“Our struggle is not against flesh and blood….”
We share below a transcript (edited for written fluency) of a substantial portion of an event that Keith Peeler and Mike Faulkner ran on Kings and Prophets. The subject matter was how leaders can think about using the prophetic, but importantly this follows from Ephesians 6 as the reader will see. The consequence of this passage leads to an appreciation of the prophetic and its role more broadly. More generally, it invites the believer to consider whether they have a wide enough view of the spiritual world.
The foundational faith question relating to Ephesians 6 is whether we believe deeply it is true. If we do, it should affect our behaviour towards others, as particularly mean behaviour is not being driven by the person but by something spiritual. This is a tough thing to do, but is driven largely by whether you really believe it. We are perfectly capable of adapting our behaviour when our beliefs are aligned to truth. For example, as parents we don’t chastise our children for doing something frustrating when we understand fully that they are not capable of doing otherwise. We get it, so we give them a break.
The implication being that, if we are constantly reacting to the challenging behaviour of others, it’s because, while we intellectually appreciate that the spiritual world is affecting the physical, we don’t really “get it” in the same way. The objective is to “get it” fully and to adapt accordingly.
The purpose of sharing the transcript is to give the reader fuller sense not only of the spiritual world and its effects, but some of the consequences we have experienced in trying to deal with the issues this presents. It’s complicated and difficult, but that shouldn’t prevent us from trying to appreciate it fully in a way that influences our behaviour.
Kings and Prophets
Opening Prayer and Setting the Tone
Keith Peeler: So let me just introduce our time by praying and let's just set the pace with our hearts. It's Friday. It's been a long week for a lot of us, long day for a lot of us, traffic, graduations, all kinds of things. So Lord, thank you that you go before us in everything, and that the power of your spirit moves in us in ways we don't understand. Some ways we comprehend, but Father, we want to be open to the fullness of who you are. Father, we're open to the move of your spirit to nudge us one way or the other. So just take a minute, friends, and I want to bless you to just take a moment to release the stress of the day. Holy Spirit, would you acknowledge and just engage my friends in one thing that might be hanging on to their minds, their hearts today.
Just help them imagine that falling away. And, Lord, as we engage you in this time, would you meet us in our thinking. Meet us in our understanding, meet us in our questions, meet us in our experiences, meet us in the flesh, in the natural, and in the supernatural. That you are a supernatural God. And we want to follow you. So Lord, we give You this time, we bless this understanding of kings and prophets. That it's what you've been leading our hearts toward. We've seen it in scripture. And we want to honor you with this time. So we say thank you. Thank you. Thank you. For being with us and joining us here tonight. We pray all this in Jesus name. Amen.
Introduction to the Evening and Speakers
Keith Peeler: We're going to just have a nice evening of back and forth. Mike and I have gotten into an interesting relationship and we're going to share parts of that. There's too many stories to tell but we're going to start with Mike.
A lot of you guys know Mike. You were here by his invitation. I'm going to let Mike introduce himself, his role in this, and he's going to do the primary talking points tonight on his perspective as a CEO.
And some of our convictions, some of these are things that Mike challenged me in our initial meetings one on one. That opened my eyes to see some things. And then the Lord gave me some things that opened his eyes. So we've just been going back and forth in this conversation and asking the Spirit to lead us.
God has clearly been doing a lot in some of the business work that we've done together, and the ministry of that work. And so we just want to give you a chance to hear some stories. We'll have some time later in the evening for questions. And then we're just here to just try to catalyze an understanding of how the kingdom is at work in the marketplace.
We want you to absorb some of these ideas, depending on your role in the marketplace, whether you're a CEO or a leader in business, or maybe you're another prophetic person like myself. Let’s just create an atmosphere of curiosity and conversation.
So that's all I'm going to say and we're going to let Mike go. And so Mike, would you introduce yourself and just see where you go and I'll follow as best I can.
Mike Faulkner: Okay, that's good. Thank you.
