By now you’ve probably heard me say several times, "Illuminate’s desire is to be a gift to our city,” and “We want to make disciples and take as many people to heaven with us as possible!” This Saturday night we are praying for our biggest outreach event yet at Treat Street. Only God can make this happen. Likewise, our Bigger, Smaller, Deeper future vision is God-sized. To make this happen we need to be on our knees in prayer and we need to understand that we are stewards. A steward is the "ward" of what belongs to someone else.
A wise pastor put it this way: "Stewardship is not about occasional acts of generosity, or now and then making contributions to good causes. It's not even about money - it goes deeper than that. The core of stewardship is seeing things differently . . . seeing everything with new eyes."
It's not complicated. In fact, Jesus tells a story about it in Matthew 25. The point is this: We must realize that everything we have - our existence, our life, our goods no matter how we got them - all come from God and belong to God, and we are stewards of these things. Once we see it this way, we live it this way. We administer well God's goods on behalf of God. That's what stewardship is.
When we die, God will ask us, "Well, how did you do in administering everything I gave you?" Imagine how off-base it would be if it turns out we spent our whole life thinking all these things belonged to us. You can count on it; God will not reward us for being misers.
Christians should be generous…and more.
It's an interesting word, “generosity." It comes from the Latin word "birth," and at its root it means "someone of noble birth". It can, without us intending it, carry the implication of bestowing some of our own riches on other people. Now that is not all bad, but what we need to do is move beyond generosity - as though we were giving away what rightfully belongs to us by birth or however we got it. What we all need to do is go beyond generosity and arrive at stewardship - the realization that it all belongs to God, no matter how we got it, and we are administering it on God's behalf.
In the end, we want to hear from Jesus, “Well done good and faithful steward, enter into the joy of your master!”
