This article is the fourth in a series on “How to Succeed as CEO of Your Life.” It began by accentuating that we are CEO of your lives. Whether we like it or not, God has assigned us responsibility to manage our lives. We are the only ones who can make decisions for the paths that we take, and ultimately we will realize the success or failure of those choices. This study identifies 14 principles that when applied will lead to success.
Our previous two articles discussed principle #1, which challenges us to manage proactively. We can coast through life, just letting it happen, floating in whatever direction the currents of life take us. Though doing so may be thoughtless, it is not innocent. It leads not only to wasted years, but it causes hurt to us and others. However, God as provided us with the capacity to actively manage our lives by engaging our intellect to identify optimal choices and applying our will to execute those choices. Scripture calls us to engage actively in managing our lives, resulting in the effective employment of the resources He has entrusted to us to produce the best outc0me.
To enable us to see these principles at work in a real-life situation, we have been following Joe, who has just been hired as CEO of ABC Widget Company. Our previous episode disclosed his awareness of the need to manage ABC Widget Company proactively in order to make it succeed. Today we find him ruminating over a second management concept necessary for success, that of identifying the product he was hired to manufacture. Joe had queried the board about producing commodities other than widgets, but they were committed to staying with the product line stated in the company name. Consequently, widget sales offered the company’s only source of profit. Therefore, in managing ABC Widget Company, Joe knew that he had to maintain one ultimate priority: the design, production, and sales of widgets.
Joe had never before worked at a company that produced widgets. Therefore, he realized that to be effective as CEO of ABC Widget Company, he would need to familiarize himself thoroughly with the essential qualities of widgets and the various forms they could take so that he could determine which ones would generate the most profit for the company and how to best produce them.
What Business Are We In?
In their book, If Your Life Were a Business Would You Invest in It? Eckblad and Kiel report: “Successful businesses identify and concentrate on what is essential to the enterprise and they spend a great deal of time focusing on the question, ‘What businesses are we really in?’”
Likewise, it is essential for us, as CEO of our lives, to ask, “What business are we in?” What commodity has God called us to produce? Success requires that we discover the nature of that product.
Christ identifies that commodity by defining the First and Second Great Commandments as follows:
And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:35-40)
The Greek term for love in this passage is agape. Jesus in effect is telling us that our job as human beings, and especially as His followers, is to produce agape. He further accentuates this job description in the statement above by asserting that the production of agape embodies all the teachings of the Law and Prophets. In addition, Jesus established agape production as our job when issuing the New Commandment to His disciples: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.” (John 13:34).
The apostle Paul highlights the significance of agape in Romans 13:8-9:
Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Paul makes the same point even more succinctly in Galatians 5:14: “For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”
Paul accentuates the centrality of agape in 1 Corinthians 13, the love chapter. In that passage he in essence asserts that if our lives are characterized by agape we are achieving the purpose God assigned to us, and if they are not, we are failing, regardless of how altruistic our deeds appear to be.
The New Testament underscores the primacy of agape production by the frequency with which it mentions the term. The noun form of agape appears 117 times in the New Testament and the verb form occurs 144 times. Not only are these terms found frequently, but they are used in critical passages, demonstrating that agape constitutes the central theme of Scripture.
Scripture promotes agape not only in verses that use the term but also in countless other passages that describe, command, and illustrate agape. For example, Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan to illustrate His teaching on love, and yet the story never once uses the term agape.
The factors cited above confirm that agape comprises the commodity God calls us to produce as CEO of our lives. In other words, God has commissioned you to serve as CEO of Agape Incorporated. God designed human beings to be agape producing organisms. That represents the ultimate purpose for our existence. Therefore, success as a human being entails eliminating selfishness, i.e. anti-agape tendencies, and instead managing our lives to maximize agape production.
The Specific Nature of this Commodity
Defining love can be challenging because while Greek employs several words to refer to different types of love, English is limited to one. Agape refers to identifying and performing actions designed to benefit others. Philia describes affection, emotional love, which can cover a broad range of feelings from friendship to romance. Eros denotes sexual love.
Since the English word “love” covers all of these concepts, it is often difficult to identify the type of love a person using the term has in mind. In our feelings-saturated society, even when people are talking about agape, they tend to allow their thinking and communication to slip away from the plans and actions of agape toward the feelings-orientation of philia. Often this unintended and undetected transition in meaning from agape to philia occurs in the middle of a conversation. Such unwitting replacement of agape with philia leads to confusion.
Let me provide an illustration that clarifies the difference between agape and philia. Jesus calls us to display agape toward our enemies. We cannot make ourselves feel warmly toward enemies (philia), but we can seek their benefit (agape). Suppose a coworker snubs you and treats you rudely. Try as you might, you cannot conjure up warm feelings (philia) toward this coworker. You learn, though, that she is about to get fired because she lacks an understanding of a certain aspect of her job that you know well and could teach her. Despite your negative feelings (lack of philia), you offer to help her get up to speed in that area (an expression of agape).
As an aside, often a display of agape toward another person engenders philia. We tend to develop warm feelings for those we are helping, even overcoming previous animosity. I had a student who was struggling with negative feelings toward a relative who had treated her badly. She wanted to rid herself of those feelings but did not know how. I encouraged her to think of some kindness (agape) she might do for that person. She decided to buy her a gift. Later she shared with me that it had worked, that doing an act of kindness toward this relative had eradicated her negative feelings. Consequently, the focus on agape does not neglect philia type of love but actually promotes it.
Since agape production comprises God’s purpose for our existence, our commitment and effectiveness in the use of our resources to produce this commodity determines our success or failure in life. It is comforting to know that God has not called us to achieve great things according to the measurements of this world, demands that may be beyond our reach. He has only called us to do that which He has enabled us to do, which is to benefit other people to the greatest extent possible with the resources He has entrusted to us. For that reason, all of us can be winners. All of us can reach God’s standard of success. We just need to stay focused on maximum production of agape love.
Our next article provides insights into how we can maximize agape production. I hope you will return as we further discuss this second principle that leads to success as CEO of our lives.