Missional Discipleship Practices, 3: Stewards

What I have is mine. I worked for it…I paid for it…it belongs to me. And what I do with it is up to me: whether I hoard it or share it is nobody’s business because it’s mine to do with as I please.

In a way of life that places so much emphasis on individualism—individual success, individual achievement—and measures the significance of that individualism mostly in terms of stuff…well, it just seems to follow that whatever we have, we own.

Yet the Bible has an altogether different take and, frankly, in a I-worked-for-it-I-paid-for-it-it-belongs-to-me world, it’s a tough sell. Tough or not, Scripture is unflinching: The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it. The world and all its people belong to him. (Psalm 24:1). In parable after parable Jesus tells, God is always the owner of the land or vineyard, always the King, and you and I—we’re the tenants, the workers, the managers, the servants. The point is not our respective roles (who wants to think of themselves as a servant?). The point is the relationship (owner/worker) and what that relationship says about our possessions.

What it says is, we aren’t owners. We’re stewards. What we possess—all of it—is a gift from God, a gift given with the intent that we will use it to meet our own needs but, equally important, to do our part in meeting the needs of others. This doesn’t diminish how hard we work nor does it suggest we don’t deserve what we have. After all, God didn’t just drop our houses and our cars and our clothes in our laps. But it does remind us of the bigger reality: if everything in the world first belongs to God, what we have and the skills and opportunities we utilized to acquire it—all that belongs to God.

This follows from the first two disciplines. My life is not about me alone but about life lived with and for others in community. As a steward of God’s good gifts, I do my part in meeting my own needs…I do my part in helping meet the needs of others.

But I don’t do it from a sense of guilt or obligation. I do it—I give—because of what Jesus gave for me. If my life was worth his life, how can I not give? It’s an act of thanksgiving and an act of worship. And an act, if you will, of testimony. All that stuff measuring my success? It’s a means to an end much bigger than my own creature comforts and sense of security. They’re tools for doing my part for the Kingdom and, in the process, showing the world something of what it means to follow Jesus.

Some Scripture: Psalm 24
                            Matthew 25:14-30