Great news: As of today we’re over halfway to our mid-year goal of $40,000! Will you prayerfully consider joining our mid-year appeal with a gift? Thanks to a generous challenge from the Ortner Family Foundation, your mid-year gift will be doubled. And with your monthly gift of $10-$49, you’ll receive a beautiful Trinity House Cafe handmade pottery mug. With a monthly gift of $50 or more, you’ll receive a mug as well as a signed and dedicated copy of our new book, Heaven in Your Home Letters & Guide! Please consider partnering with Trinity House with your gift today!  

All That I Have Is Yours 

When you hear the word “stewardship,” do you tense up? Is there conflict in your heart between what God or the Church might ask of you and what you feel you have to give? Do you have misgivings about where you are allocating the “talents” or resources God has given you?

Deep down, we all want to be the servant who invests wisely, making a good return for our Master, rather than the one who misallocates what has been given. But even though our ideal is to be the “good and faithful servant,” we struggle to make the right decisions with our resources.

This question of good stewardship—the proper allocation of resources toward the greatest good—is at the heart of Level 3 of a Trinity House, Household Economy, our focus with you in the 3rd week of each month. Why is it so difficult to invest our “time, talent, and treasure” toward God’s will for our home, family, and community, his will that we know will result in repairing the damage done by sin and building up God’s kingdom on earth?

It’s so difficult because the world and our own fallen nature tend to operate on a principle that is opposed to good stewardship. Instead of allocating our resources toward God’s will, we tend to want to direct them in a way that will increase ourselves—our comfort, our satisfaction, or our image in the eyes of the world. We want to spend our time, talent, and treasure on ourselves every time.

But when we mainly allocate our resources to growing what author David Brooks calls the Big Me, we eventually realize that those choices don’t lead to happiness. No matter how we try to assuage our sense of how we should experience our days or how we should look or what we should achieve, the results never satisfy. Hopefully, once we’ve hit that wall over and over again, we might come to really contend with how to spend ourselves.

This subject has been nothing short of a monumental struggle for us. Individually and as a couple, we’re both driven to misallocate everything we’ve got toward ourselves. In our life, this drive toward the Big Me is somewhat obfuscated by the fact that we are in ministry, but anyone with experience knows that even ministry can become a form of self-aggrandizement.

Over and over again, we’ve seen how we must turn to the concept of good stewardship to gauge whether the decisions we make—with our scheduling and how we spend our time, with our charisms and what we do with them, with our money and how we spend it—are really contributing to the greater good or just to a greater sense of self. Is our home really a Trinity House, a place where each learns to put the other first, or just a facade where each allows the other to vaunt the self? 

Here are three practical ways to take your posture towards stewardship to the next level: 

• Spend time prayerfully reflecting on biblical teachings on stewardship (here’s a compilation). Reflecting on these passages can allow us to gradually move toward a commitment to good stewardship, based on the recognition that everything we have is God’s.
• Review your budget and take one small step of faith in the direction of more radical charitable giving. 
• Give your children a “Stewardship 101” overview. The best way to reinforce what we believe is by teaching it, and these family conversations can begin to change the tide — away from the “Big Me” and toward a heart of generosity.  

If you’ve already made these shifts in your own heart and daily life, thank God. But if not, take a small step this week, asking the Lord to change the way you make decisions about your resources. We are still doing this ourselves, to say the least. Sometimes we feel we are in an endless loop of asking the Lord for this type of transformation!
 
Soon, we pray along with so many Christians, we won’t have to tense up when we hear the word “stewardship.” Instead, we can smile and give thanks to the Lord who chose us, made us His adopted children, and entrusted us as His stewards. In the end, there will be nothing to be defensive about—we will be truly good stewards of our time, talent, and treasure. Lord, help us to move away from the world’s “mine” mentality and toward what will truly make us happy!

This post is adapted from an earlier post from September of 2020.