe he just wants to step out in faith and then learn from there.”
   

6. Alan Barnhart, FDE Episode 51, “God Owns It All”
   “We decided to protect ourselves against wealth by putting a cap on our lifestyle and say we're going to draw a certain salary from the company and live a certain lifestyle. And if God chooses to prosper the business, we're not going to see that as a call to increase lifestyle, but instead see it as an opportunity to use the dollars that God provides through the business for Kingdom purposes.”
   

7. Ron Blue, FDI Episode 11, “A Founding Father in the Faith Driven Investor Movement”
   “Two questions that the wealthy needed to ask. Number one was: Who owns it? And there's a lot of implications to that. And secondly: How much is enough? Be it a lifestyle or be it accumulation or whatever it may be, because if you don't set a finish line, you'll never finish. And we help people give away a lot of money, but it was primarily because they said, ‘You know want? I have enough. I don't really need any more.’”
   

8. Phil Vischer, FDE Episode 55, “Have You Ever Had a Dream?”
   “God does not call us to outcomes. He calls us to obedience. He doesn't care how big you get, how successful you get. He actually doesn't care what you accomplish. He cares who you are. He cares about your character. He cares about how you treat people. He cares about obedience. And joy comes from letting go of outcomes and embracing obedience.”
   

9. Don Flow, FDE Episode 71, “Letting Trust Drive Business”
   there is a sense in which all of us get up every day for people of faith and say, Help me imagine with you, Lord, a way of doing business, aligning myself with your purposes in this world, which your purposes are always about, the restoration of renewal of this world to reflect your deepest desires.
   

10. Pete Ochs, FDE Episode 83, “Jailhouse Business”
    “There are 5 things that lead to courage: the first one is truth. We've got to seek the truth. The truth will make us free. I don't care whether it's economic, social, spiritual marketplace. We have to know the truth. When you know the truth and you can go to the second step, which is faith, you'll start believing it. And as you start believing the truth, God gives you through the Holy Spirit this ability to start living it out. And what I call character. So it's truth, faith and character. You work through that system. And then I think the fourth step after you've started living it out is I think God begins to give you a vision for your business or for whatever he's put on your heart. And as you get that vision, and for me, I get really excited about vision. There comes a point when I say that vision is so big. I don't think I can do that. And that's where the fifth step humility comes in. And if we understand that this isn't going to happen unless God comes along beside us and makes it happen, then it's going to work. And then at that point in time, you are going to probably run into a roadblock. There is going to be something that happens in this journey of entrepreneurship. So as you start your business, start with truth, believe it through faith, start living it down with character.”

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