Mike's Journey: From Skeptic to Believer
Mike Faulkner: Good evening. Thank you for coming. Friday night. I've got to say the journey from Austin was so difficult that we almost bailed - and I'm speaking! So we're doubly grateful that you've come.
I think if you'd asked me two years ago, whether I thought I'd be talking about this today, I would have said, absolutely no way. And you're nuts. But it has been a super interesting experience. So let me just give you a really quick background – I was a CEO for nearly two decades, more than half my adult life. I was involved in building two companies, took one public as CEO, another one public as a founder, all in financial services. And I tell you that not for any reason other than I am the opposite of the person you would imagine to be into anything prophetic.
If you'd asked me two years ago, I would have said prophets are people who overuse the word decree. And a lot of what I saw coming out of the prophetic was too general really to use in the business. Like “I decree a global anointing of forgiveness”. That's great, but I can't use that with my client that's giving me grief. For me, part of the challenge with getting to grips with the prophetic was it just had no real meaning for what I do day to day. Clearly the fact I'm stood here means that I now don't believe any of that, and I've done a 180.
Now, I had two things going for me. One is my lovely wife is much further in this journey than I am, and so that meant I had to be further in that journey. Because that's how it goes when you're married. The other is, and I think this is quite important - I believe with every fiber of my being in the authority of the Bible.
And so, whenever anything like this comes up, I'll immediately go back to the Bible. Strangely enough, about a year and a half ago, Keith and I met and he didn't use the word decree once. Which was interesting. And from my perspective, I thought he was about as normal as I am. I'm not sure that says much, but still…we're about as normal as each other. In one sense, that's helpful. I was intrigued, not least because some of the things that Keith was telling me were very specific – I thought, okay, that's my kind of language. I like specific and, that's what CEOs tend to like, right? I want something that's actionable.
The Role of Prophecy in Business
Mike Faulkner: And then I went to the Bible and this is what really hooked me. I did this little thought experiment - Ephesians four talks about the five offices of the church, right?
Let's call it six offices if we include elders. I thought, can I map those onto a company? Apostle is the CEO, We can have a debate about that, but I'll give you a pretty good argument that the Apostle is the CEO. Evangelist is head of sales, that's easy. Shepherd is team leader - that's also pretty obvious, responsible for the for the well-being of the individuals they lead. Teacher, that really should be HR. Because HR's job is to set training courses, et cetera, develop the people. So the development of the people really should be the job of HR. So far so good. The Elders are the Board of Directors – perfect! And the Prophet is… nobody.
I thought, that's really interesting, especially when 1 Corinthians 14 talks about how we should eagerly pursue prophecy. And it goes on to say that he who speaks in tongues builds up himself, he who prophesies builds up the church, right? So why is prophecy nowhere? It's not really in the church either, in many ways. And one of the things I'm going to come onto is the isolation we've seen in the prophets from the rest of us.
So I concluded that, if the whole game here is the restoration of the prophetic back into organizations, I'm up for this. And I seem to have a willing, “as normal as me” victim in Keith to have a go at this. Let's see if we can work out how we might restore the prophetic back into businesses, or any other organization. And that's really the journey we've been on for the last year and a half now.
And I've learned that there is one thing you really have to get your head around in contemplating putting the prophetic back into an organisation. It's answering one very simple question, which is, do you or do you not believe that there is a big spiritual world out there that affects what happens physically?
That really is the question. And by the way, if you look at the Bible, it's pretty unequivocal on this. You go straight to Ephesians 6 (my daughter at the back's been learning Ephesians six, so she's about to come forward and start quoting it). The section in Ephesians six starts with “put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes”. And that runs into the famous, “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the powers and principalities…” That section then runs into, “against this dark world”. is often how it's translated. Although actually dark can easily be translated darkened or ignorant.
