Is Your Business Aligned With Your Kingdom Purpose? | Kingdom LeadHERship

Is your business aligned with Kingdom purpose or are you building in your own strength and wondering why it still feels like pushing a boulder uphill?

In this episode of The Kingdom LeadHERship Podcast, host Stacy Jo Coffee-Thorne speaks directly to the Kingdom-called woman who has done the inner work, knows God has placed a business assignment on her life, and is now asking the honest question: how do I actually build this the right way?

This is not a conversation about strategy in the world's sense. This is a conversation about the profound difference between a driven woman and a called woman — and what it looks like to surrender your business to God not as a spiritual formality, but as your actual operating model.

In this episode you will hear:

• Why most business strategies fail Kingdom women — and what to build on instead
• The difference between building from striving and building from assignment
• What it practically looks like to let God be your strategist on a Tuesday morning when your inbox is full and your revenue is not where it needs to be
• How to use peace as a directional tool in your business decisions
• Why wholeness is not just a spiritual outcome — it is your most powerful strategic advantage
• Proverbs 16:3, Isaiah 30:21, and Philippians 4:7 applied to real Kingdom business leadership

Key Scriptures: Proverbs 16:3 | Isaiah 30:21 | Philippians 4:7

This episode is for the woman who loves God, is doing all the right things, and still feels like something is off. The friction you are feeling may not be a failure. It may be grace.

Connect with Stacy Jo and the Association of Christian Business Women at www.acbw.org Email: info@acbw.org Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1208084963263914 Instagram: @acbw

#KingdomLeadHERship #ChristianWomenInBusiness #KingdomBusiness #ChristianEntrepreneur #FaithAndBusiness #WomenOfFaith #KingdomPurpose #ChristianPodcast #BusinessStrategy #WomenInLeadership

Association of Christian Business Women
This episode is brought to you by the Association of Christian Business Women

Association of Christian Business Women
This episode is brought to you by the Association of Christian Business Women

