An idol is anything we give a higher priority than God. It's what we rely on for blessing, help, or guidance instead of him. It's what consumes our heart, our imagination, our devotion more than he does. It's any good thing we give more power, more prominence, more influence in our lives than God. The idols I cover in this series aren't evil things. They're business, strength, approval, control, advice, pride, ambition, money, comfort, and fear. Every one of them is something you need or something that's okay to have. The question is where your hope lives. Peter walked on water until he saw the waves. The moment his eyes moved from Jesus to the storm, he sank.
Before hiring frameworks or brand strategy, there's something that runs underneath all of it I need to address first. Running a business God's way and running it the world's way are two very different paths. The main difference is what's driving it from the inside. What you're trusting in. Where your hope lives. Most of us, including me, have built things on foundations that looked solid until the storm came.
This episode opens a new series on idols in entrepreneurship, ten episodes covering the specific idols I've wrestled with as a business owner. An idol is anything we give a higher priority than God: what we rely on for blessing instead of him, what consumes our heart more than he does, any good thing we give more power and prominence in our lives than God. The series isn't teaching. It's testimony. I map the central question against Peter walking on water: the moment his eyes moved from Jesus to the waves, he sank. That's the risk for all of us.
- An idol doesn't have to be something evil. It can be your business, your metrics, your income, your relationships, your own strength. Anything that takes God's position in your life.
- The definition of an idol: an object or concept we give higher priority than God, anything we rely on for blessing or guidance instead of him, anything that consumes our heart more than he does.
- Running a business God's way and running a business the world's way are two very different paths. They are always at odds with each other.
- Peter walked on water when his eyes were fixed on Jesus. He sank when he looked at the storm. The storm around Christian entrepreneurs, hiring pressures, economic uncertainty, labor shortages, payroll, competition, never goes away. The question is where your eyes are.
- God has to be the center, not because it makes good business sense, but because he's worthy of it. The enemy's primary tactic is distraction: slow, subtle, incremental drift from the center.
- The idols in this series aren't evil things. They're good things out of order: business, strength, approval, control, advice, pride, ambition, money, comfort, fear. Every one of them is something you need. The question is what you're trusting.
- This series isn't teaching. It's testimony. These are the ten ways I've personally failed to put God first, what it cost, and what he did through each one.
What is an idol in the context of faith and business?
An idol is anything we give a higher priority than God. It's what we rely on for blessing, help, or guidance instead of him. It's what consumes our heart, our imagination, and our devotion more than he does. It's any thing, good or bad, that we give more power, more prominence, more influence in our lives than God.
The reason I frame it this way is that most people think idolatry is something dramatic: false gods, ancient religions, obviously wrong things. But the idols I'm covering in this series are things like my business, my own strength, the approval of others, my need to control outcomes, the advice of experts, my pride, my ambition, my relationship with money, my comfort, and my fear. Every single one of those is something I need or something that's okay to have. What makes it an idol is when it takes the place of God.
The question I keep coming back to: where is my hope? Not in theory, but actually. When the leads dry up, when the team falls apart, when the plan doesn't work, what do I reach for? That answer tells you what your actual idols are.
An idol is anything we give a higher priority than God. It's anything we rely on for blessing, help, or guidance instead of God. It's anything that consumes our heart, imagination, or devotion more than God. It's any good thing that we give more influence, more power, more prominence in our life over God.
Amy Dardis, Episode 20How does idolatry show up for Christian entrepreneurs and business owners?
Running a business God's way and running it the world's way look almost identical from the outside. The same tasks, the same decisions, the same strategy meetings. What's different is what's underneath: the motive, the trust, the place your hope actually lives when things get hard.
The world's playbook says: work harder, outthink the competition, build systems, and control the outcome. God's playbook says: seek first the kingdom, abide in me, trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. Those aren't just different strategies. They're different foundations.
The gap shows up most clearly in the hard seasons. When everything is working, it's harder to tell the difference between trusting God and trusting your own competence. But when things fall apart, when the season gets dark, what you're actually standing on becomes visible.
The ten idols in this series all trace back to this: I was running good things, doing necessary things, making real decisions, and underneath them, I was trusting myself, or the outcome, or the approval of others, more than I was trusting God. The result every time was the same: eventually I hit a wall I couldn't get through on my own.
