In March of 2022 I wrote this in one of my prayer journals:
Father, what is the seed I am supposed to plant in this season? What is my act of faith, my act of sacrifice that pleases You and responds in obedience? I have accumulated so much — stuff. I am tired of it all — tired of maintaining it, storing up these treasures on earth, and looking at them just sit there. How do I get rid of what I don’t need, what I’ve collected over long periods, for seemingly no reason other than to have — just throw it all away? Do You want me to give it away or to use it (instead of “hoarding” it)? If I have an idol in my heart that my collections are associated with, I think that idol would be the image of who I want to be — my ideal “good life,” the consummate host, someone always ready for visitors and those in need — what I imagine success and community and fellowship look like in Shalom. It would be my sense of being “settled,” “secure in the land,” established and having roots and branches and shelter and fruit for others to enjoy. It’s the idea of having more than enough — being self-sufficient and having plenty to go around, plenty to share. And yes, certainly, my idea of this so-called good life and having these collections of fine things includes my desire to share it all with others generously. And I do share it with a happy heart, not as often as I would like — so it does feel sometimes like I am simply accumulating things rather than pouring them out as offerings to you. I want to, but as I look around all I see is stuff — collections — sitting here and gathering dust. But is that so bad when my intent is to share them with others? And they are nice to look at from time to time. Is it so bad to keep them for a little longer — it would be such a waste to throw it all away.
Reading it now, this entire entry rebukes me. You can hear my negotiation with the idol in my own prayers to God. (Perhaps one of the reasons why I could write about this very thing in Tearing Down the High Places.) I was standing in front of things I had accumulated, things I liked but truthfully did not need, things I wanted to be able to display — not for pride (I convinced myself), for generosity, to give them away! — asking God the way only the self-deceived can if the collection (or the desire to continue collecting) was an idol. And before I gave Him room to answer I had already entered my defense: I share it. I am generous with it. I pour it for friends. I am a good steward of my good life. I have things that people can borrow and use. I don’t keep things just for myself. These things will come in handy someday. It’s rather exhausting, isn’t it? It exhausts me.
This is what I want to write about. Not the bourbon and scotch, the wine and cigars, the wagyu and iberico, the other stuff in my collections too embarrassing to mention here — not the accumulation but my defense of it all.
The word
The confession of God’s ownership becomes the license for our own control.
Stewardship is a good word. It’s a word we use often. And we mostly mean well by it (at least we used to). The Greek for steward is oikonomos — the manager of a household, the trusted servant who holds the master’s keys, buys the food, pays the laborers, and keeps the master’s affairs in order while the master is away. Joseph was one, over Potiphar’s house and then over all of Egypt. Eliezer of Damascus was one, over Abraham’s house. The steward is not the owner. Everything in his hands belongs to someone else. That is the whole point of the office and the whole idea is a beautiful and noble one, worthy of sincere inspection. Because somewhere between Joseph’s house and mine (and maybe yours), it feels like the word has come to mean something different.
Today in the American church (in my experience), stewardship has become mostly a word about money. It is the name of the Sunday when the pledge cards go out. It is the brand on the faith-based financial planning firm. It is the capital campaign, the legacy giving seminar, the donor-advised fund, the “biblical principles of wealth” conference at the resort. None of that, by itself, is inherently evil — but neither does any of it tell us whether we are being faithful. The word seems to settle the question before we ask.
It is the name we give something when we want to show our hands are off it — or the word we reach for when we want to explain why we are wisely holding onto something. I’m just trying to be a good steward of what God has entrusted to me, we say, almost without thinking. And the sentence is nearly unanswerable, because who could argue with it? It has God in it. It has humility in it. It has responsibility and prudence and piety and gratitude in it.
Almost every time I said it, I did so with me in mind first — keeping what I wanted to keep (and for really good reasons). It was a badge of honor: I am a good steward. And beneath it perhaps, I am definitely getting that “Well done, good and faithful servant” award later on. Of course, this is me mocking myself now that I am seeing my own idolatry in the way I used to justify my self-centered desires — but I don’t mean it to sound condescending or dismissive. And of course, I earnestly want God’s approval at the end of this life. I guess my point here really is how easy it is to convince ourselves that God has approved of our good intentions and our seemingly redeemed desires.
I don’t know, but it feels more and more like Mammon in disguise, at least to me. And maybe the rebuke is meant for me only, but what I am seeing seems bigger than me.
Here is what I think the word does for us today: it lets us say it all belongs to Him but then manage it as though it belonged to me — with the added comfort of a clear conscience and a great explanation that few can argue against. The confession of God’s ownership becomes the license for our own control. We hold the keys, the accounts, the calendar, the house, the career, the reputation, the billable hour, the professional accolades, the authority and the influence. We hold them tightly, and call the tightness faithfulness, discernment, discretion, wisdom — good stewardship.
I wrote in an earlier essay that “what we call stewardship has become giving what we can live without; whereas sacrifice costs what we cannot bear to lose.” In this article, I want to go further, because I think the disease is worse than a substitution. Good stewardship, as we practice it, is not a lesser form of sacrifice. It is often the argument against true sacrifice and sacrificial obedience but dressed in Gospel-sounding garb. And I think somewhere along the way we’ve forgotten that we are dealing with a Holy God who is a Consuming Fire — who often reminds us that “whoever seeks to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.” I want to be really careful how I think about and use stewardship. And, hopefully, you do too.
Where the word has been working
Just so that we are all on the same page, I am going to name some rooms where stewardship does its work. And I have been in most of them — so I am not throwing stones forgetting that I live in a glass house. But I am tired of dancing around this stuff, and I really believe God is requiring more from His Bride, His Church. I know He is requiring more of me — and maybe you feel He is requiring more of you, too.
The Christian wealth manager. I have sat across the table from good men — really good men, the best — who love Jesus and who build their practices on “biblical stewardship.” The plan is sound: tithe, save, protect, grow, pass it on. Ten percent to God (of the net, of course, after the government has taken its portion — 10% of the gross would be too much!), and the other ninety managed for security, legacy, and generational wealth (volumes have and can be written on each of those concepts). Foundations that honor. Estate plans that shelter. Trusts that preserve. Every one of these tools has a legitimate use. But when we sit in these rooms do we ask the only question that matters: What has He asked you to do with it? The plan assumes He wants it protected. The Gospel that Jesus preached seems a little bit different. (And by a “little bit,” I mean a lot.)
The affluent Big Law partner — and I am one, so don’t think I plan to escape my own critique. We give big time — not all of us, but a lot of us. We give in ways that appear on the firm’s website and the ministry’s annual report and in ways you will never see. We sit on the boards — but we also offer pro bono services. We make the pledge that funds the building that carries the name — not because we want our name on it but to encourage others to be more like us (or so we say). And most of it, if I am honest about my own giving over the years, has cost me nothing I would miss. Not one client. Not one hour of sleep. Not one hard conversation with my wife about whether we could still afford the thing we had planned. I gave out of the overflow and called it a sacrifice because the number was significant. The number was never the measure. David knew this on Araunah’s threshing floor when the man offered him the oxen for free: “neither will I offer burnt offerings unto the LORD my God of that which doth cost me nothing” (2 Sam. 24:24). I’ve got to be honest with you: I think we have built an entire culture of Christian giving on that which costs us next to nothing, and we’ve come up with a really good, biblically based word for it and we don’t dare ask if He is pleased with our gift.
I have to be talking to myself more than the rest of you here — but what is this outlet worth if we can’t start being transparent with each other? Peacemaking sometimes requires violence — and sometimes that violence starts with me.
The prosperity preacher. The jet is stewardship of his time. The compound is stewardship of his family’s safety. The fleet is stewardship of his anointing. He is the crude version, and it is easy for a Presbyterian lawyer to sneer at him, so I will only say this: he is using the same word I use, for the same reason I use it, and he is just a little less embarrassed about the extravagance than I am.
The missions and philanthropy industry. This is the one that I have the least standing to write about and the hardest time leaving alone. There are organizations doing faithful, patient, invisible work in hard places, and I am not writing about them. I am writing about the machine. The trip that flies forty affluent Americans into a village to build in a week what local hands could have built (and a lot of times have to rebuild) for a fraction of the cost, if the money had gone to the local hands — wrecking the local builder’s livelihood in the process, and calling it service. The well that is drilled for the story more than the water. The container of free goods that shuts down the market of the town it lands in. The photograph of the child that goes back to the donors so that more money can be raised — and the percentage of it that reaches the field getting thinner, year over year, as the organization discovers that its real customer is not the poor but the donor. And then the annual report, with words like “stewardship” and “legacy” and “impact” and “great commission” printed across the top of the financial page.
