Love Your Competitor as Yourself
— by Greg Forster
Scripture demands that we love our neighbors, including those who are inconvenient to us. But most people’s daily work takes place in an aggressive marketplace. Companies are under enormous pressure to beat their competitors. Can Christians love their neighbors while striving to outdo them?
Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is “yes.” But it will only happen if Christians are serious about seeing their work and the economy through the lens of God’s Word. And that means pastors and churches play an essential role in helping people think about work.
All Work Is Competitive
Our culture teaches us that competition means a dog-eat-dog scramble to get as much as we can for ourselves at the expense of everyone else. This is why there is so much evil and destruction in the competitive marketplace. We’ve been told that in our daily work, all day every day, we’re essentially playing a giant game of Monopoly where the goal is to seize all the money for ourselves and leave everyone else destitute. (If you want a model of bad economics, the game of Monopoly is about as ungodly as it gets.)
But it is possible to compete without being selfish and destructive. We just need a better understanding of what competition is.
As simple as this sounds, it all begins with the fact that we are not God. We are finite. God has created us with many limitations—of space, time, strength, information. These limitations force us to spend almost every waking moment choosing between competing options. Do I spend the next hour reading or praying? Do I buy a new car, or do I keep spending money on repairs to maintain the old one?
Competition occurs wherever people face a choice between different options, and there is no “both/and” approach. This would be true even in a sinless world.
That is the real reason we compete. All work occurs in an economy, where people do jobs for each other. And all economies, regardless of the system, involve competition. Buyers and sellers offer one another opportunities for transactions. People select the transactions they find the most attractive while declining the alternatives.
The car dealer who will sell you a new car and the mechanic who will sell you maintenance services for your old car are, unavoidably, in competition with each other. If you buy a new car, the mechanic loses your business. If you don’t, the car dealer doesn’t gain your business.
This social web of competitive work was inherent in God’s decision to create more than one person (“It is not good that the man should be alone,” Gen. 2:18). This is why God is intensely interested in applying justice and mercy in economic transactions everywhere from the Old Testament law and prophets to the New Testament household codes and workplace parables. He’s keeping our competition graceful and honest.
Unpleasant as we may find it, competition is inherent in our finite nature. To have an economy without competition, we would need the infinite powers and radical autonomy of God himself.
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