Stewardship 101
The purpose of this article is not that you will know more after reading it – but that you will live differently! Let me ask you a personal question – what is your relationship to your “stuff”? Jay Link suggests that we answer this question as a stool with three legs upon which the answer is balanced.
The first “leg” of the stool is the fact that God owns everything because He created everything. King David tells us in Psalm 24:1, “The earth is the Lord’s and all it contains, the world, and those who dwell in it.” Not only did God create everything that exists, He used all of his own materials to build it. If we build something, we may claim it is ours, but if we use someone else’s materials to build it, then the owner of the materials can lay some claim to it as well.
The second “leg” of the stool is that not only did God create us, but He also redeemed us from slavery to the prince of this world through the death of His son, Jesus Christ. The word redeem that Paul used is no longer commonly used today. God was willing to redeem us by offering the blood of his own Son, so that He again could own us. God owns us twice – once because he created us and the second time because He brought us back because we were lost.
The final “leg” is that we own nothing. We are called by God to be stewards, carrying out the Owner’s wishes for His property. It is at this point that we need to come to grips with the terribly misused and abused concept of stewardship.
Before I focus on what “stewardship” does mean, let me tell you what it does not mean. It has nothing to do with a capital campaign. It is not a synonym for tithing.
A steward is “a person who manages another’s property or financial affairs: one who administers anything as an agent of another or others, a manager.” So, for us to be “stewards for God” we must acknowledge that all we are and all we have possession of belongs to Him. We are charged with managing His property according to His wishes.
Tithing has to do with what you give, stewardship has to do with what you keep. It’s about how you manage everything you have been entrusted to oversee. What most people miss is that stewardship is more about how you manage what is left over after you give than it is about what you give. Stewardship is about your relationship to your stuff. You are not the owner; you are merely the caretaker of somebody else’s property. It’s our job to manage it according to the Owner’s wishes.
When we realize that all we have is God’s, and we are the managers, my prayer is that our whole concept of “giving” will change. May God bless you as a manager of His “stuff.”
