Life Management-Finances/Stewardship

Our final area of life management is finances/stewardship. We already mentioned this area when we talked about margin, but it bears discussing again. As many have pointed out, the Bible speaks about money more than 2,000 times, which would be enough for us to consider it fairly often. That Jesus told us money is the chief rival god in our lives to loving and serving the one, true and living God makes it all the more important for us to address. The key truth about money and every other material resource is everything belongs to God. He created it and He owns it. That’s why we speak of stewardship in the first place when we talk about money. A steward is one who is entrusted to manage another’s resources. In our case, God has entrusted us to manage His assets.

This is a hard reality for many of us to accept. After all, we work hard to earn the money and other assets we have. They sure seem as if they belong to us. When someone tells me everything is theirs and they just can’t understand how it is really God’s, I ask a simple question: Whose will it be in a 100 years? That puts it into perspective for most of us. We get to use the money and other resources we earn for the time we’re here on the planet and then someone else will use them. The Bible reminds us that even the ability to work is a gift from God, so once again we see that everything goes back to God when we look at the matter closely enough.

The key, then, if we’re stewards is to be effective ones. Particularly if we are leaders, we need to set an example in this area for others to follow. The best stewards are generous, faithful, and diligent. You might be thinking, “How does generosity come first, if we’re going to be good stewards? Wouldn’t a good steward preserve as much of the resources as possible?” That would be a good process if God intended for us to keep as much as possible in order to be faithful to Him, but His desire is that we use what He entrusts to us to advance His work in the world, and His eternal Kingdom. When we give first, which is what generous stewards do, it reminds us to hold loosely to “our” resources since they aren’t ours in the first place. After we have given the first portion of what we’ve earned or received to God’s work in the world through the church and other good causes, the Bible teaches us that we are to use the remainder faithfully and diligently to meet our own needs, to provide for our families, to provide a reasonable amount for the future, and to always look for opportunities to do good to others.

Some of us have more natural skill in the areas of diligence when it comes to money and material resources, and the Apostle Paul tells us that some of us have the spiritual gift of giving. All of us are called to faithfulness, though, regardless of our natural inclinations or our spiritual giftedness. In order to be effective stewards we must keep track of what we earn, give, save and spend. As John Maxwell has said, “If you don’t tell your money where to go, you’ll wonder where it went.” A budget or spending plan is crucial to being diligent and faithful stewards of God’s blessings, and even of being generous. After all, if we don’t keep track of how much we earn and spend, we will almost surely have nothing to save or give.

Always remember that money is a dissatisfier, that means it can never bring us satisfaction. We can certainly be dissatisfied if we don’t have enough money to meet our needs, but no amount of money or other material possessions will ever make us truly happy. The sooner we learn these lessons of faithful stewardship, the sooner we will be able to use money as a tool in our lives and our leadership. As it has been said, “Money is a great servant, but a terrible master.”

If you have misused your finances to this point, and find yourself in a great deal of debt, many effective programs are available to help you recover from that. Whether you use Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University, or Joseph Sangl’s I Was Broke, Now I’m Not, or Crown Financial Ministries, the key is to remember that God’s principles regarding money always work, whether you are follower of Jesus or not. It may take more or less time to see them impact your financial bottom line, depending on where you are when you start applying them, but being a generous, faithful and diligent steward is something every person can attain, and a reality that each of us must attain if we are going to be leaders worthy of following.

Here’s to leading better, by becoming better stewards of all that God has entrusted to us–today!

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