Shownotes
Sometimes things go as planned, many times they do not. But God’s plans always work out according to God’s plan.
What if you could hear from God so you knew the direction you should go with your business? That would be a game changer.
Today we have on Steve Meisenheimer from The Effective Leader to talk about how God speaks to us.
Steve speaks from his many years of experience in learning to hear from God and then acting upon it.
It’s not a telephone call, letter, or email but God does still speak to His people if we seek His face.
This is not a mystical seance where you empty your mind and have it filled with ideas, but a seeking of God’s direction and accepting of what is given you. It is also validating what God is saying through the Bible and other means.
Steve has changed the phrase, “This idea might have been from God, but it was probably me” to “This idea might have been from me, but it was probably God.”
God may be speaking to you more than you know. Jesus said, My sheep hear my voice, they know me, and they follow me (John 10:3-4).
Steve hears from the Lord different from how I believe I hear from the Lord, but this is an interesting case study of seeking God’s face and being guided by Him.
I believe that God speaks to us today through the Holy Spirit and uses the Bible, prayer, circumstances, and other believers. When these four are in alignment that is an indication that a purpose or action is from God. God works through unity, not majority rule.
Listen in to Steve’s journey and how he has learned to hear God’s voice to lead in business and life.
Redeem Your Business Today by the Following:
How can we honor God in our business?
When building and operating your business seek to listen and follow the leading of the Holy Spirit, and not just follow the money.
One challenge from today:
Get started today to seek to listen to God and grow in your intimacy with God. It’s like a muscle that gets stronger over time. Seek God today.
More About Steve Meisenheimer
Website: The Effective Leader
Free Resource: The Effective Leader Free Resources
More About David Schmidt
Subscribe to Redeeming Business Today Podcast Newsletter
Book a call: Get Unstuck and Move Forward
Website redeemingbusinesstoday.com
Transcripts
David:
[0:00] Growing up, my brother often said, sometimes things go as planned,
David:
[0:03] most of the times they don't. And I've learned from experience that my plans don't always succeed, but God's plans always accomplish what he intended. So I reasoned if I could figure out what God's plans are and purposes are, I'd have more success. The problem is, how do you know what God wants you to do? And how do you know what God wants you to do in your business? And so if you're wondering how to hear God's voice, well, you're in the right place. Because today we'll be learning from Steve Meisenheimer, who is the founder of The Effective Leader, how to tackle that specific question about hearing God's voice because he's been dealing with that for a number of years now. So, Steve, welcome to the Redeeming Business today.
Steve:
[0:41] Thank you, David. Happy to be here.
David:
[0:43] Yeah. And one of the questions I like to ask my guests before we start is, what is one way that you have found you're able to honor God in your business that other people may not know about?
Steve:
[0:56] That other people may not know about. Well, I think everybody knows that if you're a Christian, that the Holy Spirit should be a central figure in the leadership of the company. He should provide the purpose of the company and really should be involved in the high level and even daily management of the company. So what we do at The Effective Leader is we really invoke the Holy Spirit from the very beginning of our relationship with the client and make sure that the leader or the owner in most cases is actually actively listening and hearing the Holy Spirit.
David:
[1:31] Okay. Very good. Yeah, and it's one thing to say, oh, I'm a Christian business. It's another thing to actually live your business, operate your business out of biblical principles too. That is a big difference.
Steve:
[1:44] It is indeed.
David:
[1:44] So tell me a little bit about your journey, where you came from, where you are today. How did you arrive at the effective leader that you're working with today?
Steve:
[1:56] Well, I will give you the high level flyover. I became passionate about business when I was just 16 years old. I'm 63. So there's been a few decades in between. And I became so enamored with business. It didn't really matter what business I was in. And I started, you know, going door to door, trimming trees and doing landscape business. But I just had such a passion to grow something that, um, over time, as many business owners do, you, you completely forsake the basic principles of, you know, we are supposed to be supernatural beings, living supernatural lifestyles, invoking the Holy Spirit. And I kind of parked all of that and, uh, just really built a business in the flesh and eventually it just became an idol. And like a lot of things, when, uh, when you start developing idols in your life, though, The Lord's primary interest is to remove those idols. And I do not know what happened to him.
Steve:
[2:50] And that's what he did. It was a very slow and painful process.
Steve:
[2:54] And when the Lord started really drawing my heart back into his presence and working on me and kind of flicking off the many idols off my altar, I developed this real passion for the Word of God. And I'm naturally a teacher. That's why I enjoy the consulting and training so much. And I just started consuming the Word of God at the expense of everything else, really. And I really wanted to merge my passion for the Word of God with my passion for business, which never diminished, even though it got reorganized in my value system.
