Stewardship Articles

The earth is the LORD’s, and all it contains, The world, and all those who dwell in it.

-Psalm 24:1

Biblical Stewardship – or Whole-Life Stewardship – is a biblical concept that will transform your life as a Christ follower. When you embrace that God is the owner of all things, that we are His stewards, and that His agenda is the only agenda, your journey as a biblical steward will flourish.

Categories

Personal Growth

As stewards (managers) of God’s possessions and not owners, Christians are called to use God’s vast resources not just for their personal consumption, but also to advance God’s Kingdom and to bless and serve others. In this section, you can begin your journey of discovery through articles that will challenge your perspective on “ownership.”

Life Purpose and Legacy

Have you ever asked yourself, “Why am I here?” Articles in this section will open your eyes to a life of meaning and purpose as you seek to make much of God in every area of life.
  • Casting a Shadow Beyond the Grave What are you doing with your life and resources to cast a shadow that will stretch beyond your grave? Keep in mind, you will not be remembered by what you have kept for yourself. You will be remembered by what you have given to others!
  • Discovering Your Fire Within A multimillionaire said some years ago — after spending a lifetime dedicated to climbing the ladder of success — that once he had finally reached the top he discovered, to his bitter disappointment, “the ladder was leaning against the wrong wall.” Have you discovered your God-given passion, your “fire within”?
  • What is Your Life Purpose? Answering the question, “What is my life purpose?” and then committing it to writing is the first step in developing your strategic stewardship plan. Once you have answered this most fundamental question, all the other questions regarding things like your lifestyle, your values, or your legacy, will be answered quickly and easily.

Lifestyle Challenges

Do you long to experience “life to the full”, yet find yourself wandering through a modern day materialistic desert? These articles will help you look at stewardship as a lifestyle – your time, your treasure, your talents, even relationships and priorities are issues of stewardship.

  • Are You Living Like a Bucket or a Pipe? Are you living like a bucket or a pipe? A bucket is designed to hold things. A pipe is designed to convey things through it. The bucket holds what it receives, while the pipe passes on what it receives. In regard to the material possessions God has entrusted to you, are you living like a bucket or a pipe?
  • Getting Comfortable With Your Wealth This article addresses three under-developed aspects of material wealth that commonly hinder rich Christians from fully maximizing their life-capacity and achieving the greatest possible Kingdom impact with all they are and have: becoming spiritually comfortable, socially comfortable, and strategically comfortable with wealth.
  • The Greatest Gift You Have to Give What Jesus wants most from you, is you! This article reveals that the greatest charitable gift you have to give is yourself! Why not commit to make a gift of yourself to our King and to some worthy Kingdom cause that you can spend yourself on? You will, without a doubt, be all the richer for it.

Spiritual Challenges

Discover a “spiritually healthy love” for the world through articles that will help you to see that material possessions are a means to an end – and not an end in themselves.

  • How Do You Calculate How Much You Are Worth? As believers, we need to answer this question by utilizing three different types of valuation methods. We need to value our life worth rather than our net worth. We need to value our internal acquisitions rather than our external acquisitions. We need to value our eternal assets rather than our temporal assets.
  • The Deeper Meaning of Life A biblical approach to life cannot focus simply on maximizing what you will keep for yourself and your family. You must also strive to address the deeper issues of your life’s purpose—what can you do to maximize your blessing to others?
  • What is Your Most Valuable Possession? If you are like most people, you may consider that your home is your most valuable asset, or it might be your business, or your investment portfolio. No matter which asset you may select as your most valuable, you will have picked the wrong one.

Whole Life Stewardship

Are you living a contradictory double life – double-minded, double-hearted, double-tongued?” These articles will expand your thinking on “stewardship” and its relationship to every area of your life.

  • Our Ultimate Stewardship Priority Am I being a trustworthy steward of the gospel? Proverbs 11:30 (NIV) tells us, he who wins souls is wise, and might I add, is also a trustworthy steward. May we all be found trustworthy in this, our ultimate stewardship priority.
  • The One Question that Changes Everything Only when we accept the truth of God’s ownership of everything, can we be prepared to ask the one question that changes everything. It is a question we must ask daily, sometimes even hourly. The question is this: God, what do You want me to do with all that You have entrusted to me?
  • What is My Relationship to My Stuff? “Stewardship” might just be one of the most misused biblical terms in the Christian vocabulary. If we were to poll a cross section of Christians and ask them what the word “stewardship” means, the overwhelming majority would say it has something to do with money and giving. This is partially right and partially wrong. And as my grandmother told me growing up, “If something is partially wrong, it is all wrong.”

Strategic Planning

Concerned about how much wealth to leave to your heirs? Or about estate planning and taxes?  These articles will help you to discover what it means to fund “life opportunities” rather than “lifestyle.” Gain insight in how to wisely guide your heirs in the wealth they receive, as well as guidance in how to deploy material blessings to causes that are on God’s heart.

