Whose Money Is It Anyway? (Part 1–Stewardship)

Whoever can be trusted with small things can also be trusted with big things. Whoever is dishonest in little things will be dishonest in big things too. If you cannot be trusted with worldly riches, you will not be trusted with the true riches. And if you cannot be trusted with the things that belong to someone else, you will not be given anything of your own. Luke 16:10-12 (ERV)

Take a moment to consider this question: What do you have that wasn’t given to you?

We use words like “earn” and “create” to maintain the illusion that we alone are responsible for everything that we have. However, if these things were really ours, then we couldn’t lose them, could we?

Sure, we work for our money, but then someone else has to give it to us. Then either we give it away to someone else by spending it, or we hold onto it forever and die, at which point we don’t take it with us. There’s a reason you don’t see hearses towing U-hauls!

So if it’s not really “our” money, then whose is it? King David answered that question emphatically after taking the offering to build the temple in Jerusalem:

To you, Lord, belong greatness and power,
honor, splendor, and majesty,
because everything in heaven and on earth belongs to you.
Yours, Lord, is the kingship,
and you are honored as head of all.
You are the source of wealth and honor,
and you rule over all.
In your hand are strength and might,
and it is in your power to magnify and strengthen all.

(1 Chronicles 29:11-12 CEB)

Everything in heaven and earth (yes, even the money) belongs to God. Therefore, we don’t really “own” anything. Rather, we are stewards of everything currently in our possession.

Simply put, a steward is someone who is placed in charge of someone else’s stuff. The principle at work here is that at some point, the steward will have to give account of how he or she has managed the property belonging to the Master. A steward that proves faithful is rewarded, but those who aren’t . . . not so much.

You see, how we handle money is an indicator of how we will steward all of the other blessings in our life. Money is just the easiest one to track. So how do you track this in your own life?

The best way to gauge that for yourself is to figure out who it is that you really serve. Are you putting your trust in the provider or the provision? As Jesus said in the verse that comes right after the passage at the top of this post:

You cannot serve two masters at the same time. You will hate one master and love the other. Or you will be loyal to one and not care about the other. You cannot serve God and Money at the same time. (Luke 16:13 ERV)

If you are primarily interested in serving God by stewarding HIS wealth, then your needs will always be met.

However, if your hope is in the money itself, then you are setting yourself up for disappointment.

(Come back for Part 2—Another Day Older and Deeper in Debt)

DN=: Part 14–Equal Opportunity

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . .

(Declaration of Independence)

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

(George Orwell—Animal Farm)

“Equal opportunity” is another way of saying that everyone has the same chance to succeed or fail.

However, instead of designating an equal chance at success or failure, “equal opportunity” has become synonymous in our culture with entitlement. Success is now assumed, and if a person does not succeed, well then that person has been denied “equal opportunity.”

But if equal opportunity in the true sense means the same as fair play and justice, then it would make sense that everyone already HAS equal opportunity. If justice is universal, then so is opportunity.

Oh, but wait a minute. Justice also means getting what we deserve. So we have equal opportunity to make our own choices, but we also have equal responsibility to own the consequences of those choices. Sometimes, those consequences are not favorable.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY DN= EQUAL RESULTS

So it should be plain by now that the “=”movement is not really about equal opportunity at all. What the “=” community is really after is a life and a world that is free from consequences.

The irony is that if the “=” community actually got what it wanted, then it would be UN-equal, since having freedom from consequences would set it apart from the justice that everyone else would receive from making the wrong choice.

“=” DN= EQUAL

Let me pause for a moment here, because I know a lot of you are wondering: “Why does he keep saying ‘the “=” community,’ when he’s obviously talking about the LGBT community?”

The answer is that gay marriage isn’t the real issue here. Sure, the media and our politicians would like to make it the issue, but in the big picture, it all comes back to a problem that plagues everyone, gay or straight—self-righteousness.

Paul makes it clear in his letter to the Romans that homosexuality is not the disease, but merely one of many symptoms:

What happened was this: People knew God perfectly well, but when they didn’t treat him like God, refusing to worship him, they trivialized themselves into silliness and confusion so that there was neither sense nor direction left in their lives. They pretended to know it all, but were illiterate regarding life.

Worse followed. Refusing to know God, they soon didn’t know how to be human either—women didn’t know how to be women, men didn’t know how to be men. Sexually confused, they abused and defiled one another, women with women, men with men—all lust, no love. And then they paid for it, oh, how they paid for it—emptied of God and love, godless and loveless wretches.

Since they didn’t bother to acknowledge God, God quit bothering them and let them run loose. And then all hell broke loose: rampant evil, grabbing and grasping, vicious backstabbing. They made life hell on earth with their envy, wanton killing, bickering, and cheating. Look at them: mean-spirited, venomous, fork-tongued God-bashers. Bullies, swaggerers, insufferable windbags! They keep inventing new ways of wrecking lives. They ditch their parents when they get in the way. Stupid, slimy, cruel, cold-blooded. And it’s not as if they don’t know better. They know perfectly well they’re spitting in God’s face. And they don’t care—worse, they hand out prizes to those who do the worst things best! (Romans 1:21-22, 26-32 The Message)

Now that sounds awfully harsh, particularly in the Message paraphrase, but can you deny the reality of that in 21^st-century America?

