Category Archives: Stewardship

One Foot in the Trap

24 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Money, Stewardship

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How do you know that money isn’t just money to you? Here are some of the signs. You can’t give large amounts of it away. You get scared if you might have less than you’re accustomed to having. You see people who are doing better than you, even though you might have worked harder or might be a better person, and it gets under your skin. And when that happens, you have one foot in the trap. Because then it’s no longer just a tool; it’s the scorecard. It’s your essence, your identity. No matter how much money you have, though it’s not intrinsically evil, it has incredible power to keep you from God.

- Tim Keller

Sabbath Rest

08 Friday Jun 2012

Posted by in Christian Life, Rest, Stewardship, The Gospel, Work

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In the Bible, Sabbath rest means to cease regularly from and to enjoy the results of your work. It provides balance: ‘Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God’ (Exodus 20:9–10). Although Sabbath rest receives a much smaller amount of time than work, it is a necessary counterbalance so that the rest of your work can be good and beneficial.

God liberated his people when they were slaves in Egypt, and in Deuteronomy 5:12–15, God ties the Sabbath to freedom from slavery. Anyone who overworks is really a slave. Anyone who cannot rest from work is a slave – to a need for success, to a materialistic culture, to exploitative employers, to parental expectations, or to all of the above. These slave masters will abuse you if you are not disciplined in the practice of Sabbath rest. Sabbath is a declaration of freedom.

Thus Sabbath is about more than external rest of the body; it is about inner rest of the soul. We need rest from the anxiety and strain of our overwork, which is really an attempt to justify ourselves—to gain the money or the status or the reputation we think we have to have. Avoiding overwork requires deep rest in Christ’s finished work for your salvation (Hebrews 4:1–10). Only then will you be able to ‘walk away’ regularly from your vocational work and rest.

Sabbath is the key to getting this balance, and Jesus identifies himself as the Lord of the Sabbath (Mark 2:27– 28) – the Lord of Rest! Jesus urges us, ‘Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls’ (Matthew 11:28–29). One of the great blessings of the gospel is that he gives you rest that no one else will.

- Tim Keller

Discerning Your Calling

27 Friday Apr 2012

Posted by in Calling, Christian Life, Service, Stewardship

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We can discern God’s calling when three factors come together for us: Affinity (What human needs do I ‘vibrate’ to? What interests me? What are my passions?); Ability (What am I good at? What do people say I am effective in?); and Opportunity (What doors for service are open? What needs to be done?). When all three factors come together, you can see God has equipped and called you to do something or to move in a certain direction.

This process can be applied to finding a job and making major life decisions, but how do we apply it to service in the church? I propose that in the church you start with the third aspect – Opportunity. In other words, find the jobs in the church that need to be done and then do them. Just serve. Don’t ask too much about whether it fulfills you.

Why? First, the only way you will ever really come to know the kind of ministry that you are best at is if you do a lot of different things; then you will know what God blesses. Don’t look first at your proven abilities – at your day job or natural talents – to determine what you do in the church, because as mentioned earlier, God may not use that. Likewise, don’t look first at your deepest affinities – the things that excite and interest you. If you gravitate too quickly to those areas, you may miss latent gifts that you aren’t aware you have. Just serve – plug the gaps in the church and help out. Go through the door of opportunity in the church, doing what needs to be done, and then as time goes on you can check your affinities and abilities and begin to specialize. If you are in a church with many opportunities, you may be able to specialize earlier on in the process.

- Tim Keller

*Quote taken from the Redeemer City to City article, “Discerning and Exercising Spiritual Gifts”

The Beginning

21 Wednesday Mar 2012

Posted by in Beauty, Creation, Stewardship, The Bible

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It is easy to read the first chapters of Genesis with the questions of our time: ‘How long ago did this happen?’ ‘Is this history or myth?’ ‘How does this square with modern views of science and evolution?’ etc. These are important questions, and we can probably learn some things from Genesis that are relevant to them. But we don’t learn much from a text if we ask questions that it was not written to answer.

Genesis is about deeper issues than biological origins. It is answering questions like: ‘What are human beings?’ ‘What are we here for?’ ‘What is our relationship to nature and to the world?’ Essentially, Genesis 1 is not about the ‘how’ of creation but rather about the ‘why.’

The word ‘God’ appears 30 times in the first chapter of Genesis. God overwhelms the text; he dominates and overshadows everything. Nothing happens unless he makes it happen. Nothing is created except by him. There is nothing in existence that does not owe its existence to him. We see immediately that the extreme repetition is a way of saying, ‘Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made’ (John 1:3).

And, we see that everything God makes is ‘good.’ Everything he touches is pleasing, joy producing, wholesome. There is a wonder and awe about the richness of the world. It ‘teems’ with life.

Notice that the overall effect of the highly patterned, repetitive text is to demonstrate that the world is made in an extremely orderly, purposeful way. There was ‘evening and morning’ not just once — but regularly, faithfully, continually. What we have here is a cosmos, not a chaos. And because God created everything, nothing is outside of his control, or outside of his rightful authority. The animals, plants, and even the mountains and seas are all part of a choir of praise to the glory of God. This is said explicitly in Psalm 19 and Psalm 150.

Notice too that only we are described as made ‘in the image’ of God. It is clear that we have a closer relationship to God than any other creature. We were made by God to be in relationship with him and to rule the world on his behalf. God gives us the task of subduing the earth and ruling over creation as his representative. Note too that it is only after the creation of human beings that the world is declared for the first time to be ‘very good’ (Genesis 1:31).

- Tim Keller

Participating in God’s Work

12 Monday Mar 2012

Posted by in Art, Calling, Evangelism, Redemption, Restoration, Stewardship, The Holy Spirit, Work

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All forms of work are participation in God’s work. God made the created world by his Spirit (Gen. 1:1-3) and continues to care for and sustain it by his Spirit (Ps. 104:30), watering and enriching it (Ps. 65:9–13) and feeding and meeting the needs of every living thing (Pss. 145:15–16 and 147:15–20). Indeed, the very purpose of redemption is to massively and finally restore the material creation (Rev. 21–22). God loves this created world so much that he sent his Son to redeem it. This world is a good in and of itself; it is not just a temporary theater for individual salvation. If the Holy Spirit is not only a preacher that convicts people of sin and grace (John 16:8–11; 1 Thess. 1:5) but also a gardener, an artist, and an investor in creation who renews the material world, it cannot be more spiritual and God-honoring to be a preacher than to be a farmer, artist, or banker. To give just one example, evangelism is temporary work, while musicianship is permanent work. In the new heavens and new earth, preachers will be out of a job! Ultimately the purpose of evangelism is to bring about a world in which musicians will be able to do their work perfectly.

- Tim Keller

Work

05 Monday Mar 2012

Posted by in Calling, Christian Life, Stewardship, Work

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As Christians we are stewards of the resources God gives us for serving the human community. Our vocations are one avenue for doing God’s work in the world. Stewardship is the cultivation of resources for God. The Bible tells us that one of the most important resources God has given us is our gifts, aptitudes, talents, and abilities.

One of the sacraments of the medieval church was the Sacrament of Holy Orders, which divided the world into the “religious” and the “secular.” Those who went into full-time church ministry as priests, monks, or nuns were on a completely different spiritual footing from those who did not. One of the Protestant Reformation’s main planks was to overturn this view with the biblical teaching of the priesthood of all believers (1 Peter 2:9). Martin Luther insisted that all forms of work are God-honoring callings. To be a farmer, a craftsman, or an artist was just as much a vocation, a calling from God, as to be a preacher.

- Tim Keller