The Principle of Stewardship
Tom Shrader explores the principle of stewardship as part five of the series 'Recovering Our Lost Legacy,' using Jesus' parable from Luke 12 about faithful and unfaithful servants. He teaches that believers should conduct their lives as managers, not owners, recognizing that God has transferred possession but not ownership of our time, talents, and resources. The teaching emphasizes accountability to God and practical steps for living as faithful stewards.
“God has transferred possession to you, but not ownership to you.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: Recovering Our Lost Legacy
Recorded: June 30, 2005
Duration: 38 min
Themes: stewardship, accountability, faithfulness, responsibility, ownership, management, resources, entitlement, struggling with entitlement, managing resources, new believer, young adult, parent, feeling overwhelmed by responsibility, business owner, seeking purpose
Scripture: Luke 12:42-48, 1 Timothy 6:17
Theological Themes: stewardship theology, biblical stewardship, discipleship, christian living, faithful service, divine ownership, kingdom principles, spiritual maturity
Full Transcript
If you have Bibles, you can open them to Luke chapter 12 and we're going to be there in a minute. This is week five of a series titled "Recovering Our Lost Legacy." This series is one of those that I'm finding myself becoming more familiar with than anyone. I really see this as bigger than just what we would perceive as we look at it to begin with.
Let me try to explain that. I have an invitation to speak at our women's ministry next week, and I do that generally once a year. They gave me a title, and I'll explain the title in a second. The title is "You Are Not Special." It's based on David McCullough. Many of you know that name from his book on the Panama Canal and the Johnstown Flood, and probably most familiar with his work on John Adams.
The Problem of Entitlement
His son is a high school history teacher. Several years ago, he delivered a commencement address. The essence of it is absolutely spectacular. "You Are Not Special," and if you YouTube it, you'll get it. It's about 13 minutes. His premise is, if you're here today at Wellesley High, you are the valedictorian, but there are 350,000 high schools in the country, so you may be special at Wellesley, but you're one of 350,000 valedictorians. His whole premise is, you've been helmeted and bubble-wrapped, and you aren't so special.
This really caught fire. This became viral. Out of it came a book that he's written. I've been through just the very beginning of it, and it's all underlined. They have it all underlined. I don't know how to use it again because the quotes are long, but the premise resonates.
So the ladies came to me and said, "Well, you do something off of this." What they said is, we're starting to see in not just the kids, but in the ladies we're ministering to, this sense of entitlement. They introduced me to two terms. One is - see if you've heard this. Have you heard the term "push gift?" Anybody heard this term? This is a gift that a father gives to a mother when she has a baby. Now, I thought the push gift was the baby, but apparently it's not just a toaster or a crockpot, but an elaborate piece of jewelry. For the life of me, I can't remember what the other one was. Equally insane.
It's this - everything is special and all this. So what I ended up deciding to do is a condensed version of this series. I've come to see, I think, that in the world we live in, culture around us, the lack of these eight principles plays itself out not just in the Christian community, but in the world at large.
The Broader Impact
When you talk about consequence, duty, authority, and reverence we've already looked at, when you look at those, when there's an absence of those in the world around you, you see the chaos that we see. Nobody's thinking about anything but me, myself, and I. So it has a big - it's bigger than just getting this for your own life. It's being able to pass these things on.
Today, week five, is a principle and I remember the first time I ever taught it. I had a guy that came up afterwards and he said, "If this is true, this literally changes everything." Number one, it is true. Number two, if you take it and understand it is true, it does change everything.
The Principle of Stewardship
It's the principle of stewardship. The principle is this: You should conduct your life as though you're a manager, not an owner.
In relationship to life and by life - because when I say stewardship, you grab your wallet. That's the first thing that happens. "He's after my money today." Not after your money today. Never been after your money. I'd say keep your money, but I'd prefer you to give it, but it's not about money. It's way bigger than that. Your life, your time, your energy, your effort, everything is something that's been entrusted to you.
Here's a great way for me to get it. Maybe it's helpful to you. God has transferred possession to you, but not ownership to you. There's the gist of this whole thing.
