Intersect: management opportunity

INTERSECT (Where the Bible Meets Life) is a regular column of ONE Magazine featuring Dr. Garnett Reid, a member of the Bible faculty at Free Will Baptist Bible College. Email Garnett greid@fwbbc.edu

And God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work  (2 Corinthians 9:8).

That’s it—stewardship packaged tightly in just 26 words, just like the letters of the alphabet. Translated from church jargon, “stewardship” is simply life management, or, as the dreaded category marked on my first-grade report card charged, “using time wisely.”

Paul’s primer on life management in this verse reminds us of our defined accountability (line 1), our sufficient resources (line 2) and their effective application (line 3). God has given us all we need to do all we should all the time, to paraphrase the apostle.

Our problem is that we are not managing our “stuff”; it manages us. And the irony is that it’s not even ours, anyway. Our economy is not on the same page with God’s. You see, the issue is not how much I can accumulate to make my life easier. Instead, God wants to know how much I will give away to make someone else’s life easier.

So how do I do that? What kind of management is that? Try these eight suggestions:

• Volunteer with the Red Cross or a hospital.

• Tutor in a literacy program.

• Sign your organ donor card.

• Hang out with your kids more (if they can stand it!).

• Be a Big Brother to another kid who needs one.

• Have a yard sale for missions, not yourself.

• Give blood.

• Share your faith in as many ways as you can.

Remember, too, that God expects us to manage well the “concrete dailyness,” the ordinary routines: cleaning the bathroom, buying groceries, repairing the faucet, shuttling the kids, painting the porch. We must not glamorize these chores by putting spiritual “spin” on them to ourselves—I “change diapers for the glory of God,” or “mow my lawn as a spiritual discipline.”

Yet we do these day-to-day, often-unsightly tasks well because we want to be faithful stewards. No, it’s no big deal that I do them, but I try to “abound in every good work” because that’s who I am as a servant of God. If Jesus “did all things well,” I at least ought to give it a shot, too.

Countless acts of kindness emerged from the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina last fall. One of the most compelling involved a young boy who approached relief workers with a handful of change. He had kept it safe during the storm and was giving it, he said, to the people who really needed it. “I’m giving this because I love Jesus,” explained the lad. The grace God gives us must return as our gift to Him.