Daily Devotional: Generosity & Stewardship: More Than Money

This is an opinion column.

OPEN HANDS

“Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms.”
1 Peter 4:10

REFLECTION

When most people hear the word stewardship, they think about money. And money is certainly part of it. But Peter’s vision of stewardship is far wider and more personal than a budget category. He says Whatever gift you have received. Whatever. Which means stewardship is not primarily a financial conversation. It is a whole-life conversation.

• Your time is a resource to be stewarded.
• Your talent, the specific abilities and skills you carry, is a resource to be stewarded.
• Your influence, the people who listen to you and look to you, is a resource to be stewarded.
• Your experiences, including the painful ones, are a resource to be stewarded.
• Your attention, perhaps the most finite and fought-over resource of the modern age, is a resource to be stewarded.

Peter calls us faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms. That phrase is remarkable. The gifts we carry are not just practical resources. They are forms of grace. When we use our gifts in service to others, we are not just being helpful. We are becoming channels through which God’s grace flows into the specific corners of the world only we can reach, in the specific ways only we can offer it.

Most of us have gifts we have not fully deployed. Skills that have been sitting unused because we have not found the right context or because we have not believed they were significant enough to matter. Relationships that have more potential for kingdom impact than we have ever tapped. Time that has been absorbed by things that feel urgent but are not truly important. Stewardship is the honest, ongoing practice of asking: what has God given me, and am I using it well for the purposes He intended?

Beyond money, what is the gift, talent, or resource that God has given you that you are most underusing right now, and what would faithful stewardship of that specific resource look like in the season you are currently in?

PRAYER

Lord, we want to be faithful stewards of everything You have placed in our hands, not just our finances but our time, our talent, our influence, our attention, our experiences. Show us where we have been unfaithful stewards, where we have let gifts sit unused or allowed important things to be crowded out by urgent ones. Teach us to hold everything we have as a form of Your

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