Five Signs You Don't Get Stewardship
As we've done in the previous four lessons, let me give you five things. If you don't get the principle of stewardship, five things you'll see.
You love the title of a self-made man or woman. You love the idea that you're from Hope, Arkansas, or you're from some little town. Ted Cruz, when he did his announcement slash crusade a couple of weeks ago, his whole thing was he started, and they're poor, and they don't have anything, and they're eating raccoon. I mean, that's become the presidential thing. All of a sudden, it's - I mean, Joe Biden literally said, "I don't have any stocks or savings," and you want to run my country? That doesn't make sense to me. So it's we don't have anything. We came from nothing, and we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps. I'm a tough guy, tough gal. You know, Carly started as a secretary, now a CEO.
Here's the second thing. You're willing to buy anything you can afford, which on the surface sounds good, until you define afford, and afford means this. You get all the stuff you want. You go to the checkout. You give them your card. You swipe it. If it says approved, you can afford it. So all of a sudden, you can see this sequential building here.
It's the third thing, because those things are important. You begin to measure people by what they have, and in most instances, that's material stuff. My father would oftentimes - I'd say, "How is so-and-so doing?" And he would always measure it, it seemed to me, in a material sense. "Oh, he just got a new job. He's the new VP. They just took a trip to Europe." That was a big deal to us. We thought if you got to Toledo, that was big. But if you went to Europe, that was a big deal.
If you're somebody who doesn't get stewardship, you want to be rich, but it's the fourth thing, you avoid the implications of being rich. I didn't fully get this when I started teaching and spending time with believers. But they liked the idea of being identified as rich, but they resisted it in another way. And that was
Paul writes this in 1 Timothy 6:17: "Instruct those who are rich in this present world not to be conceited, nor fix their hope on the uncertainty of riches, but on God. Instruct them to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share." If I don't get stewardship, I want you to think I'm rich, but I don't want the adjoining responsibility.
The fifth thing is this: there's always a way to explain the plight of the poor. There's poor people, but it's all their fault. I remember Malcolm X said this: "You can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you don't have any bootstraps." About a third of all the bankruptcies in the country right now are health costs related. I'm having an ever increasing number of conversations with people who are my kid's age, a little bit older, around insurance and health costs and somebody gets sick and how catastrophic the nature of this is.
If I think I'm a self-made guy and I pull myself up by my own bootstraps, I assume anybody can. So you'll hear Rush Limbaugh say all the time, "Anybody can do anything if they put their mind to it. There's no excuse for that." Well, there's no excuse maybe, but there's lots of explanations.
You have a whole group now—the majority of kids—born into a situation where mom and dad, 7% I think was the last number I saw, 7% of kids are living with their biological parents if they're married biological parents. For years the fastest road to poverty was have a kid outside of marriage and don't graduate from high school. 7,000 kids a day drop out of high school. The demographic is huge here. We can explain why, but if I'm rich, I want to explain their problem away rather than to say, "No, God's called us to minister to that problem."
The Parable of the Faithful Manager
Luke chapter 12, Jesus tells a parable. Jesus tells approximately 32 parables. They're word pictures. When Jesus wants to drive home a point, He'll tell a story. Of the 32, half of them deal with stuff.
Interpreting parables is a dangerous business because they generally have one point, one big point. You may have a 1 and a 1a. You may have a subtle point. It gets dangerous when you take parables and try to make them say a bunch of stuff they don't. But this is somewhat self-explanatory.
"The Lord answered and said, 'Who then is the wise and faithful manager who the master puts in charge of his servants, to give them their food and allowance at the proper time? It'll be good for that servant, who the master finds doing so, when he returns. I tell you the truth. He will put him in charge of all his possessions. But suppose the servant says to himself, "My master is taking a long time in coming." And he then begins to beat his manservants and maidservants, and to eat and to drink and get drunk. The master of that servant, when he comes on a day when he does not expect him, and at an hour when he's not aware of, he'll cut him to pieces and assign him to a place with the unbelievers.'"
