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Due diligence is needed in both business life and personal life.
We had a Sunday school teacher who was a high-level corporate manager the other day. He used some business terms in his presentation about Exodus. The two that stuck in my mind is a pair that he called top-line and bottom-line blessings. In his usage, the top-line blessing centers on man, while the bottom-line blessing centers on God. He gave some examples of top-line and bottom-line worship songs, where the top-line songs frequently use the word 'I' but the bottom-line ones all concentrate on God's purpose and glory.
The more striking example involved the phrase "let my people go." There are nine instances of it in Exodus, seven of which are used in the positive form and two of them are used in the negative as part of a threat. From the two negative instances, we see these phrases are antecedents to great consequences. Following this pattern, we would expect the positive forms also be followed by great consequences. In six out of the seven positive instances, the consequences were "so they may serve me." Clearly, in these instances, "let my people go" is the top-line, which primarily benefits the Israelites; while serving God is the bottom-line. Many people can remember the part of "let my people go," but couldn't recall the part about serving God. Personally I needed this reminder too.
Curiously, the last instance in verse 5:1 reads "Let my people go, that they may hold a feast unto me in the wilderness." In this case, the bottom-line is not "serving God" rather it is "worship God." I would say that this a little easier to do, but still how many of us remember that a reason the Israelites were freed was for them to worship God. By induction, Christians are saved from bondage of sin to worship God too. How many of Christians remember this and do it every day?
This particular tendency to concentrating on the top-line to the detriment of the bottom-line is also common in IT business. Many companies attempt to foster top-line growth through merger and acquisition, while neglect the more important bottom-line. Here is a list of business errors; on the top of the list is a merger example. The key to avoid this type of serious error in business is called due diligence. Guess due diligence is needed in both business life and personal life.
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© John Wu
The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.
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