Stewardship – Defined

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Posted on 22nd June 2010 by btorchia in Uncategorized

Thank you to everyone who joined us recently on Faithful Stewardship.  This website/blog is inspired not just by recent developments in the economy and our culture, but rather by a desire to pursue that which is most important… to live a life pleasing and obedient to God.

Why is being a faithful steward important?

Definition of Steward: noun – a person who manages another’s property or financial affairs; one who administers anything as the agent of another or others.

Have you ever thought, “Why do I not______” You fill in the blank: lose weight, have more money in the bank, have time to spend with my family, pick up the kids from school, have stronger relationships with friends, enjoy the things I used to, drive the car I want, feel a stronger connection to my husband/wife, spend time on the things I want to spend time on?

Our theory is that stewardship is the root of these questions.  Here’s why:  God owns everything.  Psalm 24:1 says, “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.” (NIV)

Consider this:   How likely is a parent to hand over the keys to a brand new $60,000 car when the child has a history of being irresponsible?

The point:  To be trusted with something of importance, one must be found trustworthy.

God trusts each and every one of us with much.  He provided the earth, our bodies, man-made luxuries, and much, much more.

In the coming weeks, our focus is to examine key areas of our lives, primarily:

  1. The Spirit (soul)
  2. The Mind
  3. The Body
  4. Time
  5. Relationships
  6. Resources

 A good steward faithfully focuses on each one of these areas.  No area is neglected.  Despite our best efforts, though, we will never arrive at some euphoric place of excellence; that place is reserved for Jesus.  However, as we draw closer to Jesus, and become better stewards, the struggles in life will become less significant, as we understand and acknowledge that everything belongs to Jesus. 

It should be our goal to manage what God has put us in charge of to the best of our ability.  This includes thing as broad as living a content life, or as specific as not overspending, eating healthy and exercising, building strong relationships with family members and friends, taking control of our time.  Not wondering, “Where did the time go?”  And most importantly, build a relationship with Christ.  If everything is His, it makes a lot of sense for us to pursue His instruction as to how He would like everything to be managed.

As you follow us, your interaction is encouraged and welcomed.  Please post stories, comments, and questions.  We would love to hear from you.

Leaving Egypt Behind – Part 4

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Posted on 14th June 2010 by jwhite in Devotional | Sermons

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Today we present the fourth part of a message given in June 2010 by Jim Overholt of Strongtower Financial* to staff at the California Southern Baptist Convention.  Currently we are working through the four objections Pharaoh gave to releasing the Israelites.

The Third Objection

In Chapter 10 we get the third objection.  Pharaoh says “Go, you that are men.”  If he can’t keep the parents, he’ll keep the children—and he’ll split the parents and undermine the sanctity of marriage and family wherever possible.

Current studies that track the loss of our youth from the church are staggering.  Somewhere between 75 and 95% of our young people leave the church within a year of graduation from high school!  And truthfully, it probably shouldn’t be surprising because for a long time, too many Christian parents—particularly the fathers—have abdicated responsibility for bringing our children up “in the training and admonition of the Lord.”

What are your our children being taught?

I think we may have only a small idea of the extent to which the neglect of Christian parents for the teaching of our children has swelled the tide of infidelity rising up around us.  We have left them to the schools and to their overloaded youth pastor.  The problem is that our schools have become schools of humanism—almost pagan seminaries—in far too many cases.  And it has been an intentional scheme of the enemy.  Let me read you a couple of quotes from some prominent humanists who, like too many of their friends, have become influential members of the education establishment.

John J. Dunphy, in his award winning essay, The Humanist (1983), illustrates the strategic focus on our children.  He says, and I quote:

“The battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith:  A religion of humanity—utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to carry humanist values into whatever they teach.  The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new—the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism.”

As Humanist Charles F. Potter predicted in Humanism: A New Religion, 1930, “Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every American school is a school of humanism.  What can theistic Sunday school’s meeting for an hour once a week and teaching only a fraction of the children do to stem the tide of the five-day program of humanistic teaching?”