"'That servant, who knows his master's will and does not get ready, or does not do what the master wants, will be beaten with many blows. But the one who does not know, and does these things, deserves punishment, and will be beaten with a few blows.'" He gives us three different servants. One is totally disregarding what will go on, and there's extreme punishment. One seems to be slightly informed, but a little bit foggy, and he'll be beaten. One says, "I just didn't know," and he'll be punished too.
The one who does the things, here's what'll happen: "From everyone who's been given much, much will be demanded, and from the one who's been entrusted with much, much will be asked."
Key Points from the Parable
Number one: God is in the role of the master. God is the boss. The story has in it four slaves managers. The point is, you can't serve two masters. God is the master, and here's the second point: your role is that of manager. God's the owner, you're the manager. This is the point where the guy said to me, "If that's true, it changes everything."
If I reach into my pocket, I know I have money, and if I say to you, "Here's 50 bucks. I'm giving you this 50 bucks," and you go, "Wait, what's it for?" And I go, "I'm just giving it to you, do whatever you want with it," I've transferred possession and ownership to you. But if I say, "Here's 50 bucks," and you say, "What?" and I go, "I'm 65 nearing retirement, I'm looking for a return on this," your relationship with this 50 bucks is totally different.
You now have a fiduciary relationship. You don't own it. It's not yours to do whatever you want to do with it. You can't go down to Starbucks and buy three drinks and blow all 50 bucks. It's yours, but it's mine entrusted to you. When Rush Limbaugh says, "Talent on loan from God," he's nailed it. I'm sure he doesn't mean to, but he's nailed it.
Everything you have, you are in possession of, but you don't own. That's not your house, that's not your car. I've been teaching a lot lately on parenting. Those aren't your kids. They're God's kids entrusted to you. So your performance is going to be affected by your ability to get this insight.
Verse 42 speaks of the wise and faithful servant. When I understand this, I'm going to know the right thing to do, and hopefully, I'll be the one who's the responsible servant, and I will do it. In that whole package, you've got three servants. You've got one who's informed, and he's responsible, and he's promoted. One who is informed but was self-serving, he's demoted. I guess it's a demotion when you're cut to pieces. The third one's informed but irresponsible, there's discipline. And then there's one that's uninformed, there's light discipline.
We can get sidetracked in all that, but don't miss the big point. Which one of these guys do you want to be? You've now heard it. I don't think you can go out today unless you are really dumb. Unless you're wearing a big old block A on your cap. You can't walk out of here and say, "I don't know. I've never heard it." You've heard it now. Your time, your energy, your effort, your life is not yours, it's God's.
The Challenge of Time Stewardship
I can't help but be autobiographical. The money part of it, in a way, is kind of the easiest because it's so clear. But for me, it's the time thing that's the challenge. And I think as we get older, maybe time becomes even more precious. Some of you have a boatload of money, some of you have some money, some of you are wearing your net worth, and some of you are way in the hole. We're all over the map. But we all have 168 hours this week to invest.
How am I doing? I mean, it becomes very difficult for me. And as you get older, it becomes even more difficult, I think. J.I. Packer, who we love, or I love to read, many of you do, and know him especially for his classic work, "Knowing God," has written a book about this thick. I always think of that. One day, they were interviewing Charles when he was playing with the Suns. And they said, "When you go on a road trip, do you take money with you?" And he said, "Yes." And they said, "How much?" And he said, "About this much."
So whenever I do that, I always think the book was about this thick. It's about 80, 90 pages of J.I. Packer. One of the points he makes over and over again is, as you age, the reality is there's a physical diminishing of your skills.
The Pressure of Aging and Expectations
That's one of the things that I speak to most of you as a fellow aging person. That's why I resent the snot out of the fact that they take George Bush skydiving when he turns 90. He's not skydiving. They duct tape him to a Ranger, and he jumps out of a plane. He's not skydiving. I mean, this sounds really harsh, but I want you to see the damage. He can't even walk to the plane. He can't walk down and get the mail. He's in a wheelchair. But they do this, "He's skydiving." He doesn't skydive.