Heirs and Inheritances

These articles speak to the important things in life as you consider inheritance issues and face life challenges.
  • Conducting an Inheritance Fire Drill It is time well spent for parents, as they contemplate the amount and timing of their heirs’ inheritance, to conduct an “inheritance fire drill”. This exercise can help determine how prepared their heirs are to receive an inheritance, and how well they have thought-out how much of an inheritance is appropriate and when it is best to give it to them.
  • Don’t Forget Who You Belong To Do you remember Joseph who, by God’s providence, climbed from being a lowly slave to second-in-command in Potiphar’s house? Life was as good as it could get for Joseph—except for Potiphar’s wife, who wanted Joseph for herself. When she pursued him, Joseph rejected her advances. What caused him to flee the temptation was his awareness of who he belonged to. Remembering this is so critical to living a successful life of stewardship.
  • When You Give, You Will Take Away The statement, “When you give, you will take away” is an intriguing maxim. If you give food to someone, you will take away their hunger. If you give work to a man, you will take away his feeling of uselessness. In the giving, there is always something gained and something lost. What makes this statement anything but simple, however, is that once you go beyond “life essentials,” it is often a considerable challenge to be sure that what you give is good and what you take away is bad.

Stewardship Planning

What does it mean to “yield” to God in decisions that affect your bottom line? Are you a “manager” or an “owner?” This section of articles will help you discern how you live, spend, and invest your resources.

  • A Tool for All Seasons One of the most powerful family stewardship planning tools is also one of the least understood and used even though it generates the greatest interest among affluent families––the family foundation. In the first of a two part series we will discuss the family foundation as it relates to two of the three most likely sources of information on the topic (an attorney or a ministry).
  • Are You An Informed or An Uninformed Taypayer? Christian families should become informed taxpayers—avoiding all capital gains and estate taxes and paying as little as they possibly can in annual income taxes, so they will have more for themselves, more for their heirs, and more for the Kingdom of God.
  • CARES Act: Creative Charitable Giving Strategies As extraordinary tax law was passed last year which introduced several new and potentially powerful charitable giving opportunities that have been extended for the 2021 tax year. The government threw a very small giving “bone” to taxpayers who use the standard deduction, but it has thrown higher capacity families a huge giving “bone.”

Generous Living & Giving

The primary purpose for accumulating wealth should be to give it away. These articles will guide your discovery of one of life’s greatest joys: using what you have accumulated to make a difference in the lives of others and expand the work God is doing around the world.

Spiritual Issues Regarding Giving

Articles that speak to the pivotal question of stewardship: How to use what you have to build God’s Kingdom, and in so doing becoming a faithful, cheerful, generous giver.

  • A Bridge or a Barrier When abundant provisions appear, they can create a barrier that limits our ability to trust God more fully. I have seen this in my own life and the lives of many others. The more we possess, the more likely we are to trust Him less. In other words, the more He provides, the less we trust Him to provide. Odd phenomenon, isn’t it?
  • A Different Kind of Needy This article does not refer to the needy who have a material shortfall; it refers to the needy who have a material surplus. Those who have a shortfall need to receive, but equally critical, those who have a surplus need to give. Both are genuinely needy, but in different ways.
  • Barns and Vats One of the most common fears of giving is this, “If I get really radical in my giving, what I currently have in my barns and vats could be greatly diminished. Consequently, I may find them being only half-full or worse yet, entirely empty because I gave too much away.”

Practical Applications on Giving

Articles on what it means to think biblically so that you live biblically. Discover how to be “good and faithful” in the way you deploy what God has entrusted to you.

  • Big Giver Small Giver Your degree of generosity is not measured by how much you give, it is measured by how much you have left over after you give. This definition should challenge all of us to reassess our current level of giving to determine if we should even be thinking of ourselves as big givers.
  • Giving or Leaving Do you believe that God is powerful enough, wise enough, and loving enough to take care of you without your help? When you can finally and fully trust God for your care and provision, you will never again need to worry about giving too much away during your lifetime.
  • When Is a Gift Really a Gift There are three key stewardship questions that every family of wealth must answer in order to maximize their lifetime giving: (1) How much is enough for us? (2) How much is enough for our heirs? (3) What are we going to do with what’s left over?

The Better Way Giving Series

When you “give”, what attitude guides your decision? Guilt? Pride? Duty? This six lesson Bible study examines New Testament giving characteristics, helping believers to frame a solid, biblical basis for their personal giving decisions.

A Motivated Giver, Lesson 1 The reason many believers are not significant givers is because they have never been significant receivers. They have never fully accepted God’s extraordinary flow of unconditional love that constantly pours over them. Until you fully receive God’s unconditional love, you will never be passionately motivated to love Him back.

A Joyful Giver, Lesson 2 Would the word joyful describe how you feel when you give? Many believers would answer that question, “No, not really.” And there may be several reasons for this. We may be giving with feelings of obligation or duty or simply because we don’t know how to say no when we are asked. It seems far too rare that people experience any high degree of joy in their giving.

A Reliable Giver, Lesson 3 When you hear the term reliable giver, you may think about how your church or your favorite ministry views your regular giving to them. Consider how God views reliable givers. In other words, when God sees a need or an opportunity that He wants to fund, how certain can He be that if He gets those needed funds to you that you would actually deliver them.