I'm going to come back to that in a bit. And it finishes “against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms”. So the Bible says yes, in fact, all the difficulty that you're going to face is spiritual. So for me, that’s the answer to that question about whether or not we have to have concern for this spiritual world that affects us physically - the Bible says unequivocally, yes, in fact, actually it's the whole game.
Challenges and Spiritual Warfare in Organizations
Mike Faulkner: Now let's make this very specific to organizations. I think there are three circumstances where you would be in real trouble if you did not assume that it had a a spiritual source. I'm going to talk about each in turn and unfortunately I've had the misfortune of having to manage through all of them.
The first one is “everything goes wrong at the same time”. Has anyone been in that one before? To the point where you look at it, and think, I don't understand how it can be this bad – such that I don't know where to start. How can it be this crazy? That's one.
The second one I would call “never catch a break” and you go from one existential problem to another. As you just solve the one problem, another one flares up, you’ve got another fire to put out - you put that fire out and then you get into another one and it's a complete nightmare.
The third one is - and I really hope that most of you haven't experienced this - what I would call a “rebellion”. Such as you wake up one morning and for some reason half your workforce hates you. A fairly unpleasant place to be. This type includes all of the forms in between. So it may very well be that, you've got someone who is incredibly disruptive or all the versions between that and a genuine full scale rebellion.
Let me give you a couple of stories on this. About 18 years ago I dealt with a genuine rebellion. And it was in a business, the same business that I took public and I was CEO at the time. And in one of our divisions, while it was hard to tell where it came from, we had a rebellion.
It really was a conspiratorial rebellion, started by someone and it just grew. Now I could smell it from a mile off. I knew something was going on. But my mistake was I dealt with it physically. So I did what you are meant to do from a physical perspective and in that context, I got all of it right. I split the offending division in two. I put all of the offending people into one half of the divided division and I dealt with it as a single entity. We got rid of them, and I took responsibility for the management of that division. Here's the problem. Because I didn't treat it as a spiritual problem, it took me a year to deal with it.
Somewhat later on - this is after we took the company public - we had a situation which was we ran straight into “never catch a break”. We went from one problem to another, from a regulatory crisis to a financial crisis to a whole bunch of other things. We never caught a break. For five years.
I think maybe we had three weeks where something wasn't an existential crisis. Absolute nightmare. Again we put out the fires, but we were in that for the best part of five years. So the message here is this - I didn't really confront these - and it's not that I couldn't have done, I just didn’t think to - as spiritual issues, and as a result it cost me a lot of time.
Roll forward - we've had two of the three problems in our businesses in the last year and half. We've had one sort of rebellion and one “everything going wrong at the same time” since Keith and I have been working together. This is the difference.
So we woke up one morning, and discovered in one of our businesses, apparently, we were shutting it down. News to me, but, anyway - this business is such that once the employees in the business get in their heads that we're shutting down, they're all looking for another job immediately - they're literally about to walk out the door. This had come from nowhere we could genuinely appreciate. It just appeared. So in this instance, I called Keith and said we’ve got an issue.
So he and I worked through it. But here's the interesting bit. We put down that rebellion in under a week, as opposed to the year it took me to deal with it physically.
And in the situation where everything went wrong - we had to do a few more things, but we solved the problem of everything going wrong in about a month. Not a year, or three years, or five years. It was much, much quicker.
The Importance of Prophets in Leadership
Mike Faulkner: I think that the conclusion I've come to on this, and this is what I encourage you to think about is, there are some things that happen in organizations where if you ignore that they're spiritual, it will take you years to solve it rather than weeks to months. You'll solve it quicker spiritually - so even if you don't believe in this stuff, you've got nothing to lose. You might as well try it, because if it works, you're better off. If not, it's not like it's going to be worse.
I want to try to give you an analogy that gives you a sense of what it's like to be in the middle of these types of problems. I would say It's a little bit like somebody turning on the negative spiritual tap. And if you try and deal with it physically, it's equivalent to “I'm just going tp dry myself off with a towel”. Which doesn't do anything because the tap is still on, so you're still getting wet.