And then that becomes the barometer that, boy, if you're 90 and you skydive, that's really significant. I didn't want to skydive when I was 30. I don't want to skydive when I'm 90. I'm in better shape than he is. And that's not a shot at him. It's a shot at how they post up, "Oh, he plays 18 holes of golf five days a week." The word in there that's a dangerous word is "still." Implication is he's still active. And if you're not still doing that, you don't have value.
I must have a lot of hostility in me today. But I'm overreacting to the fact that I can't do that. And so here's what I want you to feel. At least I feel this pressure. I want you to feel it. I can't do all the things I used to do. But I have to be careful to make sure I don't just waste the whole day. I need to be engaged. I'll be judged not for how I handled my time when I was 25 or 45, but how I handled it at 65 or 85. And I'm a steward of all of that.
The Standard of Accountability
It's verse 43, and you're going to be evaluated. You don't operate independently. There's a standard. God will judge you. And He said, "I'll tell you the truth. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded. And from the one who's been entrusted with much, much more will be asked." Faithful in little things, He said, and I will give you bigger things.
Now here's what I don't think that means. It doesn't mean if I give you $1,000 and you steward it well, I'll give you $10,000. It means if you're faithful in something, I will expand that area, which frankly throws more pressure on you to be faithful. And I really, again, if it's a cathartic event, I apologize. But I really feel the tension of this in all the areas of my life.
A Personal Confession About Time
To not just, for me, here's me. Sandy comes to PL at noon. She's got meetings afterwards. I'll go home. I can tell you what's going to happen. I'll walk in the door, and the first thing I'll do is get a bottle of water and a pair of pliers and open the water. And then I'll turn on the TV. This might strike you as odd. I'll then try to dress comfortable. I'll put on my favorite pants and my shirt, and I will sit there.
It'll be about 2 o'clock, so "The Five" will be coming on. I'll wait to see if Dana Perino is on. I'll watch her. I'll flip over at 2:30, and I can get part of "The Ingraham Angle." I mean, now we're, and the first ladies' major starts today, so I want to see how Lydia Ko's playing. And before I know it, it's 5 o'clock. Three hours. Three hours gone on stuff that doesn't matter a lick. And God holds me responsible for that. My time, my energy, my effort.
The boys have a game tonight, so that starts at 5:30, so I have to go to that. When I say "have to," it is an obligation. It's a responsibility. It matters to them. The minute we walk into the park and they make eye contact, I'll never forget. I learned so much. First, Braden's first at bat when he was 5. I think it was t-ball. Hit a ground
ball, got the first. He got the first and literally looked over and said, "Did you see that?" And he was talking to Susan. "Nana, did you see that?" I mean, all this stuff matters. And so you should conduct yourself like a manager, not an owner.
Let me give you five practical things, and they really are practical. Number one, determine who owns what you have. That's that declaration right now. When I, and the language breaks down and you'll go nutty trying to make it correct, so I don't spend that time. It's that I know it. When I reach into my pocket and pull out my money, it's not really my pocket or my money. It's God's money in God's pocket that He's loaned to me.
Discovering God's Agenda for Your Assets
Here's the second thing. Discover God's agenda for your assets. When Sandy and I got married, one of the things we had to do was to sit down and figure out an estate plan and will and all this stuff. And the guy we used was fabulous. He asked us a ton of questions. "OK, now you have Sandy, you have a daughter, and Tom, you have two daughters. Are we going to treat all three of these girls equally? How are we going to respond with this? How do you want to distribute this? What about this? Tom, in the unlikely event that she outlives you, meaning to the end of the day, how do you want to distribute these? What do you want to do? Have you thought about this? What's your goal?" As you begin to figure out how you disperse these and how you do them, not just on a regular basis, but in the ultimate big closing of the books, what are your goals for this? Well, he needed to know our agenda. What's important to you?
