Stewardship of Time, Talents, and Treasure

As much as I enjoyed posting to The Steward blog, I have several blogs and could not maintain them all. So, some time ago, I incorporated stewardship as a related topic here.

I have learned a lot in the past several years about stewardship and practically everything I have learned can be found in Randy Alcorn’s The Treasure Principle.

I highly recommend buying this book and reading and re-reading it. You will be blessed as you learn God’s principles so you might honor Him with the finances, possessions, time, and talents that He has given into your care.

The Exact Amount

Recently, our friends, Tom and Betsy, wrote us how God directed them to donate toward our ministry. We wanted to share what they wrote because God encouraged us very much through this letter.

“Tom and I wanted to share the following with you because we felt it would be a wonderful testimony to how God provides and works through his people.

“We have been praying about your situation for quite some time. You can imagine the requests we get for assistance each day . . . Each time Tom and I receive a request we pray about it separately and together, then after a period of time we come together and discuss what God has revealed to us. . . most of the time if God wants us to give he will give us both the same amount.

“. . . for the last month and a half our schedules have been extremely busy and neither one of us had been spending the quality time in prayer that we should have been. . . I was mowing the yard and talking to God and the two of you were on my mind. I told God that if he would provide extra funds, then I would take that as He wanted this for you. That day, . . when I greeted Tom I asked him to retrieve the mail and when he returned he said, ‘look at this.’ It was a check from the IRS for $329.47!

“I looked at Tom and told him it had to be fake and . . . I shared my conversation with God from the morning mowing.
Tom said, ‘Well now we have our answer.’

“Tom called [the IRS] on Tuesday and found out that the check was from 2005 from an over payment of $300.00 . . . and that the $29.47 was the interest.

“May God continue to bless us all in unexpected ways and may we always be the stewards that he created us to be.”

We could not have said it better!

Too Busy With Things

“We have too much stuff!” I fumed as I stumbled past a pile of stuff in the garage.

This wasn’t the first time I had hit my limit on the things we had accumulated. I had been trying to “purge” the house for several years now. I felt like Eustace in C. S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Eustace was unsuccessful in removing his dragon skin. Only Aslan could do it. For Eustace, the skin symbolized his sin that only Christ could remove. For me, the clinging dragon skin represents all the trivial possessions and projects that consume my time and energy. I have been pruning things out of my life and home with a goal to simplify my life, but it is now time to let Jesus dig deeper than I had been able to do on my own.

It was a revelation to me to learn recently that my struggles to downsize my possessions affect my availability to share Christ. The top four hindrances, in order, that keep Christian workers from sharing their faith are exactly in reverse order from Christians in general (The Top Four – Part One). They are:

1. Busyness
2. Not knowing nonbelievers
3. Lack of know-how
4. Fear

Busyness is definitely an issue for me. I am often too busy with possessions and projects to give people a little droplet of my time that can mean an ocean of eternity for them! I remember experiencing real freedom in this area during Hurricane Frances in 2004. We had evacuated to my son’s apartment, taking only the bare essentials with us. I finally had time that weekend! Without all the things to distract me, I had lots of time available for my family. Unfortunately, we returned home to an unwanted skylight and a puddle of brown water, with blobs of soggy pink insulation in the kitchen, so we were more-than-our-usual busy for a long time after that.

In the parable of the sower, Jesus explains that the seed sown among thorns symbolized “the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things.” What was the result of sowing seed among thorns? The thorns choked the plant, “making it unfruitful.”

Some very good questions to ponder from this parable are:
• Am I caught up in the concerns of this life? And in desires for more things?
• Am I deceived by what I own? Is something taking the place of God in my life?
• Am I unfruitful because of what I own? Or because of how much I own?
• Am I willing to let Jesus help me “throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles” so I can more easily run the race God has given me? (See Hebrews 12: 1 – 3)

As Eustace explained after his experience with Aslan: “Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off – just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt . . .”

I want to be free to serve, not entangled by so many things. To go deeper may be painful in some respects, but I am ready. It’s not worth holding on to things if they are hindering me in my availability and usefulness.

P. S. If you would like encouragement in sharing your faith, you might be interested in my blog on Way-of-Life witnessing, The Sower.

Bread or Seed?

A favorite passage of mine is 2 Corinthians 9: 6 – 15. By faith, the sower casts the seed away from him; seed that could make bread for his family today. He trusts God to provide the bread he needs and to multiply what he sows.

Notice in verse 10 that God multiplies the seed, not the bread. Bread represents the needs that God promises to supply; seed is for God to use to bless others and for the Harvest.

We are to sow generously and cheerfully, not reluctantly nor under compulsion, and also that blessing may come to someone. Our cheerful giving (verses 7 – 8 ) results in our having enough for ourselves AND abundance for donations. If we give by faith, He will multiply what we give (verse 9 – 11). Giving results in praise to God and prayers for the saints (verses 11 – 14). For instance, if I am passing God’s blessings along by investing in a ministry, I will want to be praying for that ministry and praising God for what He does through them.

Do we keep God’s blessings for ourselves, living beyond our needs instead of blessing others? Could those extra things that came my way, really be meant for someone else?

My desire is for God to open my eyes to see the seed (material goods and money) that should be blessing someone and to release my grip when I am holding on to something instead of trusting Him to meet my need. I need His grace to joyfully cast those things away from me, as a sower of His blessings in others’ lives.

“You will be made rich in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion, and through us your generosity will result in thanksgiving to God. This service that you perform is not only supplying the needs of God’s people but is also overflowing in many expressions of thanks to God.” ~ 2 Corinthians 9:11 – 12

An Eternal Investment

A young man waited at our door with a container of items at his feet. We have made it a policy not to support things we don’t know about, so I said “no” and then gave him a tract.

I really wasn’t surprised later that day to see the tract tossed aside on my neighbor’s sidewalk. I did not “invest” in this young salesman to “gain a hearing” for the Gospel. Just spending time talking to him would have shown I really was interested in him. Would spending a few minutes or a few dollars have brought an eternal return?

Fast forward several years to last month when I was given a bag of more groceries than I could use. I knew what to do and gave most of them to my neighbor across the street.

“I’ll make soup!” Cathy beamed as she examined the large bag. “My boys will love snacking on the carrots, too.”

A few weeks later, as I was spring cleaning, I brought her a box overflowing with toys that my boys had enjoyed when they were younger. Cathy’s boys, on tiptoe, tried to peer into the box as I handed it over to her.

Last week, a friend and I sat around Cathy’s dining room table to take a worldview survey with her. Suddenly tears filled Cathy’s eyes.

“Last night was very hard,” she explained.

We listened and we prayed and we hugged her. Then, we shared how she could know God personally. Cathy prayed to receive Christ with us! Her tear-stained face was radiant when we left her.

The groceries would have spoiled in my fridge. The toys would have put a few dollars in my wallet or rusted in the garage. How much better to use what Jesus gives to me as a tool to unlock a heart for God!

SIDE NOTE: Many years ago I gave up on the small return of yard sales and switched to the eternal investment of blessing someone. I could write volumes on what I’ve learned about giving things away.