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Stewardship

“Then someone called from the crowd, “Teacher, please tell my brother to divide our father’s estate with me.”” Luke 12:13 (NLT) 
 
          This man connects to a universal human impulse—the desire for justice. Jesus responds to the man’s demand by questioning his motives. Is greed or justice behind the demand?
          Here Jesus uses a story to answer the man’s question. First you have a rich man…in a society where the rich are the recipients of God’s blessing. But the man doesn’t see his wealth as a blessing—it is a problem to be addressed: ‘What am I to do with all this extra grain? I’ll build bigger barns.’
          He doesn’t see himself as a steward of what God has given him—‘what does God want me to do with this excess?’ Instead, he sees himself as self-made. He earned it. He can decide how use it. He has a problem, not an opportunity. He presumes to be in control.
          The crops seem more than sufficient for he and his family. He never thinks of the poor as a ‘solution’. He never even consults another person. He is the god of his own world.
          This is the greedy man. Aristotle once remarked that the surest way to destroy someone was to give the person his own way. If there is no God, then there will be no accounting when we die. We can build bigger barns, feed our greed and be selfish and self-determined and then die, and that would be it. But if God exists, then He says there will be an accounting. And anyone who in their greed only stores up treasures in this life and has no eternal bank account will find themselves bankrupt in the life to come.
           All that we have belongs to God. Let’s honor Him by how we handle it.
-Pastor Dino Griffin