— by Tony Evans

God has given us the Holy Spirit to guide us in decision making. And because entrepreneurs are risk takers, we know we must take calculated risk. You want risk to work out, because you can't guarantee the result of the risk—that makes it a risk, so risk involves faith. You've got to believe something about taking a risk. 

But everything you believe in is not the risk you want to take. So you need the Holy Spirit to authenticate that this certain risk is a risk worth taking. The Bible talks about the fact that he will guide you in making a profit. God will guide you in making a profit. So you need guidance. If you need guidance and you have a guide, the Holy Spirit. For every decision you make, big, medium and small, the Holy Spirit should be invited into the boardroom or into the conversation or into the Starbucks or onto the golf course where you are making the decisions. 

How does he validate it? He validates it in your heart. But then after two or three witnesses. So if you're not confident that this is God, you start asking for the two or three confirmations and they can come in a myriad of different ways. So a lot of business people move ahead because they like how it feels when it has never been confirmed. But then they often want a reversal once they see how it turned out. So bring the Holy Spirit in on the front end so you can avoid a myriad of decisions that will take you out in the long run.

For a long time Israel was without the true God, and without a teaching priest and without law, but when in their distress they turned to the Lord, the God of Israel, and sought him, he was found by them. In those times there was no peace to him who went out or to him who came in, for great disturbances afflicted all the inhabitants of the lands. They were broken in pieces. Nation was crushed by nation and city by city, for God troubled them with every sort of distress. 

Chronicles 15:3-6

That was conflict in the land—this included personal conflict, family conflict, city conflict, and national conflict. Conflict everywhere. No peace, it says, but then it says that God troubled them with every kind of distress. You would have thought with all the conflict, that would have said the devil caused it, but it doesn't. It says, God troubled it.

If God is your problem, only God is your solution. And the reason why verse three says there was all this chaos in the land was because God had been marginalized. It says the churches had failed, the priest had failed, and God had been marginalized. So when that open space opened up where God was no longer in the vicinity, all manner of evil and conflict went into that empty space. 

But verse four says this. In their distress when it got bad enough, they sought the Lord and he let them find him. Later, in verse fifteen it says, and God gave them rest when they got back to their spiritual priority, the kingdom priority, their relationship priority. God turned conflict into order. So control of the city, of the nation, doesn’t come down to the person in the White House. This is about the person who's in God's house. And if we can get God's house straight with God's people, then we can address every issue from God's point of view.