There are lots of words you could use to describe Christians. You might, for example, call Christian believers. Or followers. Or disciples. Or the elect. Or children. Or saints. The list could go on, and with each word, we see an element of our identity as Christians emphasized. But here is one more word that describes Christians we don’t think of enough:

Stewards.

Christians are stewards. And that mark of our identity is based on a fundamental understanding that the earth belongs to the Lord, and everything in it. He, as the Creator and Sustainer of all things, is the ultimate owner. As such, everything we seem to possess is not really ours, but God’s, and it is our responsibility is to steward those things.

We are caretakers. Managers. Regents. Servants. We are responsible for what has been entrusted to us. And while we tend to think of stewardship in terms of financial resources, it goes well beyond that.

If it’s true that everything belongs to the Lord, then that “everything” includes… well, everything. So, yes, we are stewards of money, but we are also stewards of time. Of talent. Of our physical bodies. Of our experiences. Stewardship is a holistic view that sees our whole selves and everything associated with us as an opportunity to honor the Lord who has entrusted, temporarily, these things to us.

One of the places Jesus opens our eyes to this principle is in Matthew 25. Jesus, in describing the dynamics of the kingdom of God, said it like this:

“For it is just like a man about to go on a journey. He called his own servants and entrusted his possessions to them. To one he gave five talents, to another two talents, and to another one talent, depending on each one’s ability. Then he went on a journey. Immediately the man who had received five talents went, put them to work, and earned five more. In the same way the man with two earned two more. But the man who had received one talent went off, dug a hole in the ground, and hid his master’s money” (Matt. 25:14-18).

Like the servants, we have been entrusted with all kinds of things. And like the servants, the quantity of what has been given to us is variable. Now that’s pretty obvious when we look around us. We see people of varying abilities and giftings, and certainly people of varying money.

But the temptation, when we see that someone has more than we do, be it more influence or money or talent or authority, is to give ourselves a break. We tell ourselves that our contribution – our investment – is not that important because, after all, we don’t have much to offer.

But stewardship is not about giftedness; it’s about faithfulness.

God does not haphazardly hand out these resources. And while it’s true that we cannot begin to try and understand how and why God makes His choices about who has what and how much, we can know that He makes those choices with great intentionality and wisdom. It is an affront to the character of God, then, to cut ourselves that kind of slack. It is a denial of God’s design to think that somehow our responsibility to steward ebbs and flows based on the amount of resources we have to steward at a given time.

Whether we have been given much or whether we have been given little, the call is the same. And the call is to faithfulness.

How, then, do we show that we believe in God’s sovereignty? How do we show that we trust His wisdom and character? We show it through our faithfulness, whether we have been given much or little.