seeJesus Blog

I was asking a good friend’s advice this week to help me understand an old friend of mine who has now passed on to glory. This old friend was a wealthy man who was very concerned about being a good steward of his money. The good part of his wanting to be a good steward was that he wanted to make sure his money was well spent. The bad side was that he became judgmental and critical. He was so fearful of creating dependency on his money that he’d start giving and then pull back.

My good friend had some very helpful insights into this old friend of mine. He added, by way of balance, that he could understand my old friend’s concern about not wanting to create dependency. He gave an example of how he was concerned not to create dependency in his children by taking them out to dinner consistently so that it would create a pattern of dependency.

 I had a check in my spirit at that point, and said, “If I had the money, I would love to take my daughters out for dinner at the same time every week. I would love for them to look forward to not having to make one dinner during the week.”

 As I was getting out of bed Sunday morning I had what I think was a Spirit-moment, an epiphany, about the steward idea. I told Jill I had an epiphany and she said, “What’s that?” I explained and she said, “Oh you mean a God-moment.” Then she started calling it an apocalypse, partly because she forgot the word epiphany and partly to make fun of me for using such a big word. I told her that epiphanies came at the beginning and apocalypses at the end. You wanted epiphanies and you wanted to avoid apocalypses.

 What was the insight? I realized that the central grid controlling how I view finances is that of the Lover and not merely the Steward. They are not opposed to one another, but I do think that Lover will sometimes trump the Steward. Or to put it another way, the world of Steward is a smaller circle inside the larger circle of the Lover. I actually wonder if there is some imbalance with so much teaching emphasizing the Steward but missing the world of the Lover. Much teaching on money focuses on being a Steward and not a Lover.

Scripture after scripture came flooding to mind.

 1. The Prodigal Son. When the son came to his father asking for half his money, the father would have been an awful Steward to let him do that. But if the father is a Lover, then he wants to win his son by letting his son spend everything. The only way to win his son’s soul is to lose half his total assets. Otherwise the son will be “lost at home”, like the older brother. The father correctly sees the trajectory of his younger son’s life. So the father plants the seed by giving him half his money and then he waits for the harvest every day, every hour of the day, looking for his son, knowing full well that money will be all spent and finally the son will remember that his father is a lover and out of desperation come home. The father will lose the money, but gain a son. The father started planning the party the moment he gave him the money.

2. The Widow’s Mite. She is a bad Steward, taking all of her assets and throwing it away. And not only that, she gives it to a corrupt institution that is going to use that money to kill Jesus. And yet, Jesus commends her because she is a Lover. She loves God so she gives it all away.

 3. The Rich Young Ruler. He is a good Steward. When he says he has obeyed all the commandments, it is true. This is a generous man. He doesn’t turn away the poor. He lives Deuteronomy’s love for the outcast. The Rich Young Ruler is the kind of donor that organizations dream about. And yet he is merely a Steward, he has not become a Lover of God and people. Money owns him. To encourage him to become a Lover Jesus tells him to give all his money away. Get rid of it. You can’t handle it. Let the poor be a steward of it. What is so striking to me is that this is exactly what happened to St. Francis of Assisi. He walked away from his inheritance when his father challenged him about his generosity. When St. Francis became a Lover, he and his Order, the Franciscans, changed the shape of medieval Europe.

4. God the Father is a Lover. Everything the Father owned or held precious was wrapped up in his Son. From all eternity they loved one another. And yet the Father was a Lover. He gave everything he held dear (his Son), so that he could transform the crown of his creation into Lovers as well. John 3:16 captures the craziness of the Father’s love for us. Likewise, the Son is a Lover. When he dies, he not only takes our sin upon himself, but he gives up his relationship with his Father.

 5. The Lover delights to take the burden off the person he loves. He or she, like Paul the Apostle says to the Corinthians, “I will gladly spend and be spent.” Of course, I know some people who are good lovers, but weak stewards on a consistent basis.

 6. Jill and I now have savings again. It is a wise and prudent thing to have savings with a mortgage and the responsibilities of Kim. We are good Stewards to do that. But after Kim was born in ’81, the pressure she brought into our home quickly put us under enormous financial pressure and we went through our savings. We used the last of our savings in the winter of ’83 to convert our heat because Kim was reacting negatively to the oil/hot air heat. For the next 25 years we lived paycheck to paycheck without savings. We were lovers of Kim so we spent the last of our money on her. I hope Jill and I will never forget how grinding that was. The lack of money was one of the things that taught Jill and I to be Lovers. We love to give people money quietly now because we know how hard life is.

 9. Another old friend who has also passed on to glory who lived this idea of Lover with his money was actually a little unbalanced. This old friend was a pastor and loved the idea of giving so much that when his washing machine would break down instead of paying for it himself he would make it a matter of public prayer asking that God would provide the money for the washing machine. He wanted other people to become lovers as well. His heart was in the right place, but it actually came across as a bit self-centered. I think it would have been better if he had just asked for a raise. But I understand his Lover heart behind it.

 (I shared this with my friend, and he rightly said that if we understand Steward correctly we will be lovers. Having said that, most godly people who think Steward say something like, “How do I be a good steward of this money which God has given me?” They don’t ask, “How can I be a good lover?” Steward ends up being a narrow category.)