The Last Christian generation?

My friend Josh McDowell wrote a book about three years ago entitled “The Last Christian Generation.” He got a lot of push back on the title from his publisher, but maintained that if we don’t do something—and I mean something radical and right now—we may be looking at just that.

God views the man and his wife as “one flesh” and the man and “his house” are often addressed as one when God speaks.  We need men to be leaders like Joshua who said:

“Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you dwell.  But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”  Joshua 24:15

Mr. Overholt joined Strongtower Financial in 2006, bringing with him more than 25 years of experience in the financial services industry. During his career, he has served as the chief executive for some of the largest and most successful companies in the financial industry. In addition to his extensive investment, insurance and capital management experience, he has always been active in ministry including most recently serving as the Executive Director of Mission America Coalition.

*Disclosure – Strongtower Financial is the fund manager for our current sponsor.

Leaving Egypt Behind – Part Three

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Posted on 11th June 2010 by jwhite in Devotional | Sermons

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This post is the third part of a message given in June 2010 by Jim Overholt, President of Strongtower Financial* to a staff chapel service at the California Southern Baptist Convention.  Currently we are working through the 4 objections Pharaoh gave to releasing the Israelites.

The Second Objection

The second objection is even more subtle.  Verse 28 says, “I will let you go, but you may not go very far away.”  If he can’t keep us here, he will try to keep us close.

Christians on Sunday – Egyptians on Monday

It is perhaps one of Satan’s greatest masterpieces that he has convinced so many professing Christians to rest satisfied with looking to the cross for salvation while remaining—for all practical purposes—in the world.  As we saw earlier, there is a big difference between giving up certain worldly things, and giving up the world, and there is probably more damage to our collective testimony caused by an apparent half-hearted giving up of the world than by remaining in it altogether.  One foot on hallowed ground, and one foot in Egypt.  Christians on Sunday, Egyptians on Monday.

God doesn’t like the border position, either in us individually or in us collectively, so I tend to worry when I hear surveys and statistics that indicate that there is no difference between the behavior, social ethics (e.g., marriage and divorce), business ethics, and even the politics, of Christians versus the rest of society.  Or that some of the so-called seeker-friendly churches have increasingly adapted the customs, language, and in many ways the moral values of the world.  Don’t get me wrong, I like “contemporary” churches.  And I like “seeker friendly” as it relates to informality, contemporary music, less liturgical, and so forth.  What worries me is the compromising of the message in a misguided effort to make it more attractive, perhaps less challenging.

Part 4 to follow

Mr. Overholt joined Strongtower Financial in 2006, bringing with him more than 25 years of experience in the financial services industry. During his career, he has served as the chief executive for some of the largest and most successful companies in the financial industry. In addition to his extensive investment, insurance and capital management experience, he has always been active in ministry including most recently serving as the Executive Director of Mission America Coalition.

*Disclosure – Strongtower Financial is the fund manager for our current sponsor.

Thank you for your visit. Feel free to forward this link to others. Your comments and suggestions are welcome.

Leaving Egypt Behind – Part Two

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Posted on 10th June 2010 by jwhite in Devotional | Sermons

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Today we are posting the second part of a message given by Jim Overholt, President of Strongtower Financial* to a staff chapel service at the California Southern Baptist Convention offices in Fresno, CA.  Speaking from Exodus 8-10 he challenges us to not only celebrate being saved from the consequences of sin as depicted in the Passover but to also take steps to leave it behind so that we can effectively serve Him.

The Israelites were wanting to leave Egypt but they first had to answer a number of objections from Pharoah.

The First Objection

Pharaoh’s first objection was in chapter 8 verse 25, when he says “Go and sacrifice to your God, but in the land.”  In effect, “believe what you want to about your God, but stay immersed in our culture.”

We could camp on this point for quite a while, but for today let’s just say this was a question of obedience versus expedience.  It would be tempting for the people to say:  look, we’ve already got all the benefits.  We’ve been saved from certain death and now we’re free from bondage.  God wants the best for us, so let’s just rest in His finished work and make ourselves comfortable here.