What tends to happen is the tap turns itself off once you're soaking because the enemy decides “I don't need to make you any wetter than you are – I can't”. But if you turn the tap off, it’s much easier to deal with the problem. So the first reason to use a prophet is that prophets are really good at turning off taps.
Simplistically, in a lot of what we've done in dealing with these sorts of situations, Keith has helped me turn off a tap and it's made my job in the physical far easier. So if you have found yourselves in one of those situations where you're looking at what's in front of you and thinking this makes no sense, I would just encourage you to confront it as a spiritual issue. I think most of us that are CEOs are not equipped for dealing with this. You need help from someone who knows what they're doing. And so I found that to be hugely helpful.
I'm going to get a little bit heavy for a while. And then I promise I'll come back. What are the consequences of not appreciating that something has a spiritual source? The answer is you get the emergence of something that I think is a lie. So think through the consequences of what happens when something really bad spiritually happens. What happens to the leader? The leader starts to blame themselves.
How many people have been through this, didn't recognize it as spiritual and said, “I must be doing something wrong. Am I a terrible leader?” I've seen a number of people going through these things, and even though they know they're a decent leader, check out because it's too hard. They do generally end up believing lies about themselves.
So I hope they would find this encouraging because all that happened was they were distracted by a lie. It's not that they were an ineffective leader. It's that if they confronted it as a spiritual issue, it would have gone away much quicker. They were just fighting against something that was very difficult to fight against, without the right support.
So the lie is a very real. And I think as a leader if you start looking at your business through this lens, prophets are really good at sniffing out lies. Ones that really matter. I want to tell you a story about something that I dealt with a little while ago. I had a a girl working for me some years ago, absolute superstar. Technical and very articulate, which is quite rare. to find a math genius and someone who can actually speak in the same body. That's actually more true than most people realize. She was very guarded. So I took her into a room and I said, I need to ask you a question, and HR won't like me doing this. But I'm going to do it anyway. I said, have you had boyfriends in the past who've been much less clever than you are? And she said, how can you possibly know that? I said, it's very simple. (I didn't call it a lie at the time, but that's what it was). Your experience has been that when you are clever, your less clever boyfriend is mean to you because they feel threatened by it.
And as a result, you have obvious learned behavior where you watch everything that you say. So here's the deal. From now on, I want you to stop doing that because that's their problem, it's not yours. If you ever do it again, we'll be having a very difficult conversation. I'm away for two days, but I'm back on Thursday and the mask needs to be off.
I came back in two days’ time and it's like someone lit up her face. She was an absolute superstar from that point onwards. And the reason I tell you this story is removing lies as a leader is the most Kingdom thing that you can do. In my view, some of them you can spot because your understanding of the Bible gets you there. Some of them you need a prophet to help you with. Prophets are great sniffing out lies. And if you take nothing else away from this, it's the significant value of a prophet to help you make sure that you understand where the lies are in your organization. I would not be without the help now. Two years ago, I had no idea that this is what prophets did.
That's the heavy bit over - now onto the uplifting stuff!
Building a Relationship with Your Prophet
Mike Faulkner: Now to the second great reason to use a prophet - and we've got four, I'm going to talk about two more, and Keith's going to cover one. How many of you as leaders have spent any time in the last couple of years wondering whether what you're doing is on God's plan, or is God's will? I can tell you that one of the consequences of working with a prophet is you don't worry about that at all, ever.
Because you absolutely know that everything you're doing is on God's plan, on God's will. It's just a function of what happens and how it works. Now that might be surprising, but the thing to appreciate about the way in which a prophet and CEO relationship works is that it's not about great big pronouncements about the future.
It's about little, often and specific. So you get regular, very regular little nudges. And I find that you tie this back to a really important scripture - everyone knows it - Proverbs 3. “The Lord will make your path straight.” I genuinely believe that if I walk in a particular direction, and the Lord wants me in the opposite direction, He can turn me and I won’t notice.
