What I Spend

Opening Remarks and Introduction

Tonight, we start a new sermon series on stewardship. Now, stewardship seems to be one of those difficult subjects to talk about, because it always seems to center on how we spend our money. But, stewardship is really much more than dollars. Instead of looking at stewardship as how we spend our money, let’s look at it this way instead. How do we manage our resources?

Like the servants in our lesson tonight, God entrusts us to manage resources that are under our control. What do you manage in your life? When I think of what I manage, I think of managing my yard-work and the height of my grass, managing my calendar and schedule at work, managing my family budget… the list of things that we manage is unending and I’m sure each of us could come up with a different list of things. But for tonight, I’d like to look it this way as the three Ts of stewardship:

- How we spend our time

- How we spend our talents

- How we spend our treasure

1. We are stewards of our time

So, let’s start with the most limited of the resources under our control, our time. With the minutes, hours, and months that we have to spend on things, how we manage our schedule shows what we value. After all, we can earn more money, we can learn a new skill, but we can’t create more time. We can also save up our treasure and spend it later, or use a talent at a time that we choose, but we are spending time continuously. That makes time the most valuable resource that we have. Once we spend our time, that time is gone, there’s no way to get that time back, and for all of us, our time on earth is limited.

With a fixed amount time, we have to use what we have in constructive ways. One of the problems is that we’re not always as good with our time as we probably should be. Sometimes, we make common mistakes by spending too much time on things that just don’t matter, like hobbies and recreation… and other times we don’t spend enough time on things that really do, like taking care of others. For me, sometimes I get tied up doing things that aren’t really important, like e-mail and Facebook, and end up losing track of time. Then I end up wondering where all the time went. Anyone else done this before? Sometimes, simple things like this can take up a significant amount of time… then I can’t do the things I want to get done. Sometimes, we need to take a look at our priorities, and figure out where our time should be spent.

Let’s look at it this way for a moment. If we knew, exactly, when our days on earth would end… if we knew when God would call us home to join Him in the heavenly realm… would it change how we managed our time? Would it change our priorities on how we spend our time? It’s very possible that we would find a way to complete the tasks that were most important, do the things that mattered most and take care of those things that we truly love and care about.

But, we don’t always view time that way. We procrastinate and leave for tomorrow something that we should be doing today. We prioritize mundane and unimportant tasks and leave more important duties undone, unfinished, and sometimes even un-started.

Sometimes, we’d rather sit on the couch or lie in bed rather than do what we know needs to be done. We’d rather be a spectator of the events around us, instead of a participant making the best use of our time. In our lesson today, the third servant didn’t use his time well. He “went off, dug a hole in the ground, and hid his master’s money”. (Matt 25:18, CSB) He took the lazy way out instead of being a faithful steward. He chose to spend zero time on the task at hand and buried the opportunity, rather then embracing it. He was a poor steward, because he chose to ignore what he knew needed to be done… And sometimes, we might be just like that servant… Like that servant, we don’t always see the best way to manage our time either.

Now, some things will always seem to became the priority. There are some things that we just have to do to continue in our lives. We have to sleep and that takes up several hours of our daily routine. We have to eat, we have to get dressed, and yet, we still have to go to work and earn a living so that we can sustain ourselves. But even after those necessities are taken care of, we still have time to manage.