From I Will to I Want To
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Earlier this week we spoke about stewarding the day well, and want to continue talking about that. We received some phenomenal comments, like limiting distractions and deliberately detaching from them. So how else do we steward our days well?
This is the day the Lord has made. We’ve been graced into a day we don’t deserve after a night of sleep to recover from yesterday’s labor. Many days, we wake up and hit the ground running, immediately taking on the tasks of the day, without first implementing some of the habits we’ve been discussing like being biblically measured and maintaining healthy families.
We may often run into complications and difficulties with stewarding the day well, but we can still evaluate how we can steward the day better. With stewardship, it’s not about how much we give, but how much we keep, regardless of whether it’s time, talents, treasure, or more.
We steward our days toward the things we value. When we consider how we use our resources, it’s typically geared toward what we’re passionate about, whether it’s ourselves, relations, work, or more. We steward our resources based on the intimacy level we have with all of these different segments of our lives, and unfortunately, often turn inward and towards ourself, instead of upward and glorifying God. Our chief aim as believers is to glorify God, but we take for granted our relationship with God—His love, desire, compassion, and mission towards us—and always assume it’s always there, causing us to focus our efforts on ourselves, instead of being obedient to Christ and not allowing our self-interests to dominate us.
It can be so easy to choose our interests more than we choose God. We might not think we are making a deliberate choice, but we are deliberately failing to detach from the distractions of life. We do not want to admit that our intimacy level with God is lacking, but let’s face it: our choices are deliberate.
We cannot become like Christ without spending time with Him. If we do not deliberately connect with Christ because our self-interests dominate us, we are deliberately allow everything else in our lives to come before God and His Kingdom. We’re deliberately not stewarding our time, talent, and treasure well. We’ve been talking about becoming fruitful and effective followers of Christ, but how can we do this if we never take the time, talents, and treasures needed to effectively produce fruit?
Even with deliberately allowing self-interests to dominate us, even when we give our treasure, we glorify ourselves in that given, making us feel like we’re accomplished, but haven’t given our time nor talents. We glorify ourselves and behavior, check off the box, and move on to our self dominating interests, diluting the gift we gave in the first place. Is this still stewardship?
There’s a difference between, “I will,” and, “I want to.” I will give my time, talent, or treasure, but the deliberate action is to choose to say, “I want to.” We should desire to do these things to bring glory to God and good to humanity. This is how we steward days well: by bringing God glory and goodness to humanity. As we say regarding Do Good Friday: we are not a community of Do Gooder’s, but we do good by way of the Gospel. It’s not about us being do-gooders, but by glorifying God by our actions and attitudes and helping those around us. Make the move from simply doing the action, but instead, wanting to glorify God with your actions and attitude and acting from there.
Start your day with the declaration, “I want to give God glory,” and you will steward the day well.
