Video Transcript: "Value Making"

In this video, I'm going to talk about value making, and I'm using you may have  heard the term value creation. And again, in this course, I'm trying to make sure  that we're using terms that are Biblically consistent with what the Bible says  about business, about the marketplace. And so I'm using the term value making, because we don't truly create the value God has created the value we simply  are able to make and form and steward the value that he has already created  and put it together in new ways. So how do we do that as business people?  When I think about value making and or value forming would be another term  you might use. I think about the thorn in my flesh. And Paul talked about the  thorn in his flesh concerning this in the II Corinthians 12:8-9 concerning this, I  implored the Lord three times that it might leave me, and he has said to me, My  grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected and weakness. And so when  you're searching for something to invent, maybe a new type of service that you  can render a way to innovate through your company. I would look for the thorn  and what is the pain point that you are personally experiencing, and then make  that solution available to your neighbor. I think that's what love your neighbor. A  way that we can apply the golden rule of Love your neighbor as yourself, is to  identify the pain point that you are personally experiencing. Maybe God isn't  going to take that thing away, but maybe you can then go, I mean, I work with  authors as the owner of a publishing company, and what they typically what the  authors are doing is that they have been through just unimaginable  circumstances in their life, just pain beyond imagination. Maybe you've gone  through things that we couldn't imagine, but they've gone through unique things  as well, and what they're doing is they're turning that into a platform of writing  and speaking where they can then go and they can help other people that have  struggled through the some of those very same things that they can identify  with. And this is a way that they are taking that thorn in their flesh. It's something that it's already happened, it's already done, or maybe it's something that's a  chronic thing, and certainly God can deal with that as well. But in the meantime,  sometimes we just need to focus on helping other people to alleviate that  problem the best as we can. And as I talked about in the previous section on  innovation, how I'm doing that with an invention that I invented for people that  suffer from chronic back pain. So this isn't a commercial for that, certainly, but  I'm just saying that I suffer from chronic back pain, and I tried a lot of different  ways in order to alleviate that while sitting at my desk, because, as I said, I work as a book publisher, so I spent a lot of time at my desk. I'd been editing books.  Fortunately, I now have a lot of other editors that helped me out with that kind of  thing now, but I was doing a lot of graphic design, web development, and just  spending so much time at my desk and just knew there had to be a better way. I  wasn't saying and certainly I was praying for healing, but I was also realizing I  was doing things that were not stewarding the healing that God was making  available so freely to me, because I've been healed of back pain in the past, but 

you're probably aware that you can pray for for healing, but if you don't steward  it Well, the problem, the sickness, the chronic pain, whatever it is, can then  come back and and so I realize there's a way that I can help other people To  alleviate their back pain to where they can sit in a position that is more optimal  for their health. That's an example of restorative innovation. It's an example of  taking the thorn in your own flesh, and so maybe God might not take away that  back pain, but by coming up with a solution that can alleviate that you can at  least deal with it in a healthier way. And I think that's why God says My grace is  sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness. I mean, because it is not  easy for me. I mean, I try to. It. I try to exercise, I try to stay strong, but to tell  people, yeah, you know, I struggle with chronic back pain. You know, it's just one of those things that that I deal with, but when I am a good steward of the  understanding of how to sit in the right posture, I'm able to manage that healing  in a much more faithful, faithful way unto God and and so this is how we create  value in the business world. As we can take those pain points and then we can  share them with other people. We don't just keep them to ourselves. And, yeah,  it's expensive to develop a product. You know, maybe you have a certain type of website that you're wanting to develop, or a certain maybe it's a nonprofit.  Maybe, I don't know what your enterprise is, but, but it's, it's you take your own  pain point and then share it to help alleviate the pain for somebody else. And  that's how businesses are born. That's how value is created. So we make value  by forming and connecting the things that God has already made. I mean, it  could be things that he has already maybe, maybe in other industries, you bring  one innovation from one industry and pair that with another innovation from  another industry, put those two together, or you to put two genres together of  music or literature. You put those together, and now you have a brand new  genre that nobody has ever experienced before, and it's a way to create value  with the things that God has already made under the sun and worse. And so  that's the advantage that we have as Christians, is that we can tune into the  voice of the Holy Spirit and make sure that we have the the the amount of dots,  so to speak to you, Steve Jobs passage that we talked about in a previous unit,  that the idea is to get is to connect the dots, but to have more dots to connect,  as an innovator, as a way to bring more value into the marketplace. And another couple of questions that I want to bring up in this segment here about value  making, is the question of, is some work more valuable than others? For  example, is white collar work, which we're talking about office work, where you  know you're you're wearing a suit to work, or you're dressing up, or more  valuable than blue collar work, where people tend to be working more with their  hands, where they might be getting dirty, maybe working in a factory or on a  farm, or something like that. Is one type of work more virtuous or more valuable  than another? Or are physical products more valuable than intellectual  products? So, you know, I know that you might see a copyright notice on 

