As many of you know, personal issues related to the death of my father — which I have written about elsewhere — disrupted my normal pace more than I expected. So although the interviews themselves have already aired, I still want to continue this written sequence drawing out what I believe are the most important insights from these conversations. Think of the “sneak peek” at the end not as a preview of shows yet to air, but as a preview of the next articles in the sequence. In the meantime, you can watch the full interviews on YouTube.
One of the recent conversations that has stayed with me was my interview with Brian Adamson on Created in the Image of God. Brian works at the intersection of business, biblical principle, discipleship, and practical stewardship. That is not a new subject. It should not be controversial. In many ways, it is simply common sense. But common sense has become uncommon, especially where faith and money are concerned.
What follows are five takeaways from that conversation. I am going to begin where Brian said something especially memorable, then work backward through the logic of it, and end where I think the whole discussion was really pointing all along.
1. Jesus fed the people before he fed the people
Brian made a line worth sitting with: Jesus fed the people before he fed the people.
The point is not cleverness. The point is order.
Again and again, Christians create false alternatives where none need exist. We imagine that meeting practical needs is somehow separate from spiritual witness, or even beneath it. But throughout the gospels, our Lord did not treat embodied human need as an interruption to ministry. He treated it as part of ministry.
Brian told the story of a marketer he had worked with years earlier, a man who first encountered Brian’s faith not through argument, not through pressure, and not through religious performance, but through real help. Later, after Brian’s coaching had helped create genuine margin in the man’s life, the man came back asking how to read through the Bible in a year.
That is often how witness works.
Not always. But often.
Deliver what people actually came for. Do it honestly. Do it well. Do it without bait and switch. Let excellence, peace, integrity, and fruit raise the deeper questions. That is not compromise. It is maturity.
I have no interest in Bible-thumping as a substitute for competence. If a man hires you to solve a business problem, solve the business problem. If he comes hungry, do not hand him a tract in place of bread and imagine yourself faithful. The bread matters. The competence matters. The integrity matters. And then, very often, those things open the door to the deeper conversation.
Creation itself teaches this. We live in a material world made by God. Bodies matter. Work matters. Time matters. Provision matters. To care for these things is not to depart from God. It is to honor the laboratory in which his curriculum is meant to be lived.
2. From hustle to stewardship
What struck me in Brian’s story is that his problem was never a lack of drive.
His problem was direction.
That is true for a great many people. The capacity is there. The ambition is there. The energy is there. But the curriculum is missing, and when that happens, we take real gifts into the laboratory of creation and blow things up.
Brian spoke candidly about his teenage years, about selling weed, about seeing entrepreneurial possibility before he had any wisdom for how to pursue it rightly. I found that deeply resonant, because one of the recurring truths of life is that our capacities do not arrive pre-ordered. We may be given strength without judgment, zeal without discipline, vision without patience.
This is one reason I return so often to Genesis. God is the teacher. Creation is the setting in which his teaching is applied. Human beings are not wrong to build, cultivate, trade, invent, risk, produce, and multiply. Those are image-bearing activities. The problem is not the drive to build. The problem is building in rebellion, or in ignorance, or in vanity.
Brian said that God had repurposed even the things he did in sin into training grounds for what he would later do in obedience. That, too, is common sense once one has lived long enough to see it. The Lord wastes nothing surrendered to him.
What begins as hustle becomes stewardship only when ambition is placed under divine authority. There is a great difference between saying, “I know how to get money,” and saying, “I know how to build with God.”
The first may produce results for a time. The second produces fruit that can be inhabited.
3. God’s way, not the grind’s way
Brian’s phrase was simple: God’s way, not the grind’s way.
Again, this should not be revolutionary. It should be obvious.
Yet many people still live as if exhaustion were proof of faithfulness, as if hurry were a virtue, as if the inability to stop were evidence of seriousness. It is not. It is usually evidence of disorder.
One of the most practical parts of our conversation was Brian’s insistence that Sabbath, margin, and obedience are not obstacles to productivity. They are part of the design. He spoke about taking Sabbath for years and getting more done, not less. He told a small but revealing story about a realtor sending him deals on Sundays, and his discipline in not replying. In time, he still got the deals.
That is not magic. It is trust.
It reminded me immediately of manna. Gather on the sixth day. Do not gather on the seventh. What is gathered in trust lasts. What is grasped at in anxiety rots.
