What happens when you have legal battles, court issues, or conflict in business as a Kingdom entrepreneur? Should you fight, show grace, maybe go to court? In this episode, Pierce shares a personal story from his own business career about a difficult situation where he had the option to go to court and what he did about it. He reveals a powerful principle he found in scripture and an inspirational testimony of what happens when you let God do the fighting for you.

Episode Topics

This episode covers the topics of conflict, difficult situations, court, the legal system, prayer, the Holy Spirit, Christian business, entrepreneurship, and business as mission.

Resources

Calling: Awaken to the Purpose of Your Work – by Pierce Brantley

To read the first chapter free of Pierce's new book Calling and for more information or resources please visit eternalentrepreneur.co

Thank you for joining us for Lunch Break. I am Pierce Brantley co-host of the Eternal Entrepreneur. Today we're going to take things in a little bit of a different direction. We are going to talk about fighting. Yes, fighting; particularly fighting your enemies. And you might be saying Pierce, the Bible says to love your enemies.

You're right. The Bible does say to love your enemies. But every once in a while, every once in a blue moon, there comes a point where you have an actual enemy. I'm not talking about someone cutting you off in traffic. I'm talking about in business, something goes beyond the point of competition, friendly capitalism, trying to offer the best thing in the market and it moves beyond that to extremes.

It could be criminal. It could be just against your reputation, but you have to deal with a genuine enemy. What do you do in those situations? Because I know what the Christian answer is in those situations. I know that, well, we'll just love them or just ignore them.

I'll let the Lord deal with them, you know, by the grace of God there go I. I know we know the patent responses you might be saying, well, Pierce, you just kind of got to love them and let God work it out, you know, someday on judgment day. Agreed. I think God will wane will lay the playing field. But what do you do in the moment in the season when someone's attacking you?

Have you ever been in that situation before? If you've been in business for any time at all, then you know that this type of stuff comes up, partnerships, go sour. You have something that goes beyond the point of competition. Like I mentioned earlier, and you need to deal with it, head on and that's conflicting, right?

When it gets serious, because the Bible says, at least with our Christian brothers, don't take them. To court brothers and sisters, we are often kind of at an impasse when something, we feel like legally needs to be done. So we get stuck. What do we do? So I've gone through a couple of seasons like this beyond the point of friendly fire.

We can say. And so I'm going to share a story with you from my own life. It's a story I've never shared with anyone before. But I think it's really important to talk about this because if you haven't gone through it before, there's a good chance you will. I'm not saying you will, but if you are doing anything of value for long enough, you're going to come up against conflict.

Conflict. And so there is a Christ centered way of faith centered way, a kingdom minded way to approach conflict. Jesus gives us some good examples in the word gives us some fantastic direction. I had the chance, the opportunity, the privilege. I say that now. To inspect a part of scripture that doesn't often get to be inspected.

And so I want to share with you my experience in that regard. So we're gonna take some time travel. We're going to go back to Pierce's early days of consulting. The names and the story been changed to protect the innocent and the not so innocent. Here's what happened. So I sold a very small company. In my early twenties, you is basically a client list.

It was a hard earned client list, but it was my client list. You early entrepreneurs know what I'm talking about, and I couldn't have been more excited to sell that little business. So it was a client list. It was a little bit of IP. And a lot of Gusto. Now at first, everything went fine. I ended up, I had the privilege of really helping the company I sold to increase its revenue.

We're talking about like multiples. It was a good thing. I had come on board after selling to basically transition my clients and then help get a new wing of the company up off the ground. And I did that. But things begin to go sour pretty quickly. It started with, I'm not getting paid. What was in my contract.

In a pretty dramatic way and it happened over and over and over again. And then it happened that my name was getting used and assigned to things without my permission. And things begin to get really, really bad. And I did confront it head on initially, but it got worse and it got much, much, much worse.

And so I made the very hard decision to part ways. I gave my two weeks, I was ready to start something new. Anyway, it seemed like everything went well at first. And then the next day, things begin to go extremely badly. I started to notice some fishy stuff. My LinkedIn got hacked, had gotten ahold of my information, some folks in the company, and they'd changed important things about my career on that, on my page.

And even had taken things like reviews down that people leave for you. And. They started sending people to my home. I started to get really, really scary. This all kind of culminated in them actually saying, Hey, you know what, under no circumstances, can you talk to your clients? We're going to tell them how you transitioned for you.

And if you are in the service-based industry and you have a deep relationship with someone, who's given you a lot of money, you know, to just go Mia on them is not, not cool. So I had a couple of things going on. At a defamation case at a loss of funds. And I had my reputation and the fact that I couldn't transition my clients, my high-paying clients very well.

And to put the icing on the cake, this bitter bitter cake, they said. Pierce your personal laptop, the one that you paid for, you have information on there, which I did fair enough. That belongs to the company. Instead of just giving that information, putting it on our drive. We want you to give us your laptop.

