Most of Us Don’t Want Counsel. We Want Agreement.

I sat in church Sunday morning and got caught.

Pastor Todd Core was preaching through a series on prayer, and he put up a line that had nothing to do with business and everything to do with how I run mine:

“Prayer isn’t getting God to bend his will to mine. Prayer is bringing my will into alignment with his.”

I wrote it down. Then I sat there for a minute thinking about the last decision I brought to my advisory board.

I had already made it. I wanted them to tell me I was right.

The verse everybody quotes wrong

The passage Todd was working from is one of the most misquoted in the New Testament. First John 5:14–15:

“And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.” (ESV)

Read fast, that sounds like a blank check. Ask anything, get anything. Todd’s point was that the phrase people skip is the whole hinge of the sentence: according to his will.

The promise isn’t that you get what you want. The promise is that when what you want and what God wants are the same thing, you can stop worrying about the outcome.

Which means the work of prayer isn’t persuasion. It’s alignment. You’re not making a case. You’re finding out what’s true and then wanting it.

Todd spent a while on the flip side of this, and it’s worth carrying over too. There’s a whole category of prayer where you don’t have to wonder, because the answer is already on record. Forgiveness, when you ask for it: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:9, ESV) Workers for the harvest, when Jesus told us to ask for them. Every line of the Lord’s Prayer, because he’s the one who handed it to us. You’re not petitioning in those cases. You’re agreeing.

That’s a real category in business too, and most of us don’t maintain it. Some things shouldn’t require a meeting, because you settled them in advance and wrote them down. How you handle a customer who got shorted. Whether you’ll take work that conflicts with an existing client. What happens when somebody on your team lies to you. If those are up for discussion every time they come up, you don’t have values — you have moods.

Now take that out of the sanctuary and put it in a conference room.

The counsel problem

I’ve sat on both sides of this. I’ve been the person asked for advice by someone who’d already signed the contract. And I’ve been the guy who scheduled the meeting to get cover for a decision I’d made in the truck on the way in.

Here’s how you know which one you’re doing. Ask yourself what a “no” would cost you. If a no from the people in the room would genuinely change your course, you’re seeking counsel. If a no would just mean you have to go find different people, you’re seeking ratification. You’re not asking. You’re recruiting.

The tell is usually in how you frame the question. “I’m thinking about doing X — what do you think?” invites a real answer. “I’m doing X, and here’s why it makes sense” invites a nod. Most of us use the second form and then feel unsupported when somebody pushes back.

James says something sharp about this, and it’s aimed squarely at business owners:

“Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’ — yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring… Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.'” (James 4:13–15, ESV)

James isn’t against planning. He’s against certainty. The plan is fine. The posture behind it is what he’s after.

Four questions that separate counsel from cover

1. Did you name the decision before you named your preference?

Lay out the situation, the constraints, the numbers, and the options — and stop. Don’t tell them what you’re leaning toward. The moment you do, you’ve given everybody in the room a costly reason to agree with you. Most people won’t pay that cost, and the ones who will are rarer than you think.

2. Did you invite the specific objection you’re most afraid of?

There’s usually one. The cash flow question. The person you hired who isn’t working out. The market assumption the whole thing rests on. Name it yourself and ask someone to argue it. If you won’t raise it, nobody else will, because they can tell you don’t want to hear it.

3. Are you asking people who are both wise and honest with you?

Todd made a point about who you go to for counsel that I’d never heard framed quite that way. He said two words matter: wise and believers. Not one. Both. There are people who share your convictions and still give terrible advice, and it’s a real category — he said the roadside is littered with people who took bad counsel from good people.

The business version is the same. Loyalty isn’t wisdom. The friend who’s been with you fifteen years and tells you every idea is great isn’t on your board — he’s on your payroll, emotionally. You need people who have both the judgment to see clearly and the standing to tell you.

Proverbs puts it plainly: “Without counsel plans fail, but with many advisers they succeed.” (Proverbs 15:22, ESV) Many is doing work in that verse. One adviser is an echo. Several is a check.

4. Have you ever actually changed your mind in one of these meetings?

This is the audit question, and it’s uncomfortable. Go back over the last year. How many times did you walk into a counsel conversation planning one thing and walk out doing another?

If the answer is zero, one of two things is true. Either you’re right every single time — and you’re not — or you’ve built a process that can’t tell you anything you don’t already believe.

What this costs you

Decisions made this way don’t usually blow up. That’s the trouble with them. They just drift. You end up two years into a direction nobody ever really tested, carrying a commitment you can’t remember choosing, wondering why the team never seemed to own it.

They never owned it because they were never asked. They were informed, in the grammar of a question.

The turn Todd was describing on Sunday is the same one required here, and it’s not a technique. It’s a posture. You come in holding your preference loosely enough that it could actually lose. Every real request carries an unspoken nevertheless — not my will, but yours. Jesus prayed it in the garden in the hardest form anybody ever has: “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.” (Luke 22:42, ESV)

If he held his request that loosely, I can probably hold mine loosely enough to hear the word no from a room of people I picked myself.

I’ve done this with Kenla more times than I’d like to admit. I’ll explain a business decision I’m considering, give her all the reasons it makes sense, and then ask, “What do you think?”

She knows me well enough to recognize when that isn’t really a question.

One time, she pushed back and pointed out something I didn’t want to hear. I had an answer for every objection. I went ahead with it anyway.

A few months later, I realized she had seen the problem before I did.

What bothers me looking back isn’t that I made the wrong decision. I’ve made plenty of those. It’s that I asked for counsel when what I really wanted was agreement.

There’s not much value in surrounding yourself with people wise enough to tell you the truth if you’ve already decided which answers you’re willing to hear.