One of the saddest things that I have yet seen is when churches water down or discard this message. It is not a church’s job to provide a safe space for sinners of any kind to come together and “be who they are.” A church’s function is to bring people together to find out who they are in Christ.

Faith in Christ Jesus is what makes each of you equal with each other, whether you are a Jew or a Greek, a slave or a free person, a man or a woman. (Galatians 3:28 CEV)

That’s right. The Truth is that we all have an equal opportunity to be equal in Christ. We have always had it and always will.

Sounds simple enough, but ah, there’s that pride thing getting in the way again. The problem with this simple solution is that it involves surrendering your will, and it is not in our nature to want to do that.

So what is left then for those whose pride prevents them from humbling themselves before God and admitting their failure?

They find someone else to attack.

Christians.

Since there is no Truth or common sense in their argument, based as it is upon their own self-righteousness, then the only avenue left to them is to tear down Truthseekers in order to maintain their perception of superiority.

And since PC code words are their forte, they have come up with the ultimate man-made nonsense word.

(And for that, you’ll have to come back for Part 15)

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DN=: Part 12–Civil Liberties

“I have the right to do anything,” you say—but not everything is beneficial. “I have the right to do anything”—but I will not be mastered by anything. (1 Corinthians 6:12 NIV)

I’m free to choose who I see any old time

I’m free to bring who I choose any old time

Love me hold me love me hold me

I’m free any old time to get what I want

“I’m Free” Mick Jagger/Keith Richards

One of the main functions of a father is to establish and enforce boundaries for his children. The intent of setting these boundaries is to protect his children, because he knows more than they do.

There is no condemnation in this, only a sense of love and protection. The child picks up on this, and remains content within the security of the boundary.

Now if an earthly father can manage to set healthy boundaries in love, how much more effective and useful are our heavenly Father’s boundaries! Would it not stand to reason that an omniscient God, who knows every possible outcome of every possible choice we could make, would know what’s good for us and what isn’t?

The most obvious example of this is the 10 Commandments. A lot of people are put off by them because of the “Thou shalt not” tone that most of them have. So why would a loving Father God put such restrictions on the freedom of His children?

One word—consequences.

LIBERTY DN= FREEDOM FROM CONSEQUENCES

Some consequences of violating God’s boundaries are obvious. Take for example “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” If you break that commandment, the most obvious and immediate consequence is generally the breakup of a marriage.

Long-term and indirect consequences are difficult to predict, however. We can’t know for certain how young children will be affected by the divorce—how they will cope with the sense of loss, how they will develop socially as they grow, what baggage they might carry into their future relationships and marriages.

God sees every potential negative consequence, and wants to protect us from them. Nevertheless, our nature instinctively reacts to any kind of boundary as a restriction on our freedom. Christian or not, nobody likes being told what to do, or to have their “freedom of choice” taken away.

But when you stop to think about it, this is a ridiculous notion. NOBODY can take away your freedom of choice, not even God. He’s the one who gave it to you in the first place.

Boundaries

God doesn’t set boundaries to take away our choice. He places them there to assist us in making the right choice, because he knows which choices will have good consequences and which will have bad consequences.

However, somewhere along the line our culture developed a callous disregard for sin, or crossing God’s boundary lines, and its consequences. Our culture has been brainwashed to believe that God’s boundaries, as set forth in the Bible, are out of date and out of touch with progress.

Since the Bible is God’s Word, and therefore our most definitive written source of Truth, this Truth gets dismissed along with the Bible. Inside this moral vacuum, people get the idea that they can create their own truth—a moving target that is relative to whatever suits their whims at any given moment—and anything contrary to that amorphous worldview then becomes a violation of their civil liberties.

Only here’s the problem. Since Truth is universal, and it’s found in the same place where God’s “restrictive” boundaries are, then it would follow that the consequences of crossing those boundaries are also universal.

The consequence of mentally turning sin into civil liberties is that to do so, the concept of civil responsibility is totally abandoned. You can’t be “free to do what you want any old time” and be your brother’s keeper at the same time.

Fortunately, God has a way of evening things out.

(To find out how, come back for Part 13–Fair Play)

DN=: Part 5–Discrimination

Discernment is the divine enablement to distinguish between truth and error, good and evil, right and wrong. A person with this gift can differentiate pure from impure motives, identify deception in others, determine authenticity of messages from God, recognize false teaching and sense the presence of evil. (Paraphrased from “Network” by Bruce Bugbee and Don Cousins.)

In other words, discernment is God’s B.S. detector.