Please hear me! I am not saying these are bad people. I am saying the word is doing something in these rooms that Joseph’s word never did. And I think it is protecting the managers from the Master. If you are happy living this way, please continue. But for those who care to allow conviction to move us towards holiness, please at least ask the question and listen past the convincing, the rationale, and the spirit of this World to His still small voice. Have we broken our jars in waste before the One worthy of all?
The manna
Israel was fed in the wilderness by bread that fell out of the sky, and the first instruction God gave about it was an instruction against the stewardship we practice: “Let no man leave of it till the morning” (Ex. 16:19). Gather what you need for today. Do not store it. Do not hedge against tomorrow. Do not build a reserve.
But some of them did anyway — prudent men, I would guess; good stewards — men who had run households in Egypt and knew that a wise manager does not depend on the sky. “Notwithstanding they hearkened not unto Moses; but some of them left of it until the morning, and it bred worms, and stank” (Ex. 16:20).
This example is the first stewardship lesson God taught His people in the wilderness, and it is that the held-back portion rots. The forty years of manna was a forty-year school in living without a reserve, so that they would learn “that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD” (Deut. 8:3). The point of the provision was not the bread. It was the daily dependence on the Father. Jesus knew this well, in His own wilderness, tempted by the Evil One. In the wilderness, God was not teaching His children to manage. He was teaching them to receive, to trust His character and His provision. Even today I know that He can be trusted, and yet, I still conserve, and collect, and steward what He has provided.
I have to ask myself, honestly, what my 401(k), my 529 plans, my reserve accounts and my collections on multiple shelves and new storages are, in that light. I am not saying they are sin. I do not know that they are — maybe that’s exactly what they are. But I know that even when I am honest enough to ask God whether He wants me to have them, I am really quick to give a solid defense of my managing of them. And I inherited my defenses like stare decisis. Everyone I respect has them. I am surrounded by people doing exceedingly well and so God must be pleased with all of us — right? The wisdom of the World and in our churches says that we are wise . . . stewards. I am beginning to wonder whether I’ve made a terrible mistake, and I don’t yet know what to do about it. Am I just like the rich young ruler from Matthew 19, Mark 10, Luke 18?
The stories that will not fit
Here is the trouble with defending our version of stewardship from Scripture: The Bible keeps telling stories that our version cannot survive.
The father in the parable. We have read the prodigal son as a story about the boy. Maybe we need to read it as a story about the father — and the father is not what we would call a good steward of his estate. His younger son comes and asks for his share of the inheritance while the father is still alive. This is a request no financial advisor on earth would advise honoring. It is a request to liquidate a third of a working estate, in cash, and hand it to a young man who has just told you, in effect, that he wishes you were dead. Every principle of biblical stewardship as we teach it says no, my son. Preserve the asset. Protect the family. Do not enable. But this father divides unto them his living (Luke 15:12). He gives it. I hope my son never asks such a thing of me. I expect I would angrily rebuke the impertinence. But he does not rebuke, does not lecture, does not condition or require a businessplan. And when the boy comes home with nothing, having wasted it all, the father does not recover a penny — he spends more. The robe, the ring, the shoes, the fatted calf. The elder brother’s complaint is a stewardship complaint: this son of thine hath devoured thy living with harlots (Luke 15:30). He is right. And Jesus tells the story so that the father is right instead. This story needs to convict us to be more like the Father.
The rich fool. Only one man in the Gospels does Jesus call a fool to his face, and he is the man with the best financial plan in the New Testament. His ground brought forth plentifully. He had a surplus. He made a decision that every steward I know would applaud: build bigger barns, store the goods, secure the future — “and I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease” (Luke 12:19). Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee. Jesus does not fault him for the harvest. He faults him for the storage houses, the collections.
The rich young ruler. As mentioned above, this man claims to have kept the whole law from his youth, and I believe him. He was a good steward by any measure we use: disciplined, moral, faithful, and rich. “One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor” (Mark 10:21). He went away grieved, “for he had great possessions.” I have always noticed what Jesus did not say. He did not say tithe on it, manage it wisely, and use your influence for the Kingdom. That is what I would have said. That is what we’ve learned and teach and celebrate as good stewardship.
The Pharisees, who loved money. In Luke 16 Jesus tells the only parable that is actually about a steward — the unjust steward — and it is a parable in which a manager, about to be fired, gives away his master’s receivables at a discount to make friends for himself, and the master commends him. Whatever else that parable means, it does not mean protect the capital. And Luke tells us who was listening and how they reacted: “And the Pharisees also, who were covetous, heard all these things: and they derided him” (Luke 16:14). The religiously articulate class heard the stewardship parable and laughed at it. They loved money and public praise. And they were the ones in the room with the stewardship vocabulary of the spirit of this World. They neither knew nor told the right stories about the Father.
