THE REFORMED WITNESS HOUR"Give an Account of Your Stewardship”Rev. Carl Haak July 5, 2009; No. 3470
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Dear Radio Friends,
The child of God in this world, whether he lives in western
Michigan with four children and is now laid off, or whether he lives in Valor,
India and is thankful for a hand mill to grind rice and lives on a mat, this
child of God in either place lives in one faith: My Father knows what I have
need of.
As God rained manna from heaven upon
But we do ask, Why does not the Lord
stockpile the earthly things for us? Why does He not lay
it all out? Why does He not show us that by the year 2015 we will have the
following assets? Why must it be day-by-day? And the response of the Scriptures
is that we must learn to trust. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every
word that proceeds from the mouth of God. He is Jehovah-nissi,
the Lord who will provide.
We are then to look toward the earthly things this way. We are
to look first at the cross. We look not at the job market or at Wall Street.
But we look at the infinite grace and the full pardon that is given to us in Jesus Christ. We remember the words of
Romans 8:32:
“He that spared not his own
Son…shall he not with him also freely give us all things?” God will give me
what I need to serve Him. And if I no longer, in His will, am called to serve
Him on earth, then He will take me to heaven.
And so, we look at what God gives us today and we thank God and we trust Him to supply our needs.
Today we look at the question, “But exactly how are we to view
and use the money and the things that God gives to us?” And then we come before
another principle of the Word of God. That principle is that God is the sole
owner of all things, and we are His answerable stewards. For His name is not
only Jehovah-nissi, the Lord who will provide,
but His name is Adonai; His name is Jehovah-Sabaoth. He is the Lord of hosts. He gives all things
to us with a purpose: that we might use them to enjoy, serve, and glorify Him.
We say, “My finances are a personal subject. I don’t ask you to run my
finances.” But God governs every part of our life: marriage, sex, care of the
body, your heart, and what is in your heart, anger, and greed. God governs and
God controls everything. Your money as well. And
always God calls us to be conformed not to this world, but to be transformed by
the renewing of our minds, that we may live to the glory of God.
We, then, are called to be stewards of all things that God gives
us, ready always to answer to Him.
We find this truth in
Luke 16:2,
where the Lord spoke the
parable of “The Unjust Steward.” Here a master had learned that his steward had wasted his goods. We read in verse 2 of
Luke 16:
“And he called him [that is,
his steward], and said unto him, How is it that I hear this of thee?
Give an account of thy stewardship.” Give an account of your
stewardship. The first thing we must see in those words is that God, indeed, is
the sovereign owner and dispenser of all things. The demand of the rich man to
his steward was, “What is this that I hear of you? You have been accused of
wasting my goods.” God is the owner of all things. He is the sovereign owner.
What does that mean? Well, the word “sovereign” is a word that we cherish. It
means that God is the King. We confess from the Scriptures that God is
sovereign in our salvation. From the very beginning to the very end, says Jonah from the belly of the whale
(Jonah 2:9),
salvation is of the Lord. Our
salvation began of the Lord in eternity, in His free grace of election.
Romans 9:16,
“It is not of him that willeth, nor of him that
runneth, but of God that sheweth
mercy.”
God’s sovereignty in salvation continued in His actual giving of
Jesus Christ and sending Him into the world to make a payment for all of our
sins. Jesus said, “I lay down my life for the sheep given to me of the Father.”
God’s sovereignty in our salvation proceeds to His calling us to Jesus Christ
by His irresistible grace, “All that the Father gives to me,” Jesus says, “shall come to me”
(John 6:37).
God, then, is sovereign in salvation. He gives
it and He controls it absolutely.
Now we must transfer that truth of God’s sovereignty in
salvation to the world of money and things. We must not simply say, “The Lord
is the sovereign of my soul.” But we must go on to say, “The Lord is the
sovereign of my hands and of my goods and of everything He puts in my hands.”
He is sovereign of money, of things, cars, banks, health, everything. He is the
owner of all. All that we have is God’s legitimate possession. He holds the
title to the land, to the home, and to the goods—to everything. He does so because He created them
(Gen. 1:1):
“In the beginning God created the heavens
and the earth.”
There is no verse in all of the Bible
that says that God signed over any part of what He had created to man. Jesus said, in
Matthew 5:45,
concerning the great source of human life, “He maketh his sun to rise on…the just and on the unjust.”
Jesus did not say, “God maketh the sun to
rise,” but He said “He makes his sun.” God owns the sun in the heavens.
Haggai 2:8,
“The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, saith
the Lord.”
I can remember that, as a child, my hands would be slapped when
I reached to take for myself what was not mine, what belonged to my sister or
brother. So also in this economic downturn, we who have begun to imagine that
these things are ours and have reached, over-reached, over-extended—God
has slapped our hands. He is reminding us that everything that we have comes
with the stamp of God’s ownership.
This must be the deep conviction of our hearts. Not simply a
mental knowledge, not a grudging confession, but a joyful celebration. We read in
Psalm 24:1, 2,
“The earth is the Lord’s, and
the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell
therein. For he hath founded it upon the seas, and
established it upon the floods.” Joyfully the psalmist confesses that
the earth is the Lord’s. The fullness of the earth is the Lord’s,
because He is the One who founded it, placed it upon the seas and established
it upon the floods.