In fact, we want you to leave it at the company. We're not going to give you your whole two weeks, just leave the laptop and go and. This was without me pushing anything. There was a lot of reasons for why they were doing this. Most of all, it had to do with a COO inside the company. And I just had chosen a side of integrity, but can you imagine you're not getting paid.

You have a defamation case. Your laptop is getting hacked. And Oh, by the way, that was twice in total and clients aren't allowed to know what's going on. And they want you to leave your laptop. It's a lot. So I had a choice and I had a decision. I was boiling with anger. Obviously there was a ton of injustice and I didn't, I didn't really know what to do, but then the Lord brought my house heart to a Psalm that I hadn't thought about in a long time, but it was a particular verse in the Psalms and he revealed it to me.

And it's the famous Psalm Psalm 23. The Lord is my shepherd Psalm. I'm not going to go through the whole thing, but in verse five, it says you will prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head, my cup overflows. I'll be honest. Considering any person an enemy is. A a hard pill for me to swallow at any point in my life, even if you're doing things against me.

And I think as a Christian and really it doesn't have to be a Christian, any person to say, you know, someone is my enemy is kind of a hard thing to kind of come to terms with. I just think of it in these terms. If someone is bent selfishly on making sure bad things happen to you. At the expense or they're trying to make something happen at the expense of your integrity or your life or your livelihood, then they're an enemy.

And they might be a short term enemy. I think that's different from someone acting selfishly within your life. We all act selfishly and we all have to repent of that and ask for forgiveness of that. I'm not talking about someone doing you badly in a cause they had a bad day or something like that.

Or they had a bad season in life. I'm talking about someone whose goal is to cause harm to you. And so that's kind of my, my definition there. The Lord had put this verse on my heart and I was like, okay, well, I feel like this is an enemy type situation, Lord, this is what I'm going to do. Your word says that you prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.

And so that is what I'm going to attempt to let you to do. I want to actually see what this would look like. And so I walk into the main area where we. Typically meet when we have lots of people there, the person that I was having the conflict with that was doing these things, but was not there. And I took my laptop, this laptop that I really didn't actually have to give.

And I told the Lord, I said, Lord, you've seen everything. That's happened up to this point. And. I don't think that I should have to give my laptop in this case, nor do I think I should have to put up with anything else I've had to put up with, but I'm not going to Sue this person. What I am going to do, God is I'm going to leave this laptop here on the table for them.

And I want you to judge the situation for me. I'm not going to court, but I want you to be my judge. And I want you to determine what you think is right in this situation. And at this point, the laptop was my means to livelihood, not to mention the fact that, you know, like I said, that they weren't paying me per my contract.

It was a risk, it was a big risk. I didn't know where I was going to have money coming from. And I certainly had money to go get another laptop at this point, but I'd lay it on the table. I laid it before the Lord in the presence of the Lord. And I walked out of that building. Never to return again. What happens next is incredible.

So about a week out from this entire debacle, I get a text message from an old client and they want to know how I'm doing genuinely. So they don't know any of this backstory, but they want to know how I am. And I say, you know, I'm okay. You know, I've left this company and I'm trying to figure out what's next.

And they said, you know, we wondered if you might be needing some work. And I did. And I said, so we want to just as a contract, we're just going to keep this month to month. We want to keep you on our payroll. And as a, as a contractor, when can you start? I said, well, here's the thing. I don't have a laptop and I don't really have the means to kind of get another little company off the ground right now.

And they said, that's fine. How much do you need for a laptop? And when can you get started? And so I told them, and without any money to my name without knowing what I was going to do next Lord provided me a client and a laptop. And the money to support myself about two weeks later at another conversation with a past client and they wanted to give me a very big contract and that next month I was able to get something signed with them.

And I had. A laptop and the, a large five for your, some in my bank account doing absolutely nothing. It was a complete miracle. Now it gets better. And I say that gravely in a sense, As I said earlier, I decided not to Sue. That was the end of it. The Lord had provided for me. He laid a table in the presence of my enemies.

He protected me. He'd supplied my livelihood in a lot of income without me missing a beat. That was cool. But then he did something else. A colleague of mine, there went through a similar situation, but they, you know, had different kind of, they had a different grid and that's fine for how to approach these things.

And they immediately told all their clients, Hey, listen, you know, I am being, you know, forced out and you never going to see me again, and it's going to happen really, really rapidly. Those clients. Said, absolutely not. You know, they, this is part of a part of our contract with the company is, you know, us having a relationship with you.

So they said, if we leave, would you let us come be your client? And would you start an agency with, with our company, which is an amazing offer, but obviously there's huge legal implications for that. So what happens next is incredible. I see this as the favor of God coming next, not just this client. But multiple of the biggest pain clients all say, this is unacceptable.

