Stewardship Defined
- the office, duties, and obligations of a steward.
- the conducting, supervising, or managing of something especially the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care.
Steward is a noun as a Title or description for a person. Then the activity that the Title represents would be stewardship. While this seems obvious most titles are assigned to us by our education, occupation, or calling in life. The definition of stewardship helps us understand a little better how this is different.
If Stewardship is the “careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care,” then to be considered a Steward one would have to be given something of value to care for and maintain. Each of us is then given life by God are stewards of the life and purpose He has blessed us with. As a Steward, we are “Accountable” for our lives and how faithful we are with the resources He has blessed us with.
We don’t have an intuitive nature for accountability. As young adults, we seek to avoid it and often put forth more effort to avoid it than it would have taken to just do what God purposed us to do in the first place. As we grow older we get smarter and learn how to transfer our accountability onto someone else and make our sins their fault.
In Genesis 3:12-13 we see the original sin also came with the human nature to blame someone else for our transgressions and we simply rationalize that it’s not our fault. Adam told God it was the woman that God gave him who was at fault and Eve said it was the serpent’s fault because he was able to deceive her.
Let’s go back to our definition of Stewardship – “careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care.”
If we are given something to care for then we ultimately must realize that we are not the owners. God is the owner and has entrusted to us this earth, our time, our money, our energy and our talent to be used in a way that would be pleasing to Him as the owner of it all. Our first step in stewardship is to acknowledge that we own nothing, and everything is God’s that he has entrusted us to care for in our lives.
May this thought be our focus as we start this series on Harvest and Stewardship.
The following scriptures may also be helpful in centering our focus on our creator and owner:
Psalm 24:1, Job 41:11, Exodus 19:5, Psalm 50:10, Haggai 2:8.
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