Matt Bell: Are you a consumer or a steward?

“Our culture calls us consumers. To consume means to use up, devour, or spend wastefully. How’s that working for us?

Consumer is more than a word; it’s a worldview. If I am a consumer, I am the most important person in the world. Life is all about me–my pleasure, my comfort, my happiness. If I’m a consumer, happiness is found in money and stuff. And if I’m a consumer, life is about competition. I’m happiest when I have more than others have and more than I had before.

And yet, the Bible says these are the exact wrong priorities for anyone seeking a meaningful, purposeful life. From a financial perspective, the Bible describes us as stewards, or managers. God has entrusted us with His resources in order to fulfill His purposes.

When Jesus was asked directly what’s most important in life, He said to love God. He then said our second most important priority is to love others. And the Bible says we’ve all been given talents and passions in order to make a difference with our lives.

Since those are the three overarching purposes of our life, they are the three overarching purposes of money. We are to use money to love God, love others, and make our unique contribution to the world.

If you were to honestly evaluate your current use of money, how well does it line up with these three purposes?”

Matt Bell in “The Purpose of Money: Does our Consumption Reflect Christ?” from Disciple, Summer 2012, 4.

“Stewardship must must be reduced to a fund raising campaign on behalf of institutions, religious or otherwise. It is a way of life and not mere rhetoric for motivating charitable contributions. God has a prior claim on everything and not just that which we label as tithe.”

Ken Carder, United Methodist Bishop, quoted by Gary Moore in Look Up America! (Keller, TX: Austin Brothers, 2012) 172.

“It’s a queer feeling to be so utterly dependent on the help of others, but at least it teaches one to be grateful, a lesson I hope I shall never forget. In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), Letters and Papers from Prison, from a letter dated “September 13, 1943” ed. Eberhard Bethge, trans. Reginald H. Fuller (Macmillan, 1953).

“The way stewardship is practiced in North America often has little to do with the Bible. It stems primarily from the most influential American “theologian”, Andrew Carnegie…

In an article published in 1889, Carnegie argued that it would not behoove the Christian faith to say anything about how money was made, since the process of producing wealth is determined by inexorable natural laws…

These laws [from his perspective] determine the determine the acquisition of wealth and fully justify the discrepancy in wealth between rich and poor…

The Christian religion, Carnegie maintained, becomes pertinent only after the production process has run its course and money has been made and reinvested. [In his thinking], only then should Christianity enter the scene to help successful producers and acquisitors know how to disperse their surplus money prudentially, that is, charitably.

Carnegie even provided the rules for distributing surplus money. It should be given only to the “deserving poor” and only to those who support the system under which the wealth was produced in the first place.

In other words, the Christian faith [according to Carnegie] has to do with charity, and charity does not extend to the basic questions of economics. Thus we have the basic understanding of stewardship in old-line and newer churches in North America: the voluntary giving of left-over money and time.”

Doug Meeks in God the Economist, (Augsburg Fortress, 1989) 20-21, as partially cited by Gary Moore in Look Up America! (Keller, TX: Austin Brothers, 2012) 139.

“A godly heart enjoys much of God in everything he has, and knows how to make up all wants in God himself.”

Jeremiah Burroughs, (1600-1646), Puritan Preacher, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment (1648; Edinburgh, Banner of Truth, 1964) 65.

“Christian stewardship is the practice of systematic and proportionate giving of time, abilities and material possessions, based on the the conviction that these are trusts from God to be used in his service for the benefit of all mankind in grateful acknowledgement of Christ’s redeeming love.”

Helge Brattgård, God’s Stewards: A Theological Study of the Principles and Practices of Stewardship, trans. Gene J. Lund (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1963) 5.

“It may be admitted that the man amassing millions is a bit of an idiot; but it may be asked in what sense does he rule the modern world. The answer to this is very important and rather curious.

The evil enigma for us here is not the rich, but the Very Rich. The distinction is important; because this special problem is separate from the old general quarrel about rich and poor that runs through the Bible and all strong books, old and new. The special problem today is that certain powers and privileges have grown so worldwide and unwieldy that they are out of the power of the moderately rich as well as of the moderately poor. They are out of the power of everybody except a few millionaires—that is, misers.

In the old normal friction of normal wealth and poverty I am myself on the Radical side.

I think that a Berkshire squire has too much power over his tenants; that a Brompton builder has too much power over his workmen; that a West London doctor has too much power over the poor patients in the West London Hospital. But a Berkshire squire has no power over cosmopolitan finance, for instance. A Brompton builder has not money enough to run a Newspaper Trust. A West End doctor could not make a corner in quinine and freeze everybody out. The merely rich are not rich enough to rule the modern market.

The things that change modern history, the big national and international loans, the big educational and philanthropic foundations, the purchase of numberless newspapers, the big prices paid for peerages, the big expenses often incurred in elections—these are getting too big for everybody except the misers; the men with the largest of earthly fortunes and the smallest of earthly aims. There are two other odd and rather important things to be said about them. The first is this: that with this aristocracy we do not have the chance of a lucky variety in types which belongs to larger and looser aristocracies.

The moderately rich include all kinds of people—even good people. Even priests are sometimes saints; and even soldiers are sometimes heroes. Some doctors have really grown wealthy by curing their patients and not by flattering them; some brewers have been known to sell beer. But among the Very Rich you will never find a really generous man, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egoistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.”

G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), “The Miser and His Friends” in The Miscellany of Men (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1912) 170.

“Christ hungers now, my brethren; it is he who deigns to hunger and thirst in the persons of the poor. And what he will return in heaven tomorrow is what he receives here on earth today.” (cf. Matthew 25:31-46, Philippians 4:17)

Caesarius of Arles (470-543), as recounted by Jill Haak Adels in The Wisdom of the Saints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) 15.

“[Those] who add forests, and who, excluding the poor from their neighborhood, stretch out their fields far and wide into space without limits…Such a one enjoys no security either in his food or in his sleep. In the midst of the banquet he sighs, although he drinks from a jeweled goblet; and when his luxurious bed has enfolded his body, languid with feasting, he lies wakeful in the midst of the down; nor does he perceive, poor wretch, that these things are merely gilded torments, that he is held in bondage by his gold, and that his is the slave of his luxury and wealth rather than their master.”

St. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage (c. 218-249), in Epistle 1.12, as recounted in Brian Rosner, Beyond Greed (Kingsford, Australia: Matthias Media, 2004) 78.

“The heart of Christianity says that you haven’t given God anything until you have given God everything.

At 30, Florence Nightingale wrote in her diary, “I am thirty years of age, the age at which Christ began his mission. Now no more childish things, no more vain things. Now, Lord, let me think only of Thy will.”

Years later, near the end of her illustrious, heroic life, she was asked for her life’s secret, and she replied, “Well, I can only give one explanation. That is, I have kept nothing back from God.”

Florence Nightingale as recounted by Rick Ezell in “Two Sermons on Giving: The Heart and Soul of Christianity” (December 5, 2003).