The talents. We have preached this one as a parable of prudent investment, and it is, but look at what the third servant actually did. He preserved the capital. He hid it in the ground, protected it from loss, and returned it intact: “lo, there thou hast that is thine” (Matt. 25:25). By the standard of a wealth-preservation plan, he was the only one who took no risk with the master’s money. And he is the one called wicked and slothful and cast into the outer darkness. The master did not want his money kept. He wanted it spent, risked, put to work, multiplied — and if it had been lost in the attempt, I do not read anywhere that the master would have been angrier than he was at his burying it.
The jar. The very first stewardship objection in the history of the church was raised in Bethany, over a woman who broke a year’s wages on the head and feet of Jesus. The objection was theologically respectable and financially precise: “Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?” (John 12:5). The man who raised it kept the purse and we know what became of him — but even the other disciples joined in the criticism. Jesus answered, “Let her alone.” I have written elsewhere about that jar, and I will not repeat what I’ve already said, except to say this: the fragrance that filled the house came from the one thing in the room nobody would have called good stewardship.
Ananias and Sapphira. They sold a field, kept back part of the price, and gave the rest to the church, presenting it as the whole. They were struck dead — not for keeping some of their property, which Peter says was theirs to keep (Acts 5:4), but for the lie. For calling a partial thing the whole and pretending to be wholly devoted to God when they didn’t even know Him. For thinking they could deceive the Holy Spirit. That is the sin I am most afraid of, because it is the one the word makes easiest.
The widow. Two mites. “She of her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living” (Mark 12:44). Jesus measured the gift not by its size but by what was left. Every stewardship metric I have ever seen measures the other direction.
The men who did not manage
Against these, set the ones Scripture holds up.
Abraham. He left Ur without a destination. When his herdsmen and Lot’s could not share the land, he gave Lot the choice, and Lot took the well-watered plain, and Abraham took what was left (Gen. 13). When the king of Sodom offered him the spoils of the war he had won, he refused so much as a shoelace, “lest thou shouldest say, I have made Abram rich” (Gen. 14:23) — he would not let anyone other than God be the source of what he had. And when God asked for Isaac, the one asset in which every promise was stored, he saddled the donkey early in the morning (Gen. 22:3). No plan. No counsel. No conditions. Abraham was not a good steward of the promise. He was a man who believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.
The disciples. They left the nets. They left the boat, and their father in it — and likely a thriving business as well. Levi left the tax booth with the receipts still on the table. When Jesus needed a colt, a room, a boat to preach from, a boy’s lunch, a tomb — someone gave it, on the spot, without condition. And everything He asked for, He gave back more than what was surrendered. The boat was filled with fish. The lunch fed five thousand and twelve baskets came back. The tomb was borrowed for three days. He never once asked anyone for a percentage. He asked for the whole, and He returned it multiplied (exponentially) and resurrected.
Zacchaeus. “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold” (Luke 19:8). Half, immediately, and quadruple restitution on top of it. No advisor. No cost-benefit analysis. No plan to give more sustainably over time. And Jesus said salvation had come to that house.
Barnabas. Sold the field, brought the money, laid it at the apostles’ feet (Acts 4:37). The whole thing — because that is what God asked and he obeyed.
Not one of these people was a good steward as we use the term. Yet all of them are described as faithful. That should tell us something about how we use the word.
Where I have to disappoint
I am a lawyer. I like frameworks. I would like to end this with a rule — give this much, keep that much, here is the line. Like a formula. Jesus didn’t use formulas.
And I do not have one, either. I have come to believe that the wanting of one is part of the disease. The rule would let me manage God and ensure the outcome I can control. It would let me satisfy the requirement and go back to the shelf. Job’s friends had a rule. The Pharisees had a rule. The rich young ruler had kept every rule from his youth. The rule is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil growing in the accounting department — it lets me decide for myself what is enough, using my own faculties, and never asking or having to hear His Voice on the matter.
So I do not have a number for you, and I do not have one for myself. What I have is a Voice, and a question I have started asking Him about specific things — the shelf, the reserve, the hour, the fee — instead of applying the word to all of it at once. Do You want this? Is this Yours to spend? Am I keeping this because You have given it to me to keep, or because I cannot bear to lose it? And I am learning that when I ask it honestly, I usually already know the answer before I finish the sentence, and the answer is usually not the one the planner would have given to me. And sometimes I still waver. I am ashamed to admit it, but I serve a good God who will complete the work He began.