That's certainly been my experience. Using the prophetic is a good example of where you experience that. The way it actually works in practice is that the Lord turns you 180 through a series of nudges and you don't even notice. They're just daily, weekly nudges that just turn you a little bit, adapt your perspective a little bit. And it's a very gentle process and that's what your prophet does for you. Little nudges. Let me give you some examples of nudges.
They can relate to people. So generally it's not do or don't do, although there is sometimes that, but more often than not, it's something like this: ”Lord, do you think I should hire this person?” Or, “do you think I should promote this person at this point?” I had this recently and Keith said “the Lord says, yes, but you're going to need to invest in him a lot, but it will be worth it.” I understood that in the context because I knew exactly what the nature of the investment was because the investment was what I've been concerned about.
So it's a yes. But you’ve got to pour into this guy. Meaning I need to carve out enough of my time to make sure I’m pouring into him or else it won't work.
We had a another example in one of our businesses where someone was being disruptive without realizing it. And Keith went through a process. We worked out who it was, prayed against it. And this guy had agreed months ago to do this training course, he just hadn't been doing it. And we think he'd been disruptive behind the scenes. But then he came in the next day with the training course done, and the disruption ended. Fantastic. Oddly enough, it just dealt with the problem.
Then there are things like if you've got someone who's disruptive, it’s very helpful to use a prophet to pray through “Lord, can we resolve this? Either as they restore themselves in some way or they leave the business.” Prophets have lots of experience of doing that.
I would say one of the areas where I have personally struggled a lot as a CEO in the context of the faith is wrestling with the need to have a performance conversation with someone, when I know the conversation will break their heart. What do you do? The answer to that is go and get your prayer team together and pray for an opportunity to have the conversation constructively. And every time I've done that, I've had the opportunity to have the conversation constructively. I've never had to have the difficult performance conversation. Some people, it's super easy to have those conversations with, but some people, it doesn't go well if you force it. You want an opportunity to do it in a way that builds people up because that's what our faith requires of us.
So I have found that having prophetic help with that kind of thing is just invaluable. And then you get into things like decisions about moves to make. So we have this little algae business. And we were just praying through what to do about that and Keith said, The Lord says there's a legal thing, it's not legally in order.”
I had a pretty good idea what that meant. And, this is worth saying, I think quite often Keith will get something that he has got no idea what it means. But I knew it meant there was something problematic around intellectual property rights. We went looking and after asking multiple times and being told there was nothing, I said “can you send me the contract”. That happened and I found immediately what I was looking for. There is an issue, but it's not really a problem now that we know it's there. But had we ended up two or three years down the line and not recognized that the problem was there, much, much more difficult to dig ourselves out of it. So a lot of this is just nudges. Super specific, great nudges.
On the same business, one of the things that this business potentially does is is deal with the breakdown of plastic for environmental purposes. Very cool. And so I thought, great – there’s an opportunity to do something to help clean up the sea. Now I'm going to paraphrase Shuhart because she was way more gentle than this, but this is what I heard – “pretty please with sugar on top under no circumstances go anywhere near the sea until we've had a much, much longer conversation.” Okay. We won't go near the sea then. So we didn't. That was more of a thrust than a nudge. She's good at that and much more gentle than I put it, but that's what she meant.
But sometimes if the Lord gives me something, the thing that's on my mind is I want to know whether it's meant to be confidential. And I want to know, can I share it with other people or can't I? Sometimes I want to be open with people, but if I'm not allowed to be, I'm not allowed to be.
So in that instance, I will ask Keith a question that that doesn't give it away. And quite often he will reply, I’ve got nothing. Great. I know it's going to be confidential. I understand the confidentiality in the context. Who'd have thought that a prophet getting nothing was helpful, but it can be!
Leveraging Spiritual Authority in Business
Mike Faulkner: This is a big one and relates to a sale of a company. I'm going to give you the numbers because it's a bit flat without this.
