It's MY Room!

“The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it…”

Psalm 24:1a

I thought about doing this blog in the cemetery again.  After what better place to illustrate that we don’t really own anything in this world.  There are no storage facilities next to our graves in the cemetery.  But then I thought of this phrase, “It’s my room?”  Admittedly this is not one of the bedrooms my kids called their own.  It’s our extra bedroom where they stay when they come to visit us.  So it will have to do.

“It’s my room!”  I wonder how many parents have heard that from their kids.  Perhaps it was when you asked them to clean their rooms.  “It’s my room.  Why does it have to be cleaned?”  Maybe we  heard it whenever we tried to clean it ourselves, or went in there after something when they weren’t around. Maybe their brother or sister took something from their room without asking. “It’s my room!  These are my things.”  I remember thinking, “I pay the mortgage for that house and that bedroom.  I bought those things that you call your things.  Whose room is it really?” 

I kind of think that we all respond that way anytime the church brings up the subject of stewardship!  We get defensive.  The church… some charity is going to ask me to give up more of MY MONEY… MY THINGS… MY TIME… MY TALENTS.  Is that really any different than our kids insisting “It’s MY room?”

The ultimate truth is that their rooms didn’t really belong to me either.  I may have paid the mortgage but who gave me the job?  Who gave me the ability to earn the money to pay for that room?  In fact nothing really belongs to us!  (That’s why I was going to go to the cemetery – you can’t take it with you when you die.) That’s the first and most important truth at the heart of Biblical stewardship!  The Psalmist has it right.  “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it…”  Everything we have… everything in this world belongs to God.  What we have is on loan from Him.  

That’s the definition of a steward – he or she is a manager of what belongs to something else.  When our daughter wanted to paint her bedroom in Flower Mound, she had to make sure that was okay with us.  The first and foremost question a stewards asks is this, “What does the owner want me to with all that He has given me?”  

Why has God been so generous with you and me?  So we can provide food and drink, clothing and shoes, house and home for our families…. So we can love and care for our neighbors… so we can be productive workers in society… so we can give to and be a part of the work of sharing the good news about Jesus!  The list goes on and on.  Everything we do from choosing what to wear, to being an honest worker, to portioning out food to our children, to helping a neighbor, to giving to church – all of that is biblical stewardship.  That doesn’t mean that we must always answer yes when our kids or when our church asks for something.  But is does mean that our chief question should not be, “What do I want to do?”  Our first concern must always be – What does God want me to do?  After all, it/s NOT my room.  It’s HIS room!