Stewardship

Last night our small group met and I did the unthinkable, I talked to college students about stewardship. If that's not a recipe for disaster I don't know what is.

Actually, we spent most of our time talking about aspects of stewardship other than giving and financial related matters.

One of the first things we talked about was what stewardship is and/or what a steward is. For our context we came down to the concept that a steward is someone who oversees or manages something that doesn't belong to him or her. We had to talk a little bit before people were able to apply that to things like time - we tend to think of our time as "our time".

We looked at the Parable of the Talents from Matthew 25:14-30. My thought process was that there are some concepts we can get from that parable other than related to what we do with resources.

One thing I didn't know, but learned from the notes in my NIV Study Bible was that our use of the word "talent" - referring to ability - is derived from this story that Jesus told. I almost feel the need to put a disclaimer on that statement, but that's what the notes said, I'm not sure how that happened or why we know that.

Clearly the story Jesus is telling is about more than how to double your investment. The first two servants took what they were given - the equivalent of many years worth of wages - and did something with it. The point I tried to make with the group was simply that God expects us to use the things He gives us, not hide them.

We talked about reasons we might be tempted not to make use of an ability or an opportunity that God gives us - fear being a number one motivator.

We also talked about the master's statement to the first two servants - that they had been faithful over a few things and he would put them over many things. I posed a question to the group:

- Does this mean if we're faithful with the things God gives us, we're guaranteed to be blessed with more (this probably deals with financial matters mostly in our minds)?

That's a bit of a sticky question and not one we really wrestled to the ground, certainly there have been people who were faithful financially and still struggled or did not receive enormous material blessings. I believe the principle Jesus was teaching that faithfulness in small things leads to greater opportunity is true, but our perspective of what that looks like is often skewed. We're looking for our bank account to swell when we faithfully tithe for a year or a huge promotion when we are diligent and faithful in our current position. Sometimes it works that way, but as with many things in life, the blessings God gives us aren't always so visible and obvious and many times they come in forms we're not expecting.

We also talked about stewardship of time and relationships. My wife gave me the strangest look when I started asking the group to give me areas of life that required stewardship other than personal finance, but after a minute or so she was the one that eventually came up with both time and relationships as stewardship issues.

The crux of what I was hoping to communicate was that we need to see things from the perspective that God has put things in our care - everything from abilities to opportunities to time to relationships to money - and our job is to manage, oversee, use, steward, make the most of (pick your verb here, but be careful with what you pick regarding relationships, you don't want to suggest to a woman that you're planning to use or manage your relationship with her) those things.

Next week I'm hoping to stay on the general topic of stewardship and deal more specifically with financial matters. I haven't figure out how I'm going to project an Excel document on my living room wall just yet, but I'm working on it (kidding).

One note from the parable we studied. The first two servants doubled the money they were given in an undisclosed amount of time. The story says the master was gone a long time, but doesn't really indicate how long. I am guessing (purely speculation) it was a couple of years. In the stock market today, if you can double your money every 7 years you're doing fairly well. If I'm right about these two doubling the master's money in 2 years they had exceedingly high returns on their investments. This is part of why I think the story was less about money and more about making use of what God has given you in a broader sense. There are other places in scripture where we read about people experiencing exponential returns on their efforts, but rarely about high multiple financial investments.