So we were in the process last year of selling one of our businesses. We had bought a business in August 2022 for about eight and a half million. And we were sitting on an offer from another company about a year later for 39 million. Unfortunately the eight and a half million was a matter of public record. So we were we're looking at this going, okay, look, we feel like we should negotiate, but it's a bit hard.
They know what we paid for it because, it's public. They know it's a great deal. We know they know it's a great deal, and what do we do anyway? So we're trying to find ways to work through this and Keith rings me up out the blue. He says “look I've had this from the Lord three times now and I know you'll forgive me if I'm wrong But I think the numbers 45. It's not 39.”
Keith Peeler: I hated that conversation because part of this is, for me in that position, coming from a very traditional Methodist/Presbyterian background. And so the idea of prophetic ministry was something I'd seen in places that weren't like the place that I worshiped. And so I had preconceived notions about what that looked like. And I won't name the name I thought of in my head, but I was like, I'm not going to be blankety blank guy. I'm not giving numbers. So I actually, I had the word for a week straight. The Lord was very kind to me. And he woke me up very clearly one morning and said, call Mike right now.
It's not 39, it's 45. I was like, nope. 100%, not doing it. I ignored the Lord basically. And the next day I woke up again and I heard it. Call Mike right now. It's 45, not 39. And I was like, nope, thank you. Nope, I understood. Cause I don't want to be like that guy. I'm not like health, wealth, prosperity, all that.
And so the Lord was patient with me for literally seven days in a row. And it came to the final Saturday - I woke up and the Lord said, that's enough. Are you going to call him or not? Yes, sir. And then I called him very sheepishly and said, look, I don't want this. I said, look it's not 39, it's 45. And that's my side of it. Now you can tell the rest, right?
Mike Faulkner: Here's the thing. I knew that bigger offer was not coming from the organisation who had given the 39 offer. There's no way we're getting them up to 45, but there was another organization that was in the frame. So I listened to that. I thought, okay, the Lord's telling me, I need to go and pull these, the other organization, which is a very well-known investment bank - to pull them back in the frame.
So we did. I rang the CEO of the business and said, look, we need to pull these other guys back. Let's go do that. And so we did. And a couple of months passed. They end up coming up with a better offer. It's precisely 45. By the way, my background's in mathematics, so I can tell you the probability of getting that right by accident is vanishingly small. There's literally no way you're going to luck out with that kind of a number. From the perspective of putting on a great show, it was a great show. But it wasn't the point. The point was, what did the number lead to in terms of behavior? It led to me realising the Lord wants me to pull in this other firm.
And there's more story that comes after that. It wasn't just bringing them in. It's what happens afterwards and after that, because he's layering more and more organizations on top. So what he was really doing is setting something up to allow this thing to play out over a much longer period of time. It was about behavior - it wasn't about, prophetically predicting a number. They're big numbers, but the numbers weren't the point.
These little prophetic nudges, they're often - we do this sometimes daily, often weekly. Interestingly when we were going through the prep for this, the thing the Lord gave me a nudge on was, “you need to talk about the lie”. Really? But that's a downer! But okay, we need to talk about the lie. I share that with you simply because I think it's useful to know that's what we had on the way into this. The Lord takes the lie stuff very seriously. And that's something we're still absorbing, in the sense that it's an issue we haven’t fully thought through how to address.
And what was also interesting about that was I've had the lie connection with a whole bunch of different people, including a pastor in the UK. Who when I talked through about this this thinking said, I can't believe you just said that. That's exactly what the Lord's putting on my heart as well, that there's set of lies underlying this and we have to go and root them out.
And the way to run a really good biblical organization is to root them out. Get people out from under them. So all that's super helpful when you think about how, as a CEO, you can use the prophetic. It's not about saying, predict the future for me. It's the little nudges. Now, it does beg an interesting question, doesn't it?
Which is if all this is true, why are the prophets so isolated? Because they are. The fact that the prophets have coalesced themselves into prophetic organizations, little clumps all around the world, actually says something. The prophets have found some kind of solace amongst themselves.
