Week 1
Discipline: STEWARDSHIP
Luke 18:18-25
Luke 16:11
Did you ever notice how often Jesus talked about the use of wealth and resources? (16 of 38 parables) It wasn’t that Jesus was after people’s money. He had no vested interest in how much people gave, after all he had no church budget to meet. In discipling people, Jesus was only interested in growing their relationship to God, and apparently one of the key obstacles he identified was money. “You cannot serve both God and money”. Jesus recognized that money functioned as a rival god, and he taught stewardship as both a means to and a measure of discipleship. Martin Luther once said, “Every Christian will require three conversions in life: a conversion of the heart, a conversion of the head, and a conversion of the purse. And of the three I am convinced the purse will be the most difficult.”
When it comes to assessing our progress in the Christian life, few things are as telling as our stewardship, which is the reason it should get a lot of attention in our own devotional life. It should be frightening to think that our salvation (the state of our soul) is tied to my practice of stewardship. Remember the rich young man who came to Jesus asking what he must do to inherit eternal life and Jesus answer to him was related to the stewardship of his wealth. What Jesus teaches is that on the journey of discipleship we cannot move forward until we deal with this. We rightly believe what Paul taught, “we are saved by grace through faith”, which is precisely where stewardship comes into play in the process of salvation. Stewardship is an act of faith. Will we trust God enough to be my source of security or will we cling to the need to secure our own future by means of wealth and possessions? That “rich young man” who came to Jesus seeking eternal life was a good and moral man (he kept the commandments even from his youth), but he obviously struggled with trusting God enough to follow Jesus without his wealth. Or remember the story of the “rich fool” who was blessed with an abundant harvest and immediately thought only of how to secure his own future (build bigger barns and store up) instead of how bless God with his abundance? According to Jesus, stewardship often becomes the litmus test of faith and an assessment of our commitment to discipleship far more than our own “morality”. How are we doing with that test in our own life?
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