How do you keep God first when running a business is so demanding?
It's not a formula. It's a posture. Eyes on Jesus, not on the waves. That's the Peter image that anchors this series. He walked on water until he saw the storm. The moment his focus shifted from Jesus to the circumstances, he sank.
Practically, that posture has to be rebuilt daily. It's not a decision you make once. Every day there are new waves. New numbers to look at, new fires to put out, new reasons to reach for the wrong thing. The discipline is noticing when your eyes have drifted and choosing to look back.
The other thing: you can't identify your idols through general self-examination. You identify them through watching where you go when things get hard. When the income dips, do you grind harder or do you pray? When you're afraid, what do you do first? The answers reveal what you're actually standing on.
This series is my attempt to give language to what I've lived. Not so that you can avoid these idols permanently, but so that you can recognize them faster the next time they show up.
Resources mentioned
- Ep 19 — How to Know When God Is Preparing You for a New Season — The previous episode: recognizing a season shift
- Ep 21 — When Your Business Becomes Your God — Next episode: the idol of business
- Free Hiring Resources
Full transcript
I'm your host, Amy Dardis. And in today's episode, we're kicking off a new series, and we're going to be diving into the topic of idols and what idols look like in our life today, especially as leaders, especially as entrepreneurs.
As much as I love talking about the practical and operational aspects of business, talking about hiring and recruiting and alignments and frameworks, none of that really gets us anywhere if our own heart isn't right first. Because what we do, how we live, the decisions we make are all based on what we value and what we believe. The same way we talk about how core values guide our decision-making and guide our behaviors.
Even deeper than that is what we believe as a person, as an individual, about our identity, about our purpose, what we believe about God in our life and his role, whether he's sovereign and in control, or whether he is just something that we believe in but maybe don't really bring him into the forefront of how we live or how we operate our business.
This series isn't so much about me having it all figured out because I certainly do not. This is me sharing my own journey and my own story of what it has been like, the struggles and the idols that I have wrestled with as an entrepreneur for the last 15 years. Unfortunately, we're a lot like the Israelites. I wish we weren't, but we are, and I certainly am. I can have an idol in my life, be wrestling with something, be putting something before God. I can go through a season of being disciplined and shaped and led through that, learn the lesson, and it can stick for a while, but it can also rear its ugly head again years later because I kind of forget. I kind of get distracted. I kind of veer off course.
We see this happen over and over in the Bible because it happens over and over in our own lives. It's easy to forget about the hard lessons we learned. Some lessons really stick, but so many of them aren't just a one and done. God can remind us gently, and sometimes not so gently: hey, we have been here before. You have put this before me before. And here I am once again, and we're going to walk through what it really means to put me first in your life.
It's easy to just think about God as something we believe in and this power that is kind of disconnected from our everyday life. It's very easy to get caught up in the day-to-day of business and operations and people and marketing and branding. Monday through Friday, we are focusing on what do we need to do for our business? What do we need to do for our people? What do we need to do for our customers? And then, yeah, sure, we go to church on Sunday, or we're praying at night before bed, or maybe early in the morning with coffee. But how much of God's leading and his will and his power is really determining our steps in our day-to-day life and how we run our business and the decisions that we choose to make?
If I have learned anything, it is that running my business God's way versus running my business the world's way are two very different paths. And they're always at odds against each other. So in every season, I think I have been wrestling with something. And when we talk about idols, in the Bible the Israelites had a golden calf, or they would make statues. In our head it's easy to be like, well, I don't have that. Like I believe in God and I go to church. But the definition of an idol is an object or even an abstract concept that is given a higher priority than God. It's something that we rely on for blessing or help or guidance instead of God. It's anything that consumes our heart, our imagination, or our devotion more than God. And it's any good thing that we elevate to a position of being the main thing. Something that we give more importance, more influence, more prominence over God in our life.
I will tell you right now, I have had a lot of those. I wish I didn't. I wish I could sit here and say, oh no, God has always been first, but he hasn't. And therein lies this series of breaking down the things that I have struggled with that aren't even necessarily bad things. An idol isn't necessarily something that is bad. The ones I'm going to talk about that I have wrestled with certainly don't come across as being evil or bad, but at times in my life, they were things that I gave more importance, more prominence over God. They were things that I relied on, that I invested into more heavily than I was relying on God.