Now, you need to go in to say, "OK, if you're a manager, you need to figure out what's God's agenda for His assets." And I can tell you overarching, what's important to Him are people and His word. And that's going to take place, a lot of it, where God's people hang out in church.
So a church ought to be something, I mean in this day and age when almost nobody talks about it, you should be committed to a local church. Many of you have two, three, four churches. You need to figure out which one's your church. And if you don't know, here's the question. If you have a grandkid who gets killed today, who are you going to call? And whoever you call, that's your church. That's where your heart went right away. And so you throw your resources there.
It's not exclusive. There's so many organizations: Christian Family Care, Crisis Pregnancy Center, I love Young Life. There's all sorts of organizations, Habitat for Humanity, whatever they are, but you have to distribute God's assets, your time, energy, effort, money, and those. What's His agenda?
Putting a Lid on Your Dreams
Here's the third thing, and if it's too late for you, meaning you've already figured this out, make sure you get this to your descendants, to your sphere of influence, to the people at the Camelback Society, to the young men. I had a guy, a guy came up to me the other day, and he's 35, and he said, "I haven't seen you in a long time. We moved to the other side of town. I don't ever see you. But I want you to know, almost every week, I'll think of something you said," which is the coolest thing in the world, okay? And I said, "Well, is there any one in particular?" Figured, we'll see if he knows any. And he said, "Yeah, put a lid on your dreams."
Here's what "put a lid on your dreams" is. Put a lid on your dreams is to say, enough is enough. There has to be that grab it, because there's no end to this. You're Tom Brady, and you just won a Super Bowl, but I mean, right away, they're gonna, deflated balls, they didn't do this. We don't know if we're gonna count that one. You know, is he gonna come back again? What's he gonna do there? You go into the office, you close the biggest deal in the history of the office. I mean, they'll, you know, get you a cake and brownies, and you can go down, and happy hour, and buy for everybody else since you closed it. But I'm telling you, tomorrow, they want to know what you're gonna, they're gonna call you in, and they're gonna say, "We want to congratulate you. Good, thank you. And we know that was really great. You worked hard, thank you. What are you working on now?" Okay, there's no end to that list.
So in staff, I walked, I'm trying to think where I was yesterday. Oh, I ate lunch at Karsten. And I'm walking in, and on the door is a Ping, whatever the new one is, G30, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I'm walking in looking for the club. I can't even play. I can't hold the driver. But I needed that driver so bad. I'm playing with a, they're a G30, and I'm playing with a G5. I'm 25 Gs behind already on this stuff. But it's no end, right? It just keeps coming. And if you don't define how much is enough, inertia is gonna pull you into a place you don't want to go.
So in the old days, I used to go to Vegas a lot. And we're on a plane going up. I got a buddy. He says, "When I lose five grand, I'm quitting." So some of you have done that. You go to Vegas, and you take $100, if you're smart, for a cab, and you hide it somewhere, which isn't really hidden, because you know where it is, okay? But you put that away, and you go, "When I lose five grand, or 50 grand, or 500, doesn't matter, whatever your number is. When I lose five grand, I'll quit."
I go by the crap table, I don't play craps. I go by the crap table, he's throwing, they're yelling, he's got chips in front of Him. I said, "What's going on?" He said, "I'm up 10 grand." I said, "That's awesome, good going." I see Him like five hours later, and He says to me, "Can I borrow five bucks?" I said, "Really?" I said, "Yeah, I gotta get some gum out of the gift shop and some other stuff." And He said, "You were up 10 grand." And He said, "Yeah, well, it didn't end that way."
Now, here's what I want you to see. This is a great life lesson. If I'm the plane, I would have said to Him, "If you won 10 grand, would you be happy?" He would have said, "I'd have been elated." Never won 10 grand, and He's not gonna win 10 grand. Why? He's got a goal.
What's his goal? Lose 5,000. He's going to play till he gets there, as hard as it may be. He's going to play and play and play and throw and throw and throw until he loses the five grand.
