Transitioning Into Kingdom Business with Dan and Christian

In this episode I sat down with my wife Christian to talk about what it actually looks like to step out of a corporate career and into kingdom business. Christian is a Harvard MBA graduate. Before we got married she was managing close to two billion dollars in assets at a foundation in New York City, then went on to do mergers and acquisitions at a large pharmaceutical company, then to international supply chain work for a major retailer. From the outside, when she met me, it looked like everything fell apart for her. From the inside, what was really happening was a restructuring.

I wanted you to hear her story in her own words because the keys God gave her in the middle of that restructuring are not theory. She lived them. And then she built a real business out of them.

When Christian quit her job and moved to Texas to marry me, the Lord gave me a prophetic word for her. He said she was entering a season of service. That was not what she wanted to hear. She is an A-plus personality, a builder of worlds, a Harvard graduate who came out of business school programmed to expect that she was one of "the leaders of tomorrow." Now she was sitting in Dallas administrating a nonprofit, answering emails, and feeling like her career had gone nowhere.

But that season was a refiner's fire. God had her renounce false mantles and false callings. He had her take off pronouncements people had spoken over her life that sounded good but were not on her scroll. She had to confront belief systems about who she was, who God was, and whether she really trusted His goodness. As I watched her go through that, I watched her spirit take the reins of her soul. That is one of the most beautiful things I get to witness in a believer. Her spirit was driving, and her soul was learning to submit.

Then God started downloading keys to her. The first one stopped me in my tracks. He told her that a kingdom business idea is birthed in the third heaven, incubated in the second heaven where there is contesting, and brought into the first heaven through faith. We wrestle not against flesh and blood but against spiritual wickedness in heavenly places. That second heaven is where your business idea is vulnerable. If you share it too soon, if you do not pray over it, if you do not protect it, the enemy can sabotage it, overrun it, even steal it.

So when you start a business, what you are actually doing is building a realm in the spirit. You have to incubate it with prayer. You have to flush it with living water. You have to ask Jesus to build it with you, and you have to build it with the spirit of wisdom because Proverbs says God Himself founded the earth by wisdom. Without that, you are working in the natural with your hands alone, even with a Harvard Business School degree, and you are not building on a kingdom foundation.

The second key God gave Christian was even bigger. When a kingdom citizen steps into business, you are not just starting a company. You are taking a mountain. You are walking into one of the seven mountains, and from a spiritual perspective it looks like a declaration of war on the powers of darkness that sit on that mountain.

Here is why that matters. As a kingdom citizen you have the courts of heaven at your disposal. When the enemy transgresses against you in your business, you can bring it before the Father, get a judgment rendered in your favor, and recover territory. Bit by bit you bring that industry under the jurisdiction of heaven. The makeup industry. The food industry. The hair care industry. There is no demilitarized zone in the spirit, no vacuum. When you move in, darkness has to move out, and it does not move out without a fight.

This is one of the places our work at Bride Movement lands hard. The body, soul, and spirit are all involved in how a person runs a company. Old wounds, old agreements, old identities shape decisions long after the events that caused them. Real change at the business level usually requires real change at the heart level first. Christian had to renounce the fear of failure more times than she could count. She had to deal with overworking that turned out to be her response to unfaithfulness she developed as a child, not the way God made her.

The other key Christian shared is this: do not enter a business without a mandate. You need paperwork from heaven. Not God thinks it is a good idea. A commissioning. That mandate is the stamp that heaven is behind you, so when the enemy comes to steal and sabotage, you have the right to enter the courts of heaven and receive a judgment in your favor. Without that mandate, kingdom resources are not assigned to your business. Angels of heaven are not dispatched to it. You are on your own.

When Christian got her mandate and started Aralux, her hair care line built on Ayurvedic herbs, she launched the company by praying over the products themselves. She laces the products with living water, with the oil of anointing, with the blood of Jesus. She prays that they go into homes with angelic assignments. That is what we mean when we say kingdom business. It is not a fish on the sign. It is the works of your hands weaponized for heaven.

If God is stirring something in you about your work, your business, or your money, do not skip past the inner work. Get the paperwork. Build the realm in the spirit before you build the office in the natural. And do not be afraid of the season of service that the Father may walk you through before He releases you. Christian's story is proof that He is faithful to the scroll He wrote over your life.