What do you think about your money? About
things? About your body? How do you think about
those things as a young person? Do you believe that they are yours? Do you say,
“Mine”? Do you simply say, “There’s more of that where it came from”? What do
we think about the pay-raise? Do we think instinctively of that coming to us as
ours? I would suggest that we all take what represents our assets: the bonds,
the IRAs, the bank accounts, the silver and the gold coins, everything that
represents value—that we take all of these things and put them on the kitchen
table, put them all in a manila envelope and with a black marker write on the
envelope: “God’s possession.” And then we must do that with joy and
celebration, not with resentment; for if we do it with covetousness, then we
confess that there is an idol in our hearts. God has given us all things, but
they are not our own.
God, then, is not only the sovereign owner of all things, but He
is also the dispenser of all things. He giveth to all what they have, says the psalmist in
Psalm 104.
He uses means. He uses
inheritance, purchase, different economies, and governments. But, nevertheless,
it is the Lord who sovereignly dispenses His goods.
We read in the book of Proverbs (22:2), “The rich and poor meet together: the Lord is the maker of them all.” The rich and
the poor, God makes them. A man becomes rich. He invested at the right time in
Microsoft, Facebook, or Google. We say, “Oh, he was
in the right place at the right time.” Another man works. He is diligent, he is
careful, he works long hours. But the storm and the wind come and destroy all
that he has made. He sees his stocks and all of his investments go sour. God
rules over all these things. The rich and the poor, says the proverb, meet
together. They interact. They bump into each other. An economy is made. There
is supply and demand. There is economic stimulus. But the Lord is the One who sovereignly controls all things and gives to each even as it pleases Him.
I Samuel 2:7,
“The Lord maketh poor, and maketh rich: he bringeth low, and lifteth up.”
What do you have, then, that is not given to you?
Here is the principle: God is the sovereign owner and the
sovereign dispenser of money and things. When we say, “Mine,” then we have
denied the living God. No, all is God’s. Ours is the responsibility.
Now in the parable to which I was referring, the parable of the
unjust steward, Jesus makes plain that our position towards money and things is
that of a steward. We must be ready to give an account of our stewardship.
A steward was one who was entrusted with his lord’s possessions.
He was to use those possessions in his lord’s best interest. And he was to be
ready always to give an answer as to how he had used those possessions.
Once again, stewardship says concerning God that He is a
marvelous and a generous God. He is no cruel tyrant. He gives us all things, says the Scriptures.
I Timothy 6:17
says that God gives us
all things richly, to enjoy. It pleases God to entrust to our care His goods so
that we might enjoy them and glorify Him in them. And He gives us a certain
liberty of action, so that we may use them according to our abilities in His
best interest. The Lord gives us the joy and the privilege to care for His
earthly things, and to use our energies, our talents, and our wisdom. We do not
say, then, to a child whose room is messy, “You need to learn to be responsible
for the things that you own.” But we say to the child, “You must be responsible
to care for the things of God.”
A steward never has ownership rights. Suppose that you go on
vacation in the summer, and you want someone to care for your house: feed the
dog, water the plants, and take in the mail. You say, “You can even live in my
house. You can sleep in my bed.” But whom do you choose? Well, you will choose
someone who is responsible and faithful to you, who will act in your best
interest. If water leaks into the basement while you are gone, or if the roast
in the oven burns and fills the house with smoke, you expect him to take the
actions that you would take if you were there, because he knows that you are
coming back and that it is your home.
So also stewardship implies the profound knowledge in the child
of God that all things in this life entrusted to us are not our own, but we are
answerable to our Master. That means that we must know the will of our Master,
that we have an outline of how He wants us to invest, how He wants us to
administer and use His goods. Then we will be faithful, seeking first the
As children of God, it goes beyond even that. We confess that
the spiritual things, the precious heritage of the truth of
the gospel, is entrusted to our care. Therefore, we must hold fast to
the faith, to the faith of the Holy Scriptures with faithfulness. And we must
be willing to evangelize. We must have zeal for the spread of the gospel. It
means that everything that we do will be done to the glory of God. The Reformed
Christian has one life. He does not have a religious life, a secular life, and
a professional life. He has one life. And that is with respect to his finances
as well. All financial decisions have a spiritual dimension. They tell
something of us. You can know a man by his financial portfolio. You have a
checkbook? You have a credit card statement? It witnesses to your spirituality.
It shows you, and it shows all your priorities. You do not have to show it to
someone else. You have to show it to God. It shows what you put first in your
life.
Our priorities, then, will be different than the world’s. The world uses earthly things for themselves. The
child of God uses earthly things for the Father’s smile and for the Father’s
glory.
Give an account of your stewardship. Everything that we do with
the earthly must be done in the realization that we must answer to God for what
we have done.
There will be many stewards in the last day who
will be caught unawares; they will be caught red-handed; they will have their
hand in the pot. We must take our stewardship seriously, for God does. God
takes the use of money and things that He has entrusted to us seriously,
because our stewardship in money and things reflects our stewardship in other
things.
In
Luke 16:10
the Lord also said, “He that is faithful in that
which is least is faithful also in much: and he that is unjust in the least is
unjust also in much.” Stewardship in earthly things is the index of
faithfulness in great things. How you use your money is a reflection of your
deepest attitude toward God.
Are you ready? Are you ready today to give an account of your
stewardship? Do you pray each day that you might use everything entrusted to
you—money, possessions, home, car, body, talents—as His joyful and faithful
steward, seeking your heavenly Father’s honor in all that you do?
Let us pray.
Father, we pray that Thy Word may enter into our hearts that we
may be humbled before it, that we may be wise, faithful, and diligent stewards
of Thy things. We pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.