Steve:
[3:30] But over the last few years, the Lord has granted that desire to merge the two. I've always been open with my Christian faith in business, but I've never really taught. From the Holy Spirit to clients. And now we really gear our practice towards Christian business owners. We will work with non-Christian business owners as well, but they will hear the exact same thing that Christian business owners hear. Like we open with prayer, we invite the Holy Spirit to speak to us. And now each training session is bifurcated into two components. Number one, hearing from God. How is he showing up in our business? How is he showing up in our leadership team? What sort of testimonies are we having? What do we need him to do next? And then we also transition into part two, which is the real down and dirty basics, building, blocking and tackling of building a business from the four, what I call the four fundamental disciplines of sales, marketing, operations, and finance.
David:
[4:30] So you concentrate on hearing and then doing, essentially what you're doing.
Steve:
[4:35] Exactly. Very focused on it. Even the basic building or the blocking and tackling. You know, you just can't go into a company and say, this is a really good marketing campaign, should produce great results for you. And it might, and it might not, but we really seek the Lord on, you know, what should our marketing budget be? You know, what should our marketing expectations be? Which suppliers are we going to work with which ones do we feel more comfortable with and take that to the Lord so it's very granular and it's very authentic and it's very productive
David:
[5:11] Good yeah and even I've also taught people too it's like you plant, you know and then you water and then God causes the growth kind of like with Paul and Apollos he said I plant, Apollos waters, God causes the growth it's the same way in your business you can do everything right, right and uh have your marketing customer base and product and all that but god is ultimately the one bringing in the sales and bringing in convincing people to buy and all that stuff.
Steve:
[5:41] So yeah god is very um we talked about this briefly on the phone the other day that you know the a good way to redirect a believer uh not in a negative way although it seems negative is to dry up the resources, you know, take a, take a key manager or partner out of the company or to, um, you know, dry up the customer base or dry up cashflow. And that's a very useful way for God to get our attention. It doesn't sell books, but it will, uh, but God at getting someone and he will use any method necessary to, uh, to get you focused on what, uh, Peter took his eyes off of when he was endeavoring to walk on water. And the reason he sank is he took his eyes off the Lord's face.
David:
[6:25] Sure. Yeah, it reminds me of Moses and the Israelites too, that before they were set free, Pharaoh made their lives just a little bit more miserable right before they started all the plagues and got them out of there. God uses those things for a motivator. Very good. So we talked about hearing God, hearing from God.
David:
[6:49] What are different ways that God talks to us today?
Steve:
[6:54] Well, what's awesome about serving an infinite God, he has an infinite number of ways of communicating with us.
Steve:
[7:00] And I like the reference I've learned that there's four fundamental ways. There's an infinite number of ways under these four fundamental ways, but not one way is through seeing. You know, I don't know, David, if you have visions or dreams that you wake up with or have visions throughout the day where you just see something in life, in real life action.
Steve:
[7:23] And then the Lord will give you some very often just an immediate interpretation for it that it does have meaning uh that's one way the other way is hearing I tend to hear God more very often it sounds like my own voice and uh another way is just a sensing I I can't really explain it but I just sense this is the direction we're supposed to take the path we're supposed to go on the person we're supposed to hire um and um fourth is uh oh gosh um just knowing just just having this knowing in my spirit nothing where i really sensed or saw or heard but i i just know and and what's really important when we're working with teams is to appreciate those four different ways because if you're a knower for instance and i'm a hearer i may discount the knower if you can't tell me that you heard god's voice i may say well david i appreciate your input but since you didn't hear god's voice on this uh we're just going to discount it but when we really start functioning in all four of those ways which we could and which we can which we should um then you gain greater appreciation for those who hear god's differently because you hear god by just knowing as well sure
David:
[8:33] So you have all those different four different ways how do you know that's you versus that's God speaking to you versus a shiny object syndrome that me and everybody else feels like, Ooh, I think I should do this. And it's like, is that God telling me to do that? Or am I just dreaming something else up? How do I know that difference?
Steve:
[8:55] Well, there's a couple of different ways that we want to check boxes. Number one, is it scripturally accurate? Does it violate any scripture? You know, I'm running a little short on cash, so I'm going to go rob a circle K. That seems like a very effective way to build up my cash flow, but there's something inherently scripturally errant about such a conclusion.
Steve:
[9:19] Other way, is it consistent with God's character? Is it consistent with what other people are hearing? If I have a leadership team that I've developed that actually has a spirit-led culture to it and we all are seeking God's voice and I come in as the owner and say, you know, I think we should hire Joe instead of the other choices, but everybody else, there's a dissonance in their spirit about Joe, you know, then I want to listen to that. And you can't have a my way or the highway approach when you're trying to invoke a spirit-led culture. So um it's just uh it's a it's a level of peace you know when you when you hear god's voice uh i just have a real sense of peace about it even though it flies in the face my wife and i experience this on occasion flies in the face of logic just like running out of cash you know that's that can be the greatest blessing in the world when you run out of cash because you went in a direction and made a step the Lord had planned for you all along, but the Lord saw around all the little switchbacks in the road that you couldn't see, and you made an encounter or you made a relationship that you would not have made if you had not run out of cash 60 days earlier. So anyway, it's wonderful, and I love the muscle, just like any other skill. So, I've heard it said, and I really appreciate this mindset,
Steve:
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