Barry Meguiar on Marketplace Ministry: Move Everyone Closer to Jesus
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Your Job Is Not the Goal. It’s the Mission Field. Start Moving People Closer to Jesus. That was the message that Barry Meguiar shared with Regent University students on April 22, 2026.
Barry Meguiar was 65 years old when he got the news that a joint venture partner was about to throw him out of the family business, his grandfather had started in 1901. He went to bed that night and prayed the shortest prayer of his life.
“God, I asked you for nothing. I know I live for your purpose. You’ll make it straight. So I’m fine.”
The next morning, in an eight-minute conference call, God turned the whole thing upside down. Meguiar walked away laughing.
That story, told with characteristic joy at Regent University Chapel on April 22, 2026, is the through line of everything Barry Meguiar has built his life around: wholehearted faith, fearless trust, and the daily, purposeful work of moving everyone around you closer to Jesus.
Meguiar is the third-generation president of Meguiar’s Inc., a longtime host of the Discovery Channel’s Car Crazy, and the founder of Ignite America. He is also, by his own admission, not an academic. What he is, unmistakably, is a man who has tested Romans 8:28 in the hardest possible conditions, including the loss of a daughter at 49, a family divided over the business, and years of closed doors and flat-out rejection from buyers who wouldn’t give him the time of day. And he has found it to be exactly what it says.
His message was simple and urgent: the greatest joy of the Christian life is not waiting for you in a pew or a pulpit. It is already in your path, in every stranger in every waiting room, at every airport gate, in every interview where someone just told you no.
“Of all the people we’re around every day,” he said, “about 90% are lost.”
That is not a reason for despair. For Meguiar, it is the opportunity of a lifetime.
He challenged students preparing to enter the workforce to reframe everything. The job search, the sales call, the first professional rejection: none of it is the main event. “Stop looking for a job,” he told them. “He’s already got it planned, beyond anything you can possibly imagine. You’ll get to the place God has planned for you when you stop worrying about the job and start moving everybody every day closer to Jesus.”
When a young man stopped him at a Southwest Airlines gate in Orlando and asked for entrepreneurial advice, Meguiar’s answer was Proverbs 3:5. The conversation went all the way to security. They prayed together in the middle of the terminal. The young man said he would remember that conversation for the rest of his life.
“That conversation with Isaiah, that’s eternal,” Meguiar said, reflecting on a similar exchange. “Think about it. It’s not going to matter how many bottles of car wax I sold.”
The thread running through it all is what he calls “the nudge.” That quiet prompting to reach out, to ask, to pray for someone, the one we so often talk ourselves out of. His counsel: follow it. Every time.
“When he nudges you, go. If you follow the nudge, you’ll live in the fog. You’ll live in the favor of God.”
He and his wife Karen, married 62 years, are in their mid-80s and describe every day as an adventure. That is not an accident. It is the fruit, Meguiar insists, of a life spent seeking and saving the lost, one conversation at a time.
“Move everybody every day closer to Jesus,” he told the chapel. “When you do that, God guarantees you’re going to have the time of your life for the rest of your life.”
Watch the full chapel address above.
Regent University prepares men and women to lead and serve with a commitment to excellence and a thoroughly Christian worldview. Learn more at regent.edu.
