What has God given you that you are responsible for? 3. We must understand that when God blesses us with abundance, the abundance creates more of a responsibility to handle what God has given us. For owners have rights and stewards have responsibilities. Since God owns everything, we are obligated to carry out the will of the father. Relating this to our lives, Adam’s purpose is our current duty to fulfill. In the beginning of Genesis, God created everything and puts Adam to work in the garden to take care of it. Deuteronomy 8:18 that demands us to “remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth.” Since God owns it all, how much authority do you give God over your possessions? 2. We must change our mindset towards ownership to obey God’s will involving our possessions. One thing that we must recognize in understanding stewardship is the fact that God owns everything in our lives. Psalm 24:1 proclaims that “the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it” (NIV). To help build a framework, we will begin unpacking this idea of stewardship through four important biblical principles. Yes, stewardship can be applied in to how we use money for the glory of God, but looking further, stewardship is being responsible for the things that God has given us. This guilt does not mean that we must indulge in a lot of breast-beating and confession it means only that there is much good work to be done by every one of us and that we must begin to do it.“What does stewardship look like in our lives today?” This question must be asked to evaluate where our mindset is. Every one of us is to some extent guilty of this bad work. The name of our present society’s connection to the earth is “bad work” – work that is only generally and crudely defined, that enacts a dependence that is ill understood, that enacts no affection and gives no honor. Good work can be defined only in particularity, for it must be defined a little differently for every one of the places and every one of the workers on the earth. Good work is always modestly scaled, for it cannot ignore either the nature of individual places or the differences between places, and it always involves a sort of religious humility, for not everything is known. It honors the source of its materials it honors the place where it is done it honors the art by which it is done it honors the thing that it makes and the user of the made thing. The name of our proper connection to the earth is “good work,” for good work involves much giving of honor. The real names of the environment are the names of rivers and river valleys creeks, ridges, and mountains towns and cities lakes, woodlands, lanes roads, creatures, and people.Īnd the real name of our connection to this everywhere different and differently named earth is “work.” We are connected by work even to the places where we don’t work, for all places are connected it is clear by now that we cannot exempt one place from our ruin of another. They come from the juiceless, abstract intellectuality of the universities which was invented to disconnect, displace, and disembody the mind. The concepts and insights of the ecologists are of great usefulness in our predicament, and we can hardly escape the need to speak of “ecology” and “ecosystems.” But the terms themselves are culturally sterile. “No settled family or community has ever called its home place an “environment.” None has ever called its feeling for its home place “biocentric” or “anthropocentric.” None has ever thought of its connection to its home place as “ecological,” deep or shallow.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |