Stewardship Part I

As we came into the New Year I was praying about what I could teach my church that would encourage them as they are becoming the men and women that God desires them to be and ultimately the church that He desires for us to be.

So, what was it that the Lord was leading us to study? Stewardship! By definition a steward is one who manages another’s property, finances, or other affairs.

As Christians we believe, or should believe, that everything we have belongs to God anyway and as we grow in discipleship, learning to become more like Christ, we should learn to be responsible caretakers of all that God has trusted us with.

As a church we are going to spend the next three weeks learning to become better stewards.

If you had a bank that credited your account each morning with $86,000 that carried over no balance from day to day...Allowed you to keep no cash in your account, and every evening cancelled whatever part of the amount you failed to use during the day, what would you do? Draw out every cent every day, of course, and use it to your advantage!

Well, you have such a bank, and its name is TIME! Every morning it credits you with 86,400 seconds. Every night it rules off as lost whatever of this you failed to invest to good purpose. It carries over no balances, it allows no overdrafts. Each day it opens a new account with you. If you fail to use the day's deposits, the loss is yours. There is no going back. There is no drawing against tomorrow.
What gets your time? We devote a lot of our time to pursuing things we value. Those things we give our time to become our priorities. Jesus said that if we learn to value and live God’s priorities then the other stuff we need comes as well. (Matthew 6:33)

The key being a steward of your time is knowing God’s priorities!

What Are God’s Priorities?
1. Loving God with all of your heart, soul, mind and strength.
2. Loving others as you would yourself.

When we look at the Example of Jesus we see that he made time for God (Matthew 14:23; Luke 2:46-49), he spent time in prayer and in worship. That time alone with the father was valuable time to him and he was not ashamed to be found in God’s presence.

Jesus also made time for other people. He made time to love other people, He made time to reach out to other people, and he made time to serve. Keep in mind that this is God we are talking about. He valued his time as something that was precious and made sure to make every second count.

How would you like to spend 2 years making phone calls to people who aren't home? Sound absurd? According to one time management study, that's how much time the average person spends trying to return calls to people who never seem to be in. Not only that, we spend 6 months waiting for the traffic light to turn green, and another 8 months reading junk mail. These unusual statistics should cause us to do time-use evaluation. Once we recognize that simple "life maintenance" can chip away at our time in such huge blocks, we will see how vital it is that we don't busy ourselves "in vain"

It’s important that we make sure that every thing we do with our time counts. As we become better stewards of our time, let’s learn to live by God’s priorities and not our own.