It must have been a heartbreaking meeting, one filled with guilt and remorse—the manager went back to church…Tom led him out of sin and not into further sin. Not always easy, but for Tom, a Christian had only one way to respond, and that was to follow Jesus and honour God and His Word.

Don’t Lead Your Brother into Sin

Paul tells us in Romans 14:13, “to never put a stumbling block or hinderance in the way of a brother”. That’s sound advice, as relevant today as it was back when Paul wrote it. We read on the reference here is regarding food and drink, but it has other applications.

My friend, we will call him Tom, because that might be his name, is an architect. One morning over a cup of tea I was busy complaining to him about all the issues I was facing with a construction tender package I was managing.

Tom was our architect on what was a relatively small refit of a retirement village facility, something around a million dollars or so in value. After Tom had completed the drawings, we had gone through all the standard processes of issuing sealed tender documents to four building contractors.

As often happens, there are a raft of questions asked by contractors during the tender period and it was my policy to reply to questions from one contractor to all four contractors, hence ensuring an even playing field, and complete transparency. The reality is that this usually helps the job run with fewer hiccups.

It came about that one contractor nominated by a manager from head office had taken to circumnavigating this process and gone directly to this manager…who in turn was then calling me on what appeared to be on behalf of the contractor and asking questions when tenders had officially closed.

Enjoying the tea, Tom opened to me about an incident that happened to him over 40 years ago when he first kicked off his practice. Tom had applied to do some work for a major corporation so off he headed for the long drive from his office to Sydney where he met with some of the corporation managers. Hoping for a good outcome Tom put his best foot forward at the interview and it must have paid dividends because not long after he received a phone call from one of the interviewing managers who advised him, they were very impressed, so impressed that they would be offering him ongoing consultancy work.

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