Have you ever known someone who accurately saw something fake or sinister in a person’s character before anyone else did? Have you ever had a friend who told you what you were thinking when you couldn’t even explain it yourself? This is discernment at work.

(Remember back at the beginning of this series when I talked about people talking in code? I didn’t forget about that. From here on out, we’re going to defuse political correctness one code-bomb at a time.)

Another word with a meaning similar to discernment, in the literal sense of having the ability to distinguish differences, is discrimination.

While discernment is a spiritual gift, given by God to whomever He chooses, discrimination is a natural skill that can be learned and developed by anybody through careful observation and judicious contemplation.

It would seem, then, that discrimination should actually be a positive thing, since being UN-able to recognize differences would be a sign of a lack of intelligence or observance.

Nevertheless, this word has gradually become associated with “bigotry,” even though those two words really aren’t connected.

DISCRIMINATION DN= BIGOTRY

There’s a big difference between distinguishing the differences in people and treating people differently. Paul wrote:

In Christ’s family there can be no division into Jew and non-Jew, slave and free, male and female. Among us you are all equal. That is, we are all in a common relationship with Jesus Christ. (Galatians 3:28 MSG)

And also:

[In this new creation all distinctions vanish.] There is no room for and there can be neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, [nor difference between nations whether alien] barbarians or Scythians [who are the most savage of all], nor slave or free man; but Christ is all and in all, everything and everywhere, to all men, without distinction of person]. (Colossians 3:11 AMP)

In making these statements, Paul is instructing these early churches that although the Church is made up of all kinds of different people from different backgrounds, it is much more significant that Christ is our common ground. Being the original Truthseeker, Paul discriminates by noting the differences, but does not show favoritism, because Christ does not show favoritism.

Looking at it this way, we can clearly see that bigotry is defined by emphasizing differences with the motive of boosting one’s own status over that of another based solely upon those differences. Bigotry may START with discrimination, but it ends somewhere else entirely.

So how do you know when you’ve crossed the line?

Labels

Whenever you refer to another person with a label instead of their name, that’s a pretty clear sign that you are crossing over to the dark side of discrimination, because you are now seeing that person not as an individual, but as part of a subset of humanity, most likely one to which you do not belong yourself.

Once you have identified the difference and affixed a label to it, the emphasis of that difference comes naturally. From there, it’s a very short walk to bigotry, simply because our human nature is to justify ourselves, and the easiest way to do that is to lower our view of others. Labels just streamline that process.

So how does discernment fit into this?

From the definitions we have already discussed, discernment is essentially God-level discrimination. But since we have already seen that God sees all of His followers as equal in Christ, then it should be obvious that the purpose of discernment is not to enable bigotry by labeling humans and dividing them into groups.

Discernment is not about judging character or outward appearances, but rather motives and the behavior that arises from them. Which leads me to my next DN=.

(Come back for Part 6–Judgmental)

Deliverance

No, not THAT kind of Deliverance!

(Yeah, that’s more like it.)

Have you ever found yourself in a situation that seemed hopeless? Did you pray to God for deliverance? I have found myself in that place on numerous occasions.

God always answers prayers for deliverance, but sometimes it’s not the answer we were expecting. We have a tendency to treat God like an ATM—swipe our prayer card, and out come the blessings.

But sometimes the answer is “no.” And sometimes it’s “not yet.” And sometimes, it’s “Yes, but not the way you’re thinking.”

God wants us to live life to the full; however, He is always more interested in our holiness than our happiness. We would love for our deliverance from trials and tribulations to be as quick and painless as possible.

But more often than not, God’s plan is to deliver us through the trial, rather than from it. And painless isn’t always part of the plan. In fact, sometimes the pain is the plan.

The trials we undergo may seem like the end of the world while they’re happening, and yet, we always come out the other side, maybe not totally unscathed, but still standing nonetheless. We may have some scar tissue, but we also frequently have a sense of liberation. We got THROUGH this! And it didn’t kill us!

Here’s the thing about deliverance though. The process of being delivered through a trial is supposed to be a lesson about reliance on God’s strength when our own is failing.

After all, why did we cry out to Him in the first place? Because we knew that we were at the end of ourselves and it was only His strength that could deliver us.

So naturally, what do we do first when the next trial comes along? That’s right, we try to fix our own problems and rely on our own strength. Again. Although we know we should never take God’s deliverance for granted, we do it anyway, because it is in our nature to forget things like that.

Fortunately God, who knows us better than we know ourselves, anticipates this, and is always there to pick up the pieces AGAIN (and again, and again). What a great thing it is to know that we can always fall back on His patience and mercy!

Still, I think we ought to make more of an intentional effort to remember why God delivers us in the first place—because He is with us, and He is for us. If He was in our corner the last time we had a problem, and we know that He doesn’t change, then it makes sense that He will go to bat for us again the next time we have a problem.

So instead of having a high-speed come-apart the next time life beats us down or backs us up against the wall, we should approach our trial with confidence, knowing that we will be delivered, and that we won’t have to rely on our own strength to get it done.