I think that we as leaders have to take a good bit of responsibility for that because I think fundamentally if you're going to work with a prophet, you need to get your head around the differences between a leader and a prophet. And I think if a leader expects a prophet to be like themselves, you've already started in the wrong place.
So let's take a couple of examples. He's a prophet, and he's black and white by definition, because he has to be. I'm a leader, and I'm grey, because I have to be. If problems were not grey, they get solved before they ever get to me. And I think that's true for every CEO. If your people have got a black and white problem, and it's black and white to solve, they're going to solve it before it ever gets to you.
So you've got all the hardest problems, and they're always grey. And that actually is where a lot of this breaks down, in that the prophets see things through the lens of black and white and the leaders see it through the lens of gray. But it's the leader's responsibility to lead the prophets.
For this reason, the leaders haven't seen the prophets as an integral part of their team. And so for those of you that are CEOs and are interested in this, I would say that your prophets could be your greatest resource, but you have to lead them well and honorably. Otherwise, it won't work. And appreciate that their differences from you are what make them great. So you have to be prepared to allow that, that they're going to come and say some things to you and you may not like all of them, but you need to recognize the differences and then honor that, appreciate it and build a relationship.
For that reason we struggle with the rent a prophet model. I think it's fair to say, right?
Keith Peeler: Yes, for sure.
Mike Faulkner: It's nuts. Okay. Sorry. Maybe that was a little harsh, but this is why it's nuts. If you haven't built a relationship with your prophet, there are absolutely certain things that your prophet is never going to share with me.
It was hard enough sharing the thing about 45 million as it was, so he’s never going to share it without a relationship. Even more so for the difficult stuff. So you need to build a relationship that is supportive enough on both sides that you trust each other enough to meet wherever you have to meet on whatever the subject matter is.
If you can appreciate that your prophet is black and white, and still involve them fully, you'll get way more out of them. And I think that's true for anybody in your management team, right? Whether it's a CFO, CMO etc, you'll get more out of them if you involve them in what the business is doing. It's similarly true for the prophet.
Open your mind to them and tell them what you're thinking, and they'll give you far more back. I think the critical thing in all of this is that how we as leaders engage the prophetic, recognizing that it is a biblical order that's meant to be that way. The prophets aren't meant to be excluded from this.
I think that's a really big deal. Personal view, and you don't have to share it, but I invite you at least to consider it. It seems awfully convenient to me that, where we talk about this ignorant world - or world filled with lies - that the prophets have got so isolated.
A critical form of defence, which is what the prophets are against the lies, have been isolated at a time when we need them the most. Now that's my view. I'm not saying it has to be yours, but personally it galvanizes me to want to use them more because I think that the isolation is deliberate. And actually, I'd rather work harder to roll the prophetic back into the way in which the organizations are run because it's too convenient for the enemy for it to be otherwise. So I think if people could get their head around the value of prophets and that it helps deal with a fundamental kingdom issue, then it'll be far more valuable for the kingdom overall. God shaped the prophets, the enemy didn’t.
Okay. That was a little heavy, but nonetheless…!
Last one from me. I've had a lot of fun with this, with leaders. So one of the things I've been doing for a little while is is mentoring and developing leaders in the context of their own faith to varying degrees. And the question I've asked a lot of leaders is especially of businesses, look, you want a competitive advantage, right?
There are lots of ways that you can't have a competitive advantage as a Christian. So for example, the Lord hates unequal measures in Proverbs. So you better make sure you're dealing fairly with everybody. Some people appear to win by doing other than that.
If they get to fight less fairly than we do, where's our competitive advantage? Now, I think we have a few. Not least of which I think Lord making our paths straight is quite helpful. But I think we have one that is often overlooked and it's a huge one. And so I often ask leaders this question, would you like to be able to use your father's resources in the management of your business, recognizing that they're both unlimited and free?
