The journey of the faithful steward is the path of discipleship, obedience, discovery, adventure, service, and joy. It is the way of freedom and the way of the cross. It is the journey of every follower of Jesus. It is on this journey that we experience deeper levels of surrender, increased intimacy with Christ, clearer identity, more robust faith and greater passion to serve. It is the path upon which we become the image bearers of Christ in our world. Our driving motivation is to equip and inspire God’s people for this journey.
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We will end with a charge to enter this journey with the understanding that it will require us to be counter-cultural (and this will be true for every culture). We will use the story from Daniel 3 to encourage and challenge listeners to stand clearly and boldly as faithful stewards in a world of consumers and owners. This last episode will seek to inspire listeners to put everything we have discussed into practice and ‘count the cost' of the journey, convinced that it is the journey that brings ‘life abundant'.
If we are committed to live as faithful stewards, we will learn quickly that we are engaged in a battle. This is a counter-cultural life that the enemy will come against and we must be prepared for the battle. We do this by practicing daily disciplines to keep us in a steward's mindset and equip us to come against the temptations to fall back into an owner's attitude. This battle is undertaken with the hope and belief that victory in this battle starts with surrender.
We were created to be stewards of creation and that original vocational responsibility has never been rescinded. We have been given the gift of nurture with which to carry out this stewarding role. We face the temptation of complacency in the way we use our time, talents and resources as faithful stewards. We will look at this temptation and its impact on our work of caring for creation, and end with a recommitment to be faithful stewards at this important level.
The Great Commandment presents a process of loving God first and ourselves next, which then frees us up to truly love our neighbor. We live out this love through the gift of presence in community. We also face the temptation of expediency where we treat people as means to our own ends. We will discuss how we overcome this powerful temptation as we steward our relationships with our neighbor.
Our identity is to be found in Christ alone as a redeemed child of God. We can have certainty (the gift) of who we are in Christ and nothing should move us from that confidence. However, we face the temptation of distraction where the enemy will seek to take our focus off Christ and lure us to seek our identity in some other source. We will discuss this battle and how we steward our identity in Christ.
In these four episodes we will look more closely at the journey of the faithful steward at each level. In each we will identify a gift we have been given as we steward this relationship, and also a temptation we will face as the battle for lordship continues. In this episode we will discuss the gift of intimacy and the temptation of stagnancy in our call to be stewards of our relationship to God.
This episode is the culmination of the previous five. The message is simple, the fruit of ownership, harvesting and control is absolute bondage. We experience it in the form of stress, anxiety, fear, depression and despair. Conversely, the fruit of the life of the steward is freedom. It is in freedom that we sow richly and submit fully. Christ came to reveal to us the freedom of the faithful steward as the ultimate one-kingdom life.
At the heart of the journey of the faithful steward is the call and invitation to full surrender of our lives to Christ. Our sinful nature wants control, believing the lie that with control comes peace and security. The journey will require our full surrender and a willful and joyful relinquishment of control, placing our lives in the total charge of God and God alone. The ultimate posture of the faithful steward is the fully surrendered and joyful servant.
As two-kingdom people we cannot help but live with the attitude of a harvester; one who seeks to accumulate and control as much as possible. We are ‘harvesters' in our sinful nature as we seek to build our own kingdoms where we play the lord. The journey of the faithful steward will transform our hearts to that of a sower. As such we will seek to sow richly and generously into the lives of everyone around us from a heart that is increasingly rich toward God.
One-Kingdom people place everything before God and relinquish ownership of every kind. By proclaiming God as the only true owner of everything at every level, we acknowledge that he is the one Lord of our life. This is an ongoing battle as we journey in faith and allow the power of God to transform our hearts to be rich toward him.
We are on a journey from a sinful, two-kingdom lifestyle to becoming one-kingdom people. That journey is a spiritual battle to determine who will be the ultimate lord in every area of our life. The journey is marked by a movement from an old habit to a new life in Christ.
We were redeemed to be One-Kingdom people and embrace all of life as a gift that we steward with joyful obedience. We will introduce two key concepts that will be used throughout the series; the definition of the faithful steward and one-kingdom living.
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