Undying Commitment: A 14-day Study in StewardshipНамуна

Master or Mastered?

It's impossible to exaggerate the Lord's claim on 'our' possessions and lives. The truth is that we possess precisely! nothing - not even our selves. Creation belongs to God; there was, after all, nothing here beforehand. Yet in generosity God has chosen to entrust to us the joyous responsibility of cultivating and caring for the world - and beyond, as we venture beyond planet Earth - as his stewards.

Nehemiah 9:15-35, the heart of this passage, contrasts various episodes of disobedience and rebellion from Israel's history to God's steadfast love, compassion, discipline, grace and generosity. One theme that emerges is this: whenever God's people have experienced peace and prosperity, they have become self-sufficient and have begun to wander from God.

Money can make us feel invincible. Consider Pharaoh, who mockingly asked Moses, 'Who is the Lord, that I should obey him?' (Ex 5:2; cf. Pr 30:8-9). Or take the nation of Israel - who 'grew fat and kicked; filled with food he became heavy and sleek. He abandoned the God who made him and rejected the Rock of his Savior' (Dt 32:15).
A reflection made in 1918 by stewardship writer David McConaughy still rings true today:

Money, most common of temporal things, involves uncommon and eternal consequences. Even though it may be done quite unconsciously, money molds people - in the process of getting it, of saving it, of using it, of giving it, of accounting for it. Depending upon how it is handled, it proves a blessing or a curse to its possessor; either the person becomes master of the money, or the money becomes master of the person.

Our Lord takes money, the thinking that, essential though it is to our common life, sometimes seems so sordid, and he makes it a touchstone to test the lives of people and an instrument of molding them into the likeness of himself.

Augustine (354-430), an early church father, speaks more pointedly:

The devil! would not have ensnared man in the open manifest sin of doing what God had forbidden, had man not already begun to live for himself. It was this that made him listen with pleasure to the words, 'you will be like God,' which they would much more readily have accomplished by obediently adhering to their supreme and true end than by proudly living to themselves. For created gods are gods not by virtue of what is in themselves, but by participation of the true God. By craving to be more, man becomes less; and by aspiring to be self-sufficing, he fell away from him who truly suffices.