I don't think there's a bigger competitive advantage than that. To which the answer is always yes. Okay. And then I ask them, “So do you know what it will take to get them?” They think for a while and they usually say no. There are three conditions that you're going to need to get your father's resources in the management of your business.
The first is you're going to need to be specific. If you turn up and say father, can I use some of your resources for something I haven't come up with yet? You'll get the same response that somebody asking that of you would get. It's never going to happen. You have to be specific. You have to ask for them and be detailed enough about what you want to use them for. The second one's super easy - you need to bless others. So if you're doing something in your business that is not blessing others, you probably shouldn't ask, because you're unlikely to get supported. The third one is, your behavior needs to be Biblical.
And that's quite interesting and quite detailed, and it's a very big thing to dig into. And it's where we get into questions of, are businesses out of order? It's amazing how often leaders get suckered into being out of order without really realizing it. A common one we find is leaders being bound to a fool. It could be a client contract. It could be the way in which the business is funded. Who put the money up? What are the things that go with it?
Are you bound to someone? Do you have to pay it back? What does it look like? It could be all sorts of ways. And it's one example of a where if you've got yourself out of order, it's unlikely you're going to get to use your father's resources. So there's a couple of things that prophets are really helpful for doing.
Firstly, you need to know where you're out of order. And the prophets are great at that. And you may not like all the answers, but they'll be right. And secondly they can help you pray into action. You really want your prophet there when you do it.
As weird as that may sound - the idea of praying a plan to action - it really works. I would recommend it to anyone. If you've not done it, it's an experience like you've never had before because in the moment you get the signal that you've got the approval, It's like this spiritual steamroller just knocks all these things off your plan and it's not obvious how it happens. It just seems to happen. If you want to run your business biblically and you want to succeed, it's always struck me as being odd that we don't ask for our father's resources more, because he's got so many and he wants to give them to us. The conditions are just straightforward. We just have to do it.
Okay. I'm going to sum quickly what I've said and I'm going to hand over the con to my friend here.
I think the thing that we've learned in the last couple of years is that how prophetic is used within a business bears no resemblance at all to how it appears to the outside world, certainly to those of us who have got no experience of it. What I understood the prophetic to be versus what it actually is are two diametrically opposed issues.
Your prophet is going to be helpful to identify, remove and avoid destructive lies at all levels. Your relationship with the prophet is key. Don't go down the rent a prophet route. You need to build your relationship, it needs to become trusting. The Japanese have got an expression – “don't let the tea go cold” on relationships. So don't let the tea go cold - even if you don't need something prophetic, maintain the relationship because it's valuable.
As a leader you'll find you get the most value from the prophetic in little, often, and specific nudges. Don't expect, don't desire for great big, sweeping changes. “Oh, this is where your business is going to go. It's going to be fantastic…” That's got no value at all. In practice it is actually more like you, the Lord and the prophet working together. The Lord's going to say, I think you should do this instead. You don't have to, but you should. So take the opportunity to benefit from it where you can. And then finally, remember your father has resources to give you, and your prophet will be super helpful in in helping you as a leader own that.
But at the end of the day, it's yours to own as the CEO. Okay. It's my bit. My friend is now going to talk about spiritual authority.
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We strongly recommend that you consider viewing the whole presentation, the original of which is at Kingsandprophets.com in the media section. You will find it easily. In particular, spend some time listening to Keith’s section, where he talks about spiritual warfare, spiritual authority and a range of other things.
The purpose of sharing the above is to give you a strong sense of how pervasive the “powers, the principalities, the rulers of the dark world…” are in our physical world. The objective is simply to help you consider the extent to which spiritual forces may be affecting your life and to pray through this with the Lord. You should also recognise that there are some things you may be facing where you need help from someone with prophetic ability. We are not all equipped equally.
As importantly, it is worth reading your Bible with this lens. There is a strong spiritual/supernatural worldview operating throughout the Bible, and to miss this is to miss a great deal of context.