Stewardship! “Yes,” you sigh, “here we go again with yet another periodic reminder to use our money for good things and give to the church and missions and all that. Being careful with what God has given us. Yeah, I know the drill.”
Sorry to disappoint you, but this article is not about that, or at least not just that.
“Oh, so it must be money and time, right?”
Closer, but still not quite there.
Let’s look closely at that word stewardship. Dictionaries often refer to how a person administers, manages, or controls something belonging to someone else. It implicitly looks forward in time to the reckoning when stewards account for their management.
Think about accountability for a moment. Consider three servants to whom their master entrusted varying amounts of money (Matthew 25:14-30), measured in a quantity they called talents. The servant with five talents doubled his investment. So did the servant with two. The wise and generous master commended them both and rewarded them.
The servant with a single talent did nothing with what he had. He claimed fear as his excuse, but the master saw through that. The fearful servant could at least have deposited the money somewhere to draw interest. No, he described the third servant as wicked and lazy (verse 26). Yes, he could have tried to work with what he had received. He might have failed; he might have succeeded. In truth, however, he just couldn’t be bothered. His behavior was not just lazy; it was wicked! He showed complete disregard for his master’s character, skill, generosity, values, or efforts. The master held him accountable.
The Apostle Paul told the Corinthians faithfulness was the big requirement for stewards (1 Corinthians 4:2). Faithfulness involves trust and obedience. Hmm, someone should write a hymn about that, maybe call it Trust and Obey or something of the sort! We are accountable to God to cultivate the attitude of faith and the practice of obedience, in every area of life and every phase of life.
What has our Master granted us to use before His return? Could we start with life itself? If you add up all the time you live, from beginning to end, you have your life. God has granted each of us one of the greatest gifts imaginable — life! We are stewards of our very lives, everything about our lives, including our:
Skills, talents, and abilities.
Health and physical condition.
Emotional development.
Influence.
Church affiliation.
Accomplishments.
Challenges and even failures.
Suffering, physical or otherwise.
Choices, wise and foolish.
Family.
Thoughts.
Attitudes.
Actions.
Resources. (Yeah, yeah, you knew there would have to be a tie-in with money. But did you notice how long the list was before we got there?)
From our first moment, we are building a life. We are accountable to use that life to produce something honorable to God. We can learn from the example of the Master Builder. In Genesis 1, God’s Spirit brooded over an empty world without form. Let there be light! And there was light. And what wasn’t light was darkness.
Next, He divided between earth and sky, land and sea. After He formed those spaces, He filled them with what was appropriate to them: stars in the heavens; vegetation on the earth; living creatures moving on the land, swimming in the water, and flying through the sky. Finally came humanity. Mankind was created to be God’s steward, the manager of all He had made.
And what formless, empty chaos we start with in life! If all goes well, we grow. We learn. We learn the difference between a life of light and a life of darkness. We learn the difference between ourselves — children of the earth — and the God of Heaven. We learn to populate the different areas of our lives — relationships, finances, skills, capabilities, and more — with that most suitable to each one. We learn to bring appropriate order to our part of creation, during our time in history, and thus reflect our Maker at every point.
Preach a sermon; teach a lesson; work diligently; cook or eat a good, healthy meal; write or learn a song; learn about gardens, building, computers, governments, oceans, and mountains; mow the lawn; play with the dog; make a bed; do dishes; build a family. We don’t have enough time or paper to list all the ways we build and live life to God’s glory. The point is we must use our precious and fleeting days to produce something pleasing to God when He calls us to account. We dare not be lazy and wicked!
Finally, as in Genesis 1, we come to the sixth day. We leave someone else to care for things after we are gone. We go to join our Creator. We leave our legacy — how we populated the different boxes of our lives — to those who build their own lives in our place.
We can use these questions to help navigate this in a responsible way:
What are the areas I need to address? What is the earth and sky, sea and land of my life? What areas of responsibility may I have missed until now?
What is most appropriate for those areas at this point in my life? Students and grandparents share many of the same areas of life, but what is most appropriate for them may be very different!
What can I do today to practice faithful trust and obedience? This is a constant struggle at every stage of life. How can I trust God to yield an increase for what I put into His service? How will I act upon that trust? College students may fret about what work they will do, how they will find it, whom (if anyone) they will marry, and so on. Grandma or Grandpa may worry about declining health, dwindling resources, the state of the world they leave behind, or strained relationships they haven’t yet mended. Proverbs 20 reminds us young and old alike have their own particular strengths: The glory of young men is their strength, and the splendor of old men is gray hair. The Body of Christ, the Church, needs both the strength and enthusiasm of youth, and the wisdom and experience of the gray-headed, older folks.
How do we work to put things properly in place for those who will come after us? Building a life in faithful trust and obedience feels a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle. When we actively focus on building a life as an offering to the God who will call each of us to account, figuring out what to do with money and giving tend to fall into place.
About the Writer: Allan Crowson is former director of online studies at Welch College. He and his wife LaRue also served 20 years as missionaries to Côte d’Ivoire and France.