When we talk about some of the things we're going to dive into, it really surrounds the relationship between God's role in our life, our role as an entrepreneur, and our very own identity. A lot of my identity has been wrapped up into my business and into the success and the frustrations and the obstacles and the good and the bad along the way. Over the years, God has been breaking some of those things in my life, breaking some of those holes to say: your identity is not based on what you do or how you run your business. Your identity is based in me and in what you believe about me in your business.
This journey, all these ups and downs, have brought me face to face with some very dark moments, some very tough decisions, some very brutally honest truths: what do I really believe about God? What do I really believe about myself? And how is this belief, how is this faith, going to dictate the action I choose to do next? How is it going to dictate how I choose to behave or make this decision, even when it seems to go against everything the world is telling me to do? And where is my hope? Is my hope in God? Or is my hope in my business? Is my hope in my own strength? Is my hope in my ability to make things happen? Is my hope in my plan and my ability to control and call the shots? Is my hope in the approval of others, in the scorecards, the statistics, the profit and loss statement? Is my hope in the advice and strategies I'm getting from well-known business experts? Or do I not have hope? Am I allowing fear and doubt and stress to rule me instead?
That last one is very real. It's very real to not have hope in this world because we see so much darkness, devastation, brokenness, and pain. Or we've been beat down and kicked so many times that it seems impossible to get out of the hole. It seems impossible to ever break free. And so that becomes an idol in and of itself. Over the next 10 episodes, we're going to break down specific idols. These are not all-inclusive. These are just things that I personally have come face to face with and how they have run my life, affected my life, the consequences I have paid for them, but also God's grace through it all and his faithfulness, getting me through and kind of teaching me his way of doing business.
I think about Peter in the boat, and Jesus is coming towards them, and there's this storm raging around them, the wind and the waves. Here comes Jesus walking out on the water, and Peter says: if that's really you, tell me to come to you. He gets out of the boat, fixes his gaze on Jesus, keeps his eyes on him, and while he does that, he walks on water. And I think that's the life God is calling us to live: get out of the boat and focus on me. All around us we have this storm raging. Hiring problems, labor shortages, the economy, tariffs, prices going up, having to mitigate price increases to customers, trying to stay in the black, make payroll, grow, beat out a competitor. And in the middle of all of that, maybe you have a family and kids and sports and you're trying to be a good parent. This is the storm that rages around us. It doesn't ever go away, it very rarely gets calmed.
And here God is saying: keep your eyes on me. Love me with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. Keep your eyes on me. And when we do, in the midst of this chaos, we're able to do something incredible, beyond what we could ever ask or imagine. But then we get distracted by the wind and the waves and the storm, by our own fear and doubt and inability. And we come face to face with that, and that's when we start to sink, that's when we start to drift.
Business is not bad. Your desire to be profitable so you can pay your employees, donate to your community, be a blessing to others, that's not bad. Wanting to track your stats and metrics and see growth, none of those things are bad. But it's when we forget who's really in control. We forget whose glory this is all for. We forget that this life here on earth is so short, and there's an eternity that comes afterwards. That's when we get distracted, and that's when we start to give these other things more prominence, more influence, more power in our life than they should ever have.
I'm going to share my own story. These are just the idols I have struggled with, how they've showed up in my life, the struggle I have had facing them, the consequences of what they did to my life in the meantime, how they affected my relationship with God, but ultimately how God has been reminding me and what it looks like when he becomes the most important thing in my life.
This podcast is really about this idea of putting God first, understanding our own purpose and identity, what he calls us to do, what we believe, how that relationship is lived out within our business and the decisions we make because of that, the way we treat our people, the way we treat our customers, the way we hire our people, the way we build processes. Those things will only matter to you if deep down you are also led by God in his leading in your life, what you're really here on earth to do, what you're really being called to do as an entrepreneur in this life. So that's going to wrap up today's episode. As always, you can learn more at clearauthenticbrands.com. That's all for this episode. I am excited to jump into the next one.