FAITHFUL STEWARDSHIP

Welcome, dear friends to the second Sunday of our blog. I hope you had a blessed and fruitful week. If you made the appointment and you are reading this again this week, God truly bless you, to Him be all the glory and honor.

To be honest, when I was writing last week, I wasn’t even sure I would follow through and post it, you know how it is when procrastination is whispering over your left shoulder, you’ve been there before, right? I wasn’t even sure I would write again this week. Diane, my wife, put it best: “Here you go again starting another project which you would abandon in the next few weeks like you always do.” She’s probably right I don’t know  but while I’m inspired to write, I’m just going to keep going at it and let the Holy Spirit  do the rest.

So I’ve been attending the contemporary service at the Accra Ridge Church. This is a modern youth-oriented service but the excellent thing about it is that within one hour, the service is wrapped up and you are free to attend to your regular Sunday morning affairs. This Sunday however, my Mum asked me to attend the main service with her. Any young person who has attended the Accra Ridge Church main service before knows that you are going to feel hot , sleepy , and bored  even with the best of intentions  . So you can imagine how I felt going into the service but my Mum had asked so nicely and I hadn’t attended the “Big” Church like we Ridgians so affectionately call it in a long time so I decided to go.

True to the fact, during the service, I felt hot, sleepy and bored, however, I still managed to retain the message that was preached and I would like to share it with you. The sermon that was preached was about “Faithful Stewardship” and it was based on the Parable of the Talents which can be found in Matthew 25:14-30. For those of you who might not know the Parable, let me explain briefly but you can always pick up your Bible and read it for yourself which is what I would recommend you do. So Jesus told this Parable of a master who was leaving his house to travel, and before leaving, entrusted his property to his servants. According to the abilities of each man, one servant received five talents, the second received two, and the last only one. After this, the master went on his journey. The man who received five bags of gold went at once and put the money to work and gained five bags more. So did the one who received the two bags and gained two more. But the one who received one bag went away, dug a hole, and hid his master’s money. After a long time, the master returned and held his servants accountable. The one who had received the five bags presented the other five he had gained and so did the one who had received two bags present the two extra he had gained. Then the man who had received one bag of gold came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you. To the first two, the master replied ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness! But to the last, he replied ‘You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest. “ ‘So take the bag of gold from him and give it to the one who has ten bags. Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

I hope I didn’t lose you with the long paragraph explaining the parable, I did that for those who are not yet familiar with this Parable but even for those of you who are, a little reminder does not hurt . Or does it? Let me know in the comments if it does.

This Parable, and Sunday service’s sermon, inspired me to write  today’s blog because I feel it is relevant to the journey of faith I have just embarked on and that some of you may have as well. For the purposes and intents of this blog, let’s take the word “talent” in the literal sense of the term, that is, a natural aptitude or skill. I’d like to even go further and define it as a God-given aptitude or skill because all good skills and aptitudes come from the Creator.

The interesting thing is we do not all have the same talents, we are all endowed with skills in one thing or the other. Some of us have many aptitudes, maybe five, maybe two, maybe more some of us haven’t honed enough talents so we may be very good at two things or maybe even only one.

My wife, ever since we met, has always told me I have a skill for writing. I’ve written scripts and started writing a novel or two but up until now, I didn’t have any sense of purpose to write for. On the other hand, I’m terrible at cleaning up and when we met it was a major bone of contention between my wife and me, she would always be shouting after me to close the wardrobe doors or put things back exactly where I found them after using them. Over the few years we’ve been married, I’ve been honing my tidying-up skills and my wife will testify that I’ve gotten better. At least, I hope she will .

All these talents are entrusted to us by God and though we may use them to go about our daily business either making money or using them for one form of personal gratification or the other, what God expects us to do with them is to use them to further His kingdom. That is what stewardship is about, taking care of what has been entrusted to us. In the parable, the act of putting the bags of gold to work by the first two servants and earning a profit can be likened to using the talents God has entrusted us with to serve Him and win souls for His kingdom. This is the Great Commission which was left to us by the resurrected Christ, by being faithful stewards of the talents He has given us we are spreading the Gospel to either win new souls for Christ or edifying the members of the great Christian family. This is the meaning of faithful stewardship.

The point, like Pastor T.D. Jakes so eloquently put it is that not all ministry is about preaching behind a pulpit. You could be doing hair and using your talent for the glory of God, you could be baking cakes and using your talent for the glory of God. I don’t know who I am writing for today but I’m sure you have something you’re good at. Have you considered using that talent to further the kingdom of the Lord? Some people who always amaze me anytime I go to church are the sides-persons. In Ridge Church, sometimes, they are elderly folks and I sometimes try to imagine what their lives may have been like. Probably managers or directors in one business or the other or even probably well-traveled people with Doctorates or PHDs but you can never really tell by the way they so humbly direct you to your seat or to go and take communion. This also, is a form of stewardship.

It takes not only the Preacher at the pulpit but also the sides-person, the organist, the chorister, the video team, the interpreter, the hairdresser, and even the Baker who bakes the muffins that we enjoy at Sunday service brunch to make up the body of Christ.

In essence, this article can be summed up succinctly in the first and the last stanzas of MHB 589 which is appropriately entitled “Go Labor On”, they read:

1. Go, labor on; spend, and be spent;
Thy joy to do the Father’s will;
It is the way the Master went;
Should not the servant tread it still?

7. Press on, and in thy work rejoice;
For work comes rest, the prize thus won;
Soon shalt thou hear the Master’s voice,
The midnight cry, Behold, I come!

“Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.” ‭‭Matthew‬ ‭9‬:‭37‬-‭38‬ NIV.‬‬ Will you serve? Have a happy Sunday 🙏🏽.