There is a broader business lesson here, and it is not complicated. A man can produce fruit and still fail to enjoy it. He can increase revenue while destroying peace. He can scale activity while shrinking his soul. He can gain margin in a spreadsheet while losing it in his home.
This is one reason so much modern talk about success rings hollow. It is all output and no order. All velocity and no wisdom.
God’s way is not against work. Scripture honors work too plainly for that. But it is against toil in the deepest sense: disordered striving, proud striving, faithless striving, striving cut loose from timing and trust and proportion.
The alternative to burnout is not laziness. It is obedience.
4. Overspiritualized and undermonetized
Brian used a phrase that made me laugh because it was so direct: many believers, he said, are overspiritualized and undermonetized.
There is a lot packed into that.
He was not saying money is the goal. He was saying many Christians pray for miracles where God has already given principles. That is a needed correction.
I have long argued that there is a divine curriculum, and that to neglect it is not spirituality. It is immaturity. If God has built certain principles into reality — sowing and reaping, planning and counting the cost, diligence and restraint, stewardship and multiplication — then refusing to learn them does not make us holy. It makes us ineffective.
Somewhere along the way, many believers absorbed the idea that wealth is suspect, that poverty is inherently pious, or that material success must always compromise the soul. Of course money can corrupt. So can poverty. So can envy. So can false humility.
The biblical witness is much more balanced than our slogans. Joseph administered economic life with extraordinary wisdom. David and Solomon were not paupers. Lydia was not condemned for commerce. The virtuous woman in Proverbs 31 is not allergic to productive enterprise. And, as Brian rightly observed, ministry itself requires means.
No, wealth is not the highest good. But neither is confusion.
If you continually refuse to learn how value is created, how service is delivered, how people are helped, how reserves are built, how risks are weighed, and how provision is stewarded, then eventually someone else will make those decisions for you. Usually poorly.
What matters is not merely whether money is present, but whether it is ordered under wisdom and placed in the hands of people who understand they are stewards rather than owners in the absolute sense.
5. Build with Him
This, to me, was the deepest takeaway of the whole conversation.
Brian spoke about a new curriculum he is developing called Build With Him, and the phrase gets at a distinction many believers desperately need. Too many people think in terms of doing things for God rather than with God.
That sounds subtle, but it is not.
Doing things for God can still leave the self in charge. It can still mean pursuing my agenda, my timing, my image, my strategy, and then asking for divine endorsement after the fact. It can reduce God to consultant, mascot, or brand asset.
Doing things with God is different. It implies listening, surrender, timing, restraint, integration, and fellowship. It means the work is not merely dedicated to God in theory. It is actually shaped by his presence and order in practice.
This is where the split in modern Christian life becomes so destructive. Many people live one way Monday through Saturday and another way on Sunday. Or, as I put it during the conversation, they hide their faith in business and then hide their business success in church. The result is a kind of practical schizophrenia. Nothing integrates. Nothing harmonizes. Nothing becomes whole.
But wholeness is the point.
If we are created in the image of God, then our work, our households, our worship, our money, our time, our risk, our building, and our service all belong within one coherent life under God. Not perfect. But coherent.
That is what maturity looks like.
Not less material engagement, but more rightly ordered material engagement. Not withdrawal from the world, but faithful action within it. Not the abandonment of business, but its redemption through obedience, wisdom, and service.
Build with him.
That is where peace enters. That is where fruit becomes sustainable. That is where ambition is converted from appetite into stewardship.
And really, that is where this whole conversation was headed.
If you missed the interview with Brian Adamson, you can find it on YouTube as part of the Created in the Image of God series.
Sneak Peek
Since I am behind on the written sequence, the sneak peek now refers to the next essays, not to upcoming broadcasts. The shows themselves have already aired, and you can watch them on YouTube.
The next two conversations in this sequence were with Richard Strilowitch, on treating work as a spiritual journey and on how inner wisdom shapes the way we lead, serve, and grow, and with Mark Galli, reflecting on faith, tradition, worship, holiness, the church, and the enduring pursuit of truth, grace, and spiritual renewal.
So that is what is ahead in writing, even though the interviews are already available to watch.
In the meantime, thank you for reading, for your patience, and for continuing to think with me. As always, remember: you are created in the image of God, and God loves his creation.
