The Christian Business Life

About this book

For thirty years, Gary J. Martel built a Christian business the way most Christian business owners are taught to: with integrity, with Christlike character, and with his faith carefully managed around his work rather than lived through it. Years later, he found himself hiding behind his Christlike character to do some very un-Christlike things to support his struggling business and life, following pride, fear, and sin over the line. What followed changed everything.It cost his family, friends, and clients more than he could have ever imagined. It cost him his career, his freedom, and six years in federal prison for the misappropriation of funds others had spent a lifetime building.What God revealed to him while incarcerated became the foundation of this book.The Christian Business Life: Salvation as a Service makes a claim most Christian business teaching has never made: no part of the Great Commission was never suspended for the marketplace. It was buried - and even where it has resurfaced in recent decades through relationship-based ministry teaching, one part of it never came back. This book names that missing part, traces how it disappeared over two thousand years of church history, and shows Christian entrepreneurs, business owners, and everyone who works alongside them exactly what it looks like, sounds like, and feels like to recover it - starting Monday morning, in the middle of an ordinary business day.Built on the model of Priscilla and Aquila, the first-century tentmakers who carried the gospel into the marketplace while they built their business rather than after it succeeded, this book introduces a practical framework for living it out: the Light of Christ, Holy Spirit Engagements with fellow believers, and Good News Enlightenments with those who don't yet know Christ - all activated through a single, simple question the author calls the Big Ask.This is not a book about adding evangelism to your to-do list. It is a call to recognize a mandate that was there all along, hiding in plain sight inside a commission every Christian already claims to have accepted.Salvation as a Service. Always available. Always present. Active while you build.