This is what can happen so often in life. You have what you rationally would declare would satisfy you, and you get it, but because it's not defined, you keep playing till you're miserable. Every person in here at this point has had that moment in their life where they moved into the house. It was the house. We could die in this house. We're the happiest in this house. Oh, my gosh. We got an extra bedroom for our kids.
This is the one that always kills me. We got a running ramp for our dog. We could be here the rest of our life. And two years later, you're moving. Why? You made some extra money. Up we go, because that's what you do when you make more dough. Now, this may not connect with you at a gut level, but you may have already been through this, but there's some equivalent in your life of that. And if not, you own it and believe it, pass it on to the people around you.
Put Accountability in Your System
Here's the fourth thing. Put accountability in your system. This is really hard to do. If you're married, it ought to come naturally in the course of a dialogue. Sandy and I, the getting married thing is a tricky thing the second time. It's a tricky thing the first time. It's a tricky thing the third time. But it's tricky.
I love her pretty fast. She loves me pretty fast. And so we're in love pretty fast. And you're moving down this road, and what happened for us, God is so good. He put us together with essentially the same values and personality. And so we don't spend much money. I don't spend money on clothes, obviously. We don't spend a lot on cars.
We spend our money mostly eating out, which has become very difficult to do because there's no place to eat. If you know a restaurant that doesn't serve kale, email me, and I'm ready to go. I don't want a kale burger. I don't want quinoa. I said to somebody the other day, can we just go to Durant's? Let's just go to Durant's. We don't even have to order anything. Let's sit at the bar and get a Pepsi, and I don't have metallic stuff around me everywhere. I'm so sick of spending all this money.
Anyway, so we'll do that. I spend money on running shoes because Sandy needs them, and a few things like that. But what's happened to us money-wise is, the other day I went in, took my car to get the oil changed, which is dangerous. Because I know, I know, and I get a voicemail from the mechanic, Anthony, but I couldn't hear what He's saying, so I get over and I think, all right, new transmission, but I needed new brakes, and I text Sandy, and I said, hey, I'm going to need new brakes, you know, whatever it was, 350 bucks or whatever.
And so there's that. You have to hold each other accountable. And I will tell you men, you tend to be the budget busters more than the gals. They'll bust it for a dress, you bust it for a boat. But you need to hold each other accountable in these areas.
Be a Giver According to God's Investment Plan
And then the last thing is, you need to be a giver. And you need to be a giver in line with God's investment plan. If I gave you a bunch of money as my financial planner, and you spent it in alignment with your investment desires, not mine, you'd be an embezzler.
I'm not standing before God. Let me tell you what makes this really difficult. There isn't a singular answer here. So one of you, or one of you as a couple, are going to say, I'm going to do this. And somebody else is saying, I'm going to do this. And you now debate each other.
It doesn't matter. God's not going to judge me on how you spend your time, energy, effort, money. He's going to judge me on how I spend my time, energy, effort, money. If there was ever a time when you say, get the log out of your eye, this is the time. And it's really serious.
Time, energy, effort, money transfers possession to you, but not ownership.
Closing Prayer
Let's pray. Father, thank you for this. I know this truth, and I know how hard it is. There's no question in my mind from what we read that this is your stuff. It's your gift to me of life, and you transfer possession to me, but not ownership to me.
God, I pray that you would help me understand that and live a life that reflects it, that it's your time, your energy, your effort, that this is your money. And it's not just give you a minimum contribution. God, help me grapple with that big question. Grapple with that big question. Not how much to give you, but how much of yours should I keep?
Father, what a weekend for us in the church community. Tomorrow night to be able to commemorate the death of your son, Jesus, the purchasing of our salvation on the cross, and on Sunday, the resurrection. Your amen to His, it is finished. What an amazing event.
God, for some of us, myself included, it's been now 35 Good Fridays and Sunday mornings as a believer. Father, let me have the excitement and the vigor, the reality that it was that very first Easter that I experienced as a believer. God, help us all to stew our heart and mind toward you, especially not just today and this weekend, every day, but especially this weekend. We ask it of you in Christ's name, amen.