Like individuals, companies have souls that either attract or repel God’s (and even the market’s) favor. You may notice that the soul of all companies, small and large, will shift when a change in leadership ushers in new values and priorities.

Likewise, your company has a soul that manifests your values and priorities. The following teaching may provide some useful insights in understanding the battle within your individual soul as well as the battle within the soul of your company and how to change them if you don’t like what you see.

Benjamin Franklin recorded 13 virtues in his quest for moral perfection. He considered them his guiding principles to become the man he thought he should be. He would spend one week focusing on each virtue and cycling through them repeatedly. The 13 virtues included temperance, silence, frugality, moderation and humility to name just a few.

He would journal his progress with each virtue daily. By focusing on one virtue at a time while keeping the others in mind, he hoped to achieve moral excellence.

This would be a tremendous lifelong discipline for you and me too if there were not a better way. And there is a much better way.

I’m continually challenged when I hear messages that teach us to pursue moral excellence like Benjamin Franklin, but they fail to introduce the Holy Spirit, which is the power source that makes their teachings possible.

When we work hard to become morally good in our own power and not in the power of the Holy Spirit, we become religious, which creates a whole new problem. When we focus on the Lord instead of our own works (by reading the Bible, praying and godly fellowship as taught in Acts 2:42), we will supernaturally become more like Christ.

Romans 12:2 makes this point when it says,

^“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

We all want transformation but notice that “be transformed” and “the renewing” are passive verbs. This means that they act on us, they are not something we actively pursue.

Just like we did not choose God, but he chose us. In the same way, we become more like Christ by his grace, not by our many good works and intentions as in Benjamin Franklin’s method.

What is actually happening when we pursue moral excellence through the Holy Spirit’s work in us? To break it down, our souls come gradually into alignment with the soul of God himself. Our soul is made in the image of God’s soul, which is comprised of three parts: the mind, will and emotions.

The more we read the bible, we systematically replace our carnal thoughts with God’s thoughts and our minds start to come into alignment with the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16).

Then, the second part of our soul, the will, begins to come into alignment with the will of God as spoken of Romans 12:3 where we begin to see God’s will for the first time as good, perfect and pleasing to us.

Finally, the third part of our soul, our emotions, and sometimes the most challenging component of our soul, comes into alignment with God’s emotions. Emotions are very powerful and they can quickly overwhelm the mind and the will and get us in trouble. But, just as our minds and wills come into alignment with the Lord’s, eventually we begin to know and express the powerful and positive emotions of God himself.

This is the process of sanctification. Through this process, we come into greater understanding of what it means to flow in the Spirit and to remain there as Jesus commands us to do in John 15:4-7. He knows that it takes time, but he gives us the grace and he walks us through it.

Now, consider the sizable impact on your company if the individuals in it were committed to aligning their souls with the soul of God. There is a saying that the attitude of the king permeates the kingdom. If you have been the king of your company, there is a great likelihood that the attitude of your managers and those below them mirror yours. But when Christ becomes the King of a company because the leader’s soul is aligned with his, all the promises of God will seek you out.

How much greater could Benjamin Franklin have been had he known this?