Not all bondage seems oppressive

But God knows what’s really good for us, and He has a very different view of Egypt than we do.  He wants us free not only from its brick kilns and taskmasters—the oppressive part—but also from its beautiful temples and alters, its gardens and palaces, its principles and customs, its religion and politics, and so on and so forth.  He knows the even greater danger of these things—all the things of the world, the things that deceived Eve in the garden, the same things that Jesus was tempted with in the desert—but we so often miss it.

Expedience versus faithfulness

And it’s easy to rationalize expedience, isn’t it?  Go with what works.  Listen to what’s easiest to hear, preach whatever draws the largest crowd, etc. etc.  Moses, happily, had already learned this lesson.  How easy would it have been for him to say:  you know what, I’m a prince of Egypt and heir to the throne. Think of what I could do for God’s people from that position!  I could make them prosperous, even wealthy.  I could command the worship of our God by all of the Egyptians.  We would be in their midst as a witness for the glory of our God, and have credibility because we would be seen to be like them in their society.  They didn’t stop to think that their worship—to the extent that it was faithful—would be offensive to the Egyptians (verse 8:26) and they might be tempted to tone it down so as not to be offensive to the culture.  Sound familiar?

But the point is, God had spoken.  And He had said in connection with His judgments earlier in the chapter that He wanted to “make a difference between” His people and the Egyptians, and that to properly serve Him, they needed to put a distance between themselves and the culture.  There needed to be a distinctive change to be an effective witness, and it’s the same today.  Especially in our post-modern culture, people are tired of hearing from us about a life-changing God when they don’t see our lives changed.  God’s word says that just a little leaven leavens the whole lump, and that we should beware of the leaven of the Pharisees—which is hypocrisy.  I fear that in far too many ways we have become the Pharisees of the 21st Century.

Click here for Part 3

Mr. Overholt joined Strongtower Financial in 2006, bringing with him more than 25 years of experience in the financial services industry. During his career, he has served as the chief executive for some of the largest and most successful companies in the financial industry. In addition to his extensive investment, insurance and capital management experience, he has always been active in ministry including most recently serving as the Executive Director of Mission America Coalition.

*Disclosure : Strongtower Financial is the fund manger for our primary sponsor.

Thank you for your visit. Feel free to forward this link to others. Your comments and suggestions are welcome.

Leaving Egypt Behind – Part One

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Posted on 9th June 2010 by jwhite in Devotional | Sermons

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A transcript of a message given by Jim Overholt, President of Strongtower Financial* to a staff chapel service at the California Southern Baptist Convention offices in Fresno, CA. We have broken it into 5 parts for ease of reading and to provide a better way to allow comments on different parts of the message.

At first glance some may be wondering what the Exodus has to do with stewardship. This will become clearer as we go through the message.

Learning from the Old Testament

I was a pretty new believer when I discovered the Old Testament, and particularly how those wonderful old stories were written not merely as recorded history, but as recorded messages that are expressly intended to apply to our lives today.  In reference to the history of God’s people in the Old Testament, Paul says (in 1st Corinthians 10) that “all those things happened to them as examples, and were written for our admonition,” so all of a sudden the New Testament had opened the Old Testament up for me in wonderful new ways, and I learned that we have not only the license to apply those lessons to our lives today, but the absolute mandate to do so.

More than just deliverance

Most of you I’m sure have seen that classic movie “The Ten Commandments”with Charlton Heston and Yule Brinner in what has become an epic film that is still broadcast every Easter.  It’s a story that every Sunday school teaches at a very early age, but generally speaking, what people learned as a child about that wonderful story is too often all they ever learn about it, and that’s a shame, because the fact is, that story is a beautiful allegory of the gospel message…  and not just the salvation part depicted in the Passover, but the second half of the message—the part we too often neglect these days—the deliverance of God’s people from the bondage of sin so that we can worship and serve Him.  That’s the part depicted by the passage through the Red Sea and eventually, the journey of not just one day, not just two days, but “three days” into the wilderness.

