Stewardship not Ownership

I recently had lunch with a man in his seventy's whom I respect. He told me, “I don’t know why it has taken me so long to learn the lesson that all I have is God’s. When the Lord took away things I thought were mine I finally learned they don't really belong to me.”  Wow! I then recalled how difficult that lesson has been for me as well. It seems like we all are challenged with understanding that all we have is only on loan from God.

Here’s our tendency....

We think that because we possess something we own it. The truth however is that all we have— our health, our jobs, our abilities, our kids, our money, our material effects, our time— are gifts from God given to us for a certain period of time and for a particular purpose. They are temporary and may go away, or may be taken away at any time, and certainly one day they will return to the Lord when we pass on to heaven.

But there’s another category of possessions that we often believe are ours— spiritual possessions. These include God’s promises, God’s will for our lives, as well as divine opportunities and people in our lives that He clearly has provided. Likewise, times when we’ve prayed and prayed and God finally delivers what we’ve prayed for. We can take those answers and hold them in a way that they become our hope, our security, and our joy rather than the One who gave them to us in the first place.

The difficulty to understand the principle of stewardship has been around for centuries.

Abraham, the father of our faith, struggled with this idea. In Genesis 12 God promised him offspring and descendants. 25 years later— still no son. So he and his barren wife Sarai (Sarah) devised a plan for Abraham to bear a child through their handmaiden Hagar (a common custom for continuing the family line in the ancient world). Hagar gave birth to a son and they named him Ishmael. So Abraham and Sarah took matters into their own hands and decided to achieve God’s will their own way. The problem is—this wasn’t God’s provision.

God then comes to Abraham and says that Ishmael is not the promise and that He will provide a son through Sarah. Sarah conceives and Isaac is eventually born.

For many years Abraham waited for the son that God would provide. Isaac was God’s idea. God came to Abraham, made the promise, and then finally delivered on it. I can’t imagine the joy and wonder that Abraham felt at the gift of his son.

Years later however, God came back to Abraham instructing him to sacrifice his now teenage son Isaac on the altar. Possibly over the years Abraham had taken ownership of Isaac and forgotten that his son was a gift from God. Maybe Abraham lacked humility in this gift or took for granted this miracle? Or possibly, God simply wanted Abraham to remember how generous the Father was to provide Isaac.

Regardless of the reason, God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Amazingly, Abraham takes his son on the mountain and up to the altar. He raises the dagger, but then suddenly an angel from heaven calls out for him to stop. The voice says, “Do not lay a hand on the boy. Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.” (Gen. 22:12)

Abraham passed the test. He gave up to God his most precious possession. He was willing to give back to the Father the very thing the Father had given to him. To hold it loosely, to steward it faithfully, and to release it when God came asking. Amazing!

Hundreds of years later the Israelites needed the same lesson. Upon being freed from Egypt, God instructed them to remember the One who gave them their new land and that it, as well as the possessions within, were only on loan.

 “And when the Lord your God brings you into the land that he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you—with great and good cities that you did not build, and houses full of all good things that you did not fill, and cisterns that you did not dig, and vineyards and olive trees that you did not plant—and when you eat and are full, then take care lest you forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” Deuteronomy 6:10-12

You see, the way we steward the things we possess gives evidence as to whether we remember the Lord in them.

This is one of the reasons why we must manage carefully in the Lord such things as our time, our gifts and abilities, and our money. Our stewardship of these and other areas are rooted in the same faith that Abraham had when he withheld nothing, not even his son, from God. So just as Abraham did, we give back to God our first and best in order to remember and recognize His place in our lives— and that its all His in the first place.

Do you really understand that your money, your time, your abilities-- all are on loan from God? Do you steward them in such a way that you recognize God's place in relationship to them?

Because when we believe that the things we possess are actually ours or exist because of us, they begin to control and define us rather than the other way around. Consequently, our security and identity becomes rooted in them (not in God) even to the point where they not only have power over us, but they become a part of us… or we become a part of them. When that occurs we are then unable to separate ourselves from them, release them, or trust God with them because to do so would mean to lose our selves. This was never God’s intention for the gifts He gives His creation.

If we have a difficult time giving them back to the Lord, maybe we really don't believe that they are God's in the first place?