somebody's blog posts, and I write up a lot of blog posts. I work with intellectual  property, with my authors who are writing books, is the content of that book  somehow less valuable than somebody that is bringing a physical product to  market, like an e book? You know, there's a lot going on with piracy, and I think  this is because some people have the idea that intellectual products where, oh,  it's no problem for me to just go and download a bootleg or a pirated version of a movie or of a song or of some other type of intellectual property and just  download that without paying for it, use it without paying for it. But I know that if  it's because it's not a physical product. If it was a physical product, I wouldn't just walk into a store and take the take the DVD or the CD off the shelf and just put it in my pocket and try to walk out because, oh, that's a fit. That's a physical  product. And that's where we we have a disconnect between what God sees as  valuable and what we tend to see is valuable. Sometimes Another question is, is some work more spiritually valuable than other work? Because sometimes we  had, and we talked about this in a previous unit, where sometimes there's a  hierarchy where certain types of work are more valuable than other types of  work, where if I'm the pastor of a church or I'm you know, I'm raising support to  be a missionary in a part of the world that doesn't have some of the  conveniences that I'm used to that somehow that's more spiritually valuable  work than the being the CEO of a company and ministering to people that way,  or just doing just the work itself being being at least as spiritually valuable and  God's eyes and so really, to that first point about is some white is white collar  work more valuable than blue collar work? Another way of saying, If I get paid  more, does that mean that my work is more valuable than somebody that  doesn't get paid as much as I do. But in God's economy, contribution does not  equate to remuneration, and so just because you might not be making as much  money, you might not be making any money at all doing the type of work you're  doing as, for example, a stay at home mom, or maybe you're volunteering your  time, and you're rendering service that way, but you're not seeing a financial  return. You're contributing no less, but you might not be getting paid for it. The  contribution is what matters in God's economy, that you're making yourself  available, that you are serving people that you're carrying out, that you're you're  loving others as you love yourself, and how that shows up through your the work that you do in the marketplace. That's what really matters to God. I mean  physical products more valuable than intellectual products, absolutely not,  because I can tell you that. I mean, it takes a lot of time to book, to put together,  for example, this course, or to put together a book, or to put together as I don't  have experience in in writing and producing music, but I know, having done  some limited audio production work with podcasts that there is a lot of work that  goes into that, in terms of the the money, and the way that we tend to assign  more financial value to some things more than other things. Money is simply the  story we tell ourselves. And this is a quote back for or a thought really more from

Yuval Harari that I brought up in a previous unit. He pointed out that money is  simply the story we tell ourselves about the value of work and and so but, but it  might not be the right story. So we need to make sure that as Christians, that  we're looking at things from a biblical standpoint and understanding that even  though our culture might value might pay more for one service versus another,  that doesn't mean that in God's economy, the service rendered by the blue collar worker or the white collar worker is more or less valuable than the other. It  doesn't mean that you can just go and pirate, knock off, steal somebody's  intellectual property, because it's available for download, because you were able to get around, and there's all kinds of software, and, and, and just, you know,  really unscrupulous websites out there that are making some of this stuff  available that because you wouldn't just walk into a store and pull something up, maybe you would, if you weren't afraid of getting arrested, but, but hopefully, our standard Is is at a higher level in understanding that God is the one we are  seeking to please in the business world and certainly the work that we're doing  unto the Lord, that's what is, quote, unquote, spiritually valuable to God. It's not  if you're the pastor of a church or you're doing something that maybe your local  church tends to celebrate more than another type of work. I mean, I'll be the first to say my local church would certainly celebrate somebody saying I'm going to  go, you know, move overseas, to a place where there's no running water or no  electricity, and I'm going to just be sold out for God. They're going to celebrate  that more than somebody saying, You know what? I'm going to I'm going to  heed God's calling to go and serve Him in the business world, as a business  leader or as an influencer in the marketplace, as an entrepreneur, whatever the  case might be. And that because that is the place where God is calling me to be, ultimately what matters in terms of value, the value making that we are called to  do as Christians must always be understood in view of what God sees as  important.