Adam Smith is often credited with creating much of our free market principles as we know today as capitalism. Capitalism has created, at least in the West, a world where anyone can succeed if they work hard, save hard, and spend wisely. Much of our understanding of our resources is viewed through the lens of self interest. We are in control of our money and our gifts. However, we have seen how greed and corruption have affected our world through this Great Recession.
We need to begin to retool our understanding of how we care for our time, talents, money, abilities, and gifts. We need to look at these abilities through the understanding of stewardship.
Peter Block, business consultant and author of Stewardship Choosing Service Over Self-Interest provides some business world insights to stewardship that model what stewardship should look like:
Authentic service is experienced when individuals act out of their own choices, as opposed to acting out of compliance.
The ways we govern, manage, and lead today are a testimony to self interest and entitlement.
Stewardship is to hold something in trust for another. It is the willingness to be accountable for the good of the larger organization or community of which we are a part
We choose service over self interest most powerfully when we build the capacity of the next generation to govern themselves.
The key, for Peter Block, is that we must freely let go of our self-interest. This is a problem for us. Why? It is because we have not enter stewardship into our vocabular. Here is where we can begin to understand stewardship. Webster’s dictionary defines “steward” as:
Someone who manages, directs or supervises.
And “stewardship” as
An individual’s responsibility to manage his life and property with regard to the rights of others.
Clearly Webster’s definitions place the emphasis on managing for the benefit of others. Or, more directly, living responsibly in relation to others. However, Christians think of 
stewardship as a series of transactions with God every time they put money in the offering plate.
In the New Testament (Matthew 4), Jesus calls his disciples into service as they are working in their trade: fishing. They were fishermen and had become fishermen because their fathers were fishermen, and their fathers were fishermen, and so on and so on. All they knew was fishing. Jesus said to them, “Come with me.” And they left. They gave up and relinquished their control of their ability and resources to a higher power.
For the disciples, they had to relinquish their priorities. And that is the first step in stewardship. Like the disciples, we must follow God’s call for us. God’s call for us is to give our income, our time, our service, our talents, and our gifts. I’m not saying that God is calling you to blow all your money or your time on God through the church. We have a responsibility to respond to the needs of our churches, missionaries, the poor, the oppressed, and the needy.
Again, we need to under stand the definition of what a good steward is: an individual’s responsibility to manage his life and property with regard to the rights of others. Let us be people who manage our life and property with regard for others, not just ourselves. Let us also mange our life and property in regard for God.
Pentecost 18b
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