What a steward is for
Paul uses the word. So does Peter. And neither of them is talking about money.
“Let a man so account of us, as of the ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God. Moreover it is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful” (1 Cor. 4:1–2). “As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God” (1 Pet. 4:10).
Stewards of the mysteries. Stewards of grace. The New Testament steward is not charged with the master’s capital. He is charged with the master’s presence in the house. His job is to see that everyone under the roof is fed with what the master has given, that the grace gets to the people it was given for, that nothing the master intended to be spent is buried in the ground. He is not a wealth manager. He is closer to a priest.
And that is where this lands for the Christian Lawyer, because — as I have written elsewhere — the priests in Israel were the one tribe given no inheritance in the land. “The LORD is his inheritance” (Deut. 10:9). “I am thy part and thine inheritance among the children of Israel” (Num. 18:20). The priest had no barns. He ate from the altar. He lived, by design, without a reserve — so that the whole nation would see what it looks like when a man’s portion is God Himself and nothing else.
I have argued through this whole series that the Christian Lawyer is being called back into that office — that the practice of law is holy ground when the Presence goes with us. If that is true, then the priest’s economics come with the priest’s office. The steward of the mysteries does not get to keep the barns of the rich fool.
So let me put it in the terms I actually live in. The associate who needs an afternoon of your time that will not be billed, and will never be known, and will produce no return you can measure — that is the steward’s work, and the billable hour you spent on her instead of the file is the sacrifice, and it will cost you something you will actually miss at the end of the quarter. The client who needs to hear the truth that will end the engagement. Tell him. The fee you lose is the manna you were not supposed to keep overnight. The pro bono matter that is not the firm’s showcase case, that no one will photograph, that takes three years and does not settle well and does not make the website. Take it anyway. Judas would have sold the ointment for a better case.
The fee you could forgive for the family that cannot pay and will never be able to. Forgive it, and do not tell anyone, and do not deduct it. The hour with your children that the practice says you cannot afford. The father in the parable could not afford the calf, either. And the shelf. Whatever is on your shelf. Ask Him about it and then listen. I am still asking about mine and moving in obedience as He directs.
None of this is a stewardship plan. It is a way of being spent. I wrote in the jar essay that we are the coin, stamped with His image and inscription — that a coin in a vault does nothing but sits; it only works when it is paid out. That is the whole of it. The steward of the mysteries is not the one who preserved the Master’s things. He is the one who was found faithful with them — and found is a word that assumes the Master came back and looked, at everything, including the part we kept.
A final word
As I keep saying in all of these articles, I am not writing this from above anything. The sentence I started with — and yes certainly sharing with others generously — is still the fastest thing my mouth reaches for when God gets close to something I treasure. I have used the word steward to keep a hundred things He may have wanted, and I have used it well, and it has worked — according to the World’s way of measuring. My conscience was clear. My accounts were in order. My giving was documented. But the fragrance in the house did not smell of Him.
What I am asking for — for myself first, and for anyone who practices law and loves God and has found this word sitting comfortably in the middle of a life that has never really cost anything — is not a new rule and not a bigger check. I am not suggesting that you jump off a (financial) cliff — hoping His angels will catch you — and try to call it faithfulness when that is not what He has called you to do. Rather, for the willingness to let Him ask for the whole thing, the way He asked Abraham, the way He asked the boy with the lunch, the way He asked the woman with the jar, the way He asked His Son. And then to find out, the way every one of them found out, what He does with a thing that has been fully given.
He gives it back. Not always in the form it left. But it comes back, and it comes back alive.
If this sounds like your shelf, or your plan, or your practice, I would like to hear about it — here, or in my inbox. I would rather compare notes with someone who is still asking than keep managing this alone.
Lord, teach me to be a steward of Your Presence and this short life You have given.
Turris fortis mihi Deus.
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Michael C. Kelley is a Florida attorney and shareholder at Lawson Huck Gonzalez, PLLC. He writes at Turris Fortis on faith, justice, and the practice of law as peacemaking — not the kind that confuses peace with avoidance, but the kind that contends for it with the weapons God supplies. Turris fortis mihi Deus — Prov. 18:10.
The Good Steward stands alongside the numbered Turris Fortis essays rather than within them. It grows out of They Have Not Spoken Rightly of Me and Breaking the Jar, and it takes for granted what those two argue. The full map is at Start Here.