Family Night tomorrow! 5:30pm pizza and a lesson on Moses!
October 8, 2024
Dear Friends,
“Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master” (Matthew 25:21).
In Sunday morning Bible class, we’ve talked a lot about how God built the world like a house and he put mankind in the house to take care of it. That’s what it means to be a steward – it’s to be given responsibility for something that belongs to someone else.
The owner of the restaurant hires a manager to make sure that the operation runs smoothly. The captain of the ship entrusts the operation of the engine to the engineer. The parents assign their children responsibilities for helping take care of the home – take out the garbage, feed the dog, clean the bathrooms. God gives to you and me all that we have and asks us to love him and our neighbors.
The responsibilities are entrusted as well as the means to carry out the task. To be a good steward means using the things you’ve been given to do the job that you’ve been assigned.
Last week, when I wrote you about reading the Bible, we were talking about stewardship of your time. Time is arguably the most precious commodity. You can earn more money, but you cannot gain back lost time. You could live in any number of different houses and eat all different kinds of food and wear any kind of clothing, but time is unique. Each minute, each second is the only one of its kind. And once it’s gone, it’s gone. And it was either well-spent, or not. You were either a good steward or not. And that’s why taking stock of your time is an essential exercise.
Although time is uniquely precious, the same exercise is important for everything that’s been entrusted to us from God. How are you stewarding the other gifts God has given to you? Your family? Your health? Your money?
It turns out that we are all prone to neglect when it comes to the stewardship entrusted to us by God. And so it’s fitting to take time regularly to examine ourselves, to repent of our selfishness or laziness or pride or whatever it may be, and to renew our effort at being good stewards of God’s varied gifts.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll share in these e-mails and in church on Sunday some insights from God’s Word about stewardship generally and about money in particular. The short version of the story is this: God gives us good things so that we can love him and serve our neighbors. Think about the Epistle from Sunday, which ended like this: “Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need” (Ephesians 4:28). To help us remember our stewardship and to teach us not to fall in love with our things, God invites us to begin by giving our things away. A tithe is 10% off the top, and that’s a good, hard, and necessary challenge to our sinful flesh. It also comes with the extraordinary promise of God’s blessing. More on all that later, though.
God bless and keep you,
Pr. Buchs
COMING EVENTS:
Wednesday, October 9
8:30 am – Homeschool Choir
9:30 am – Chapel
10:00 am – Bible Study
5:30 pm – Family Night
7:00 pm – Vespers
Thursday, October 10
6:00 pm – Elders
7:00 pm – Council
Sunday, October 13
9:00 am – Divine Service
10:30 am – Sunday School/Bible Study