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Transcript

Speaker 0:00

Welcome to Kingdom Leadership, the podcast for women pursuing kingdom purpose with faith and intention. This is a space for clarity, encouragement, and conviction. It's a place to pause, refocus, and realign your leadership with what God is asking of you. Whether you're leading in business, ministry, your home, or your community, this podcast is here to remind you that your calling is intentional. Your obedience matters, and your leadership is meant to be aligned with God, not carried in your own strength. I'm your host, Stacy Jo, and together we are leaning into leadership that is whole, obedient, and rooted in purpose. Let's get started. Hey there, welcome back to the Kingdom Leadership Podcast. I am your host, Stacy Jo Coffee-Thorne, and I am so glad that you are back with us today. I want to ask you something before we dive in. Have you ever felt like you've done the work, the real work, that inner work that we've been talking about? And now you're standing at the edge of something? You're not broken anymore, you're not stuck in the waiting room. God has done something in you and you know it. But now you are looking at the business he's called you to build, and you're wondering, okay, how do I actually do this? How do I take what God has done inside of me and build something real with it? And if that's where you are, you're exactly in the right place today. Because today we're talking about what it looks like to build your kingdom business from a place of wholeness, not from striving, not from hustle, not from that wound that you had been trying to outwork, but from the solid, settled, God-established place of who He made you to be. So get comfortable, grab your journal if you're a note taker, and let's get into it. So I want to start here because I think this is something a lot of us have felt, but have never had the language for. You know, so many kingdom-minded, God-called, spirit-led women find themselves spinning their wheels in business. Does that resonate with you? Because it does with me. You know, we're all doing things, we're taking the courses, we're building the funnels, we're learning the strategies, we're showing up consistently, and yet something just still feels off. There's this friction, a resistance, if you will, and a sense that no matter how hard we push, we're not quite getting to where we're supposed to be. And we internalize that. I'll speak for myself. I internalize that. I thought, well, maybe I'm not working hard enough. Maybe I need a better strategy. Maybe I'm just not cut out for this. But the reason I found that so many business strategies fail Kingdom Women is not because we're not capable enough, we're not disciplined enough. It's because most business strategy is built on a foundation that was never designed for us. And most business strategy is built on striving. It's built on the assumption that if you optimize enough, if you hustle enough, if you outperform enough, you're gonna succeed. And you know just as well as I do that the world has built entire industries on this premise. But kingdom business is not about striving, it's built on assignment. I'm gonna say it again. So I want you to sit with that distinction for a minute because it changes everything. There's a profound difference between building a business because you're driven and building a business because you're called. She's chasing the next milestone, the next launch, the next level. And drive is not bad. Please don't get me wrong here. I can be driven, but drive without direction is just exhaustion without momentum. You wouldn't get your in your car and drive without knowing where you're going, right? Without having a direction to head. But a called woman asks a completely different question. She's not asking, how do I get to the top? She's asking, Lord, what are you building? And how do I get to be a part of it? And one of my mentors, Rachel Wortman, who I greatly appreciate and value everything that she brings to the table. She spoke recently about building from heaven down. And I thought that was such a great perspective because we want to build from heaven down. But when we try to apply worldly business strategies to a kingdom assignment, there is going to be resistance. It's going to feel like you are pushing a boulder uphill. And that friction is not a sign that you're failing. That friction is often God's grace pressing back against a strategy that was never meant for you. I love Proverbs 16:3 that says, commit your work to the Lord and your plans will be established. Not commit your marketing plan, not commit your quarterly goals, commit your work. The whole thing, the vision, the process, the outcomes, all of it surrendered to Him. And here's where wholeness comes directly into this. You cannot truly surrender what you are white knuckling out of fear. You cannot commit your business to God when part of you is absolutely terrified of what he might do with it or what he might ask you to let go of. But a woman who has walked through healing, who has experienced God's faithfulness, who leads from a place of wholeness, she can surrender. Not because she doesn't care about the outcome, but because she trusts the one who holds the outcome. So I want to ask you something, and I want you to sit with it. Is your business built on striving or is it built on surrender? Because your answer to that question shapes everything. Now I want to get practical for a moment because I know that let God be your strategist. That can sound like something that you would put on a coffee mug or a t-shirt. But you struggle to live it out on a Tuesday morning when your inbox is full and your revenue is not where you need it to be, and you're not sure how you're going to make payroll. So let me tell you what this actually looks like. Letting God be your strategist does not mean that you stop making decisions. It doesn't mean that you sit back and you wait for the burning bush before you make your next step. No. It doesn't mean you stop learning. It doesn't mean you stop being excellent at what you do. What it means is that your decisions flow from relationship rather than reaction. And here's the difference a reactive business owner makes decisions based on what's happening around her. What her competitors are doing, what the algorithms rewarded this week. And if you're trying to keep up with the algorithm, algorithms, they change daily. So, you know, that in of itself can be a rat race. Maybe you're looking at what someone in a Facebook group said worked for them or what you saw worked for them. And I understand that. I understand that pull. We all feel that. But reacting to the world around us is not the same as responding to God within us. A kingdom business owner makes decisions based on what God is saying. Like I was saying from heaven down. And that requires proximity. It requires that you're close enough to Him to actually hear Him, which means that protecting your time with God is not a spiritual discipline that competes with your business growth, but it is the very thing that drives your business growth. And I can remember a season a year or so, it's probably been two years ago now, when I was watching what everyone else in my space was doing. And I started chasing a direction that looked successful on paper. It looked like it was going to bring in the money. It looked like any problems we had were going to be over, but it felt completely wrong in my spirit. And I kept pushing through that friction. I kept pushing through instead of pausing and asking God if this was even his plan for me. And it wasn't until I finally stopped and I got still, I got in the word, got on my knees, and then I recognized that this wasn't for me. It cost me time and it cost me a bit of money as well. And it shifted my perspective. And here's how it shifted my thinking on this. I used to