T3 – Treasures closes out our fall stewardship study. We’ve looked at all that God has given to us, our time and our talents. In this final lesson we see that all of our material wealth comes from our gracious God too.
Dirty Trick
What if I asked you about your possessions? I could ask how many cars you own – or pairs of sock, frying pans, bath towels, or vacuum cleaners. In America we have a lot of stuff! How we describe it as our possessions isn’t necessarily wrong. BUT in the Bible study I started with a different question. There is a spinning globe on the screen with Psalm 24 – The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it! So who owns everything? God. What about your cars? God. Or frying pans? God. The trick of it is to get you to say that you own something and then pull the switcheroo so you THEN have to admit – ok, fine, technically God owns it all.
Stewards
So how does this all work? How do we describe the relationship of having possessions and money, but really God owns them all. This is the concept of stewardship. We are taking care of all that we have until one day we give it back to God. One of the ways that we worship God right now is to give God back some of the things that he’s given us! This is God’s idea. We can do so in four ways.
- Priority – we practice first fruits giving
- Personal – this is freewill giving
- Proportional – God doesn’t want what we don’t have, this is in keeping with our income
- Privilege – since everything belongs to God, it frees us to be generous
Want to hear more? Watch this week’s Bible study from our series T3 – Treasures.
Please click HERE for the Bible class slides.