PRAYER: Lord, help me to give of myself in ways that mirror the sacrifices You have made for me. Let my sacrifices honor and worship You. Let my stewardship and my giving honor You as my Lord and my God.
DAY 13 - READ 2 SAMUEL 24:18-25
We are beyond the halfway point of our devotional journey. We have been learning from 2 Corinthians 8 that God wants us to first commit our lives to Him and then give generously to His kingdom as we serve one another in His church. Paul tells us that “Though he [Jesus] was rich, for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). He did this out of obedience to the Father. Following Jesus’ model, we first give ourselves to the Lord. We then pray for God’s will to be done in our lives. We become stewards of His house—the church. We examine our resources to find every way to make our faith real with our gifts. These gifts are part of a stewardship decision that reshapes our life—we are growing in “the gracious work of giving.”
A financial gift will make some difference to the church, but a stewardship decision is a gift that makes an eternal difference in you and the church. Through your stewardship, God is actually growing your faith and your commitment to Him. Stewardship is your gift back to God of what is already His. Such a gift will certainly cost you something. The prophet Gad commanded King David to offer a sacrifice so that God would hear their prayers and relent from the plague that was upon them. King David had an opportunity to make an easy sacrifice (or offering) to God. Araunah was going to give him everything—the threshing floor for the altar, the oxen, and even the wood for the sacrifice—for nothing. What a deal! But David realized that such a deal was really no sacrifice at all. It did not represent worship that honored his Lord and God. “I will not offer a sacrifice to the Lord my God which costs me nothing,” David said.
Offering yourself to God, giving sacrificially, does not come easy. It will cost you something. Does your stewardship and giving model the kind of commitment that would honor and worship God? Like Jesus, though we are rich, are we becoming poor so that others may become rich? Stewardship requires us to give up our earthly riches (time, talents, treasures) in order to invest in others (with our time, talents, treasures) so that they may become rich in Christ. God is calling us to exchange the temporal for the eternal, but it will require sacrifice.
ACTION ITEM
Reflect on this question: Does the stewardship of my time, talents, and treasures reflect the life of sacrifice that Jesus gave for me? Will others become rich through the sacrifices I am making for Christ?