Business Secrets from the Bible: Spiritual Success Strategies for Financial Abundance

Secret #5

Making Money Is a Spiritual Activity

All human activities can be located somewhere along a spectrum that is anchored on one end by spirituality and on the other by physicality. Praying is near the spiritual end; reading and writing, composing music, and making tools are its neighbors. As the source of both great sensual pleasure and also of all new life, sex might be somewhere near mid-spectrum, while eating and all other bodily functions belong over toward the physical end.

So where do commercial transactions fit? When a man exchanges coins in his pocket for goods he desires, is he performing a physical act or a spiritual one?

One way of identifying a spiritual act is by determining whether a chimpanzee would understand the action. When I return home from work and slump into a comfortable armchair, my pet primate undoubtedly sympathizes. As I move to the dinner table and begin eating, he certainly knows what is going on. When I open a newspaper, however, and hold it motionless before my face for 20 minutes, he becomes quite confused.

Another criterion for the spiritual is whether the action can be replicated by a machine. If a human soul is indispensable for a certain process, that process is at least partially spiritual. Only a human soul can compose music that inspires men to march to war or brings a lump to the throat. No machine exhibits loyalty or can even test whether an individual possesses that quality. We therefore know loyalty to be another spiritual characteristic. ...