If you look at Exodus 8-10 there are many things we could talk about that are very relevant to us today:

Imitations of truth

We could talk about Jannes and Jambres, the magicians of Egypt who Paul tells us in Second Timothy “withstood the truth.”  How?  “With their enchantments.”  Remember what they did?  When Moses asked God for a miraculous display, they imitated it.  From that we learn that we have to guard the truth very carefully, and that sometimes those things that come closest to it—that imitate it well—are the most subtly deceptive, and the most potentially destructive.  I’m afraid that we have a lot of Jannes and Jambres these days.  Those who only imitate the truth to avoid teaching some of its hard lessons, those who use emotional gratification to satisfy spiritual needs—treating the symptoms rather than the causes of the problems we have in these last days.

We could also look at the successive judgments of God following Pharaoh’s series of refusals to let the people go, and see that they are all aimed directly at the idolatrous gods of Egypt:  the god of the Nile River, the god of fertility, the sun god Ra, and the several others.  The many and diverse gods of this world all have a role in resisting the will of the one true God, and in keeping His people in “Egypt,” in various kinds of idolatry.

Facing resistance

But rather than drill down on these, I thought we’d step back a bit and talk a little about what was really going on here, and flesh out this notion that the enemy will resist God’s people every single inch of their way to deliverance—deliverance not only from the penalty of sin, but from the continuing power of sin in our lives.  Being saved from the consequences of sin as depicted in the Passover is one thing.  Leaving it behind us so that we can effectively serve Him—getting out of Egypt—is quite another.

And it is little wonder that Satan will resist every inch of movement of God’s people towards deliverance.  He knows from painful experience that when God’s people come together in obedience, there is no more powerful force on earth.  So he directs all of his schemes and plans to prevent it.

Israel’s bondage as a metaphor

As I mentioned earlier, the Apostle Paul uses Israel’s bondage in Egypt to illustrate the Christian’s bondage to the world, and he talks a lot in his epistles about the dangers of not escaping the bondage, or even worse, returning to it.  He emphasizes over and over that God wants us delivered from it because it is only when the things of the world are thoroughly out of our hearts that we can

  • Properly serve Him
  • Properly worship Him
  • And ultimately find our way to that land of milk and honey that He so earnestly desires for us.

Now, the King of Egypt obviously didn’t want that to happen, and when he finally realized that he had no power to keep them there, he decided he would use his more subtle, deceptive ways—as he always does—to keep God’s people as entangled as possible with the things of the world, and as I look around, I find that it’s the same with us today.   Satan will seek to spoil what he has no power to hinder, and he has quite an arsenal of fallback positions to resist every step the Christian takes in obedience to God’s call.  So in our text, he makes a series of objections to the movement of God’s people, and they serve to illustrate for us what to be wary of.

Click here for Part 2

Mr. Overholt joined Strongtower Financial in 2006, bringing with him more than 25 years of experience in the financial services industry. During his career, he has served as the chief executive for some of the largest and most successful companies in the financial industry. In addition to his extensive investment, insurance and capital management experience, he has always been active in ministry including most recently serving as the Executive Director of Mission America Coalition.

*Disclosure : Strongtower Financial is the fund manger for our primary sponsor.

Stewardship and Leadership

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Posted on 8th June 2010 by jwhite in leadership

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“Using God given talents to manage God given resources for God given purposes”

That is the definition of stewardship used at the California Baptist Foundation – a Christian trust and estate management organization (*disclosure – CBF is the parent organization of our sponsor)

Foundation President, Dr. Phil Kell was speaking recently to a leadership summit at Immanual Baptist Church in Highland, CA – below is an excerpt of his address where he connected stewardship, discipleship and leadership together.

This video was embedded using the YouTuber plugin by Roy Tanck. Adobe Flash Player is required to view the video.

Thank you for your visit. Feel free to forward this link to others. Your comments and suggestions are welcome.

