To be a Human is to be a Steward

God putting us in charge of his stuff all started way back with Adam and Eve.

In the first chapter of our Bibles, God said, “Let us make humanity in our image, so that they will have dominion and will rule over the creation.” In the second chapter, the Bible tells us that God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.

That is God’s MO. He places people made in the image of the Trinity over what is God’s, the entire cosmos that God created. We have an awesome responsibility to be stewards over it all. Work it. Take care of it.

A steward is a person placed in charge of something or someplace by the owner. The manager of what is somebody else’s stuff.

So, check this out!

To be human is to be a person that is given the responsibility to care for what God owns. To be a redeemed person in Christ is to be restored to that. God gives us the responsibility to rule over his stuff. This is no small thing — it is central to the essence of what it means to be human. God wants us to be restored to our human calling in life.

So, what is God’s stuff? Silly question, isn’t it? Everything is his stuff!

Sure, according to our bank accounts and our portfolios, we are the owners of our stuff. Well, not according to our Mortgage and our car loans! Somebody else owns that stuff. But we sure like the think we own our houses and cars!

Who owns your body? Your gifts and talents? Your home? Your kids? Your job? Your hopes and dreams? Your heartaches?

God owns it all, and we have the privilege as God’s redeemed people to steward it all. To spend God’s money well, to give God’s money away well, to wisely, prayerfully, thoughtfully do with God’s stuff what the owner of that stuff would want us to do with it.

So, when we think through our finances, we realize that what we do with all the money in our care is an opportunity to worship through offering all that we think we own back to God and say, “Thank you, God, for giving me all this to steward over for you.” To show that we indeed have this attitude toward God’s stuff, we offer the very best to him in an offering. We give not because we think we under compulsion to give, we give because we are seeking to wisely invest God’s finances in what God wants us to invest it in.

We have thought through this. We have prayed about this.

We give to our local church community because it is our community in which we participate and we see that this is God’s work. What happens through our church really matters. So we gladly give God’s stuff to what God wants us to give it to.

And we create a budget that has enough margin to give to anyone that God leads us to give because they have need. Our money is not ours simply for our own pleasure (though God does not command us to live masochistic ascetic lives that cannot enjoy the good things in life like good food, good living conditions, good art, good life-helping gadgets, good games and hobbies, etc.), our money is also for those around us so that they too can flourish in a fallen world.

I want to encourage all of us to see ourselves as stewards of God’s stuff.

It’s not mine. It’s not yours.

Work it and take care of it.

Image by Pictures of Money. Used with permission. Sourced via Flickr.