treat my quiet time and my work time as two completely separate things. This is the God part of my day, and this is the business part of my day. But I came to realize that for a kingdom business owner, that separation is an illusion. My quiet time is my strategy session. The clarity that God brings in prayer, the direction he speaks through his word, the ideas he drops in worship, or in the shower, because I don't know about you, but sometimes I'm in the shower and I just get downloads from the Lord. But that is our strategic roadmap. It's not an addition to it. It's actually the roadmap itself. When you look at Isaiah 30, 21, where it says, whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you saying, This is the way, walk in it. That's not just a devotional promise, but that's a business promise. God is actively committed to directing the steps of the person who is committed to walking with him. So practically speaking, what does that look like on a day-to-day basis? It looks like opening your day in prayer before you open your laptop or sitting down at your desk. It looks like bringing your big decisions to God before you bring them to your business coach or your mastermind. Not instead of those things. I'm a firm believer in having business coaches and being part of masterminds, being a part of people who are further ahead than I am, who can speak life into me and encourage me to move forward and to be a better version of myself. So not instead of those things, but before. It looks like building your calendar around your kingdom assignment first and then filling everything else in from there. It looks like asking a different set of questions when opportunity is in front of you. Instead of only asking, is this profitable? Is this scalable? Is this what everyone else is doing? You also ask, is this what God is directing me towards? Is this consistent with the assignment that He placed on my life? And then you can ask, does this bring peace or does this bring pressure? Because that'll answer a lot of questions right there. And I want to talk about that peace for a minute because I think we underestimate it as a strategic tool. Philippians 4 7 calls it the peace that surpasses all understanding, a peace that guards your heart and your mind. And that's not just spiritual experience. That is God's way of communicating direction to us. When we're in alignment with our assignment, there is a settledness that does not waver even when circumstances are uncertain. And when we are moving in the wrong direction, even if it's profitable, impressive looking, but it's still the wrong direction, that piece is absent. So learn to treat that absence as information. Now I want to address something because I think some of us have been conditioned to believe that wanting our business to succeed is somehow unspiritual. That desiring growth or revenue or influence means we're not fully surrendered. And I want to push back on that gently but firmly. I want to tell you God is not threatened by your ambition. He's the one who placed the vision inside of you. He's the one who gave you the gifts, the drive, the desire to build something meaningful. So what he is after is not a smaller version of your dream. He's after the version of your dream that is fully yielded to him. I love the word yield, and we use it in unbound a lot. But he's after the version of your dream that is fully yielded to him, because a yielded dream in the hands of God will always go further than a self-directed dream ever could. And here's what that yielded partnership actually looks like in practice. It looks like bringing your business plan to God and asking him to edit it. It looks like being willing to hear a no just as readily as you receive a yes. It looks like holding your goals loosely enough that if he directs you midway, you trust the detour more than the original route. And that's not weakness. That is the most sophisticated business strategy available to kingdom women. There's also something powerful that happens when you stop trying to be both the visionary and the architect of your own success. When you take yourself out of the role of sole decision maker and invite God into that seat, the weight of your business changes. It doesn't mean the work gets lighter necessarily, but the burden does. Because you're no longer carrying the full responsibility of the outcome. You're partnering with the one who already knows how the story ends. That partnership also changes how you respond to setbacks. A woman who's building in her own strength takes every closed door personally. And I will attest to this because I didn't understand for a long time why wouldn't they want what I have? Why don't they want to work with me? And I would take it personally. Every slow season feels like failure. Every no feels like a verdict on your worth. But a woman who's building with God understands that closed doors are often protection. Rejection is God's protection. That slow season, that's frequently preparation. And that no from the wrong opportunity is actually a yes being held for the right one. This is the business posture that wholeness makes possible. Not a posture of passivity, but of grounded, faith-filled, eyes-wide open collaboration with God. And this is where wholeness ties everything together. When you're operating from a broken place, when you're operating from scarcity, from fear from old wounds, which we've talked about previously, the noise of those things makes it incredibly difficult to hear God. Fear suddenly sounds urgent. Scarcity now sounds like wisdom. Old wounds can dress themselves up as discernment when they are really just self-protection. But when you've walked through healing, when God has restored what was lost, when you are leading from a place of wholeness, you have capacity to hear him that simply was not available to you before. That is the practical strategic advantage of doing the inner work. Wholeness creates clarity, and clarity is the foundation of every kingdom strategy worth building on. Really, really good. Some of them will even work for a season. But if they're not built on the foundation of your God-given assignment, and if they are not flowing from a place of wholeness and surrender, they'll eventually run out of steam. And I'm going to tell you that so will you. Take just one area of your business and bring it fully to God. Not to ask Him to bless what you've already decided, remember, because we're building from heaven down, but to genuinely surrender it and ask, Lord, what do you want to do here? And then listen and trust what you hear. And if you are not part of the Association of Christian Businesswomen yet, I want to personally invite you because this table was built for you. We'd love for you to join us. I'm going to pray us out. So if we could bow our heads. Where there's been striving, Lord bring surrender. Where there's been noise, Lord bring clarity. And where wholeness is still a work in progress, and for many of us it is, I pray that you would continue that good work because you are faithful to complete what you begin. We trust you with our businesses because we trust you with our lives. In Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you so much for being here with me today. Lead whole, lead well, lead obedient, and be sure to lead with joy. I will see you next time on the Kingdom Leadership Podcast. God bless you. Thank you for spending time with me on Kingdom Leadership. If today's conversation encouraged you or brought clarity, take a moment to reflect on what God highlighted for you. Trust him even when the path isn't clear, because he is faithful to direct every step. New episodes of Kingdom Leadership are released every Monday, and I invite you to join me again as we continue pursuing kingdom purpose with faith and intention. Until next time, lead with wisdom, walk in obedience, and trust God with where he's leading you.