You can't treat us this way by doing this basically a second time, they all pay their huge cancellation contract cancellation fees to the company. Just because they feel slighted, go form, let this other person form a new agency that supports, supports them. What happens is that within the period of the year, that original company implodes it implodes because of bad character and a lack of finances.

And. You know, it's a sobering, it's a sobering sobering thing to, to kind of experience that and to see that. But what was, it was justice. It was genuine needed justice for a lot of, a lot of bad things. The incredible thing about it was the only thing that caused that outcome was surrendering the entire thing to God himself.

And he provided and he took care of reputation. He took care of the things that I put before him. And ultimately he made sure that transition happened for everyone else. He worked all things to the good of those who love him. And we see this over and over again in scripture where there's a battle to fight.

And the Lord says, I'm going to fight the battle for you. What I ask is that you surrender. And let me do what I can do best. Now. I've found something mind blowing in scripture, and I want to share it with you all because I never seen this before. And then I was reading through Isaiah and I found this incredible little scripture, Isaiah 59, check this out, starting with verse 15.

Truth is missing and whoever turns from evil becomes prey. The Lord looked and was displeased that there was no justice. He saw that there was no man. He was amazed that there was no one to intercede. So his own arm brought salvation and his righteousness sustained him. He put on righteousness like a breastplate sound familiar and the helmet of salvation on his head.

He put on garments of vengeance and wrapped himself in a cloak of zeal. Now does that sound familiar to anybody? I'll let's hop over to Ephesians six, starting with verse 10, finally be strong in the Lord in the power of his might put on the full armor of God so that he can make you stand against the devil's schemes for our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers against the authorities against the powers of this world's darkness and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Therefore. Take up the full armor of God so that when the day of evil comes, you will be able to stand your ground. Having done everything, to stand, stand firm, then with the belt of truth, buckled around your waist with the breast pain of righteousness, arrayed, and with your feet fitted with the readiness of the gospel of peace.

In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one and take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God. Now, why do I share that entire verse with you? There's a principle it's called the first origin principle and it refers to looking back to see in scripture when the first idea comes up and using that as a basis for understanding when the idea comes up again, the concept comes up again.

So why is this important? God lets us where all of his armor as Christians. All of his armor, but one thing kind of two things, basically. One thing the garment of vengeance is nowhere in Ephesians and neither is the cloak of zeal. Whereas the Bible say vengeance is mine says, Lord, you're adopted, you get all the benefits of being a Christian.

All of the blessings. There's some things that belong to God and to God alone. And as an analogy, the cloak of the zeal and the garments of vengeance are not things we get to put on. Those are God's alone to wear, and he wears them very well. He wears them very well. So in some, if you're going through a situation right now where you feel like you have an enemy, if you are in a situation where you think that you might need to address something legally, but you're conflicted.

If you're in a situation where you just feel like you need some justice, then what I ask you to do. Is to bring it before the Lord said, Lord, your word says, you prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You say that you don't think it sets a good example when we take people to court and you say that vengeance belongs to you.

God, I trust you. I'm putting up the shield of faith. And as a daughter, as a son, I'm asking you to work on my behalf, look at the scale's gone and weigh my situation. And then leave it and then leave it. I promise you, I promise you the hand of God is strong and he is mighty to save and he will intercede and he will act on your behalf in his will, even in your business.

Okay. That's all I've got this week. Everyone. Hey, if you enjoyed this, I got a quick question. For you, maybe you could help me out. Not everyone can help me out. Here's who can help me out if you have an iPhone and you happen to use the podcast app, the iTunes app, don't hang up. Here's the thing. The show is growing and it's growing at a great clip and we're really proud of that.

One of the main things. For iPhone users that gets the show scene is reviews. When you review the show, it enables other people to find the show. When we asked for reviews, you know, in the, in the fancy little clips or whatever, before the beginning of the end of the show, it's not to make Pierce feel better.

It's not to make, to, to, you know, make Joe feel better. We love encouragement, but what happens is when you leave a review, Other brothers and sisters in Christ who are operating their business, trying to find a way to operate a kingdom business, find this content, and then they get the benefit from it.

So if you got two minutes, shoot, I'll take 30 seconds and you can hop over to the podcast app and leave us a quick review. I would be grateful. I would be grateful because other people are going to be able to find the content and it's one of the biggest factors in their, in their algorithm. So that's all appreciate you.

Thank you in advance. Have a fantastic week and think eternally. Thank you so much for listening today. If you enjoyed this show, please leave us a five-star review and share this with a friend. It would help us out tremendously. Also, if you'd like to stay in touch and get a free copy of the first chapter of Pierce's new book.

Calling how to partner with God and any business with any boss at any place in life. Then click on the link in the show notes to sign up for our weekly email or visit Pierce brantley.co/podcast. Thanks again, and we'll see you next week. .