Taking time to pursue excellence

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Posted on 4th June 2010 by jwhite in Resources | time

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There is an old cliche that says, “Have a look at how someone spends their money and you’ll get a sense of their real priorities.” This statement has some truth, but in our opinion it is dwarfed in significance when you consider how much more a person’s priorities are revealed by their use of time.

We came across an interesting article by a Dr. Rob Vande Steeg at Pathos Christ Centered Counseling in which he referenced the Parable of The Talents (Matthew 25:14-30) while commenting on the book  “Outliers : The Story Of Success” by Malcom Gladwell.

One of the things suggested in the book is the notion that it takes about 10,000 hours to truly become an “expert” in something.

Vande Steeg focuses on a number of aspects of the parable, the book, and individual Christians, but the the paragraph that really caught our eye was:

Giftedness appears to be individual specific and each of the parables definitely seems to suggest the need to cultivate (i.e. practice) our giftedness in a way that develops expertise. Therefore, let’s look to see how we can apply the “10,000 rule” to both you and me. Scripture clearly calls each of us into Christ-like excellence. Obtaining this excellence is multi-faceted, but at its core I believe we can all agree that God calls us to the pursuit of studying scripture and making it applicable to our lives. Therefore, if we do some quick math applied to the study of God’s word and we utilize the “10,000 rule” we would need the following time commitment:

  • One hour a day for seven days a week than we need approximately 27 years to obtain true expertise.
  • If we reduce our study time to a mere three hours a week, we need a little more than 64 years!

Time is one of our most precious commodities and it is the ultimate NON-RENEWABLE resource. Whether or not 10,000 hours is the magic number is immaterial, the challenge is to consider whether we are being good stewards of our time.

Now an hour a day may seem like a lot but consider this:

Based on stats supplied via CSU Northridge (click here for stats and commentary) the average person watches !!4 hours!! of TV per day.

Here are some other stats we found ……… and some we wonder about.

  • 3.5 minutes spent in meaningful conversation with their children……. per week! (quoted in the CSU Northridge article)
  • 15 minutes per week -  47% of Americans read their Bible outside of church or Sunday School time for more than this time.  We could find an overall average time – anyone know? (Barna Group)
  • 2.5 hours per day in a car (US Census Office)
  • ?? time spent in prayer?

It doesn’t matter whether our goal is to become more familiar with God’s word, hone and develop the gifts and talents given us, spend more time in fellowship with our families, neighbors and others. Only let us become more aware of how we spend our time and be good stewards of the opportunities given us.

If you were to submit a journal of what you have done with your time in the past month, what would it say about your priorities?

Thank you for your visit. Feel free to forward this link to others. Your comments and suggestions are welcome.

The trap of focusing on what you don’t have

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Posted on 1st June 2010 by jwhite in Devotional

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When we focus on the things we don’t have we can fall into a number of traps.

The most obvious trap to fall into is covetousness. Apart from being specifically forbidden in the Ten Commandments (Ex 20:17) coveting eventually causes us to sin even further. (James 4:2).

However, another trap is to sin by omission.  That is, we fail to do the things that we should with what we DO have (James 4:17).

What excuses might we use to do nothing when there is something that we can do?

  • Perhaps we feel that what we can do is so insignificant that it really isn’t worth the bother? But in God’s way of thinking it is not the magnitude of the task that is crucial but rather the act of obedience and faithfulness on our part. Consider the story of the widows mite in Luke 21:1-4
  • Or perhaps it might be that we compare ourselves to others? We conclude that we are already doing enough or we think that someone else is more suited to the task than we are. (1 Cor 10:12)
  • Or maybe we feel that we are owed some slack because of circumstances and trials that we have to deal with? While it’s important to be aware of our limitations we can’t use that as an excuse not to use what we DO have for the benefit of the Lord and His kingdom. (1 Peter 4:10)

We’d like to share with you today an inspirational video produced by Deidox. It is the story of Alyssa, born blind but still seeking ways in which God wants to use the gifts given her in His service.

www.deidox.com (will open in new window)

Thank you for your visit. Feel free to forward this link to others. Your comments and suggestions are welcome.