Stewardship

APAD Day 5

by Daniel Owino Ogweno
02/21/17
Not For Sale
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God’s Copyrighted Property

I heard about a story of a young man who was not a good son to his father. At the father’s deathbed, he called for his son in order to speak his last words to him. Unfortunately, his last word was bad news to the young man.

Because the father was about to die, he wanted to give out inheritance. Because the son had not been good to him, he told him to choose only one thing amongst all he had, the rest he would give to the servant-slave who had faithfully served him over the years. The son was devastated. He thought he would inherit his father’s estate, but he was shocked to hear that he could only inherit one thing. What to choose became an extremely difficult decision.

He didn’t have much time to decide. The condition of the father deteriorated with each passing minute, he could pass on any minute. In an inspired moment, a thought dropped in the son’s mind: Choose the servant! That did the deal. By choosing the servant-slave who was to inherit everything, the son ended up owning the servant and everything he (the servant) had. The point is that the person who owns you, owns everything else you have.

While the son owned what he owned by inheritance, God owns us and everything we have by authorship. We are, in other words, copyrighted property of God. Even after man sold himself to the devil, God paid the infinite ransom to get man back. The coming of Jesus to our world was precisely a demonstration that God was determined to get us back. But we have to be willing to accept the invitation and honour the reconciliation by receiving Christ into our life.

For those that have heeded the call. The Bible says:

What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s."—1 Corinthians 6:19-20.

 "For he that is called in the Lord, being a servant, is the Lord’s freeman: likewise also he that is called, being free, is Christ’s servant. Ye are bought with a price; be not ye the servants of men." —1 Corinthians 7:22-23.

From the above, it is clear that we are not just going to account for material things, but also for our own bodies and everything that constitute our being. Elsewhere, for example, the Bible says that a man is a slave to whatever masters him (2 Peter 2:19). Any kind of addiction means that the addicted person is ‘mastered’ by the stuff of his addiction. If we destroy the body with cigarettes, for example, we are not being good stewards of the temple of the Holy Spirit. The Bible is categorical enough to warn: “If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are” (1 Cor. 3:17).

Knowing that we belong to God, taking care of ourselves is honouring the Owner of the house.

Managing the body is therefore an act of stewardship. In marriage, for example, a lady takes good care of her body to make herself beautiful and attractive for her husband; a man shaves off his beards because the wife doesn’t like them. The wife’s body is for the husband and the husband’s body is for the wife (1 Cor. 7:4). It is like God saying to the wife: Woman, I give you this body for your husband, go and give it to him! And to the husband: Man, I give you this body for your wife, go and give it to her!

When a woman honours her husband with her body, she glorifies God. Likewise, when a man honours his wife with his body, he brings glory to God. Honouring God and glorifying Him is using whatever He has given us according to the instructions He gave us.

When a man is good to his wife, she will thank God for giving her the husband. When a wife is good to her husband, he will also thank God for the wife. Anyone who mistreats his/her spouse is depriving God of gratitude that the partner would have given Him. It is like being given something to deliver and failing to deliver it. The person who was supposed to receive the consignment cannot thank the sender because he hasn’t received what was sent.

The reader has probably heard somebody say: it is my body, I can do whatever I like with it! Or, It is my life, I am free to do whatever I like with it! What a lie! The question is: where did we get our body, and where did we get our life? As we have seen above, our body and life belongs to God. We get fulfilled not by self-preoccupation but by serving God through serving others within the divinely prescribed values and virtues.

"Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others…. For all seek their own, not the things which are Jesus Christ’s."—Philippians 2:4,21.

Recently, I told my son that although he had turned 18 and according to the law of the land, he is now a grown-up, free to make his own decisions, I still ‘own’ him. He doesn’t cease to be my son and I don’t cease to be his father. I don’t stop being responsible to advise and guide him because now he is an adult.

If somebody’s life is his own and he can decide whatever he wants to do with it, why do people close to him (relatives and friends) lose sleep whenever his bad decisions boomerang? Why do they have to dig deep into their pockets to sort the person out if his bad decisions result into financial woes?

When somebody suffers because of misbehaving or making wrong decisions, we may say that we don’t want to have anything to do with his suffering but the truth is that we will be emotionally pained. This means that if we fail to be good stewards of our life, we will not only cause problems to ourselves but also to people around us. In the same way, God is not pleased whenever our rebellion leads us to sufferings.